Actually, the Eye is described as a physical presence in one of the Silmarillion stories
No it isn't. Besides, Sauron is an extremely minor character in The Silmarillion even if he did bring about the death of Finrod. He only appears in "Beren and Luthien" and at that point he's definitely anthropomorphic until he turns himself into a wolf.
You also see him in "Akallabeth" (he's anthropomorphic there too) and in "Of the Third Age" where I don't think he was physically described at all.
I think I've seen it referred to in a physical sense in Unfinished Tales as well.
No, you didn't.
Crikey, if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe Wikipedia!
why wasn't the blade useful against the Dark Riders that night?
Because Merry was a wuss that night and never actually attacked a Nazgul with it?
I've always thought that Weathertop scene represented a fairly sizeable plot hole in and of itself. What exactly is so scary about the Nazgul if all of them could be beaten off by one man with a burning stick? (And not even a pointed stick at that!)
Yes, the incident with the palantir is the major plot point in Gandalf's humiliation of Saruman. They're obviously going to gloss over it, which they can probably get away with. They've made Sauron into a pretty stereotypical Dark Lord baddie (yes, he's archtypal, but he shouldn't be stereotypical) who seems to do evil things just for the hell of it, so little motive has to be imputed to him for his premature attack on Gondor. I mean, geez, he's even got an evil rotating eye sign on top of Barad-dur. What a stupid idea. It makes me think of the "Evil Scientist - Boo" neon sign from that one Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Assuming the seige of Minas Tirith even there. That battle should be 10x as intense as the one at Helm's Deep, but they built Helm's Deep up so much that it's difficult to see how they're going to outdo it. I'm almost expecting them to cut it altogether.
During shooting there was a well-publizized set photograph showing Saruman getting impaled on the gears of one of his own infernal machines. This is obviously part of the scene that's being cut. The Ents have already been cut out of Helm's Deep itself -- no sign of Hurons at the climactic moment -- so there's no real resolution to be had with respect to them. What I can't understand is how they're going to reunite Merry & Pippin to the rest of the Fellowship. Maybe they'll just gallop past Isengard and scoop them up as they go by.
It opens up a plot hole of course. Now that a Nazgul has seen Frodo standing on the walls of Osgiliath waving the Ring around (what a stealthy guy!) there's no reason for Sauron to not assume that it's still right on his borders. Pippin's peek into the palantir, and Aragorn's revelation of himself to Sauron through it, were what distracted Sauron's attention away from any notice he might otherwise have taken of Frodo -- who in the book, of course, was never so foolish as to dangle the Ring under a Nazgul's nose. Now that distracting Sauron is of even more importance, there's no mechanism that allows them to do it.
Um, not that I've been over-thinking this or anything... ^^;
Thank God. I was beginning to think I was the only one here who remembered the CP/M machines the IBM PC replaced -- and why. The IBM was certainly not a superior machine, and all of its most useful apps were there for CP/M first.
That was also back when "PC" was a generic term that didn't refer specifically to IBM's architecture. The Apple ][ was a PC, f'rinstance. IBM invented neither the concept nor the term.
remember that because of the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France, the Scottish nobility was about 90% French as every Scottish king married a French princess for many generations, and the French princesses were all Catholic
Wow, that explains how the Stuarts got so foofy. I mean, could you imagine any self-respecting highlander (or even lowlander) Scot dressing like this?
Is it just me, or does that Japanese vehicle look a lot like the McDonnell-Douglas DC-X they were experimenting with a few years ago?
I work for a competitor, but I've always regretted the DC-X getting its funding cut. It looked like it was a truly innovative idea and had a lot of promise.
I'm not talking about any of the other crap you mentioned. Akira bored me too, and I'd take Monsters, Inc. over it any day. But I'd equally take a Miyazaki film over Monsters, Inc. There's a reason why he's one of the few animation directors in the world that no critic, American or not, is ever embarrassed to lionize.
Ah, now we enter the bizarro universe, wherein Disney doing theatrical releases of Ghibli films (and not incidentally, spending MILLIONS OF DOLLARS on re-dubbing, striking new prints and putting together DVDs) is, somehow, a conspiracy to prevent people from seeing the films.
Oh, I see. You have no actual information, so you're going to try to be a wiseass instead. No. I don't expect to make an impression; facts never do with your kind. Here's reality anyway.
