LOST

So, Lost is done. I made a couple comments on the washingtonpost.com analysis. Here they are...

Oh my god, I had to stop reading this analysis a few paragraphs in. It must be incredibly frustrating to the writers to lay things out so plainly and have so many people still confused. Christian's little speech at the end said everything we needed to know. Perhaps because of the non-linear plot or people trying to fit the story into their preconceived notions of what was going on, it gets lost. Here's what happened, and I don't think there's much to dispute here.

1) Jack dies after re-corking the island. We see him die. There's no mystery here. He re-corks the island, winds up in the river, wanders around a bit, falls over, and dies. Incidentally, Charlie died underwater, Boone died in season 1, and Sayid died in the sub, in case there was confusion.

2) Lapidus, Kate, Sawyer, Miles, and Claire fly off the island, presumably to live uneventful lives in the wider world. They eventually die, maybe at 60, maybe at 40, maybe at 110. Also, Hurley and Ben live on to be caretakers of the island, their first order of business being shipping Desmond off to be with Penny and baby Charlie. Everything does not hinge on Jack. As Christian said, some died before him, some died long after him, but everybody dies.

3) There is no logical contradiction in point 2, above. As Christian said, there is no "now" in sideways world. Just because they all died at different times doesn't mean those different times have to correlate to any specific time in Sideways world. We were set up for this idea in Season 5, with all the time travel.

4) They did not die at the plane crash. What happened on the island was real. The island is a real place. Jacob, MiB, and the rest are all real entities. The Oceanic Six did really return to the wider world, and did really go back to the island. The understanding of this point is crucial to the point of the show, as Christian puts it. They all meet up in the Sideways World because the time they spent together on the island was the most important time of their lives. Not of their afterlives, or of their purgatory lives.

There's still plenty to debate and wonder about, but the four points above have to be taken as the basis for any reasonable discussion. It was a fantastic finale, but I've just been amazed at what people are trying to take away from it.

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You asked:
What's special about the island? Who knows?
Why does it need a protector? I dunno.
Who are they protecting it from? Beats me.
Who are the others? Who cares?
What was Dharma initiative? Doesn't matter.
What was Widmore after? Never mind.
Was anybody alive at all? Picky questions.

Most of these questions could be dealt with fairly offhandedly. If the show had come out and said (which it basically did, on a few occasions) that there are places on the Earth where electromagnetism spikes, and that the island is at one of those places, would that explain to you what's special about the island? Do you need a physicist to come out and explain it to the audience like we're in a lecture hall (they also went for that approach through Faraday a couple times).

The sci-fi stuff starts when it comes to what happens when you interact with the electromagnetism. You become the smoke monster. You live forever. You destroy the world. That's why it needs protecting, and who it needs protecting from. The frustrating thing is that the only character in the show who ever seemed to actually know the whys of this situation was Faraday, and he died last season. I don't think Jacob ever really knew what the island was, nor did MiB. Maybe their "mother" did, but that's doubtful, too.

The others are presumably people that came to the island sometime after the Black Rock but before the Army and Jughead. That's a pretty narrow window, so it's actually a fairly precise answer. Presumably, after Jacob denotes Alpert to be his right hand man, Jacob brings people to the island for Alpert to work with, trying to prove humanity's goodness.

The Darma initiative was a group out of Ann Arbor that came to the island to study/harness the electromagnetic characteristics of the island.

Widmore's mission was personal. He wanted to reclaim his position as leader of the Others and important dude on the island.

Finally, see my post above, but yes, everybody was really alive. The Sideways World was the only thing that wasn't real, or at least not of our world.

CollAPSe

So the Caps lost last night, and made a premature exit from the Stanley Cup playoffs in the first round. This morning on the radio, questions abounded as to the fate of Bruce Boudreau, Mike Green, and Alexander Semin. As much credit as he receives, though, I believe George McPhee deserves the lion's portion of the blame. Before the trade deadline we had the Eastern Conference all but locked up, and it was obvious that, despite our surplus of talent on offense, we had too few strong defensive players. Mike Green was the primary example of this - he consistently leads the league in points and goals for a defenseman, but his penchant for joining the forecheck leaves us vulnerable for the counterattack. Given his youth and skill, he would surely be incredibly valuable to a team that would like to score more, and ought to net us an incredibly good shot blocking zone clearing defenseman who we could match up against anybody, in the same way that Montreal matched Hal Gill against Ovechkin. This is the trade that needed to happen before the deadline, and it didn't happen. Montreal neutralized Green during the playoffs, and he cost us dearly in the last game. He had at least two penalties that I remember, one of which led to the first Montreal goal late in the third period.

