Blast from the Past Movie Review: Patriot Games (1992)

The month of November 2019 was Harrison Ford month for the film podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. The first movie we did was The Fugitive (podcast here), while the second one we did was Patriot Games. Here's the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

Historian, retired CIA agent, and retired Marine Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) is visiting Great Britain to lecture some Royal Navy students when he foils an attack on a British government official by members of a more militant Irish Republican Army faction, killing young terrorist Patrick Miller (Karl Hayden) in the process. Unfortunately Patrick's older brother Sean Miller (Sean Bean) survives the incident and vows revenge on the injured Ryan. Now we have a trans-Atlantic cat-and-mouse game, with the lives of Ryan's daughter Sally (Thora Birch) and pregnant wife Cathy (Anne Archer) at stake as well.

The Good

*Although I felt The Fugitive was dull in places, I didn't have that problem with Patriot Games. The movie moves along briskly and there's never a dull moment. They simplify a lot of the plot from the book (the IRA factionalism and ideology is downplayed, as I explain below, plus there's no scheme to recruit black militants to assist Miller's revenge) and that's a good thing.

*Sean Miller has a character arc, getting progressively more unhinged in his desire to kill Ryan even when it interferes with other IRA objectives. It's so obvious that I was wondering when his IRA bosses (the IRA was pretty organized for a terrorist group, run along rather military lines) were going to remove him from the mission or even straight-up kill him as a liability. He even straight-up calls the Ryans' house to taunt Jack about his injured daughter, for crying out loud. He's probably using up a lot of IRA funds on long-distance calls from Africa. Considering the IRA at least tried to look humanitarian (i.e. calling ahead before setting off their bombs), knife-twisting sadism by one of their operatives in an area where they had a lot of sympathy (New England and particularly Boston) is something that would really undermine the organization's goals and one hothead is ultimately expendable.

*As Nic pointed out in the podcast, the movie has an excellent roster of early 1990s actors. Harrison Ford, Anne Archer, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, Sean Bean. Everybody does a great job, which logically means good direction as well.

(If you want to see good actors with bad direction look at pretty much everybody in Revenge of the Sith. Sorry George.)

*Although the movie doesn't go into nit-picky detail about the factionalism within the IRA or the IRA's exact beliefs (a lot of South Boston types naively sending money to Belfast would probably be horrified to find most IRA factions are varying degrees of Marxist and some just use "the revolution" as an excuse for criminal activity like drug-dealing), it does retain the book's subplot that Miller's crew is intent on setting up other members to be taken out by the British (or simply murdering them themselves) to strengthen their own position. It's very quick and subtle here--we're not talking about Game of Thrones-level intrigue with poverty and brogues.

The Bad

*There's a lot of, in TVTropes terms, Easy Logistics going on here. Sean and his merry band travel from England to America to what's pretty obviously Libya and back to America again pretty easily, despite being hunted by the British intelligence agencies and presumably American ones as well. Miller's initial escape from Britain is explained in-film and makes sense given the IRA's connections to Libya, but how does he make the other trips, especially so quickly? It seems like the movie takes place over the course of no more than a month or so, given how the elder Miller's trial takes place after the attack and before the real cat-and-mouse game starts.

*In the books the IRA's initial targets are pretty obviously Prince Charles and Princess Diana, although I don't think they're named. Given the fame of the two, one wonders why this was changed to some random British official who's a cousin of the royal family. Did they think the movie would suffer in Britain or Ireland if they depicted the IRA trying to abduct or kill the very popular Princess Diana?

*Jack Ryan is of Irish background and Catholic himself, something that's not really touched on in the film. Given Miller's hatred for Irish who work for the British government and an IRA spokesman's insistence he would commit suicide before selling out his "countryman" Miller, someone could at least touch on that even if they don't spend a lot of time on it. The IRA spokesman could try to play that card with Ryan and get shut down, perhaps in the "gun money" scene in the bar.

*As was pointed out in the podcast, the sole female IRA member Annette (Polly Walker) is explicitly described as being English, but we get little about her motivation. The IRA is easy for outsiders to romanticize given the historical mistreatment of the Irish by the British and how the Protestant majority of Northern Ireland mistreated the Catholic minority in recent years, so making her some kind of student radical who naively joined what she thought was some kind of liberation army and is now too deep to ever get out might've been interesting. Or if you want to plagiarize Leon Uris's Trinity, which is about the lead-up to the independence of (most of) Ireland in the 20th Century, she could have followed a boy into the struggle. Given the IRA's Marxism, there's also "the workingmen of the world have no country" anti-nationalism or she simply could be an extremist English Republican who just hates the monarchy. This isn't something that needs a lot of explanation--she could reference it in her conversations with the bookstore owner Dennis Cooley (Alex Norton), for example.

The Verdict

Definitely worth a watch. 9.0 out of 10.

ISIS Nukes Brussels, The Seljuks Beats the Mongols, and Stalin Joins The Axis

Although I'm still self-banned from posting on the biggest alternate-history forum on the Internet, I do visit the public sections to see what interesting actual alternate history (as opposed to the endless political arguing I quit the forum to avoid) is being discussed.

This led to my finding three more interesting timelines in recent weeks. One takes place in the modern day, the second in the days where Turkish power expanded into Asia Minor at the expense of the crumbling Byzantines, and the third during World War II.

The Sultanate of Rumistan: An Alternate Anatolia-The Seljuk Sultanate of Rum was established after the defeat of the Byzantine Empire by the Seljuk Turks, which began the process of Turkifying and Islamizing Asia Minor and the Byzantines' long decline. The Sultanate was eventually defeated and forced to pay tribute to the Mongols after their defeat at the Battle of Kose Dag, but in this timeline, the Seljuk sultan listens to his experienced commanders and waits for the Mongols to come to him rather than attack them immediately. The Mongols are defeated and the decline of the Seljuk Sultanate--which ultimately led to the rise of the Ottoman Empire--is averted. This is going to make life rather difficult for the Byzantines, but the author knows a whole lot about the workings of the Seljuk Sultanate, the neighboring Kingdom of Georgia, and the Byzantine secessionist regime in Trebizond and it's really quite interesting.

