The Point is that the Barbie Princess Movies are Great

Here's a little break from stuff about politics, ecology and firearms.

I have a 5 year old daughter and a 2 year old son. So I watch a lot of kids' movies. Usually again and again and again. I have watched all of these movies literally anywhere from 5 to 50 times. Naturally I have developed some, ahem, opinions about what kids movies are any good and which ones should never have entered the house. I'm just going to be looking at feature-length animated movies that were made for kids.

Read on for my love of Barbie princess movies.

'Ice Age' sucks. The sequel sucks even harder. It is a string of slapstick skits that makes very little sense. The writing sucks and the voices are annoying. This is a typical movie designed to create 2 dimensional characters for 'limited edition' fast food food soda cups. For some reason they put a Jar-Jar in it, which is grounds for dismissal on its own.

'Over the Hedge' is ok, I guess. It has its moments. At the end of the day it is a poor man's 'Pom Poko.' Pom Poko was great, by the way. Weird and great.

Anything by Pixar will be great. 'Cars' was awesome. Literally, this could have been done as an old Steve McQueen movie for adults 30 years ago and the concept, with much of the script, would have worked just as well. This was a really good movie that happened to be computer animated and marketed to kids. 'Toy Story' and its sequel were both great. 'Monsters, Inc.' was another Pixar movie with a 2 year old girl named 'Boo' and the character is dead-on. I don't know why so many writers and directors have so much trouble with creating child characters that are remotely like an actual child, but an ability to do this well is something that Pixar shares with Studio Ghibli. I think it is a big part of why kids respond so well to their films.

'Open Season' sucks. At first it appears to be some sort of attempt to teach kids about conservation and ecology, except that the writers knew nothing about these topics and got everything wrong. Instead, they settled for typical suburban know-nothing preachy negative caricatures of hunters as evil louts who murder for fun. I doubt it ever even occurred to them that millions and millions of Americans are hunters and that insulting these people in front of their children makes them complete assholes. I literally threw this movie in the garbage.

Anything by Hayao Miazaki or his Studio Ghibli will be brilliant and wonderful. This includes 'Spirited Away,' Porco Rosso,' Howl's Moving Castle,' 'My Neighbor Totoro,' 'Castle in the Sky,' 'Nausica of the Valley of the Wind,' 'Whisper of the Heart' and everything else that they did. Miazaki's films are everything that Disney wishes that they could do but constantly fail at. They are not designed to sell toys or make for flashy trailers. The movies are intended to be visually beautiful, engaging stories that kids will imagine themselves within.

You remember that scene from 'Snow White' where she's looking into the wishing well and you see her reflection rippling on the surface of the water? Everyone looks back at that fondly as some sort of apex of animation as art that has never been equaled since. Wrong. Most of Miazaki's films have this level of detail and attention paid to the art. 'Totoro' or 'Spirited Away' make 'Snow White' look amateurish. 'Spirited Away' makes everything else look amateurish, actually.

Anything by Pixar will be great. 'Cars' was awesome. Literally, this could have been done as an old Steve McQueen movie for adults 30 years ago and the concept, with much of the script, would have worked just as well. This was a really good movie that happened to be computer animated and marketed to kids. 'Toy Story' and its sequel were both great. 'Monsters, Inc.' was another Pixar movie with a 2 year old girl named 'Boo' and the character is dead-on. I don't know why so many writers and directors have so much trouble with creating child characters that are remotely like an actual child, but an ability to do this well is something that Pixar shares with Studio Ghibli. I think it is a big part of why kids respond so well to their films.

Almost everything made by Disney in the last 20 years has been absolute shit. Not to say that they have never made a good movie, but its been a long time and the company seems more interested in gloating about movies made 50 years ago than anything else (Like Pabst Blue Ribbon still crowing about some medal they won in 1893). Disney does not really make children's movies. Disney makes brands and logos and crappy Happy Meal toys and then crams an 80 minute long cartoon around that brand with animation below the quality of most computer games from a decade ago. Do not even bother with anything with their logo unless they are only acting as the distributor, as with many of Pixar's and Miazaki's films.

Mattel's Barbie Princess movies are often unexpectedly awesome. In fact, I would argue that the quality of the writing and the music of these straight-to-video Barbie movies beats Disney's output during the same period hands-down. The better examples include 'Swan Lake,' 'Island Princess' and 'Princess and the Pauper.' I would personally skip 'Barbie and the Diamond Castle,' which abandons the catchy Broadway and classical scores of the previous films in favor of the most awful adult contemporary shlock you could imagine wading through. Definitely not one you want to be around for repeated viewing.

