Reagan’s Blood is for sale online. This is insane, but not unexpected. Neither is the pseudo-religious outrage from those on the Right that still want Reagan to run for a third term or, failing that, have him sainted by way of a constitutional amendment. “It’s an outrage!” they cry, “Where is his basic human dignity?”

Bought and sold in your precious free market, that’s where. In my book, anyone that wants to make an appeal to basic human dignity for a dead president needs to do so for the living poor that have been trampled underfoot by the deregulation of things that should have stayed regulated.

Yes, regulation keeps innovation from happening. It also criminalizes activities that exploit other people through force or trickery. Would anyone like to go back to when medicine was unregulated? Would anyone want to have no regulations on pollution? If you don’t want it in your back yard, you shouldn’t insist that some one else have it dumped in his back yard because his property values are lower and he can’t access lobbyists or Congressmen the way a rich man does.

I’ve heard free market wonks say that EVERYTHING should be free to buy or sell. EVERYTHING. That disgusts me. There are things we should hold sacred, above the value of money. Putting a price on things demeans them.

No, Reagan’s blood should not be bought or sold in a free market. There oughta be a law, I know… of course, one can still get around that law by simply ignoring it and hoping one escapes justice for that crime. Ideally, we wouldn’t need a law if we were a moral people. Our biggest problem is that we idolize the sociopath and want him to run our companies and our governments.

Ironically, it was Reagan’s gang that really opened the gates for the sociopaths to run wild. Now we have a pathocracy, rule by the dangerous.

Choose what you want, but as for me, I choose morality.

… it’ll be every bit as big in that year as MySpace is now. Graphic shamelessly copied from ZeroHedge.

If the popularity curve fits, wear it. In this case, the tail of Facebook hits around 2020. Unless FB has some kind of rabbit to pull out of its hat, it’s peaked and is going to ride a curve that’s on its way down.

Maybe that rabbit is increasing popularity in India, where FB viewers are worth about an eighth of what they currently monetize at in the USA. I doubt it, though. Most of the new users in India are going to be young mobile users, and the monetization of the mobile platform is next to nil on FB. I know this because I use the mobile version on my PC to keep from having all the blasted ads and recommended pages on the sidebar. I also use it so I don’t have to endure the travesty of the “timeline” format, which I abominate. I love every social media platform and often suggest my colleagues take assistance from marketing service providers like Marketing Heaven to build a prominent presence of their business online.

FB page looks more and more like a MySpace page used to look right around the time when everyone started hating it. People are already gaming FB with public and private FB pages – one for the future bosses and strict parents, the other for wild and crazy guys, hoping that the latter page never emerges in a search for the former. Compartmentalized pages can only mean one thing: the increase of the sleaze factor. It happened to MySpace, it happened to Yahoo Groups, it happened to Geocities, it happened to newsgroups… (bonus points if you remember newsgroups).

That’s why I’ll always keep my current website. I’ve had it since 1999 in one form or another. I’ve had *a* website since 1995. I get to customize it to look the way I want it to look and as long as I pay the bills, the content stays up and the content stays mine.

To all the kiddos out there that think the Facebook is the bees’ knees and will never die out: Kids, I’ve seen ’em come, and I’ve seen ’em go. Microsoft used to be the evil empire, once upon a time. Now it’s Google. Apple under Jobs found a way to be briefly relevant from time to time. Novell used to dominate the server OS market. “Cloud computing” used to be called “dumb terminals and mainframes.” Facebook, too, shall pass.

As in cheapoair.com… Thankfully, I only bought two tickets there for a one-way commuter flight. They made the total price for one ticket look like the total price of two tickets. In reality, the one ticket they sold me was $20 more than it would have been on Kayak.com. (This was travel in Russia, by the way, which is why I didn’t go with Priceline or Hotwire.) Worse, I couldn’t pick seat assignments from a list of available seats unless I was willing to shell out $11.95 per seat!

These guys are deceptive and I plan to avoid them as much as possible in the future. I hope I don’t wind up with a nightmare like I’ve seen other people go through with this company.

Dear Mr. Buchanan,

How are you? I am fine. I hope you’re coping with unemployment OK. Losing a job can be tough. I feel for ya, bro. Really. I do. Even though you earn more being unemployed than I do as a teacher, I can still have a little compassion for you. Of course, you should learn from your mistakes.