The Maw: When the Lights of the World Went Out-This story begins with agents of the infamous Islamic State somehow getting hold of a nuclear weapon--just how they got it hasn't been explained yet--and they smuggle it from the Middle East into Belgium. They set it off in the downtown area of Brussels, killing tens of thousands (if not more) immediately and provoking France to nuke ISIS's capital of al-Raqqa in reprisal. A straight-up World War II level obliteration of ISIS soon follows. It looks like the author was setting up a much darker scenario based on the hints he was dropping, but the timeline hasn't been updated in some time. Given how the real-life migrant crisis in Europe has been, well, a crisis, a world where ISIS agents snuck into Europe via Greece and ripped a chunk of a major EU city out with a nuke, I suspect the people getting the worst of it are going to European and refugee Muslims.

The Twin Vipers-Stalin joins the Axis. Although given Hitler's ultimate desire to conquer the Soviet Union, exterminate "Jewish Bolshevism," and turn the Slavs into helots for German Spartans and how in general fascism and Communism are opposed ideologies make this sound absolutely insane, there were talks to that effect. Rather than refusing to deal more than the bare minimum with people whom he viewed as racial enemies, the Germans were actually willing to admit the Soviets to the alliance to help defeat Britain. That would have made life very difficult for the Western Allies, since the Soviets could menace the Middle East and India in a way the Germans could not.

However, this timeline begins somewhat earlier than the real-life talks that took place after the defeat of France when the 1939 border conflict between the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan that ended with the Battle of Khalkin Gol escalates into a full-blown war. This leads to Mussolini getting sidelined, the British and French fighting the Soviets in Finland, and even Operation Pike, an Anglo-French plan to bomb the Soviet oil fields that didn't happen in real life.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: V for Vendetta (2005)

The movie V for Vendetta and I have a long history. I don't remember seeing it in theaters when it came out, but I do remember using it as the basis for an opinion column I wrote for the University of Georgia student newspaper The Red and Black about the dangers of government surveillance and overreach in the age of terrorism.

It got a lot more personal when I studied abroad in Great Britain in 2006. I, like many other tourists, got caught up in the liquid-bomb scare, which broke out the night before we were going to leave to return home. My flight home had to wait for several hours on the tarmac at one of the London airports while we were all being background-checked. I had to pack up the books I'd bought in Oxford for the trip home rather than bring them on the plane. I could have bought new books at the airport bookstore, but at the time I thought the ban on all carry-on items not bought at the airport was a scam to make people buy all-new products and unnecessary to protect the security of the flights, so I didn't. Fortunately the airplane's televisions were on and I watched V for Vendetta as well as a significant chunk of The Wind that Shakes the Barley and at least one Doctor Who episode dealing with the Cybermen. I ended up watching the movie at least twice.

Now 12 years later, Myopia: Defend Your Childhood is doing a series on films people thought were So Profound when we were in college, to see if they still hold up. V for Vendetta was one of the films, and I made sure to appear on it. I may have mellowed out a little on politics since college, but governmental overreach in the name of fighting terrorism, a war, etc. is still a personal bugbear. Here's the podcast. Now for the review...

The Plot

Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) works for the British Television Network, a successor to the British Broadcasting Corporation in Great Britain. In an age of peril--the United States has fallen into civil war and there's been at least one global pandemic--Britain has turned into a police state under the rule of a "High Chancellor" Adam Sutler (John Hurt) and his Nazi-like Norsefire Party.

Sutler's regime, however, is challenged by the mysterious V (Hugo Weaving), a terrorist with near-supernatural fighting abilities who disguises himself as Guy Fawkes. V blows up Old Bailey on November 5 and vows, a year later, to blow up Parliament itself. Evey finds herself mixed up in the whole situation when V rescues her from some rape-inclined "Fingermen" (secret police) and ends up staying with him for an extended period. Meanwhile, some ordinary British police assigned to help investigate V find themselves stumbling onto a conspiracy dating back all the way to the founding of the Norsefire regime.

The Good

*There's actually quite a bit of intertextuality in the story, some overt and some more subtle. V's campaign against Sutler's dictatorship, though driven by the ideological belief that governments should fear their people and not the other way around, also has a strong element of personal revenge. The Count of Monte Cristo shows up repeatedly throughout the film. I also noticed a strong resemblance to the story of The Phantom of the Opera, especially the more Phantom-sympathetic interpretations--a pretty young woman falls under the thrall of an older disfigured genius and it's not completely non-consensual on her part. I can appreciate thoughtfulness.

*The script was well-done. I rather liked V's introductory speech and the vocabulary he uses. Very impressive.

*I also liked the acting in general. I don't think there's a bad delivery in the whole film. Hugo Weaving and Stephen Fry are particularly impressive.

*There's a really well-shot scene involving dominoes.

*V's strategy as a terrorist makes sense. Terrorist organizations often try to trick governments into overreacting and driving people who would otherwise not support the terrorists to do so. Some of V's schemes involve this.

*In the comic, the Norsefire government is able to seize control of Britain after the country abandons its nuclear weapons, causing it to avoid being nuked during World War III. Even without getting nuked, Britain would be cut off from world trade, inundated with massive flows of refugees, and subject to possible climactic disruption, and I could imagine that kind of crisis spawning a dictatorship. However questionable that proposition is in the first place--West Germany and other mainland European states part of the NATO alliance didn't have independent nuclear capability and they were going to get trashed regardless, plus the Soviet government has had a grudge against Britain from the beginning--that obviously needs to be updated. The descriptions of how the world and the United States in particular--which would not tolerate such a regime taking over one of its closest allies--are in a state of chaos are small and subtle, but they work for story purposes.

*Britain has an extensive security-camera surveillance system. The film shows how easy it could be used to track down enemies of the state (much like the film Enemy of the State, in which our own much less overbearing system is used for the same purpose) as well as stop crime.

*The subtleties of a British (or specifically English) fascism are well-done. The official action hero is named Storm Saxon and he's depicted as rescuing a British woman kidnapped and tortured by a caricature of an Islamic extremist, regime propaganda is delivered by something obviously based on the BBC, the Anglican Church is promoted heavily, etc.

The Bad

*Waaaay too much 9/11 Trutherism in the film. I'm not going to go into more detail for reasons of spoilers. It is entirely possible for a government to overreact to a legitimate danger rather than "there are no dangers and any 'dangers' are straw enemies to justify seizing power." The Japanese Internment doesn't mean the attack on Pearl Harbor didn't happen, the 1944 Sedition Trial doesn't mean the Nazis weren't dangerous, and McCarthy's excesses doesn't mean there weren't Soviet spies in the U.S. government. That was my single biggest beef with the film, as it undermines its credibility as a warning against government overreach.