The other assertion bandied about on the radio is the persistent ridiculous idea that Crosby is somehow better than Ovechkin. Aside from the first game, Ovechkin had an excellent series against Montreal, scoring what should have been the tying goal in the beginning of the third that was inexplicably washed out, and shooting the point shot on the Caps' only goal that counted. People who point to the Penguin's Cup last year make a false argument based on the premise that Crosby took his team on his back and won the Cup all by himself. Comparisons are constantly made to Jordan, but hockey is nothing like basketball. It's rare for a single player to be on the ice for even a third of a game, and rarer still to be able to point to a single player as being the sole reason a team won four games out of seven. Has Crosby ever done that? Has Ovechkin? Hard to say in either case, but it's pretty disgusting listening to sports radio personalities who didn't even know what hockey was three years ago pontificate about the finer points of the game when they truly have no insight to offer. The fact is that Crosby landed on a better team than Ovechkin with a better fanbase and a better history. The Caps are catching up to the Penguins as a franchise, but much less has been demanded of Crosby than has been of Ovechkin. The true time for the debate of these two players is after they've both retired from long fulfilling careers, not when they're still young kids. As for me, I wouldn't trade Ovechkin for Crosby in a million years - I believe he's the better player because he has a greater capacity to take the team on his back and lift the franchise as a whole. Crosby, from what I've seen of him, is little more than a role player with a quick inside shot. His list of capabilities is small, but he's very good at what he does, and the Penguins use him well. Ovechkin, on the other hand, is the type of athlete that can do it all, and is much more of a threat at any point he's on the ice.

This is turning into a rant, so I'll stop.

Comment on Tea Partiers and Racism

dude1394 wrote:

When dissent is racist it's time to ignore ALL accusations of racism. This is nothing more than an attempt to silence critics, it's disgusting to throw the race card every single time someone disagrees with you.
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What are they protesting? What in the health care bill is bad? The reason Colbert King writes this piece is that the Tea Party group just aren't making sense if you take them at face value. They claim Obama is socializing health care when he's not. Health care is still directly provided by independent hospitals, and the means to pay for health care is still provided by independent insurance companies.

Tea Party protesters claim that they want to reduce the deficit, but that's exactly what this bill does. The money we spend now on health care is so inefficiently and wastefully spent that, if we do things smarter, we will all save money. And this is what the CBO has projected.

So, if it's not really about socialism and it's not really about the deficit, there are only a few things it can be about.

1 - The Tea Party protesters are uncompromisingly stupid, and don't know what socialism and the deficit are. They're simply confused or misled.

2 - The Tea Party group just doesn't like the tax increases on the wealthy that help to pay for this plan. This likely accounts for a large amount of the protesters, but it's an argument as old as taxes themselves - so why the vitriol now? In a government controlled by Democrats, expect higher taxes on the rich and greater benefits for the poor.

3 - Tea Partiers are motivated by some other impulse. This is the question King ponders in his editorial, and he finds striking resemblance between the current movement and those who protested civil rights. Is it coincidence that these similarities occur when we have a black president? Or when the issue in question similarly takes an exclusive right of the wealthy (health care) and gives it to the poor? I do think King is on to something here, and I can understand if you don't, but I don't think you can reasonably claim that he has no basis to think this way. He is, after all, operating under the assumption that there is some sense to the Tea Partiers.

The bottom line is that this bill is a capitalist bill through and through. It provides a social safety net which helps encourage people to seek better jobs and be more daring in the work place. It also decreases the burden on those of us who have insurance, so that we get a larger portion of our paycheck to spend in the free market each month. The second a Tea Party protester can argue those points without bringing up socialism or the deficit, I'm all ears.

