Ban Youthful Hijinx

From the AP, via Military.com:

Penn State Riot Ends Aspiring Army Officer's Dream

Perhaps none have learned a harder lesson than Justin Strine, a young man from central Pennsylvania whose planned career as an Army officer is over before it began -- the casualty of his own split-second decision to put his hands on a news van, and a judicial system that considered him as guilty as classmates who did far worse that dark night in State College.

An estimated 4,000 to 5,000 people poured into downtown State College on Nov. 9 after the Penn State board of trustees abruptly and unexpectedly fired Paterno -- the beloved football coach who led Penn State for nearly 46 seasons -- and removed President Graham Spanier over the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal.

What began as a peaceful protest of Paterno's unceremonious dismissal quickly turned ugly as a "riotous mob," as State College police would later call it, threw bottles and rocks, damaged cars, and tore down light posts and street signs.

I was a student auxillary with our university campus' police department in the early '90s, and was on duty the night a significant fraction of the student body rioted, building a bonfire in the middle of an intersection, destroying a traffic light, a police car, and the football field goalposts. Word was that our football team had won a game. An away game.

No one was arrested.

Now, on the one hand, I'm inclined to hope that young Justin's ROTC career will ultimately be rehabilitated, assuming that the AP article above is telling the full story. But I am also grateful that the legal system is sending a significant reminder that there is nothing about being a college student that puts him above the laws the rest of us are expected to live by. For too long, students at all levels have been given a pass for illegal, not to mention boorish and offensive, behavior. It seems the proliferation of cell phone camcorders combined with YouTube and Facebook have made it a lot easier for the police to build cases against individual rioters, and I am frankly glad for it.

Nothing brings out the worst in undergraduates and their coatholders like intercollegiate athletics. Now, based on my recollection of the timeline, the full details of Paterno's coverup of Sandusky's behavior had not yet made the press at the time of his resignation. So I am prepared to allow that the student body's support of Paterno might not be as indicatve of quite the level of moral obtuseness as it would appear in retrospect. But having said that, some level of moral obtuseness is pretty baked in. College football fanaticism has corrupted universities in all sorts of ways, from lowered admissions and retention standards to a see-no-evil attitude towards crimes commiitted by athletes. The Penn State scandal is symptomatic of that larger cause, and I'd just as soon see the whole thing shut down.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Mrs. Φ and I went to see our first theater movie together in years:  Snow White and the Huntsman.  KMac pretty much nailed the racial allegory, and while I would like to recommend the film on that basis alone, I regret to say that it fails at basic storytelling in several critical ways.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW.]

In an early scene, Snow White (Kristen Stewart), held captive by her step-mother, recites the Lord’s Prayer, revealing herself to be an observant Christian; at the end, her coronation is superintended by what I take to be Roman Catholic prelates.  So far, so good.

The problem is that the intervening movie is filled with magical creatures like dwarves, fairies, and trolls, and paranormal activities like the life-force-sucking, shape-shifting witch dissolving into a flock of ravens.  Thus the filmmakers’ fundamental confusion about what kind of movie they were actually making.  Is it an allegory?  Is it an other-worldly fantasy?  Or is it real-life good-versus-evil set in the Middle Ages?

I don’t think these mix especially well.  Snow White is identified as the one who destined to “heal the land,” and her death and resurrection makes her kind of a Christ figure.  Which is fine in an allegory, but problematic in a movie in which Christianity is made explicitly present.

The confusion isn’t just about theological hair-splitting.  It undermines the unfolding of the story.  Snow White, escorted by the dwarves, the huntsman, and the prince, passes through the “sanctuary forest”, home to the fairies.  The fairies awaken her and lead her before a white moose-looking creature with a large rack of tree branches for antlers.  The dwarves explain to us that the magical moose is “blessing” her as it mutely tosses its head at her.

Then the moose gets shot.  And dissolves into a flock of doves.

None of this makes any sense.  We aren’t told who the moose is, nor were there any references to moose prior to the scene.  We’re given no idea as to the relationship between the moose and the witch, although there must be one because of the whole turning-into-birds connection.  We never see the moose again (or the doves, for that matter), nor is there any indication that the blessing has endued her with anything worthwhile.  And the magical forest doesn’t seem to be worth much either, considering that the bad guys can operate pretty freely there.

Contrast this with, say, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  Granted that C.S. Lewis (or any movie based on widely read books that build anticipation around a specific story) is a tough act to follow, but . . . Aslan is given a substantial build-up during the children’s journey to his camp.  So when we finally see him, his significance doesn’t have to be narrated by a dwarf in real time.