The spin-off 'Fairytopia' series is definitely weaker than most of the princess movies. Not awful, not as bad as Disney, but I wouldn't start picking those up until you've been through the Princess movies first.

Barbie's 'Nutcracker' is another good one. 'Rapunzel' is decent, as is 'Pegasus.' The thing about all of these Barbie movies that most adults will have to get past is that fact that the animation is all computers and not as good as what Pixar does. The way it is all rendered will remind most people my age (30) of cheap computer games. However, consider the fact that we are stuck on this detail merely as a result of our association of the style as something that only belongs in a game rather than a movie. To the intended audience (under the age of 10), they have no such association and can approach the movie for what it is.

'The Incredibles' was unexpectedly good. The writers followed a sort of Josh Whedon approach by taking a genre, that being superhero movies, and completely turning it on its head by looking at it as an everyday sort of thing under a microscope. Fun movie, well written and good art.

Give 'Monster House' a try. I certainly have, roughly 20 or so times. This is another computer animated movie which succeeds by totally getting middle school aged kids and depicting them in an honest, believable way. Yes, there is a house that tries to eat them and highjinks ensue. But that isn't what really makes the movie. Its the writing ("DJ! You pee in bottles?") and the voice work that results in my kids watching it over and over again.

I hated 'Polar Express.' Tom Hanks decided to play pretty much every single character in the movie and it doesn't take much to get Tom Hanks-ed out. The movie also suffers from sloppy writing. Things are said and done to create 'feel-good' moments that make no sense. Skip it.

'Iron Giant' is about a huge robot that falls to Earth and hangs out with a little kid in the 1950's. Terrible things happen in the end. Everything about it is exactly right and you should watch it.

Back to rifles, conservation and politics soon. I promise.

Is Modern Hunting 'Fair?'

One of the most common arguments against hunting that I as a part-time subsistence hunter encounter is the notion that the hunt is 'unfair.' Other hunters reading this have surely heard the same thing.

The position usually goes something like this: It is so easy to kill a deer, bear or other animal with a firearm or archery equipment that no real challenge is presented. This is unfair to the prey and in the interest of fairness, the hunter should use only his bare hands or perhaps a knife. To use a rifle or other modern technology is 'cheating.'

Ok, lets take this apart and see what really makes it tick.

First of all, let us review the concept of 'fairness' versus 'cheating' in hunting. I think that the use of these terms stems from the popular idea of hunting being a 'sport.' Hunting is not a sport. The definition of 'sport' when used in the relevant context is:

sport (spôrt, sprt)n.

1.

a. Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively.

b. A particular form of this activity.

2. An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.

A sport is a physical competition between 2 or more parties who mutually agree to a set of rules by which their relative success will be determined. I missed the part where the deer signed up for this shit. They are trying to survive and I am trying to kill and eat them. The prey is not deliberately constrained by any set of rules. This is not a game.

Complaining that another hunter is using a bolt action rifle rather than a single-shot or a recurve bow or a rock or his pinky finger is absurd. You might as well complain about how someone is dealing out the cards wrong in a game of solitaire. So long as the prey is killed as humanely as is practical, and the hunter is hunting in a manner that is safe to other people in the woods and is observing the bag limits necessary to ensure that the species will continue to thrive, what is the problem? Whether it dies of a bullet wound or a spear through the chest is, as far as the deer is concerned, purely academic.

Like nearly everyone else, the critic will often attempt to use history as a defense of his or her position. This usually consists of something like; 'hunting for food is fine, but what you are doing is different from hunting for food in the past, because Native Americans and cave men and other predators in nature used low-tech methods that gave the prey an even or better chance of victory.'

Yeah, about that. Lets talk about how paleolithic and neolithic humans in North America hunted. Specifically, lets talk bison because there is so very much evidence for how those hunts were conducted.

Before the arrival of the domesticated horse in the 16th century, bison hunts on the great plains were usually conducted through the use of impoundments of one type or another. People would spend days constructing a very large corral out of logs, sod, stone, or whatever was available. Radiating from the narrow entrance to the impoundment would be a pair of low fences that extended more or less at right angles to one another for hundreds of yards.

Then they would scout for a great herd of bison. It was the big herds that really counted for a village of several hundred people. When a herd was sighted, a carefully orchestrated process began in which members of the tribe would work around the herd and start them moving towards the impoundment. The herd would pass in between the broad pinchers of the radiating walls without realizing what they were in for and by the time the ones in front saw that they would be trapped in the corral, it was too late with the herd thundering behind them.