*The movie drags a bit in the middle before things start ramping up toward V's endgame.

*We get a second "homosexual persecuted by the regime" story later in the narrative when we've already been given one, although to be fair, the second is more vivid than the first. Given how Norsefire is explicitly English-supremacist and a character having an Irish mother is brought up to threaten them, perhaps one of the two persecution narratives could be swapped out with a real or suspected IRA sympathizer? Even the democratic British government violated the rights of Catholics in Northern Ireland during the fight with the IRA, and I imagine Norsefire would be even uglier. Or to create an even more sympathetic victim, someone totally unconnected with terrorism who's a little too publicly proud of their Irish or Scottish heritage for the regime's taste?

(There's also a timing issue as to when homosexuals start getting persecuted that I'm not going to get into for reasons of spoilers. Making the second victim into someone falsely accused of being an IRA supporter for advocating for Catholics' rights in Northern Ireland and keeping the first victim as-is makes more sense chronologically, given the origins of the Norsefire regime, when it takes power, and when it starts persecuting different groups. Another alternative: Perhaps the second victim could be a Muslim falsely accused of being a terrorist? A prominent Norsefire official served in the military in various Middle Eastern places before the regime took power, so that's where he could have gotten his guinea pigs. Given how the film is a cautionary tale against anti-terrorist overreach, perhaps a Muslim victim would have been too on-the-nose, or the suits would have thought bigoted consumers wouldn't see the movie. I remember people complaining about a character having an illegal Koran, so that might've pushed them further along the boycott-denounce road.)

*The sense of time gets a little wonky toward the end. How long is Evey with V?

*Given some of the stuff that happens to Evey in the film I would expect her to be a lot more screaming-angry than she ends up being. Her reaction comes off as really understated. Natalie Portman can do better angry than that. Hell, she sounds angrier here when she's rapping on Saturday Night Live.

*Per the above, what happens to her would realistically require multiple people to pull off, not just one. Not going into more detail for reasons of spoilers.

*The back-story for the Norsefire regime on the level of Britain itself starts breaking down once we get deeper into it. Sutler is depicted as being a powerful Conservative politician with Nazi-esque banners, marching paramilitaries, etc. even before the St. Mary's plague that threw society into crisis and swept Norsefire into power. That he'd even get that far seems extremely unlikely--the British National Party suffered quite a bit when they got prominent enough for their then-leader Nick Griffin to get a spot on the BBC show Question Time, where he showed himself to be an idiot. And the BNP was trying to avoid looking like a bunch of Nazis. Sutler's crew is even more overtly evil than the BNP--they would have been marginalized (and potentially outlawed if they did more than prance around) and Sutler would never get into the position he was in before the St. Mary plague breaks out. And if he's not part of the British government (no more details for reasons of spoilers), the whole story doesn't work.

*Historical accuracy problem: Guy Fawkes was not a freedom fighter trying to overthrow an oppressive regime. He was part of a scheme by some English Catholics to re-impose the Catholic monarchy on an increasingly Protestant country. Yes, the British government was persecuting Catholics and that's not cool, but assuming the plan even succeeded--rather than provoking an even more extreme anti-Catholic backlash--the resulting government would have had to become oppressive simply to stay in power and keep its conspirators alive. We're talking Inquisition-level stuff here. Fawkes has more in common with Osama bin Laden than with V, even if V is borrowing his aesthetic.

The Verdict

Good, but could be better. I'd have liked it a lot better without the 9/11 Trutherism. 8.0 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Under Siege (1992)

One of the movies I'd wanted to see when I was a kid but wasn't allowed to was the original Under Siege, starring noted martial artist Steven Seagal. Like most movies I wasn't allowed to see I ended up losing interest in it, but thanks to the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood and Amazon Instant Video, I had the chance to see it again.

Here's the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

The U.S.S. Missouri, the venerable battleship that accepted the surrender of Imperial Japan in 1945 and was upgraded to fight in the Gulf War, has finally been retired. It's making one last cruise from Hawaii to San Francisco to be decommissioned. Aboard the ship is cook Casey Ryback (Steven Seagal), personally chosen by Captain Adams (Patrick O'Neal) but disliked by the cranky executive officer Commander Krill (Gary Busey).

Krill throws a surprise birthday party for Adams, led by apparent musician William Strannix (Tommy Lee Jones), but it turns out it's all a scheme to seize control of the ship and sell its Tomahawk missiles (including several tipped with nuclear weapons) to the highest bidder. With most of the crew killed or welded up in the ship's forecastle, it's up to Ryback and some unlikely allies to save the day.

The Good

*The movie is entertaining and moves along at a pretty brisk clip. It's never boring, which is the major reason one sees these movies. :) In TVTropes terms, there are several Crowning Moments of Awesome, including one involving the Missouri's main guns.

*Tommy Lee Jones does a good job as the brilliant but deranged Strannix. It reminds me a lot of his later performance of the manic Two-Face in Batman Forever. And as befitting someone with military command experience (he references attending the War College, which colonels and lieutenant colonels apply to enter) he avoids, as TVTropes puts it, the infamous Villain Ball. Instead of sending out individual goons to be killed, they're to patrol in groups, not pursue Ryback into unsecured areas, check in regularly, etc.

*There's the theme throughout the movie of political-hack superiors throwing fighting-men under the bus. Although one would like to think our military is immune to CYA and other such bullshit, that's not the case. Although I'm violating the Servo Rule about invoking good movies in one's crappy movie (okay "mediocre" is more accurate), the novel Once An Eagle (later adapted into a miniseries) features a slimy politically-savvy staff officer Courtney Massengale and the battle-tested Sam Damon who has to fix or take the fall for his screw-ups.

*The opening scene in which the executive officer is the hard-ass and the captain more mellow reflects something I remember reading about how a well-run Navy ship operates. The captain is supposed to be the "good cop" and the XO the "bad cop." The XO is also more involved in the day-to-day hands-on stuff than the captain is. Commander Krill getting on Ryback's case about his uniform reflects that.

*I'm pretty sure that's really President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush in the movie.

*The terrorists' scheme to get aboard the ship actually makes a lot of sense. After all, Cher filmed the music video for "If I Could Turn Back Time" on the USS Missouri when it was docked in California.

*There's a really creative henchman death involving an I-beam.

*A first-time killer (who starts out the film as a pacifist no less) reacts with all the emotional trauma one would expect when they have to kill a terrorist.

