Doctor Who

"Doctor Who" is that show you should have been watching your entire life, but only discovered last fall.  Wait, I'm sorry, I slipped into the second-person there.  I'll start again:  "Doctor Who" is the show I should have been watching my entire life, but only discovered last fall.  And by the way, you should have watched it too.

When I was a little kid I loved anthology SciFi/Horror shows like the 90s "The Outer Limits", "Tales From the Crypt", "Are You Afraid of the Dark?", the original "Twilight Zone", and of course - and this one is closest to my heart - "The X Files" (which technically had a plot but who cares?).  I just loved that idea of sitting in front of the TV waiting for a new fantastic adventure to start up, never having any kind of clue what kind of insane things can happen.  One week its wizards in the woods, another week you got incestuous hillbilly monsters, and then there are killer fire ant aliens, its was awesome.  Sometimes they were scary, sometimes they were funny, and often enough, you'd realize that the possibilities to your universe are far more infinite than you would possibly imagine.  Where are the anthology SciFi shows of yesteryear?  Where is the comforting cackle of the Crypt Keeper making terrible ghoulish puns?

"Doctor Who" basically is one of those SciFi anthology shows.  Its like a British "X-Files", only with its own deranged wackiness and genius.  The Doctor is a character everybody needs to know, and then love.  I usually don't review non-anime TV shows, if you've been reading this blog for a few years you'd know that.  I'm making an exception here.  Because "Doctor Who" is that good.  I'd put it in the running for some of the best television I've ever seen.

200,000 Pageviews

Its a thing I did.  Or well, you guys did.  Because let's be honest, only a tiny fraction of those pageviews can possibly be me.  Thanks.  Keep reading.  Stuff is always coming up here at the BlueHighwind Blog.

Graveyard of Empires

The War in Afghanistan is now the second longest single conflict in American history, right after Vietnam.  And for roughly half the war's running time, we've been losing.  Barrack Obama, fulfilling one of his main campaign promises - "to end the pointless War in Iraq and focus on the real threat in Afghanistan" - massively upped the tempo of combat, increased troop strength, and aggressively fought the Taliban and Al Qaeada insurgencies in Afghanistan and their main base in Pakistan.  Unfortunately, this aggressive stance, though successful in killing Osama Bin Ladin, has succeeded in just about only that one thing.  Pakistan, who was always something of a false friend, seemingly playing the United States and the Jihadist against each other while not really committing to either, has fully dropped support for the United States.  And now after a series of disastrous incidents, most notably a horrifying massacre of Afghanis by a crazed American soldier who was supposed to be protecting them*, we might have lost all alliances with the main Afghani government.  Worse, we're no where closer to defeating the terrorists.  Somehow or another in the Central Asian region, the United States and the rest of NATO has turned into the main villain.

What the heck are we supposed to do now?  Obama's main strategy for the last couple of years was to bring the Taliban to the peace tables, but offering very little to persuade them.  I'm going to get critical on the President now, his handling of this war leaves a lot to desire.  In fact, he probably lost it for us.  Yes, Obama refocused the mission to Afghanistan, but clearly he never brought enough force to frighten these guys into capitulating.  Obama's decision to put a 2014 timetable for withdrawal of US forces from the region completely undermined whatever effect the surge in troops could have had.  Its even math for the Jihadists:  just wait the Americans out.  And unfortunately, the Afghani government isn't all that much better.  Hamad Karzai is... well, a dictator, let's not joke around there.  So now the Afghanis have a choice:  either the corrupt Karzai dictatorship, the drug-dealing warlords, or the Jihadists that promise Islamic Empire.

Karzai, wisely noting that his own political fortunes might leave with the Americans, has now positioned himself against us, demanding that NATO scale-back and withdraw much faster.  Obama has so far refused, planning to stay the course he has already laid out.  But should he have taken that offer?

John Carter of Mars

So for the last few weeks the sharks have been circling around "John Carter", with all the major Hollywood press junkets gloating about the flop-to-be.  250 million dollars have been spent by Disney on this SciFi epic, and honestly nobody seemed to interested.  I've gone around and judge the word of mouth for my own friends and family - guess what, I went to see this thing alone.  They're right, this movie is flopping.  Disney is losing a fortune on this thing, and if you're one of those big fans of giant failures, "John Carter" is your next "Waterworld".

"Waterworld" for about fifteen years now has been the by-word for a total disastrous expensive flop of a movie.  Its the "Watergate" of flops, a single incident that defines the entire embarrassing phenomena.  "Waterworld" was a huge overblown disaster that, along with "The Postman", flat-out killed Kevin Costner's directing career.  However, there's one thing people forget while gloating over the hilarious box office failure of "Waterworld"... it wasn't a bad movie.  Go out and rent it, "Waterworld" is actually a lot of fun.  I recommend it.  And "John Carter of Mars" is actually a damn good move, forget the box office.

If you're after a SciFi adventure that works in all the places that matter, "John Carter of Mars" is what the doctor ordered.  This is the kind of movie I would have loved as a kid, its the kind of movie I love now, and God help me, its the kind of movie I'll love until the day I die.  When you get too mature for simple thrills and quality storylines, then what's the point of even watching movies any more?  It was just a lot of fun:  you got the pretty visuals of a Star Wars prequel, BUT with a more competent director and a much better script.  So I loved it, there you go.

Paying For Sex

For the past few weeks I've been attempting to ignore a long discussion in our Capital, mostly for the same reason that I've ignored a few political issues lately:  its goddamn depressing.  So right now in the Congress and around the country we've been back to debating about abortion and birth control and sexual freedom, issues that some people might have thought were settled back in the 1970s.  Like really, abortion again?  Didn't Roe v. Wade solve this shit?  Then you got candidates like Rick Santorum who honestly are out there standing in opposition to the idea of Sexual Liberation and pretty much every modern definition of sexuality.  Its frightening how goddamn crazy the world is getting.

I mean, I try to play up some kind of visage of being a moderate, but its really hard to stand in the middle when the Right keeps getting more and more insane.  Also, I don't like abortion personally, I've had this discussion before (and honestly came off as idiot the last time, I should apologize).  Its hard business, a minefield of contradictory morality that makes it difficult to decide on what or how it should be handled*.  So out of the interests of being a moderate, I'll give Conservatives some credit here.  They aren't talking about banning abortion, they aren't talking about banning contraceptives, but they are talking about blocking the government's funding of them.  Yeah, this an Obamacare situation, so it gets very complicated.  Its specifically the part of Obamacare that demands that religious organizations have to buy Health Insurance for their employees that include birth control.

Now, that doesn't sound so bad, and I guess I came off at the Right too hard at first.  Simply blocking one part of a large bill for one special case isn't all that big or crazy, but the Conservatives don't only want that.  I haven't seen any serious interesting in compromise out of that entire wing of politics for years now, and even when Obama does give ground, they're just as unsatisfied as before.  Also, the debate right now isn't that small, its blown up pretty badly, mostly thanks to one Rush Limbaugh, who went ten steps too crazy.  He went ahead and called Sandra Fluke, a woman who wanted to testify before the Senate for this debate (making her the first, sadly), "a slut".  He went ahead and recasted the debate by ranting against Miss Fluke wanting the United States to "pay for her to have sex", casting Fluke as the prostitute and Obama as her pimp.  Oh, now we see what its really all about, don't we?