Rambo was freakin' awesome! Everyone should see it. God, I love that Sly came back and made Rocky Balboa, and now Rambo. He closed out both franchises extremely well.

We lost a good one today. Heath Ledger's performance in Brokeback Mountain was one of the most powerful I've seen. Here was my post the day after I saw the film.

This is my distilled answer to the insane position of being against "illegal" immigration, while purportedly supporting immigration in some abstract sense. From an exchange with Ron Paul-supporting "libertarians" at UNC:

Imagine that we lived in a society where pizza delivery was largely outlawed, and as a result we had a bunch of illegal, ( Read more... )

How is the Terminator series able to debut during a writer's strike? Who's writing the thing?

Awesome Star Trek trailer!

It's a long wait.

More MLK Day thoughts.

Liberals have a monopoly on race because they are the only ones who seem to care about racism.

Conservatives, libertarians, Objectivists -- they all have sound arguments against some forms of affirmative action, race-based quotas, and identity politics. But they don't give any indication that they really care about racism. ( Read more... )

Twelve years ago, I was working at a convenience store in Tucson on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. There was a big MLK celebration at the park across the street.

A couple of young black men came up to the counter. I assumed they were on their way to or from the festivities at the park. One of them asked me if we had a restroom that his friend could ( Read more... )

The force is strong in Walk Hard -- so much so that I suspect it will be a great film, on a par with The Golden Compass.

In other news, I've been moderately amused by the reality-experiment Whopper Freakout commercials from Burger King:

Employee: "We no longer carry the Whopper."

Customer dudes: "What's your slogan going to be now? The Home of the ( Read more... )

Arizona is cracking down big time on "illegal" people, with a fascist new law targeting the people who employ them. With this law, Arizonans willingly decided to shoot themselves in the foot, or as Judith Gans eloquently put it: "Getting rid of these workers means we are deciding as a matter of policy to shrink our economy..."

And this:
Dora ( Read more... )

Does anyone know why P51 Mustangs from WWII were much faster than today's latest prop planes? Why has civil aviation advanced so little in sixty years? Everything else is exponentially better, but Cessnas and their brethren are ridiculously slow and pathetic.

And guns too. We seem to be advancing slowly in personal arms.