The Bad

*The amount of skill required to hijack a U.S. Navy battleship is the kind of thing Soviet special forces or some other high-end military force would have. The terrorists seem like a bunch of mercenaries initially recruited for a CIA black-ops scheme or even a multinational criminal gang (there's a Eurotrash-looking guy, a Japanese guy, what sound like some Italians, a British guy, etc) led by what seems like a disgruntled U.S. Special Forces officer rather than a coherent unit. The recruiting effort needed to collect the people with all the necessary skill-sets from different nations, armies, etc. would raise all kinds of red flags, especially given the villain's immediate back-story, and then there's getting so many different people to actually work together.

It would make more sense if the perpetrators were some Soviet military or KGB die-hards who know they're on the way out (if this is in the fall or winter of 1991 the coup against Gorbachev has already failed and the USSR is clearly doomed) and are looking to secure their retirement if not take revenge on the Yankee capitalists. They'd be a coherent unit trained and working together for years with espirit de corps rather than a bunch of mercs who might balk at something so extreme and dangerous as taking on the U.S. Navy and simply take the money or some other goodies and run at first sign of trouble or before they even go through the mission. Mercenaries have historically not been very reliable soldiers..

Of course, given how dangerous a company or even a platoon of Spetsnaz would be, it'd be a much different and probably much shorter movie if the baddie rank-and-file were professional soldiers and not thug and merc types.

*Steven Seagal is a capable fighter, but he's not a very good actor. His delivery isn't very strong most of the time. Since he's the lead actor, this kind of presents a problem. :(

*Ryback gives a gun to a character who's an incoherent and frightened mess and expects them to be able to use it intelligently after having a couple of the gun's functions explained to them. One would think a trained soldier would know better. Of course he promptly uses this person as an ammo mule, so maybe he only intended them to actually use the weapon as a last resort.

*Do any of the terrorists have grenades? If they had grenades to use themselves, or if Ryback managed to snag a couple off the terrorists he kills, a lot of those gunfight scenes would be very difficult. Given how Strannix is a black-ops type, I would imagine his people would be carrying a bit more than small arms just in case.

*At one point Ryback basically abandons a bunch of his allies to go gallivanting around with only one other character, never mind that the terrorists still have at least half their numbers.

*A major plot point involves Tomahawk missiles having self-destruct codes the captain of the ship can trigger. I'm pretty sure those don't actually exist in real life--if an enemy got hold of them, they could use them to prevent a ship from effectively using its weapons. It'd be better if they were still relying on targeting data from the Missouri's radars or satellite inputs and could be redirected using the ship's fire control, but even that would be a problem.

*There's a love-interest plot involving Ryback, but there's no foreshadowing of it or any depth to the relationship. Some kind of weird trauma-bonding perhaps? It'd be more interesting if they avoided it completely, since a lot of action films have a token romantic plot and this would be different.

The Verdict

Fun, but more than a little bit nonsensical. See it once. 7.5 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998)

As part of the introduction of a spin-off podcast focusing on the James Bond films, Myopia: Defend Your Childhood is doing an episode on the science fiction film The X-Files: Fight The Future based on the hit FOX television series. I was a major fan of the show when I was in later middle and early high school, so this was definitely a childhood favorite. Here's the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) have been reassigned from their usual job of investigating the X-Files (unexplained FBI cases involving the paranormal) to investigate a bomb threat against a federal building in Dallas. At the same time, a young boy in Texas discovers a cave with the skeleton of a Paleo-Indian who'd died in combat with an extraterrestrial...and the aliens' nefarious mind-controlling black oil. It turns out the bomb threat and the cave's contents are related, and our favorite FBI agents find themselves once more locking horns with the nefarious Syndicate and mastermind The Cigarette-Smoking Man...

The Good

*The opening scene where a pair of Paleo-Indians hunt down an extraterrestrial in Ice Age Texas was awesome when I saw it nearly twenty years ago and it was still a lot of fun. As Nick pointed out, this was before CGI became so all-encompassing. That's a real alien there, not a video-game creation. And the cave-men display some tactical sense--they're fighting an enemy with gigantic eyes in the dark, so they use their torches to disorient and blind it.

*There are some really good character moments. One of the most entertaining moments is Scully (a medical doctor) diagnosing her own symptoms as she goes into anaphylactic shock after getting stung by a bee. When we first see Mulder and Scully, their bantering shows a lot of what we need to know about them as people. We don't need to be told much if anything. And Mulder makes a great speech to Scully at one point.

*Per the above, the film was designed to appeal to those who weren't already X-Files fans. Mulder's back-story comes out in a drunken rant in a bar, for example.

*We learn some interesting stuff about the aliens and the Syndicate. I won't give away a lot of information for spoilery reasons, but there is a quote from The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien I found appropriate: "It is difficult with these evil folk to know when they are in league, and when they are cheating one another."

*The movie is very 1990s. There are references to the Waco siege and the Ruby Ridge shootings. The Dallas bomb-threat is very reminiscent of the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing in terms of both concept and visuals. I remember reading somewhere that the government conspiracies, aliens, etc. were what filled the gap between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror and that's plain here. There're even references to the dangerous African "killer bees" and the all-powerful Federal Emergency Management Agency (here're some comments on FEMA from a conspiracist POV) that are very 1990s. Heck, the movie even has a character refer to FEMA as "the secret government."

*There's a really good cliffhanger "WHAM!" moment I did not see coming. Bravo.

The Bad

*If the aliens that the Syndicate is working with are that old and powerful, why the need for the conspiracy in the first place? The British were only a few thousand years' more advanced in terms of technology and organization than the Stone Age aborigines of Australia and they didn't need indigenous proxies to work for decades to prepare the way for them. They just swept in, took the lands they wanted, and wiped out most of the natives in the process. To cite the Dalek from Dr. Who, a conflict between them and us would not be war, but pest control. There's an in-universe explanation involving the leverage the early Syndicate had, but given the back-story revealed for the aliens, I don't think that would work.

*To that end, it would have been better if the prologue took place in the 19th Century or early 20th Century, using Comanche Indians or cowboys instead of cave-men. This would show the alien colonization scheme was only a few decades or a century old. The aliens would be a powerful and dangerous opponent, but weak enough that they couldn't just sweep right in and take over.

*Mulder manages to get to Antarctica at one point in 48 hours. That seems to be pushing it, especially given how he's likely being watched. It would have been better if the events in Antarctica took place in, say, Canada. It would be closer to the Syndicate's North American center of power and wouldn't take as long to get there. Mulder wouldn't need to buy plane tickets or anything else that could give away his location--just drive there.