Shouting "millions of dollars" doesn't change the fact that a few million here or there means very, very little to a big Hollywood studio. Small budget Hollywood films have budgets of at least $15M these days. Independent films have miniscule budgets by comparison; My Big Fat Greek Wedding was made for $5M, but that was a non-Hollywood indie film. To put this in perspective, the original Japanese version of Spirited Away cost 1.9B yen, or less than $20M US. If they spent more than $5M on the dub with that cast (the biggest names were John Ratzenberger and Suzanne Pleshette, not exactly top draws) they spent too much even by Disney standards.
By contrast, Treasure Planet which was released in the US a few months after Spirited Away and was a critical and commercial flop, cost $140M to make. Got some perspective now? The risk in distributing Spirited Away was absolutely minimal. They could have spent twice what they did, and it still would have been a tiny risk compared with what Hollywood normally gambles when releasing a film.
Now, bear in mind that before the US release, it had already taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival and grossed $250M worldwide. It was the top-grossing film ever in Japan, out-doing Titanic, which was just as popular over there as it was here. Critics nearly unanimously raved about it. This was clearly a film with huge potential. If the goal was to make a good profit on it -- and in Hollywood, that's always the goal -- there was absolutely no reason not to place the full power of the Disney hype machine behind it. For once, they had something on their hands that could live up to the wildest hyperboles they had to offer.
Instead, they didn't hype it at all. There was practically no publicity for it. There was a great deal of free press from the critics, but that only affected those who pay attention to what the critics say, which is a distinct minority. It hardly mattered. Disney opened it on fewer than 30 screens, and in it's initial release it never played on more than 39. It was given a wider release following the Oscar win, on nowhere near as many screens as a typical Disney release, but as the re-release was very abrupt and still practically unpromoted it didn't do particularly well.
This is odd behavior for the film industry, no matter what you think of the matter. I'm not the only one to notice it either (just to pick the first example I ran across). There is a serious disconnect between the way this film performed overseas (in every other market in the world) compared to how it performed in the US. It's not something that can be easily explained away. The writer above attributed it to simple mishandling, but if that's what it is then Disney has systematically mishandled every other Miyazaki film it's had the rights to, too.
Fox's ineptness with Totoro, as a singular example, is less relevant than you try to make out here. Fox isn't exactly known for its animated features, and Totoro is odd enough that it's a good bet they had no clue what to do with it. Disney, however, promotes animated films as their stock-in-trade. They ought to have known what to do with Spirited Away, just like every other distributor who's handled it worldwide knew what to do with it. Somehow, they didn't. Same with Mononoke. And Kiki. And Laputa. Someone might be forgiven, I think, if he has trouble attributing a
No human being is "out of place" in a debate concerning human life. It affects all of us. And the story in question need not have been part of the abortion debate at all, except that the politically correct take any notion that the unborn are human beings in any meaningful sense of the word and places it there. This is the one idea that pro-abortionists absolutely cannot abide because it would so clearly make abortion out to be the monstrous procedure it is.
There is never a good reason for abortions carried out for reasons other than saving the life of the mother. Nothing says the mother must be the one to raise the baby once it's born. There are still waiting lists years long for adoptions. Sure, pregnancies are difficult, and sure, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy might cause problems for a young woman's social standing -- although far less nowadays than would have been the case 30, or even 20 years ago. The inconvenience these things entail is nothing next to the value of a human life.
Of course the abortion decision is a difficult one, and it doesn't help that women considering them are rarely presented with all the information really needed to make a fully informed desicion. But the main reasons it's so difficult is that the right choice involves so much work, even if the baby is adopted out, and because there's this overwhelmingly loud chorus chanting that there's really nothing wrong with it. Under the circumstances, it's a wonder that any mothers in this situation do choose life at all.
The response:
Having said all that, Miramax didn't throw it away: they released it into the "ten major markets", and if the audiences had come out for it, then its theatrical release would have got much wider. Probably best simply to view it as a step on the way to something...
I don't mean this unkindly, but I really think Neal's kidding himself here. Look at the numbers for Spirited Away. For its opening weekend, it grossed an astonishing $17,300 per screen, $449,839 on 26 screens. This is comparable to the heavily-promoted, heavily licensed, heavily merchandised Monsters, Inc., released the same year. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Despite all this, it never received the wide distribution that was promised, even after the Academy Award, but was buried by a different subsidiary of the same company that gave Princess Mononoke such short shrift.