And while I’m on it, recall the LW&W journey itself.  We meet the beavers, who explain the story.  We have a flight seen and a dramatic escape on an ice floe.  And we see Father Christmas, who gives the children the weapons they will use in the series.  All significant , well-paced events.

In Snow White, the journey is overlong and tedious.  The protagonist and her followers have to escape the witch’s henchmen several times, none of them particularly suspenseful.  They encounter a troll, which beats up on the huntsman for a while before Snow White stares him down.  Now, a competent film would have the troll, obviously impressed with Snow White’s specialness, show up later to fight the bad guys or something.  Here, we never see the troll again.

The plucky travellers get taken into an all-female village whose inhabitants have disfigured themselves so as not to have their life-force sucked out by the witch.  The bad guys show up and burn the village, and we don’t see the inhabitants again except as observers at the coronation.  The whole sequence does nothing to advance the plot.

Then we meet magic-moose (I may have these events in the wrong order, but the truth is that the order is pretty irrelevant, a bad sign), but that’s just an accident:  their actual destination is the fortress from whence the prince’s father and his band of insurgents carry out guerilla attacks against the witch.

There are other loose ends.  Somewhere along the way the prince shows up.  Now, at this point the huntsman vs. prince competition is framed, and a competent film would have the two of them hash it out.  But these two guys start traveling together and never have so much as an exchange of words, about Snow White or anything else.  Again, contrast this with, say, Prince Caspian, where King Peter’s return frames a leadership conflict with Caspian, a conflict that the movies deals with.  Here’s the conflict, no less painfully obvious, is not even addressed.

The writing was an embarrassment.  This isn’t a problem in most of the movie, since nobody has much of anything to say to anybody else anyway.  But Snow White’s resurrection should have been dramatic – it wasn’t – and her “Crispin’s Day” speech wouldn’t have inspired a little league team, let alone an assault on the witch’s castle.  It didn’t help that Kristen Stewart – quite good in the Twilight series at standing around looking vulnerable while various factions of vampires and werewolves fought over her – is out of her acting depth in this role.  (OTOH, can anybody think of a movie in which a female leader didn’t look ridiculous trying to rally troops?  Maybe Mila Jovovich . . . .)

Things to like:  the racial angle, plus the fact that the witch is openly portrayed as a man-hating feminist.  The revelation that the talking mirror was a product of the witch’s hallucination was an interesting twist.  The the movie got its money’s worth from the special effects department.  But considering the budget, couldn’t they have spent some of it on a script doctor to make the thing coherent?

Platform Planks: Where Policy Goes to Die

From, for instance, American Renaissance

The Republican Party has officially endorsed its backing for Arizona-style state immigration laws, adding into its platform language that such laws should be “encouraged, not attacked” and calling for the federal government to drop its lawsuits against the laws.

Uh, huh. Like how the Republicans put a pro-life plank in the platform in 1980, secured the Evangelical vote, and then proceded to nominate and confirm three pro-choice supreme court justices in the next five tries.

On the positive note, it's the politest "go to hell" we were likely to get.

Who changed the rules?

From the AP, via Military.com:

Special Operators to Anti-Obama Groups: Zip It

WASHINGTON -- A group of retired special operations and CIA officers who claim President Barack Obama revealed secret missions and turned the killing of Osama bin Laden into a campaign centerpiece are coming under criticism from some of their own.
Some special operations officers say the activist veterans are breaking a sacred military creed: respect for the commander in chief.

"This is an unprofessional, shameful action on the part of the operators that appear in the video, period," U.S. Army Special Forces Maj. Fernando Lujan wrote on his Facebook page, to a chorus of approval from colleagues.

A Green Beret who returned last year from Afghanistan, Lujan says that attaching the title of special operator with any political campaign is "in violation of everything we've been taught, and the opposite of what we should be doing, which is being quiet professionals."

Correct me if I am wrong, but what violates everything they've been taught is for active duty soldiers to shamelessly flack for the president in the middle of a campaign. The idea that former soldiers have a duty to stay out of politics would come as a suprise to . . . well, everyone from George Washington to Wesley Clark. If there is some special rule for "special" forces, then I've never heard about it.

But this doesn't look good:

"I don't take these folks too seriously," President Barack Obama told the newspaper The Virginian-Pilot on Monday. "One of their members is a birther who denies I was born here, despite evidence to the contrary." Special Ops OPSEC member ret. Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, who appears in the group's film, has publicly questioned Obama's birth in Hawaii.

Note to Republicans: be careful about recycling your key personnel. If one of your attacking points winds up discredited, then it's best not to have that set of activists headline your other causes.