*When a Syndicate base is collapsing, one of the minions asks about Mulder. Why do they even care about him? He's their enemy and the only reason he isn't dead is because he has allies with leverage on the Syndicate (I think in one episode Assistant FBI Director Walter Skinner tells The Cigarette-Smoking Man that if anything happens to Mulder, some damaging information is getting released) or because they don't want to make him a martyr ("kill Mulder and we take the risk of turning one man's quest into a crusade"). Him getting killed in a way that doesn't look like a murder would be good for their plans.

*A character is shot in the head at one point (but not lethally). We only see the wound intermittently.

*There's a scene that I described as "the alien water-slide of doom" that should break a character's legs (or at least hurt him rather badly), but it really doesn't.

The Verdict

It's an entertaining film that you should go see, especially since they're reviving the series. 8.5 out of 10.

Thoughts on Obama's Prayer Breakfast Speech

On February 5, U.S. President Barack Obama made an address at the National Prayer Breakfast. And as can be expected whenever he takes a position on a controversial topic, some people got upset. In particular, people objected to his invocation of the Crusades, slavery, and Jim Crow as something people defended in the name of Christ. In the context, he was warning Americans to not think violent religious extremism was something other people (i.e. Muslims) did. To quote Scripture, 1 Corinthians 10:12 warns anyone thinks he stands to take heed lest he fall.

First things first, none of what Obama said was false. The Crusades were ordered by the Pope, the head of the Western Church, whose subordinates literally shouted "Deus vult" (God wills it). And although the Inquisition's body count has long been exaggerated by its Protestant and secularist critics, a few thousand across centuries murdered in the name of Christ (and countless others subject to lesser penalties like torture, public humiliation, internal exile, etc) is still a few thousand too many. And closer to home, many Christians in the U.S. defended slavery as Biblical and later separation of the races likewise. Christians today--and even many Christians back then (Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World includes accounts of Christian opponents of witch-hunting, some of whom were violently punished)--recognized these things as wrong, but that doesn't mean evil was not done in the name of Christ. Hell, even today many churches invoke 1 Corinthians 6:1-8 to try to silence (Christian) critics and cover up wrongdoing (actual crimes, not just the petty crap the verse is referring to).

However, self-flagellating over the Crusades in particular lacks historical perspective. The Crusades began when the Eastern Roman Empire, crumbling in the face of aggression by Muslim Turkic peoples (both the Great Seljuk Sultanate and independent ghazi warlords), requested military assistance from the Catholic world. This was only the latest of many defeats inflicted on Christians (and others) by Islamic warriors since the days of Mohammed himself. This article here provides an overview, but here's a map I found on Facebook this morning that illustrates the situation particularly vividly.

Furthermore, as this article from The Federalist points out, it is theologically much easier to justify violence in the name of Islam than Christianity. Jesus was a teacher executed by His government and a cynic (or a Nietzsche groupie) could write off the violence associated with the teaching of the Second Coming (see this quote from Luke and, well, most of the Book of Revelation) as a revenge fantasy of His followers. Meanwhile, Mohammed himself was a conqueror (even though, to be blunt, the Meccans persecuted him and his followers first) and his followers waged the wars depicted in the above image and Wikipedia article very soon after his death. The Federalist's article isn't perfect--when Tracinski comments about Islam not being able to uplift feudal and caste-ridden societies after 1,000 years he forgets the Golden Age of Islam and how the modern-day failings of many Islamic states can be attributed to later political problems like the resource curse, colonialism and other foreign meddling, etc. before they can be attributed to Islamic doctrine--but having a warrior vs. an ascetic as a spiritual leader has its consequences.

Obviously "they started it" or quibbling over theology does not justify the particularly gratuitous acts of violence that accompanied the Crusaders. The Jews were not to my knowledge involved in the Islamic wars of conquest at all and yet vast numbers of them suffered, both in pogroms along the line of march or the burning of the synagogue in Jerusalem, possibly with the worshipers inside. It was the Crusades, according to a history book I read in high school (it wasn't the official textbook but perhaps something I read as part of Academic Bowl) that kicked off the first pogroms that occurred intermittently all the way to the late 1940s. Furthermore, even if Islamic powers were the military enemy, there was no justification for gratuitous massacre of unarmed Muslims as occurred when the Crusaders took Jerusalem. Given St. Augustine had devised the doctrine of the Just War centuries earlier, the Crusaders (at least the clergy and more educated nobles, who would be in charge) should have known better.

However, just as the advances of the Caliphate or various Muslim rulers like the Seljuk sultan (who as a person seemed like a pretty cool fellow, based on the research I did for an article on the Battle of Manzikert) did not justify Crusader war crimes, the terrorist attacks of al-Qaeda and the conquering advance of ISIS do not justify the maltreatment of innocent Muslims today. For example, Daniel Pipes and Michelle Malkin have advocated measures going far beyond differentiating between Muslim men and little old ladies from Peoria when conducting airport security in regards to American Muslims. This article here, written by a Muslim, cites various indignities endured by American Muslims after 9/11. And you should see the comments that resulted when I defended the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" and brought up the opposition to a Catholic church in New York centuries ago.

Yes, there are jihadis hiding among Muslim civilian populations in the U.S. and elsewhere, but there were Klansmen and other white-supremacist terrorists hiding among the white civilian populations of the defeated South after the Civil War. The federal response to their shenanigans--more widespread in geography, numbers of attacks, and political effectiveness even if smaller in body counts than modern Islamists--was generally more measured than the policies certain people have advocated toward Muslims. And Muslim allies will be needed to defeat ISIS--and after the murder of that Jordanian pilot there will be no shortage of them. Mistreating Muslims will jeopardize that.

So although Obama seems to have the typical blind spot Western left-wingers have when discussing the Crusades versus the wars that provoked them, the reaction to his comments has been ridiculous. We as conservatives need to do better.

On The Ethics and Practicality of Hanging ISIS Prisoners...

Posted a news article I found earlier on Facebook and got quite a discussion. The gist of it is the Jordanians have threatened to kill ISIS prisoners if any harm should come to a Jordanian pilot captured alive by ISIS during the air campaign.

I posted that I supported this policy. After all, one of the reasons armies are (supposed to be) kind to enemy prisoners of war is reciprocity--they don't want any bad things happening to their own people who fall into enemy hands. ISIS, given its propensity for killing prisoners en masse (you see this mostly with Syrian Army soldiers), taking and beheading hostages, etc. clearly needs to be taught this lesson.