I'm not generally one for conspiracy theories, but it's not unreasonable to conclude at this point that Disney licensed the Miyazaki corpus not to bring it to the American public, but to ensure that most of the American public is never exposed to it. Repeatedly, they have met what has to be a minimal contractual obligation for promotion and distribution, after which the films disappear from the theaters no matter how the fans clamor for it. I suspect the only reason Miramax/Disney releases them on DVD at all is because they know people will just order them from overseas if they don't. (Even legitimate film distributors in Hong Kong generally produce Region 1 or region-free DVDs for the overseas market. They're not afraid of wide-open markets there for some reason.)
Why would they do this? One possible reason is the sheer quality of it. It makes their own work look very, very bad, although these days we don't really need much of a standard for comparison. Disney's recent Brother Bear demonstrates clearly that they're no longer capable of producing quality animated films on their own. The success of films like Monsters, Inc over Disney's hand-drawn animation should be ascribed less to the computer animation than to the fact it was actually made by another company entirely. But unlike Pixar's work, Disney can't really rebrand Miyazaki as their own product. It's just too unlike everything else they do, both in terms of the animation style and the story values. So they do their best to hide it instead. This way they never have to compete with it.
So I'm afraid they indeed threw Mononoke away. Just like they've thrown away every other Miyazaki film.
You're also being wrong. CMEs and solar flares are caused by anomalies in the Sun's magnetic field that are also associated with sunspots. This means these events are closely correlated with both individual sunspots and overall sunspot activity.
I don't mean this unkindly, but you've clearly gone off the rails.
I said that people expect governments to work for their good, not that governments actually do that. This, as well as so much else in your post, indicates that you're so blinded by what you expect to see that you can't see what's actually there. I hate to employ arguments that appear ad hominem but you've misapprehended so much of what I actually wrote that I can't see how it can be otherwise. (Unless you're doing it deliberately out of malice or out of desperation to appear to carry the point. Futilely, I must point out, since it's almost certain that no one's reading this topic anymore. I'd not even bother replying if I wasn't so bored right now.)
But don't our governments generally work for our good, or at least do what they think is for our good whether it actually is or not? You can raise all the conspiracy theories you want, but the fact is that in general we're rather well off in both material and political terms. We can say what we want, we can travel where and when we please, we can marry whomever agrees to marry us and have as many children as we want, we worship God however we like (or not worship him at all), no one here need ever go hungry, and we're the wealthiest society the world has ever seen measured in terms our our real physical situation. With your paranoia about "the system" you sound like some deranged hippie from about 30 years ago. Yes, things like the PATRIOT act are highly worrisome, and parts of it are clearly unconstitutional. I expect it to be challenged at some point, and for that challenge to carry. We've had abuses in the past, and they've always been corrected at some point.
You'll try to use this as an example of further complacency. Fact is, I could shout all I want on my own and it won't change much. I believe I possess a certain realism about how things can really be changed, and writing vicious rants isn't effective.
Your blithe assumption about how easy it would be to take over the US belies a complete ignorance about how our system works. If our government appears to be out of control sometimes -- well, that's a correct impression. It's often out of control, literally. No one's controlling it. No one person can control it. Try actually learning how our system operates, and you'll get some inkling of why that's true.
An "enemy combatant" is a recognizable category; it's also called "prisoner of war". We've always jailed prisoners of war without ordinary due process. So has everyone else involved in a war. That's just how it works. People get shot in wars too. It's unpleasant. That's why sane people avoid wars.
As far as jailing citizens as if they were POWs, I think the "war on terror" has the government doing a number of things in something close to a panic that they might not do on more rational consideration. A fair-minded person would concede that this isn't a normal situation, and that a citizen can indeed be an enemy combatant. It's not clear how to treat such cases. Am I happy with it? No, not really. Should it be done differently? Almost certainly. Will it be done differently? Yes, I think it will, one way or another.
I could tell you're not a libertarian, since you would obviously strip people of their property rights. That was just an easy example of how an economic or political situation is discussed in theoretical terms when it should be discussed in terms of past real-world examples, just as you're doing. If the example I gave for anarchy looks chaotic, that's because chaos is anarchy's inevitable result. It's just what happens. People (and corporations) simply are not, as a group, sufficiently restrained to govern themselves without a reasonably stable body of laws. That's why we have laws in the first place.