'Legitimate' Sh!tstorm

It was immediately apparent to me that the aspiring senator Todd Akin was attempting to make three points:

• Rape induced preganacy is a small percentage of pregnancies even weighted for the frequency of rape;
  

• they are a small percentage of induced abortions; and
  

• forcible rape is not the same thing as stat rape, or morning-after regret.

Of these, only the first appears to be false, and candidly, I didn't know it was false until researching this post. I had heard the rape-seldom-causes-pregnancy factoid 25 years ago and probably from the same place Akin did. I had never heard it contested, and never thought to contest it myself. While I once was quite passionate on the subject of abortion, my interest waned as I realized how thoroughly gamed out the issue had become, and I no longer regard a Republican politician's prolife protestations to be worth especially much, in and of themselves. But for Akin, a genuine partisan on the issue, to be so mis-informed in the age of the internet speaks ill of him.

As does his artlessness:

First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

The initial reaction from his oppoents was to harp on "legitimate", which indicates that they didn't really know the stats either. It was only later that jokes about "sperm goalies" started up.

As Ann Coulter put it:

Akin wasn’t asked some out of the blue question no Republican candidate has ever been asked: He was asked the most jejune, obvious question every Republican is asked in any race for any office. How can a Republican not have an answer for: “What about abortion in the case of rape and incest?”

The point I believe Akin was ultimately driving at was that this is a teeny-tiny percentage of all abortions, so why are we spending all our time taking about it? How about saying: “Yes, it’s still a life, but more people are killed in drive-by shootings in Chicago every year. You give us the 2 million abortions that aren’t a result of rape and incest and we’ll give you the few thousand that are.”

Instead, Akin rambled about “legitimate rape” – violating an ironclad rule of politicians that the word “legitimate” should never appear within 15 yards of the word “rape.” And he talked about the medical possibility of becoming pregnant from a single traumatizing rape.

He’s not a talk radio host. He’s not sitting around shooting the breeze in a college dorm room. This is a politician who should have a clear, nonthreatening answer at the ready for the most cliched question in the MSM’s playbook.

Well said. But remember this incident, those of you with IQ above 115, who wonder why candidates always sound perfectly scripted and always spout the same talking points no matter what the spin of the question. That's the only kind of answer we seem to tolerate.

It's only "McCarthyism" when it targets Democrats . . .

When it targets Republicans, it's just law enforcement. From Politico:

FBI INVESTIGATES GOP MEMBERS AFTER NUDE SWIM INCIDENT IN ISRAEL

The FBI probed a late-night swim in the Sea of Galilee that involved drinking, numerous GOP freshmen lawmakers, top leadership staff — and one nude member of Congress, according to more than a dozen sources, including eyewitnesses.

The FBI looked into whether any inappropriate behavior occurred, but the interviews do not appear to have resulted in any formal allegations of wrongdoing.

Wait a sec . . . .

Look, Congressional skinny dipping at the end of a busy day "factfinding" abroad kinda strikes me as fratboy behavior, but what bothers me here is that the FBI seems to have launched its "probe" without even an accusation of any laws being broken. Isn't that backwards? I thought that somebody had to make the allegation first, or the FBI had to come across some evidence of illegality, and then "launch and investigation".

And what is this business about "inappropriate behavior"? Is our country just a big fundamentalist boarding school where everybody is a child whose character needs careful molding? Since when is it the FBI's business to enforce "propriety", rather than, you know, the law.

Or perhaps the whole point of the investigation was to generate this particular headline.

Red Lobster Heads Downmarket

From The Blaze:

RED LOBSTER WAITRESS REPORTEDLY ATTACKED FOR REFILLING WATER GLASSES TOO OFTEN

The witness said that as the waitress walked away, one of the customers threw a water glass at her, striking her in the back of the head. When the victim turned around, the witness said the customer picked up a menu and hit her in the face with it.

I can't upload the article image to Blogger from my iPad, but . . . yeah, your suspicions are correct.

When I was a kid, and even as late as the late '90s, I thought Red Lobster was fairly upmarket as chain restaurants go. I didn't eat there very often, but my impression was that it strove to be just a cut above, say, Applebees and other family bar-and-grill chains. But I took the family there a few months ago, and was disappointed. The service struck me mediocre, and the restaurant seemed to be attracting a demographic not dissimilar to the one appearing in the article, and this is a nice part of town.

This article on Darden Restaurants, Inc., which owns Red Lobster, confirmed this observation about the company's targeted customer base, but does anyone know when and why this changed, or was it always thus and I have only become more sensitive.