Some people took issue with my supporting this policy on the grounds of both morality and practicality...

The first to object was Zaid Jilani, who pointed out that the guilt or innocence of anybody tried and convicted by Jordan is questionable given the practice of judicial torture, especially in regards to terror suspects. In case you need a source other than Wikipedia, here's al-Jazeera and here's Human Rights Watch. He also said "civilized people" don't execute prisoners, which is not something I agree with but that's not relevant to the issue at hand. My friend Evan, a college professor, said if anything merited killing ISIS prisoners, it would be that they had committed capital crimes, not that ISIS had killed prisoners/hostages first.

These are some very good arguments. If the Jordanians captured a bunch of teenage conscripts forced to fight by family members held hostage (I don't know if ISIS actually does this, but knowing them I wouldn't be surprised) or people like this teen "volunteer" suicide bomber, that would be victimizing them twice. The same if the captured female suicide bomber is telling the truth about being an unwilling participant in the scheme. During WWII the Allied powers didn't retaliate for Nazi crimes by making indiscriminate massacres among POW camps, although organizations that routinely violated the rules of war could expect little mercy. All too often the argument "don't sink to their level" is basically an exercise in putting the scrupulous at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the unscrupulous (think honorable Ned Stark vs. the crafty Cersei or Littlefinger in Game of Thrones--if Ned had been more willing to be more ruthless or dishonest about his ultimate intentions he could have won even as late as the attempt to arrest Cersei in the throne room), but this is not one of those situations.

On the matter of practicality, Zaid pointed out that ISIS glorifies the deaths of its soldiers in battle, so they wouldn't be unduly upset if some of their prisoners were hanged. Furthermore, martyrs can make useful propaganda tools, so giving them more is not a good idea. And if those hanged were not guilty of major crimes, the PR problem is multiplied on top of the morality problem. To use a WWII analogy, this isn't like bombing Germany--there are many Germanies and some of them are U.S. allies (i.e. Jordan, Saudi Arabia), so PR, propaganda, etc. is much more important.

(I didn't come up with that analogy, but it's a good one.)

Furthermore, this article depicts an ISIS emir captured by the Kurds praising them for their mercy and claiming to have been deceived by ISIS "caliph" al-Baghdadi, so even a high-ranking (and presumably guilty of capital crimes given ISIS's propensity for killing prisoners, making Yezidi women into sex slaves, etc.) enemy commander could be worth more alive than dead. The captive emir, for example, could be used to make particularly effective anti-ISIS propaganda videos and encourage ISIS soldiers facing the Kurds to surrender rather than fight to the death. Showing mercy to a defeated enemy is not just an ethical issue, but can be a practical one as well.

That said, avoiding making martyrs is not the be-all, end-all. The Allied powers made millions of martyrs for fascism during WWII and yet the occupied Axis countries are not ungovernable hellholes. Furthermore, there are martyrs and there are martyrs. If the Jordanians hanged some teenage conscripts, ISIS and opponents of Jordan's government more generally could give them such hell over it that it might not be worth it. But if the Jordanians have got an ISIS technical specialist (like the chemical weapons guy just killed in an air strike) or commander, the threat of hanging them might deter ISIS from killing its remaining hostages (since these people, unlike foot soldiers, aren't a dime a dozen) and their deaths would damage ISIS's cause so much that the "martyr factor" wouldn't compensate.

Think the bombing of the Axis countries during WWII--whatever hay Goebbels (or his Italian or Japanese equivalent) might make it of, their physical ability to make war was damaged. Severing the spinal cord of a mad ax murderer might make him more angry or psychotic than usual, but if he's paralyzed he can't do anything. And as far as the "repentant ISIS fighters make good propaganda" angle is concerned, someone who is remorseful and willing to denounce his former comrades is useful--an unrepentant fanatical twit is not.

So however much hanging ISIS prisoners might appeal to one's instinct, this course of action should be trod very carefully. It would have been better if the Daily Mail article had included more detail about who these "ISIS commanders" the Jordanians have got are, so whether hanging them is moral and/or worth the trouble can be examined. However, it is not a course of action that should be closed off completely either. However vile and racist the Confederates could be in the Civil War (see the Fort Pillow Massacre or Confederate slave-raiding during the Gettysburg campaign), the threat to kill or enslave Confederate prisoners was enough to deter (most) Confederates from treating black prisoners as slave rebels.

A Less Ridiculous "Captain Planet"

Earlier today, I came across a discussion on my alternate-history forum on how the infamously Narmish television series Captain Planet could be a critical and commercial success. For those of you not in the know, it was an environmental-themed cartoon featuring a bunch of teenagers fighting incredibly unsubtle "Eco-Villains" (I think the idea was to avoid upsetting children whose parents worked in ecologically-difficult industries like logging) with the aid of some kind of magically-summoned warrior-type being with a green mullet.

It's actually not all that difficult if you put some thought into it. Here are some suggestions I came up with:

*No "Eco-Villains." Instead, have the Planeteers respond to problems resulting from ecologically unsafe practices. Ideas include pollution-spawned mutant monsters (like the movie Prophecy with the deformed psychotic bear spawned by mercury pollution), killer mudslides caused by deforestation, loose Soviet nukes, etc. Maybe there's an antibiotic-resistant plague resulting from excessive use of antibiotics in agriculture and the Planeteers have to bring in the one effective drug and fight a bunch of criminals trying to steal it and sell it? I remember one episode features a panic about a shark leading to mass killing of sharks and a resulting plague of jellyfish, so it's not like the idea wasn't there.

*Subtler, less ridiculous portrayals of polluters. Nobody seriously wants to destroy the environment, regardless of what the show depicted. According to one of my writing books, the "polluter" character in The China Syndrome is not a bad guy--he cuts corners to cut costs to create more jobs. One CP episode featured an Indian prince who allowed a forest to be cut down to build a resort to generate jobs for his people--since this was something they did in real life, it's not like they weren't capable of subtlety.