So you want laws to change? Fine! Laws change! That's why we have legislatures that do nothing else but sit around changing the laws. You've not presented any problems that can't (and aren't) addressed by our cu
Edison had a lot more going for him than just the movie industry. Remember the light bulb? Commercial electric power distribution? The phonograph? His stock ticker? Multiplex telegraph? And a couple of dozen others?
That's what made him obscenely rich. The movie industry was only a small part of his enterprise. That it became an even smaller part of it was, yes, because of the mistakes he made in trying to assure himself of a monopoly.
No pagan, no Buddhist, no Confucist, and certainly no atheist would use the word like that.
You should read more works on spirituality written by Hindus then.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" has always impressed me by its very murkiness.
What's so murky about it? "Establishment of religion" has a very specific meaning. There are many posts in this topic that have taken the trouble to explain it. Here's a web page that explains it too. It's anything but murky.
The Pledge isn't read, it's recited. Details of capitalization aren't particularly a propos, and it's a silly quibble on your part anyway.
The defense of the Pledge is characterized by you as religious. That don't make it so. It certainly doesn't look religious from where I'm sitting.
I had no idea that the expression of any idea was supposed to make everyone comfortable. Surely you don't belive that yourself do you? Aren't you trying to make anyone who disagrees with you as uncomfortable as possible? Aren't you free to do that if you want? Aren't numerous things that happen in school uncomfortable for many students? Comfort is an absolutely useless standard of what should and should not be said in any context much less this one.
No, "God" by itself doesn't suggest any particular religion. Ask any fundamentalist or religious conservative. You're apparently in complete ignorance of the religious point of view.
Thank you for citing court cases. The Supreme Court has been wrong before, and it was wrong in Emerson on a plain reading of the words of the Constitution. They simply don't mean that. You might as well interpret the Second Amendment to mean that everyone must own a gun. It's every bit as reasonable.
Again, "God" suggests no religion in particular at all. The phrasing was clearly intended to be as vague as possible. If it had said, "The Holy Trinity" or "The Lord Jehovah" instead, you might have a point. As it is, you're arguing pretty much off-case.
I defy you to tell when a word's capitalized when it's spoken out loud.
"Allah" is simply Arabic for "God". The fact that Muslims don't view their scriptures or prayers as valid unless they're in Classical Arabic is neither here nor there for this discussion. Nor is the fact that Arabic-speaking Christians refer to God using the same word. The Pledge is neither scripture nor a prayer.
Among the eastern religions, I think you'll find that in Hinduism, for example, "God" would not be incompatable with their beliefs. Many others would also be comfortable referring to a generalized divinity in this way. In any event, the bare word "God" does not imply any religion whatsoever. I do not share the beliefs of most people who describe their deity with that word, and they don't agree with me.
The Constitution does not provide for the "separation of church and state". The First Amendment certainly doesn't. Re-read the "establishment" clause carefully and then honestly try to find out what "establishment of religion" actually means. You may find your preconceptions aren't supportable.
You have an interesting point of view. You say you're not a pragmatist and your opinions bear you out. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, not a theoretical ideal, and people tend to expect their governments to actually work for their good. A certain amount of pragmatism is therefore necessary.
You advocate change for the sake of change alone. In my view, this is foolish. Change should be made when change is necessary, and not otherwise, because there's no conceivable good that can come of it. People cannot function in a constantly changing environment. We are highly adaptable as a species, but as individuals we are not so adaptable. A government such as you describe will necessarily result in much cruelty inflicted on a large number of individuals. True, other systems are also cruel in their way, but not all of them have it built in as a feature.
You misuse the word when you say that laws can be "circumvented" by passing new laws when this is in fact the Constitutional method of implementing the change you advocate. Here again, I think you're wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Should we change the laws or not? You can't have both.
What do you mean by "voluntary laws"? If you mean that adherence to them is voluntary, then you're not being realistic. Murder is universally felt to be wrong? Not hardly. You need to read more history. For a glaring example, read some of the Icelandic family sagas. It was very much a society built along the lines you advocate. With no central government to speak of there was no authority to compel obedience to laws or court decisions. Murder was routine, since the strong feeling against it you are assuming was absent, or at least greatly attenuated. It was bad when it happened to you and yours, but not so bad when it happened to that clan in the next valley you've been feuding with for a few decades. Although there were theoretical restraints against it, they didn't work much of the time. This society didn't last, and Iceland eventually had to invite the king of Norway to rule there to prevent a complete societal breakdown.