All of the bison within could be slaughtered far more easily and with less personal risk to the people involved than if they had attacked individual bison in the open. Other variations on this technique included driving entire herds off of cliffs, spooking them onto iced-over lakes or rivers where they would slip and break bones, or driving them into the water where waiting members of the tribe could swim or float beside the bison and execute them with no danger of being charged or out-run.

There is ample physical evidence of these methods being used for thousands of years in North America.

Was any of this 'fair?' Most of those animals never even had a chance at defending themselves. The humans were using technology, intelligence and cooperation to reduce risk and increase their odds and total yield. Just like modern hunters. If anything, North American hunters 1,000 years ago were probably more successful by most standards than modern hunters with cartridge rifles and the latest camouflage.

We could similarly review hunting methods used in ancient Europe, Asia and Africa, finding that technology and cooperation has always been used to reduce risk and increase harvest. Basally, we can observe the hunting practices of chimpanzees, baboons, bonobos and other primates and see that risk is avoided and odds of success are frequently improved by group behavior, which suggests that human ancestors have probably been 'cheating' at hunting going all the way back to our days in the trees. But this is a blog entry rather than a text book so I'm going to spare you a full description of those methods and their histories.

Every hunting method or technology was, at some point, an astounding new innovation. It is worth noting that I cannot think of any hunting society in the past that specialized in hunting whitetail deer or a species of similar size and behavior. As recently as 100 years ago, whitetails were considered too difficult a prey to bother making a specialty of. They spend most of their time hiding either alone or in small groups. In every part of the whitetail's pre-colonial range, there were larger quadrupeds that were easier to hunt. Not to say that whitetails were not killed when the opportunity presented its self. But even right here in Virginia we had bison up until around 1800 and elk until 1900. There is a reason why both of those species were extirpated from the east by white colonists and farmers; they are a lot of meat that is easier to kill than deer are.

When a group of hunters decides to specialize in a new type of prey, new methods and technology are usually required. That has been the case with whitetail deer over the past 40 years or so since American hunters began to specialize in them. Elk could be bugled in during the rut or spotted in the open from far away and bison could be manipulated into traps through their herd behavior. But deer generally need to be studied locally and then ambushed. Tree stands were invented, scent control became more important, etc. As always, the technology needed to be matched to the prey.

What I have demonstrated here is how the criticism of modern hunting as being unfaithful to tradition or a form of cheating is absolute nonsense. The typical critic of American deer hunters, who often use the best technology available, is comparing them to a past that never existed.

If anything, a critic should favor the approach of modern American hunters over that of our paleolithic ancestors. That is, if one must go applying modern standards to the past at all. Modern hunters of 'game' animals are legally require to take home all of the edible meat from their kill. They usually have a personal concern for the experience of the animal, striving for the single shot kill and as little suffering as possible. They are also very much aware of the fact that a species can be hunted or otherwise driven to extinction, and they regulate their conduct and help preserve habitat accordingly.

We are not saints, hunters. We kill to eat. Perhaps the Jains are on to something and in the next life we'll all come back as lizards or ants and they'll be off the wheel. But we're at least no worse than any of our ancestors and perhaps a little better. I remain convinced that hunting is, ethically, the next best thing to being a vegetarian. One thing for certain is that what we do is not a sport, not a game, and not anything in which it is possible to cheat at in some grand universal sense.

[Image courtesy of the Smithsonian]

The 'Terrorist Watch List' is an Abomination

Senator Frank Lautenberg has decided to kick up a big fuss about the fact that people whose names appear on the 'terrorist watch list' are usually allowed to purchase firearms legally. And now CNN and sundry other tabloids are running with it.

Oh horrors! So this means we're selling guns to terrorists, right?

Ok everybody, take a step back. Lets review what the 'terrorist watch list' actually is. Essentially, its a list of people whom the Bush administration didn't like. They had funny names, or they were involved with political causes that Bush's people didn't like, or they knew someone who had a cousin whose 3rd grade math teacher once visited Pakistan.

The terrorist watch list should not exist at all. I have no idea why Obama hasn't done away with it since taking office. Don't most of us remember the legions of stories over the last 7 years or so about completely innocent people being stopped at airports because their name appeared on this list? Don't you remember being infuriated at this?

