The Friday Bacon

The image is of bacon grease filtering into the grease cup. I feel remiss for not posting this before the New York Times and Yahoo. But at least I got there before Ric Romero. If there isn't already a patron saint of bacon, Jason Day deserves that honor.

The Afterglow

I have made the analogy before that the campaign was like being hit on by a drunken sociopath. In the aftermath of the election it seems even more so with various special interest groups and media outlets remembering various promises made by Obama while on the road to the White House. They seem like an expectant lover on the morning after, hopeful that this impulsive decision to get in bed with this beautiful person who said all the right things will turn into a healthy relationship. All the while the recipient of the lover's attention hurriedly prepares to move on with his agenda while assuring the lover that, "that was all pillow talk baby." We can at least hope that Obama doesn't spurn the voters like a one night stand. But he is a politician and I won't hold my breath.

John Stewart made the observation to Obama that the country isn't what it was when he started this race. Truly Obama is inheriting a sloppy shit sandwich from one of the most hated presidents in history. Unfortunately for the discontent, Bush is scheduled to leave office and they will loose a symbol of everything they dislike about U.S. policy. But the problems he created will remain. What happens if Obama fails? Do we loose the meager gains we have made in race relations? Does the country swing wildly back to the politically extreme right? Will there be much left of the country after four years if he can't get a hold on these various crises?

Parts of the country started to reflect Bush's low approval ratings by going blue this election. My question is whether these states who were red in 2004 have an indelible sin on them for causing the last 4 years of unnecessary downward spiraling of the nation. Ohio and Pennsylvania, I am looking at you.

As usual, I have nothing positive to say.

Gay Marriage In Connecticut

It should be obvious that anyone that is against gay marriage holds such an opinion because they don't like the idea of gay sex. Although we joke in popular culture that sex and marriage have nothing to do with each other, you won't see any significant principled division between the people who object to homosexuality and those who wish to deprive homosexuals of their civil rights.

Today Connecticut's supreme court ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry violated that state's constitution. Effectively becoming the third state to allow homosexual marriage.

Something that is often glossed over in discussions of gay marriage is the issue of civil unions. These are often touted as being the same as marriage but with a different name. Gay rights groups often do a good job of pointing out that "separate is not equal," but it gets a bit more technical than that. There is a certain deference that is given to the status of marriage in American law that would not transfer over to any artificial legislative construction. You can make a statute that gives persons in a civil union the same tax benefits(penalties), the same visitation rights, and same property ownership as marriage and these are the rights typically cited by people discussing the issue, but there are a number of other rights that most people don't know come from marriage. You can have joint ownership of property but what about inheritance? What about the "Marital Privilege" where your spouse can not be forced to testify against you in court? There are a number of others but the point is that the status of marriage is so ingrained in our culture that a legislature would have to rewrite its entire civil code to create a substantially similar civil status to marriage.

Which still leaves the question of motive. Why would you go to all the effort to create something exactly like marriage just for the gays if not to keep them separate? I have yet to have heard a coherent explanation of why conservatives believe that it somehow harms their marriage if homosexuals are allowed to marry. My wife and I may have had less sex, or poor communication on the week California first allowed gay marriage, but I guarantee you it was not the cause.

A Tale of 2 Film Buffs

I love movies and watch them often. I have a friend, we'll call her Pear, who also loves movies. We sometimes watch the movies we get with each other, sometimes not. Neither of us has an extensive DVD or, god forbid, VHS collection. We watch so many, that it would be ridiculous to purchase every movie we want to see. Rent? Oh no, no. Pear, as far as I know, has not rented a movie in what may be years. I will occasionally rent one, but it is usually if options are limited. No, Pear and I watch all of our movies for free, essentially.

The fact that my font name is Bloated Nemesis and this is a blog, you could probably make an assumption that I download movies from the log cabin. Well, you would be partially correct, son. That used to be the way to watch movies in the Bauman Manor living room. Downloading has a couple of significant draw backs. The most relevant to this post is the concept that the downloader now has a copy of it. They can spread this copy around as if it is their own. The downloader can become a distributor. Though, I really have no problem with that, I hear there are some rich, fat, selfish dudes in Hollywood who seem pissed about that possibility.

No, the preferred way to view flicks in the Bauman Manor is streaming. It is easy. It is quick. It isn't always reliable. However, it is beautiful. After I watched Bad Lieutenent last week, I could not distribute it to others. I can point someone towards to the site I watched it with, but that is about it. Essentially, it is being broadcast using the log cabin. Now granted, if we applied FCC laws to the peeps who are broadcasting it, they would be shut down.

Pretend it is 1945, and we all love radio. I'm scrolling through the stations and I stumble upon a station I have never heard before. It turns out some rogue electronics nerds with resources set up a tower and started broadcasting with no FCC authorization. Well, those rogue nerds would get in trouble when they were caught. However, those of us who listened to the station would not have legal problems.

So, one of our two film buffs uses log cabin streaming. Well, what does our friend Pear do? She goes to the library. You know, the public library, or that big ass building downtown that has all of the books and homeless people. Ring a bell? Pear watches a lot of movies, all for free. (Well, I suppose technically tax dollars factor in it, but we are working on the individual consumer level right now.) That is completely legal. Shit, you are considered a "good citizen" if you use libraries. Well, it is a slight surprise to some people that libraries often have movies. Lots of them. Good ones, too. Often, many of the same ones you can get from the log cabin. When Pear gets movies from the library, she does not get to keep them. There is a limited time period in which that movie is "hers."

So, in recap. Pear and I both watch a lot of movies. We watch them for free. We have a huge selection to choose from. We have a limited time period in which the movie is "ours." Shit, libraries and streaming both have an unreliability to them. (Even if Pear knows the library has a movie, they may not have it available at that time. When I stream, I often run into server problems or bad copies.) Seems like borrowing media from a library and streaming off of the log cabin are pretty comparable to me.

So, I was just wondering, if the log cabin is the future of information dissemination, and libraries are the past, why is there not a similar legal option on the log cabin to libraries?

Oh yeah, I remember. The log cabin is a new frontier, much like America was up until 100 years ago. The corporations are trying to make the log cabin completely profit driven, and they want to squash anything that is more utopian than them.

Central Banking

For those of you who might not have taken a course of instruction in all matters fiduciary, here's a primer, a movie called Zeitgeist. In case you, like me, end up screaming at the video for footnotes while you're watching it, they're sort of included on the movie's homepage, here. Even their online statement, which reads like a manifesto without the scathing vocabulary, mentions that they soon hope to add footnotes and other such materials on the website, but it has not, as yet, manifested.