Please, if you're going to advocate some radical change in society, examine world history to see what has happened when something along similar lines has been tried in the past. Libertarians, for example, will blather on about laissez-faire capitalism as if it had never been tried. It has been tried of course; in England during the Industrial Revolution. It was disastrous economically, environmentally, and in terms of human rights. You owe it to yourself to examine past anarchic societies and see why they went wrong.
It's often said that the US is a "young country" as you do here. This isn't true by any reasonable definition. We have been operating under the same Constitution for over 210 years now. There are very few countries that can say the same. The 20th Century was not kind to "anciens regimes" anywhere. Compared to most countries, we're actually rather old.
I'll not comment on your natural distrust of the courts, and your belief in the fragility of the US system. It's a lengthy topic I don't have the time to fully address right now.
That's "naive", an insult that loses a considerable amount of force when misspelled. So tell me, what part of "The fact that activist judges try to do just this has seriously undermined the prestige and perceived validity of their offices," did you not understand?
The funny part here is that activist judges who rule based on their personal biases regardless of the law think of themselves as liberal when they're really working in the finest traditions of absolute monarchy. Meanwhile, everyone calls judges who use strict construction like Robert Bork "arch-conservatives" when they're really working firmly within classic liberal philosophy. People are so ignorant of history.
Slashdot Mirror
No it isn't. Besides, Sauron is an extremely minor character in The Silmarillion even if he did bring about the death of Finrod. He only appears in "Beren and Luthien" and at that point he's definitely anthropomorphic until he turns himself into a wolf.
You also see him in "Akallabeth" (he's anthropomorphic there too) and in "Of the Third Age" where I don't think he was physically described at all.
I think I've seen it referred to in a physical sense in Unfinished Tales as well.
No, you didn't.
Crikey, if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe Wikipedia!
He'd obviously just finished getting an earful on the subject from RMS over the phone when he wrote that...
Boy, that's even stupider than I thought it was. Sauron's Eye is metaphorical. He wasn't supposed to be literally eye-shaped.
Because Merry was a wuss that night and never actually attacked a Nazgul with it?
I've always thought that Weathertop scene represented a fairly sizeable plot hole in and of itself. What exactly is so scary about the Nazgul if all of them could be beaten off by one man with a burning stick? (And not even a pointed stick at that!)
Assuming the seige of Minas Tirith even there. That battle should be 10x as intense as the one at Helm's Deep, but they built Helm's Deep up so much that it's difficult to see how they're going to outdo it. I'm almost expecting them to cut it altogether.
During shooting there was a well-publizized set photograph showing Saruman getting impaled on the gears of one of his own infernal machines. This is obviously part of the scene that's being cut. The Ents have already been cut out of Helm's Deep itself -- no sign of Hurons at the climactic moment -- so there's no real resolution to be had with respect to them. What I can't understand is how they're going to reunite Merry & Pippin to the rest of the Fellowship. Maybe they'll just gallop past Isengard and scoop them up as they go by.
It opens up a plot hole of course. Now that a Nazgul has seen Frodo standing on the walls of Osgiliath waving the Ring around (what a stealthy guy!) there's no reason for Sauron to not assume that it's still right on his borders. Pippin's peek into the palantir, and Aragorn's revelation of himself to Sauron through it, were what distracted Sauron's attention away from any notice he might otherwise have taken of Frodo -- who in the book, of course, was never so foolish as to dangle the Ring under a Nazgul's nose. Now that distracting Sauron is of even more importance, there's no mechanism that allows them to do it.
Um, not that I've been over-thinking this or anything... ^^;
That was also back when "PC" was a generic term that didn't refer specifically to IBM's architecture. The Apple ][ was a PC, f'rinstance. IBM invented neither the concept nor the term.
Wow, that explains how the Stuarts got so foofy. I mean, could you imagine any self-respecting highlander (or even lowlander) Scot dressing like this?
I work for a competitor, but I've always regretted the DC-X getting its funding cut. It looked like it was a truly innovative idea and had a lot of promise.
I'm not talking about any of the other crap you mentioned. Akira bored me too, and I'd take Monsters, Inc. over it any day. But I'd equally take a Miyazaki film over Monsters, Inc. There's a reason why he's one of the few animation directors in the world that no critic, American or not, is ever embarrassed to lionize.
Oh, I see. You have no actual information, so you're going to try to be a wiseass instead. No. I don't expect to make an impression; facts never do with your kind. Here's reality anyway.