Making anti-Semitic comments is a no-no for most employers. Making homophobic comments are also not good. Racist comments have been known to get people in trouble with HR. Combining all three in a book titled The Suicide of a Superpower and having a chapter in it called “The End of White America” is generally a career-ender. And how do you put that on your resume? Who’s gonna hire you after writing the American version of Mein Kampf?

And it’s not that you’re not free to express those kinds of sentiments in the USA. You are. We’re also free to think they’re disgusting and that they have no place in our public dialogue. I’m a decent guy and I got nothing for it. Nobody’s offering me massive speaker fees or huge book advances. Yet, I also don’t get ejected from polite circles for being a horrifying racist. At the end of the day, my soul is intact, and I’m glad for that.

Yes, Pat, you’re free to be that guy. You’re also free to change your mind and learn to love and tolerate the way Jesus taught us all. Or Moses. Or Mohammed. Or Zoroaster. Or Buddha. Or Gandhi. Or Lao Tzu. Or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Do you see a pattern here, Pat? Or do you want your legacy lumped in with Goering, Goebbels, and Hitler? Because that’s where you’re sitting on the ideological bench right now, Pat. You’re free to choose, but we’re also free to not agree with your spew of hate.

Good luck in getting your soul back from Satan,

Dean Webb

This is one of those movies one only need see once, and the imprint is forever made. There is so much in the film, based on eyewitness experiences of the Byelorussian genocide during World War II, that one cannot approach it with a brief summary.

It’s not easy writing about this imposing film. It’s not something as simple as Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now. It’s much, much more. Saving Private Ryan was pretty much soldiers storming Normandy and making their way into France to hold a bridge against all odds with a cameo by Ted Danson. Personally, I found the premise of the film insulting, as it basically created a situation in which the lives of one group of soldiers were considered to be worth less than the lives of the one Private Ryan. It’s one of the reasons why I cringe at the prospect of seeing another Spielberg movie. He’s got his moments, but his films overall leave me feeling manipulated.

Apocalypse Now is another overrated film. Better to see the documentary of how it was made… but the soundtrack in the main film makes no sense at all. The thick synthesizers sound more appropriate for a cartoon. Martin Sheen works out all right as the Marlowe figure, but Coppola should have gotten Klaus Kinski to be Kurtz. He should have also gotten Werner Herzog to direct. The fact that I can address both Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan is testament to their accessibility and to the difficulty in confronting Come and See.

I cannot be dismissive of Come and See. I cannot find the adjectives to address it. It is more than a tale of a young man that joins partisans: in its two hours, it stands in stern judgment of offensive war and those who advocate it. It does not allow excuses, nor does it permit the so-called Nuremberg Defense: “We were only following orders.” The Russian auxiliaries, the SS, the regular Wehrmacht, all of the Nazi thrust to wipe out the Russians are there, and all are guilty. There are no beautiful cameo actors to stride across stolen scenes. It is as if the Russians rose from the earth and the Germans emerged from the mist to battle for their lives, and we are there to see it. There are no fancy special effects: the bullets are real, the bombs are real, and the toll on the actors is real.

The film was shot in chronological order, so one watches the aging effects of the war on the film’s main actor. When he appears greyed, shattered, wrinkled, and broken at the end, we do not see a Hollywood makeup job. We see an actor that lived as his character did for nine months – starving, marching, harrowed by the sights around him.

Much of the dialogue in the film is delivered head-on from actors confronting the camera, looking directly into our souls. The music aids the psychological heaviness and impact. The film is so involving, we don’t have time to think “my, what lovely cinematography!” It’s every bit as involving and demanding as Das Boot, but with the added burden of being a documentation of genocide.

Come and See is a film that demands to be seen and then reflected on. It is not entertainment. It is a conduit for pondering, questioning, and a search for answers.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Madoff,

How are you? I am fine. I heard on the news that you were both very sad after you found out that Mr. Madoff’s fraud was going to be public. Sudden publicity can be shocking, so I can understand why you both might be depressed. What bothers me is that you did not feel sad enough to not perpetrate the fraud in the first place.

