Reviews of movies, anime, and the occasional TV show mixed with warnings on Blogger spam. Also to be found are musings on whatever I am thinking about - all from the point of view of being left to watch everything from the sidelines of life.
Thanks to the wonders of YouTube I’ve found a public service announcement I used to see as a kid. The local TV stations would dump PSA’s onto the early hours of the morning but there were two that stuck out: the crying Indian and the one that always made me laugh – Tennessee Trash. It didn’t hurt that I hated litterbugs, but this is a classic.
The Untold Story of Black Mormons
I ran across mention of this documentary on the Net and and tracked down the website dedicated to it. After seeing the trailer, I knew I had to own the DVD.
The documentary by Margaret B. Young and Darius A. Gray is utterly fascinating and often deeply moving as it follows the history of African American’s in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Much has been made of the Church’s past prohibition against men of color holding the priesthood and this film does not flinch from the hard questions around this. Being a lover of the truth, the absolute candor of Nobody Knows impressed me no end.
Highlights include accounts of Elijah Able and Jane Manning James. Able was a member of the LDS Church from the early days and a priesthood holder. Ordained an Elder and a Seventy, he even served as a missionary when that wasn’t that common. Jane Manning is better known in Church history as she was taken in by Joseph Smith in Nauvoo, Illinois. Her faith and trials showed what an amazing person she was in holding on to her faith.
Also standing out are all the interviews with members and nonmembers alike. For me, Darius Gray and Paul Gill’s conversation at the end is simply wonderful and the best. That’s not to short change the others, they are all interesting and inspirational.
Topics covered are the beliefs of the Latter-day Saints, the restriction on the priesthood, the “seed of Cain” theory, the “fence sitters” theory, efforts to seek revelation to remove the restriction, Genesis Group, lifting of the restriction in 1978, and what it is like to be black in a predominantly white church.
Rather than go into detail about the documentary, I encourage you to buy or borrow the DVD. I think it is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever watched and highly recommend it. The extensive extras are all worth watching. If you don’t feel your heart touched after watching it, you need to see a cardiac specialist to see if you have a heart.
Nobody Knows should be seen by everyone in the Church, but especially those who still hold on to prejudice. Sadly, there are still racists in this modern age but if they watch this I think they will be forced to face the truth – that we are all children of a Heavenly Father Who loves us.
Personally,
I want to thank everyone who made this beautiful documentary for they have done us all a great service.
One of the refrains I’ve seen of late is how capitalism failed and that’s why we are in an economic crisis. Something I’ve tried to explain to people in the past is that real capitalism is rarely seen in America these days. What we have is huge corporations that dearly wish to be monopolies. Monopolies don’t want competition, they want total control and are big believers in centralization.
So I’ve found it interesting how Republicans have been labeled the party of big business when so many big businesses mainly contribute to Democrats. When big government and big business conspire, you get what we have these days. What I am is a believer in competition of the free market which is different than being pro-business. Jonah Goldberg has an excellent piece on this that everyone should read.
At Blogmocracy, Rodan has a post based on Goldberg’s op-ed that connects the union of progressives and big business with the policies of fascism. In it, he uses a term I’ve used for years, Neo-feudal to describe the attitude of those wishing control through making everyone beholden to them. I have to point out that the ever increasing number of “czars” in the Obama administration accentuates the impression of feudalism to me. Having people with cabinet level power who directly report to the President is all too much like vassals reporting to their lord, in my view.
I will say that the video in the post is annoying, it has some good content on socialism and George Orwell, then completely goes off the rails with the cartoony stuff at the end.
I think a fundamental human mistake is to vest power in one organization and then have all the decisions be made at the top. This is the essence of centralization and history shows that it leads to inflexibility, inefficiency, and corruption every time. This applies to businesses, organizations, political parties, and governments equally.
But here we are, repeating the same mistakes and being shocked when it goes wrong. While I think people are starting to wake up and see what is happening, I wonder if it is too late. The consolidation of power by the federal government and large corporations has been going on for some time now. The ACTA shenanigans are a good example of how it works, with the US government doing the bidding of the entertainment industry.
The solution is smaller government and small business. A focus on these things will lead to better economic and political health in the country. But will the American people do what is needed to bring reform about? That’s the multi-trillion dollar question.
Imagine being killed by exploding chewing gum. Sounds like something from an Austin Powers movie, doesn’t it? Pretty funny, right?
In Ukraine, a chemistry major was killed when his chewing gum exploded. Supposedly he used to dip gum in citric acid and may have confused another chemical with it.
This is too strange to believe. Or not to believe. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of it and wonder if we’ll ever get a full explanation of what happened. I just feel sorry for his poor parents.
After all, it isn’t like we can stop it.
Life in Minnesota involves the occasional blizzard or two and we’re in the middle of one right now. Most places in the area have gotten between 10 and 16 inches already and it is still coming down as I post this.
The Post Bulletin is predicting it will end up in the top ten blizzards in Rochester history. 18 inches is looking likely for Winona, Rochester, and North of La Crosse. I have the feeling I’ll be canceling the Missionary Coordination Meeting at church scheduled for tonight.