Shouting "millions of dollars" doesn't change the fact that a few million here or there means very, very little to a big Hollywood studio. Small budget Hollywood films have budgets of at least $15M these days. Independent films have miniscule budgets by comparison; My Big Fat Greek Wedding was made for $5M, but that was a non-Hollywood indie film. To put this in perspective, the original Japanese version of Spirited Away cost 1.9B yen, or less than $20M US. If they spent more than $5M on the dub with that cast (the biggest names were John Ratzenberger and Suzanne Pleshette, not exactly top draws) they spent too much even by Disney standards.
By contrast, Treasure Planet which was released in the US a few months after Spirited Away and was a critical and commercial flop, cost $140M to make. Got some perspective now? The risk in distributing Spirited Away was absolutely minimal. They could have spent twice what they did, and it still would have been a tiny risk compared with what Hollywood normally gambles when releasing a film.
Now, bear in mind that before the US release, it had already taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival and grossed $250M worldwide. It was the top-grossing film ever in Japan, out-doing Titanic, which was just as popular over there as it was here. Critics nearly unanimously raved about it. This was clearly a film with huge potential. If the goal was to make a good profit on it -- and in Hollywood, that's always the goal -- there was absolutely no reason not to place the full power of the Disney hype machine behind it. For once, they had something on their hands that could live up to the wildest hyperboles they had to offer.
Instead, they didn't hype it at all. There was practically no publicity for it. There was a great deal of free press from the critics, but that only affected those who pay attention to what the critics say, which is a distinct minority. It hardly mattered. Disney opened it on fewer than 30 screens, and in it's initial release it never played on more than 39. It was given a wider release following the Oscar win, on nowhere near as many screens as a typical Disney release, but as the re-release was very abrupt and still practically unpromoted it didn't do particularly well.
This is odd behavior for the film industry, no matter what you think of the matter. I'm not the only one to notice it either (just to pick the first example I ran across). There is a serious disconnect between the way this film performed overseas (in every other market in the world) compared to how it performed in the US. It's not something that can be easily explained away. The writer above attributed it to simple mishandling, but if that's what it is then Disney has systematically mishandled every other Miyazaki film it's had the rights to, too.
Fox's ineptness with Totoro, as a singular example, is less relevant than you try to make out here. Fox isn't exactly known for its animated features, and Totoro is odd enough that it's a good bet they had no clue what to do with it. Disney, however, promotes animated films as their stock-in-trade. They ought to have known what to do with Spirited Away, just like every other distributor who's handled it worldwide knew what to do with it. Somehow, they didn't. Same with Mononoke. And Kiki. And Laputa. Someone might be forgiven, I think, if he has trouble attributing a
That should, of course, be Neil. My apologies.
There is never a good reason for abortions carried out for reasons other than saving the life of the mother. Nothing says the mother must be the one to raise the baby once it's born. There are still waiting lists years long for adoptions. Sure, pregnancies are difficult, and sure, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy might cause problems for a young woman's social standing -- although far less nowadays than would have been the case 30, or even 20 years ago. The inconvenience these things entail is nothing next to the value of a human life.
Of course the abortion decision is a difficult one, and it doesn't help that women considering them are rarely presented with all the information really needed to make a fully informed desicion. But the main reasons it's so difficult is that the right choice involves so much work, even if the baby is adopted out, and because there's this overwhelmingly loud chorus chanting that there's really nothing wrong with it. Under the circumstances, it's a wonder that any mothers in this situation do choose life at all.
I don't mean this unkindly, but I really think Neal's kidding himself here. Look at the numbers for Spirited Away . For its opening weekend, it grossed an astonishing $17,300 per screen, $449,839 on 26 screens. This is comparable to the heavily-promoted, heavily licensed, heavily merchandised Monsters, Inc., released the same year. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Despite all this, it never received the wide distribution that was promised, even after the Academy Award, but was buried by a different subsidiary of the same company that gave Princess Mononoke such short shrift.
I'm not generally one for conspiracy theories, but it's not unreasonable to conclude at this point that Disney licensed the Miyazaki corpus not to bring it to the American public, but to ensure that most of the American public is never exposed to it. Repeatedly, they have met what has to be a minimal contractual obligation for promotion and distribution, after which the films disappear from the theaters no matter how the fans clamor for it. I suspect the only reason Miramax/Disney releases them on DVD at all is because they know people will just order them from overseas if they don't. (Even legitimate film distributors in Hong Kong generally produce Region 1 or region-free DVDs for the overseas market. They're not afraid of wide-open markets there for some reason.)