I’m not saying that I’m perfect. We’re all human, and it’s human nature to make mistakes. It’s also human nature to sometimes do bad things. When we do a bad thing, though, we’re supposed to be sorry for it and to try and undo what was done. You both, however, used the court system to try and keep some of the money you had basically stolen from others. Because the US Government accepted the plea, you both now get to keep some of that money. This is bad because it is not good.

Your scandal made lots of other people very sad. Many of those people are still sad. They are deeply and profoundly sad. Some of them thought that the deep and profound sadness was behind them after they got out of the Auschwitz murder camp, but you found a way to shatter their peace and security in their last days on earth. When I tell people about how life can be unfair, I will be sure to use that as an example, Mr. and Mrs. Madoff.

I don’t think I’m being overly judgmental to say that what you did was bad and that you need to try harder to make it right. You’ve still got some of that money and before you say you need it to live off of, think about what the people that you made very very sad are going to live off of. They were planning to live off of the money you are living off of.

I hope you both choose to make things right while you still have time. As long as you’re alive, you can change and do the right thing.

Please try harder,

Dean Webb

This is a list of remediation rates for Dallas-area students that enroll at junior colleges. If you’re not in the Dallas area, just Google up your district name and the keywords “college remediation.”

Now a word on the statistics: you can also see the number of students per graduating class that went to junior college. The percentage of remedial students is a percentage of that number, not the total graduating class.

So why would a student need remediation if he or she was able to graduate high school? Is this evidence of the existence of social promotion, which was supposed to be wiped out with the testing regime imposed waaaaay back in 1990-91? As it turns out, the NCLB act has given it new life.

If a school is going to be considered unacceptable, unclean, and untouchable with a too-high dropout rate, no school administrator is going to want to have a student drop out. Students that fail courses drop out, so the pressure is on to get these guys to pass and graduate. What they do after graduation is not an overriding concern of the school district, at least not enough to take on the real overriding concern to keep from being rated non-performing because of a bunch of kids that, for whatever reasons justified or otherwise, do not perform well at their campuses.

I’m against the idea of schools arbitrarily kicking out students or using expulsion to target unpopular minorities, but I’m equally against the idea of the Vietnamization of schools, where statistics are the end-all and can be tweaked to hide the fact that the actual mission is not being accomplished.

And, the fact is, for all the efforts made at so-called reform, which is actually a bunch of micromanagement and statistical fudgery from above, we still see that nearly all the schools in the Dallas area – and they’re by no means alone – still graduate students that need to be taught what they were supposed to have been taught.

Is it the fault of the teachers? The parents? The administration? The society in which we live? The students themselves? Yes. But the key to success in the schools is not to be punitive. The best program I have ever taught in has been in my own church’s education system. There, the emphasis was on having the right spirit, the right attitude about education. There, we invited the students in. If they did not attend, that was a matter for a case-by-case assessment, not a blanket ruling. We invited the students to participate in the lessons and to find their own value in what we taught. For those who chose to be there, many had a fantastic experience that affected their lives for the better.

I was a student myself in that program when I was in high school, and I don’t remember specific lessons, but I do remember the spirit of that classroom. I remember the teacher’s love and dedication to us, her students, and how that love helped us to enjoy what we were learning. I then think over to my other great teachers in the schools I attended, and it’s the same with them. I don’t recall specific lessons, but I do remember that attention, that love, that dedication, that care for each of us as individuals, rather than as an aggregate of data for accountability reports.

That’s what made my schooling great: the teachers on the front lines that taught with love, often in spite of what their administrators were doing to them. As a teacher, I know I’ve brought that same love and dedication and, yes, I have taught in places where it was in spite of what the administration, state regulations, or NCLB did to me.

I see the numbers for my high school on the list and I have to think that maybe, just maybe, the solution in dealing with the remediation problem might just be in junking the government-mandated high-stakes tests and other punitive metrics and instead dealing with each student as an individual – and realizing that, in a free country, some individuals will simply choose to not participate with the others. They will be left behind. It is sad, but we have to move on.

Facebook fan page for my class. Like it and survive this year!

There is no American flag in heaven.

Whether you believe in heaven or not, there is still no American flag there. God is not an American, and neither is Jesus. I state this in a position contrary to one seemingly adopted by hard-right conservative Christian ideologues.