The wind is adding insult to injury. Wind chills and blowing snow take much of the fun out of a blizzard. Tonight temperatures will drop below zero in the AM meaning 20 to 30 below wind chills. I hope that everyone stays safe and warm during nature’s siege.
Except this is no dog, this is a car. The Brits who officially broke the sound barrier on wheels 12 years ago are back with a project to go 1,000 mph in South Africa. The SSC Thrust hit 763 mph for an average using two jet fighter engines but that isn’t enough now that others want to break the record. With a hybrid rocket motor this project is aimed at more than setting an amazing record. They are hoping the involvement of schools and universities will have an effect like the Apollo moon shots did back in the 1960’s by bringing in more students into science degrees.
Quote of the article:
Put it this way, if you fired what used to be the most powerful handgun in the world, Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum, at the tail of the rocket/jet car as it passed and Green toggled the 20,500lb thrust hybrid rocket as the revolver went off, the bullet would never hit the car.
I wonder how big a speeding ticket he’d get for that?
But seriously, I’m skeptical they can do it because the low level speed record for an aircraft is only 994 mph. An aircraft has a lot less friction to deal with -- not only involving air but with no energy being lost to contact with the ground. The other thing worrying is the dual engine concept with a jet engine and a hybrid rocket motor. That won’t be the easiest thing to work out. It reminds me of Chuck Yeager’s flight in a similarly augmented NF-104A Starfighter that ended in a crash so vividly depicted in The Right Stuff.
Speaking of Starfighters, I’m looking forward to seeing if the North American Eagle team can break 800 mph with an adapted F-104 Starfighter fuselage on wheels. Being very fond of the F-104 in all its incarnations, I’m rooting for their success. They’ve been ramping up test runs and have run into some problems lately but it doesn’t look project threatening.
Most people don’t know of it, but back in 1979 Stan Barret broke the sound barrier in the Budweiser Rocket Car built by Hal Needham’s team. Sadly, the first supersonic car run couldn’t be recognized because it had three wheels and only did a one way trip. Check out the story at YouTube:
With the East Anglia “climategate” scandal slowly starting to get a little media attention, I’ve found out I’m not the only one worrying it will tarnish all scientific research. At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henniger has an opinion piece warning that the credibility of all science is at risk. In it he brings up some valid points why this may happen and this quote gets to the heart of the dilemma:
Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost.
There is great danger in mixing politics and science, but I’ll only address the biggest and possibly least perceived danger. That being the loss of stature in the public eye. Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey breaks down the Rasmussen Reports poll that shows 59% believe data on global warming has been falsified. What is amazing in these polarized times is that majorities across the strata believe this. If that isn’t a loss of credibility, I don’t know what is.
I’ve always thought AGW was based on faith rather than hard science as that massive nuclear furnace in the center of our solar system dictates more than we fully comprehend. Perhaps it is because I remember two previous panics that were widespread. In the 1970’s it was the fear of another ice age that some of the AGW scientists actually pushed back then. Later on the terror of the hole in the ozone layer dominated the media and led to a banning of CFC’s to reduce damage to it. In these I see the arrogance of man combined with the allure of hysteria making for bad science driven by the politics of anti-capitalism.
Shifting gears a bit, it doesn’t help that we are starting to hit some hard walls with scientific research producing practical results. While the search for knowledge is a good thing, in the end most of it needs to deliver something of use to humanity in general. This is particularly true in medical research.
The Telegraph has a sobering article about the diminishing returns of the huge amounts of money thrown into medical science. While I think the title of the article is overly pessimistic or sensational, it is hard to argue that we aren’t getting our moneys worth. Such high hopes were placed on the human genome project that it couldn’t possibly live up to expectations.
Unfortunately, it is not looking good there and if science is done objectively as is suggested in this article, it may open a Pandora’s Box of political and racial problems. The promise of finding the causes of diseases and ways to treat them with gene cocktails has not had much success so far, possibly due to the small sample. Geoffrey Miller posits that the research will instead go in another direction once wider sampling is done:
The trouble is, the resequencing data will reveal much more about human evolutionary history and ethnic differences than they will about disease genes. Once enough DNA is analysed around the world, science will have a panoramic view of human genetic variation across races, ethnicities and regions. We will start reconstructing a detailed family tree that links all living humans, discovering many surprises about mis-attributed paternity and covert mating between classes, castes, regions and ethnicities.
In the pop culture, the original Star Trek television series speculated that there will be a eugenics war between genetically enhanced and superior humans with the rest of humanity. That is where we got the memorable villain, Khan. If we do get the kind of research suggested, I don’t think that scenario is too far fetched. The wealthy will want to tinker with their progeny and I can see state run programs in totalitarian states wanting to achieve dominance in a genetic arms race. Worse, I can see racial strife based on both rejection and embracing of the studies coming out of the research.
All of that could lead to an extreme neo-Luddite reaction, especially if science has already become viewed as just another political football. The last people to see that coming will be the scientists themselves due to their living in insulated academic bubbles. Perhaps more transparency and less politics would help, but it needs to happen quickly before the public consigns science to the trash heap of politics.