Why would they do this? One possible reason is the sheer quality of it. It makes their own work look very, very bad, although these days we don't really need much of a standard for comparison. Disney's recent Brother Bear demonstrates clearly that they're no longer capable of producing quality animated films on their own. The success of films like Monsters, Inc over Disney's hand-drawn animation should be ascribed less to the computer animation than to the fact it was actually made by another company entirely. But unlike Pixar's work, Disney can't really rebrand Miyazaki as their own product. It's just too unlike everything else they do, both in terms of the animation style and the story values. So they do their best to hide it instead. This way they never have to compete with it.
So I'm afraid they indeed threw Mononoke away. Just like they've thrown away every other Miyazaki film.
You're also being wrong. CMEs and solar flares are caused by anomalies in the Sun's magnetic field that are also associated with sunspots. This means these events are closely correlated with both individual sunspots and overall sunspot activity.
Geez, that almost looks like it should be a Doom 3 screenshot or something.
So what the hell are you waiting for?
Two things I use every day! How could I possibly have forgotten?!
I said that people expect governments to work for their good, not that governments actually do that. This, as well as so much else in your post, indicates that you're so blinded by what you expect to see that you can't see what's actually there. I hate to employ arguments that appear ad hominem but you've misapprehended so much of what I actually wrote that I can't see how it can be otherwise. (Unless you're doing it deliberately out of malice or out of desperation to appear to carry the point. Futilely, I must point out, since it's almost certain that no one's reading this topic anymore. I'd not even bother replying if I wasn't so bored right now.)
But don't our governments generally work for our good, or at least do what they think is for our good whether it actually is or not? You can raise all the conspiracy theories you want, but the fact is that in general we're rather well off in both material and political terms. We can say what we want, we can travel where and when we please, we can marry whomever agrees to marry us and have as many children as we want, we worship God however we like (or not worship him at all), no one here need ever go hungry, and we're the wealthiest society the world has ever seen measured in terms our our real physical situation. With your paranoia about "the system" you sound like some deranged hippie from about 30 years ago. Yes, things like the PATRIOT act are highly worrisome, and parts of it are clearly unconstitutional. I expect it to be challenged at some point, and for that challenge to carry. We've had abuses in the past, and they've always been corrected at some point.
You'll try to use this as an example of further complacency. Fact is, I could shout all I want on my own and it won't change much. I believe I possess a certain realism about how things can really be changed, and writing vicious rants isn't effective.
Your blithe assumption about how easy it would be to take over the US belies a complete ignorance about how our system works. If our government appears to be out of control sometimes -- well, that's a correct impression. It's often out of control, literally. No one's controlling it. No one person can control it. Try actually learning how our system operates, and you'll get some inkling of why that's true.
An "enemy combatant" is a recognizable category; it's also called "prisoner of war". We've always jailed prisoners of war without ordinary due process. So has everyone else involved in a war. That's just how it works. People get shot in wars too. It's unpleasant. That's why sane people avoid wars.
As far as jailing citizens as if they were POWs, I think the "war on terror" has the government doing a number of things in something close to a panic that they might not do on more rational consideration. A fair-minded person would concede that this isn't a normal situation, and that a citizen can indeed be an enemy combatant. It's not clear how to treat such cases. Am I happy with it? No, not really. Should it be done differently? Almost certainly. Will it be done differently? Yes, I think it will, one way or another.
I could tell you're not a libertarian, since you would obviously strip people of their property rights. That was just an easy example of how an economic or political situation is discussed in theoretical terms when it should be discussed in terms of past real-world examples, just as you're doing. If the example I gave for anarchy looks chaotic, that's because chaos is anarchy's inevitable result. It's just what happens. People (and corporations) simply are not, as a group, sufficiently restrained to govern themselves without a reasonably stable body of laws. That's why we have laws in the first place.
So you want laws to change? Fine! Laws change! That's why we have legislatures that do nothing else but sit around changing the laws. You've not presented any problems that can't (and aren't) addressed by our cu
That's what made him obscenely rich. The movie industry was only a small part of his enterprise. That it became an even smaller part of it was, yes, because of the mistakes he made in trying to assure himself of a monopoly.
You should read more works on spirituality written by Hindus then.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" has always impressed me by its very murkiness.
What's so murky about it? "Establishment of religion" has a very specific meaning. There are many posts in this topic that have taken the trouble to explain it. Here's a web page that explains it too. It's anything but murky.