Neither God nor Jesus has signed any sort of trade deal, mutual defense pact, or even a treaty of goodwill with the USA. God, therefore, is not on our side. He’s on His own side and those who are not with Him are against Him.

Who is against Him? Jesus said one cannot serve both God and Mammon. Mammon is the Hebrew word for money, not some arcane Philistine deity. Mammon is money. Money is the world made to go ’round by money. Money is not love – it is cruelty, it is interest rates, it is moral hazard, it is corruption, it is that, when loved by man, becomes the root of all evil. To say otherwise is to lie.
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I picked up this film at the Half-Price Books this past weekend and enjoyed it greatly. Perhaps “enjoyed” is the wrong word… it’s an incredibly brutal war movie. I should say that I appreciated its importance and scope greatly. It’s a magnificent film and is superlative as a war movie.

I watch war movies because of what they have to say about the human condition, both about the soldiers that fight and the people that make the films. I feel that war movies as a genre deserve a system of rating that considers them as war movies, to the possible exclusion of other elements.

The first consideration is how much stuff gets blown up. Wars are about destruction, and that has to be depicted strongly, or the film must deliver significantly in other areas. Even if a film is near-perfect in other areas, an absence of massive, cyclopean destruction will prevent it from being a consummate war film. In this regard, Tae Guk Gi delivers. Some would say that it over-delivers. The film has a strong advisory that is warranted for its stark, graphic, brutal depiction of what war can do to a human body. The film does not flinch from hand-to-hand combat with improvised weapons, shells rending bodies, or massacres of innocents. The violence makes it difficult to watch, but compelling as well. There is much to learn in that this is a true face of war, and it is ugly. 2 points for the blowing stuff up.

Next, I want to assess the honesty of the depiction of war. Every great war movie is also an antiwar movie. A movie that glorifies an aspect of the conflict is propaganda. Tae Guk Gi glorifies heroism, but on a personal, rather than national level. It questions so-called “national heroes” as fabrications of propaganda, with their actual deeds perhaps best left unknown. Tae Guk Gi is most certainly an anti-war movie. The war moves across Korea and devastates the whole of it. The characters are all complicated, regardless of their side, which aids the impact of the film. 2 points for honesty without propaganda.

Third for me is a question of veracity: does it ring true? I’m a military historian, and I cringe at ignorance of history. Ignorance of history leads directly into propaganda and mythology and glorification of war, which there should be none of. Tae Guk Gi is painstaking in its detail, down to the anti-communist brute squads that executed South Korean citizens in liberated areas for suspicion of collaboration with the Communists and the North Korean slaughtering of villagers in the path of the South Korean advance. The uniforms are impeccable and the equipment period- and theatre- accurate. I enjoyed seeing the North Koreans equipped with the proper USSR 1938-era war surplus, as happened historically, along with the evolving quality of equipment for the ROK forces. 2 points for veracity.

After veracity, I want to see empathy for the other side. Not sympathy, but an understanding of their motives – empathy. I don’t want the contending army to be simply “the bad guys.” I want them to be the enemy, but I want to see them act intelligently and not be a set of cardboard targets to blast apart. I don’t want to see a film that’s little more than a first-person shooter game. Again, Tae Guk Gi comes through on this count. The North Koreans aren’t idiots. They also aren’t a nameless mass. We see their soldiers, their officers, their prisoners of war, and each character has a memorable impact. There’s also a great Chinese mass charge scene that incorporates CGI and live action properly… unless the filmmakers really did hire 100,000 extras to charge up a hill for 20 seconds… but the scene conveys the idea of a mass charge more than any description I’ve read. I understand the Chinese style of fighting more now. 2 points for the empathy connection.

Finally, I need intensity of experience. I need to feel like I’m there, in the midst of the conflict. Tae Guk Gi is excellent in that regard. The cinematography uses a number of artistic touches that again and again put me directly in the trenches, bunkers, and city ruins. Blood, dirt, and bullet casings fly up into the lens, giving me more than a 3-D experience. I travel in time with those touches. 2 points for the intensity, 10 total.

Tae Guk Gi is what I would consider to be a consummate war film. It has it all, plus bonuses I did not need to consider because of its attainment of superlativeness without their consideration. This is not a romance. This is not a teenage angst vehicle. This is a WAR movie, and there is much to learn from watching it. If you like war movies, you owe it to yourself to see it.