*If there absolutely must be Eco-Villains, dial them down a notch. I had the idea for a pollution-spawned mutant messiah who thinks his kind are the next stage of evolution and wants to rule the world. It turns out there actually was such a character--Verminous Scum. Obviously he'd have a more subtle name--I suggested "Lord Vermin" as a name he gives himself to scare people. Alternatively, just buy the rights to the Skaven from Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy--they're not as well-known a fantasy race as Orcs, Dwarves, Elves, etc. so they'd be new and innovative. They can be depicted as a dangerous race of mutants, with some moral grayness courtesy of "good" Skaven who want to share the Earth with humans and murderous racist humans who want to kill all Skaven no matter how peaceful (some of) them are. Another idea could be to have the Planeteers prevent a bin Laden-type figure from getting his hands on unattended Soviet nuclear weapons and he swears revenge, becoming a recurring foe. A PC-type like Ted Turner isn't going to go for that, but he could still be an interesting enemy.

*Don't make Wheeler (the American character) a hothead dumbass. Seriously, do you think Americans are going to want to watch a TV series depicting them so poorly?

*More focus on non-Western environmental pollution. There was one episode where the Russian girl went home to find her hometown getting wrecked by a slipshod Soviet-era mine or something. Depict how environmentally-destructive Communist regimes have historically been. Dedicate a whole episode to the draining of the Aral Sea, for example. The "loose nukes" episode could have Linka pontificating about how horrible life under Communism was in order to put some Western environmentalist who's green on the outside and red on the inside in their place, with the Soviet regime's nuclear weapons now getting bought up by terrorists and malevolent dictators.

Here's a suggestion the board member whose handle is Admiral Hook came up with:

*Captain Planet is actually some kind of being summoned from a ecologically-devastated future back into the past to change history. When he's in the present-day, his body in the future is comatose, which could present some real problems Indian in the Cupboard-style (IIRC a WWI soldier brought into the present-day as a figurine was killed while asleep in a trench due to being summoned). If there's a parallel future storyline (perhaps involving a war on the blighted future Earth), that could be a way to build up some suspense.

Some of these ideas make an appearance in this special episode of The Geekly Oddcast, "Pitches Get Frankenstitches." They also show up in this episode of the Myopia: Defend Your Childhood in which we discuss Captain Planet.

News Article Round-Up...

It's been awhile since I've done a "new article round-up" blog post, but given how little blogging I've done this month, this is a quick and easy way to get new content up.

California Farmers Short of Labor, and Patience

The gist of this one is that California farmers are short of workers due to prior immigrants getting too old to do the heavy work, native-born Americans not wanting the jobs, and increased border security keeping out new illegal/undocumented immigrants who ordinarily do this kind of work. It's getting to the point that these fiscally-conservative sorts are considering voting Democratic due to the Republicans lack of interest in immigration reform.

Now, one could say that these farmers should increase their wages and that'll attract native-born workers, but many farmers, especially the smaller ones, won't be able to afford that and will go out of business. This would lead to a further concentration of agribusiness that might not be desirable.

A solution to this particular problem might be a revival of the old bracero program, which ran from the 1940s until the 1960s. Obviously the old program had some issues, but the point of studying history is that we learn from it.

This'll horrify some of my fellow conservatives, but I've given some thought about how an overly-strict concern about illegal immigration has actually infringed on the rights of the native-born. There's no natural right to have cheap labor, but how I need to produce documents in order to have a (non-contractor) job is annoying. "Your papers, please" is something one generally associates with Communist countries. And lest anyone think this is something that's been in place too longer to change, the I-9 form and what-not have only been requirements since the 1980s. That's after I was born.

Heck, if I wanted to be really radical, I'd start advocating open borders. After all, before WWI, international travel without a passport was pretty easy and passports were viewed by many as an unpleasant government imposition. Of course, in an age of international terrorism, that'd be pretty reckless, but on the other hand, the 19th Century had in the Anarchist movement its own version of al-Qaeda.

25 Drug Companies Agree to Limit Antibiotic Use on Farms

This is excellent news. Although people in the medical field complain about patients demanding antibiotics for viral infections and the like, if anything's contributing to a coming antibiotic-resistant super-plague, it's going to be stuff like this. The SCALE is just so much larger than stupid patients. I've got a doctor friend who straight-up advocates banning antibiotic use in agriculture.

Voluntary steps are good first steps, but if this doesn't drastically reduce the reckless use of livestock, it might be time to get more regulatory. I'm generally a fan of less government regulation, but risking the end of the antibiotic era and a return to the time one could die from a scraped knee is a pretty scary thing. My great-grandfather and my infant great-aunt died of pneumonia that could've been treated by antibiotics, just to make it personal. And one of the big killers of childbirth is actually puerperal fever, not more immediate problems like bleeding. For Westerners, death in childbirth is typically something one reads about in books and that's something that shouldn't change.

What Makes the Muslim Ms. Marvel Awesome

Those of you who know me know that I'm a conservative, but on the issue of increasing minority representation in media, particularly the field of speculative fiction, I've lined up (some) with the obnoxious Internet Social Justice mob. I'm not going to act like portraying Muslims as terrorists on TV is worse than the existence of al-Qaeda, but let's be frank. If I were an Arab or a Muslim, I'd get sick of one of the the dominant media portrayals of my demographic being bomb-throwers pretty quick even if on an intellectual level I might recognize it as having a valid basis.

Besides, this makes good business sense. The United States is a lot less white and a lot less Christian than it was in the 1930s through the 1960s, when most of the major superheroes were created. If media creators ignore this growing market, they do so at their peril. I've made some money thanks to Arab fantasy writer Saladin Ahmed tweeting "The Beast of the Bosporus" to his thousands of followers, many of whom I imagine are Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners who'd like to see characters like them.

Furthermore, I've complained in the past about filmmakers' reluctance to have non-Western villains, with the rather Aryan "Mandarin" of Iron Man III and the British Khan Noonien Singh of Star Trek Into Darkness being particular targets of my ire. This isn't solely due to Hollywood PC-ism (although it's certainly there)--foreign markets are increasingly important and one doesn't want to offend audiences (or governments which will keep them from audiences--even democratic India banned Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). It'd be easier to have historically non-Western villains like the Mandarin or Khan (or some kind of superpowered jihadist) if there are more non-Western characters on the side of good.

One suggestion I remember to avoid the political problems of an Asian Mandarin would be to have a particular character (who I think was a female employee of Stark Industries of Chinese background, but I can't find her online) filling in for that kid in Tennessee. If they'd made the Mandarin primarily Asia-based, Tony could travel over there to fight him and after a gratuitous beat-down, Stark Industries' Asian staff could help him get ready for the second round. There's also the Red Ronin, who could team up with Tony on an equal basis rather than just being a helper.