Thank you. I wanted to say this, but couldn't think how to do it briefly.
The defense of the Pledge is characterized by you as religious. That don't make it so. It certainly doesn't look religious from where I'm sitting.
I had no idea that the expression of any idea was supposed to make everyone comfortable. Surely you don't belive that yourself do you? Aren't you trying to make anyone who disagrees with you as uncomfortable as possible? Aren't you free to do that if you want? Aren't numerous things that happen in school uncomfortable for many students? Comfort is an absolutely useless standard of what should and should not be said in any context much less this one.
No, "God" by itself doesn't suggest any particular religion. Ask any fundamentalist or religious conservative. You're apparently in complete ignorance of the religious point of view.
Thank you for citing court cases. The Supreme Court has been wrong before, and it was wrong in Emerson on a plain reading of the words of the Constitution. They simply don't mean that. You might as well interpret the Second Amendment to mean that everyone must own a gun. It's every bit as reasonable.
Again, "God" suggests no religion in particular at all. The phrasing was clearly intended to be as vague as possible. If it had said, "The Holy Trinity" or "The Lord Jehovah" instead, you might have a point. As it is, you're arguing pretty much off-case.
"Allah" is simply Arabic for "God". The fact that Muslims don't view their scriptures or prayers as valid unless they're in Classical Arabic is neither here nor there for this discussion. Nor is the fact that Arabic-speaking Christians refer to God using the same word. The Pledge is neither scripture nor a prayer.
Among the eastern religions, I think you'll find that in Hinduism, for example, "God" would not be incompatable with their beliefs. Many others would also be comfortable referring to a generalized divinity in this way. In any event, the bare word "God" does not imply any religion whatsoever. I do not share the beliefs of most people who describe their deity with that word, and they don't agree with me.
The Constitution does not provide for the "separation of church and state". The First Amendment certainly doesn't. Re-read the "establishment" clause carefully and then honestly try to find out what "establishment of religion" actually means. You may find your preconceptions aren't supportable.
You advocate change for the sake of change alone. In my view, this is foolish. Change should be made when change is necessary, and not otherwise, because there's no conceivable good that can come of it. People cannot function in a constantly changing environment. We are highly adaptable as a species, but as individuals we are not so adaptable. A government such as you describe will necessarily result in much cruelty inflicted on a large number of individuals. True, other systems are also cruel in their way, but not all of them have it built in as a feature.
You misuse the word when you say that laws can be "circumvented" by passing new laws when this is in fact the Constitutional method of implementing the change you advocate. Here again, I think you're wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Should we change the laws or not? You can't have both.
What do you mean by "voluntary laws"? If you mean that adherence to them is voluntary, then you're not being realistic. Murder is universally felt to be wrong? Not hardly. You need to read more history. For a glaring example, read some of the Icelandic family sagas. It was very much a society built along the lines you advocate. With no central government to speak of there was no authority to compel obedience to laws or court decisions. Murder was routine, since the strong feeling against it you are assuming was absent, or at least greatly attenuated. It was bad when it happened to you and yours, but not so bad when it happened to that clan in the next valley you've been feuding with for a few decades. Although there were theoretical restraints against it, they didn't work much of the time. This society didn't last, and Iceland eventually had to invite the king of Norway to rule there to prevent a complete societal breakdown.
Please, if you're going to advocate some radical change in society, examine world history to see what has happened when something along similar lines has been tried in the past. Libertarians, for example, will blather on about laissez-faire capitalism as if it had never been tried. It has been tried of course; in England during the Industrial Revolution. It was disastrous economically, environmentally, and in terms of human rights. You owe it to yourself to examine past anarchic societies and see why they went wrong.
It's often said that the US is a "young country" as you do here. This isn't true by any reasonable definition. We have been operating under the same Constitution for over 210 years now. There are very few countries that can say the same. The 20th Century was not kind to "anciens regimes" anywhere. Compared to most countries, we're actually rather old.
I'll not comment on your natural distrust of the courts, and your belief in the fragility of the US system. It's a lengthy topic I don't have the time to fully address right now.
The funny part here is that activist judges who rule based on their personal biases regardless of the law think of themselves as liberal when they're really working in the finest traditions of absolute monarchy. Meanwhile, everyone calls judges who use strict construction like Robert Bork "arch-conservatives" when they're really working firmly within classic liberal philosophy. People are so ignorant of history.