Everyone from Cat Stevens to Nelson Mandela to airline pilots to random elementary school kids have been turned away from air travel due to this list. And its just the name that gets you stopped- not even your full identity. If your name is John Smith and some other guy named John Smith is on that list, you're out of luck.

There is no particular criteria or set of rules for being included on the list. No standards. Not much of a legal process for getting removed if you happen to share one of the 1,000,000 names that were on the list as of last March.

In the past two years, 51,000 people have filed "redress" requests claiming they were wrongly included on the watch list, according to the Department of Homeland Security. In the vast majority of cases reviewed so far, it has turned out that the petitioners were not actually on the list, with most having been misidentified at airports because their names resembled others on it.

Of course, how can any of those people prove a negative? With no trial, no legal proceeding and no information even provided as to why you are on the list in the first place, how could anyone possibly prove their innocence? Even the few who were fortunate enough to get their cases reviewed and a general agreement that they are not terrorists still usually find that their name doesn't actually come off of the list. The next time they try to get on an airplane, its the same gestapo treatment all over again.

The terrorist watch list is like something out of Nazi Germany. It represents the worst of the deliberate, bureaucratic erosion of civil rights in America under the Bush Administration.

You are a terrorist. Why? Because your name is on the list. Why is your name on the list? Because you are a terrorist. Asking questions means that you are a terrorist. Complaining means that you are a terrorist. You will have to come with us now.

My fellow Democrats have all finally agreed that it is morally and legally wrong to take away Constitutional rights from someone without any legal due process, even if some anonymous person in TSA or Homeland Security decided to call them the 'T' word. We've agreed that people are entitled to free speech, the right to a fair trial, the right to freedom of religion, the right to vote if they are a citizen, etc. So why is it, exactly, that the people whose names appear on this assinine, Stalin-esque list, should capriciously be denied the same right under the 2nd Amendment that other law-abiding adults are entitled to?

Don't let your fear or dislike of firearms lead you to embrace the expansion of one of the worst institutions created under the Bush Administration. During the mid 2000's, Republicans supported the use of the 'terrorist watch list' because they let fear of something govern their decision-making. And now are you going to let your own fear govern your decision-making regarding the exact same list of names?

Congress Just Knee-Capped Moussavi

Dear Congress,

You idiots. You stupid, show-boating, saboteur idiots. What you just did has effectively kneecapped Moussavi and his supporters in Iran.

Obama has been taking the right approach on Iran following their 'election.' He is right not to openly take sides for two reasons.

1. Most Iranians hate America, including a lot of regular people that Moussavi depends on for support. When the US Government makes statements that explicitly support Moussavi and oppose Ahmadinejad in this election process, that is hurting Moussavi's position. It is tying him overtly to American foreign policy, which makes him look like a traitor to other Iranians. A word of support from an American President or Congress is a kiss of death for an Iranian politician.

2. Our top priority with regard to Iran is preventing them from developing and using nuclear weapons. The potential for millions of people being wiped out in a mushroom cloud trumps your desire to showboat for your constituents or to complain about a rigged election in Iran. Period. Obama realizes this. He has to be able to negotiate with whomever emerges from this political process. Staying out of this Iranian election debacle is absolutely essential for being able to do that. Hitherto, Obama has been creating a situation where even Ahmadinejad will probably be willing to enter into negotiations over their nuclear program. You, Congress, are sabotaging that right now.

Every one of you who introduced this bill is a moron. A moron who apparantly wants to prevent Moussavi from having a snowball's chance in hell of becoming President of Iran. A moron who prefers political posturing to actually helping the people you claim to be concerned about.

If North Korea Wanted to Scare Us

If I was in North Korea's shoes right now, given their objectives, I would not be looking at a long range missile launch in the general direction of Hawaii per se.

I think that the North Koreans could make a much more dangerous point by launching a long range missile and having it hit a target in the ocean that is exactly 3,404 kilometers away.

3,404 km being the exact distance between Pyongyang and Guam. Guam being the strategic hub of US military operations in the Pacific. Guam is home to roughly a third of our Air Force's aircraft at any given time and a large proportion of our naval assets. Nuking Guam would severely cripple us in the Pacific. Such an attack would be the modern equivalent of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. In pure military terms, hitting Guam now would hurt us more than a hit on Hawaii would.

North Korea is still a ways from being able to miniaturize a nuclear warhead and place it on top of a long range missile. And there is no way that one of their aircraft could get close enough to Guam's airspace to bomb it. But just putting a missile down at exactly that distance would make the point that they are approaching the ability to strategically attack the US in something beyond an asymmetrical manner.