(Since it's been revealed there's a real Mandarin with a cult-like army out there who isn't pleased with being impersonated by a British crackhead, maybe we'll meet him someday. Since the Ten Rings is portrayed as being similar to al-Qaeda, I'm wondering if the Iraq-based Desert Sword superhero team can make an appearance. Perhaps in the Marvel Cinematic Universe they can be an Iraqi spinoff of SHIELD established after the fall of Saddam.)

Hmm...the Muslim Ms. Marvel's brother is depicted as a fundamentalist. Maybe he becomes some kind of super-jihadist and they fight each other in their superhero forms not knowing who the other is? That could get real tragic real fast.

The Gary Johnson Campaign: Media Buys or Consultants?

I promised one of my readers just before the election that I would do a blog post citing some links he found about how Gary Johnson's 2012 Libertarian campaign and how Jill Stein's 2012 Green campaign spent their money. During a discussion on Facebook, he posted these links showing that the Johnson campaign spent very little on advertising and a great deal on administration and consultants, while the Stein campaign spent a significantly larger percentage of its money (and more in absolute terms) on advertising. The breakdown as to what money went where is even more damning, with Stein's largest expenditures being media buys and Johnson's being various advisers.

What the heck? The Libertarian Party, although it's got the best ballot access of all the third parties, still suffers from the popular image that it's a party focused on legalizing drugs. When I was in high school, a friend of mine gave me a photo showing the three parties as cartoon characters, with the Democrats as a donkey carrying a board with a nail in it, the Republicans as big, burly elephant, and the Libertarians as a pot leaf with an assault rifle. Humorous as that was, the Libertarian Party is not going to get any traction if it's viewed as the party of stoners and gun fanatics. I'm not saying the campaign wouldn't need consultants and advisers, but when they eat up money that could be spent on, well, getting out the vote, there's a problem.

I do recall seeing a Gary Johnson advertisement on YouTube about how he was the only candidate who did not want to start a war with Iran, but when I searched YouTube for Gary Johnson advertisements, that was all I found other than an ad for Ron Paul and Gary Johnson that was around four years old. Meanwhile, I found several Jill Stein advertisements that got a lot more YouTube hits.

Of course, the obvious response is that Johnson ran one of the most successful Libertarian campaigns in history, getting one million votes and one percent of the popular vote. Jill Stein's results were much less impressive.

However, imagine how much more successful Johnson could have been if he spent more money on advertising. He could have gotten his name out there as the civil-liberties candidate, in contrast to both Obama and Romney. Although Romney could have used "the president can make you disappear" as a hammer to beat Obama with, he basically said both he and Obama can be trusted not to abuse this power and said U.S. citizens who join al-Qaeda are not entitled to due process because that's treason.

(Never mind the Constitution has specific provisions dealing with treason, but that's a different matter.)

Johnson could have also piggybacked on the successful marijuana-legalization initiatives in both Colorado and Washington. Given how Romney and Obama are both opponents of marijuana legalization, even in limited medical circumstances, promising not to interfere with state-level drug policy would have been a way to gain support from the voters who made marijuana legal. Given how Colorado Democrats feared Johnson would take enough votes to push Colorado to Romney, that was a MAJOR missed opportunity.

I did not hope Johnson could win the election outright, but I was hoping he'd be a spoiler in enough states that it might force the election to the House of Representatives. Colorado would not have been enough to do this in and of itself, but it might have been part of a larger strategy.

2012 was a massive missed opportunity. Who knows if another such opportunity will come again?

Why I'm Not Voting for Romney or Obama

As those who have known for while awhile know, I've been self-identifying as a Libertarian since a road-to-Damascus moment about how there is no moral difference between nonviolent ownership of "assault weapons" and nonviolent marijuana smoking when I was in high school. Although I was too young to vote in the 2000 presidential election, I voted for the Libertarian Badnarik in 2004.

In 2008, I voted rather reluctantly for John McCain. I can't remember why--either something the Libertarian candidate that year did got on my nerves or perhaps there was something about Obama I really didn't like and I didn't want to risk helping Obama win Georgia. Although I'm drifting away from Libertarianism (more because I support government spending on education, science, and infrastructure), my views are sufficiently different from the two major parties that I'm not inclined to vote for either of them and I'm not going to vote for hard-leftists like the Greens.

However, although I haven't voted yet, I'm probably going to vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson. Although I have spoken out in favor of Republicans Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul, here's why I'm not interested in supporting either candidate.

Obama

One thing I didn't like about Obama back in 2008 was the whole cult-of-personality thing that coalesced around him, with him being "the one" who would bring "change." I'll give Obama credit that he tried to make a joke out of it rather than use it for some more sinister purpose, but that did rub me the wrong way.

One of the big reasons I didn't like him in 2008 was the born-alive controversy in Illinois. This isn't a matter of abortion in the first trimester or so of pregnancy when the fetus doesn't really have much in the way of a brain. If there's the possibility the fetus can survive outside the womb, it must be fairly far along. See this. This isn't even abortion anymore.

Although I shed no tears for Gadhafi and have flat-out recommended Obama claim credit for Gadhafi's death to look tough on foreign policy, Obama has claimed the U.S. contribution to the overthrow of Gadhafi did not require congressional approval. I do not believe that to be the case.

Obama does not oppose indefinite-detention provisions that violate the Fifth and may infringe on the First amendments.

And then there's Gunwalker.


Romney

For starters, Mitt Romney flip-flops when it's politically convenient. I have no beef with changing one's opinions based on new evidence--after all, that's what science is all about--but the timing of Romney's changing views on issues like gun control and abortion smell.

It's not like Romney opposes the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens either. If someone is killed in battle and is a U.S. citizen that's one thing, but if they're arrested, that's something else. The U.S. Constitution specifically says people can be charged with treason for making war on the U.S. and that's how to handle American members of AQ who are taken alive.

Mitt Romney also opposes online gambling, using downright nanny-state arguments in favor of keeping the ban. I don't gamble for money, but I don't care if anyone else does. If someone causes their family to suffer because they can't control their gambling, that's unfortunate, but it's not justification for the government to ban everyone from doing it.

Romney vowed to fight marijuana legalization "tooth and nail." Considering how Colorado has greatly benefited from "medical marijuana" and several states are voting on legalizing marijuana this fall, we might well have a major state-federal clash. Considering how the GOP claims to support state and local control, the federal government being aggressive on this issue is rather hypocritical.

I'll get to why I support Gary Johnson later, since I generally believe in providing positive solutions rather than just complaining.