A Quotation

Here's something I came across that I think pretty aptly characterizes the Republican attitude about health care especially, and government in general:

"It is when I see others degraded that I rejoice knowing it is better to be me than the scum of 'the people.' Whenever men are equal, without that difference, happiness cannot exist. So you wouldn't aid the humble, the unhappy. In all the world no voluptuousness flatters the senses more than social privilege."

It's from 120 Days of Sodom, a movie based on writings by The Marquis de Sade which I encountered in high school. As disgusting a quotation as it is, it made me feel sort of at peace with the opponents of health care reform; at least it's a logical statement, and doesn't try to mask it's true feelings. Fascist? Yes. But at least unabashedly so.

Lost

I've figured out the problem with the new season - not enough Ben. Early in the show there was the drama of acclimating to the island and growing used to not being rescued, but then there needed to be another driving force of the show. That came in Ben Linus. The bulk of Lost has been driven by Ben Linus - the things he knows, the things he's capable of, and ultimately whether his motivations were good or evil. This season has felt limp because Ben has been castrated and relegated to the background. Instead we get the Temple, and Lennon and Dogen, and Jacob and MIB, and we don't have any kind of investment in these types.

Based on the teaser, Ben will die next week. Let me be the first to say that, while the writers have earned my trust thus far, if Ben Linus isn't an important player in the endgame of Lost, it will be a HUGE disappointment.

Getting Old(!)

So, I'm turning 26 in a week and a half. That's not so old, I suppose, but I just had my first serious encounter with an object from my past that makes me feel positively ancient. My car. Here I was, innocently reading an article on lithium ion battery production (too many startups and discounts) when I started to think about when I would buy my next car. I got my car in college, and still think of it as a new car. It's a 2004 Honda Element. But wait... 2004 was six years ago now. My car is six years old. That means that if I had a kid at the same time I got my car, it would almost be six years old! It would be going into kindergarten, or first grade. Sure, there are other things that make me feel old, like the fact that The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails came out in 1999, but I was still a kid at the time. Lots of people are having kids when they're 20, which is how old I was when I got my car, and so it's perfectly plausible to come to this realization.

In summary, I could be the parent of a six year old human being right now. And that makes me feel old. Katie and I don't plan to have kids for another 3 or 4 years (after she graduates and gets settled into a career), which I think is entirely appropriate. It's one of the luxuries of living in the developed world that you can choose when to have children. Besides, there is a bright side to my brief moment of quarter life crisis - my car is almost six years old, which means that it'll be prime time to get a new one just as the second or third generation of electric cars are hitting showrooms! Sweet...

State of the Union Comment

This is a comment I made on a washingtonpost.com board. The end addresses the other commenters. Ironically, it was too long, so it wasn't actually posted...

The State of the Union was an eloquent speech full of strength and idealism, two qualities that have been absent from Washington for a very long time. Obama was careful to point out that he's not naive (he knows just how entrenched those in Congress are with special interests). I was impressed with the boldness of his points, and I almost expected him to call them out, as in "I know each and every one of you are thinking about your biggest campaign contributor and how mad they're getting right now. Let them go. Stand on your own platform!" It was incredibly disingenuous of the Democrats to applaud him when he called out the special interest influence, and he even tried to stop their applauding at one point. They didn't get that he was talking to them, too.

Which seems to be the problem with a lot of the comments here. I firmly believe that Obama is operating on a four year cycle; he's not running for reelection yet. He believes that, if he just does what is right for transparent and logical reasons, the American people will appreciate it. And, if they don't - oh well. America needs saving right now; we have needed it for the past twenty years. If Obama only gets to be president until 2012, but he manages to make a lasting impact to improve our infrastructure, our economy, our standing in the world, our defense, then I'm pretty sure that's fine with him. We need it, and he wants to give it to us. We need him.

For those of you who call him a liar, or make comments about how high speed trains don't put food on the table, I ask you to explain yourselves. Please. I don't want to be naive in my opinions, and i like to know all sides of an argument. So please present a side to the argument. So much of what happens on these boards is based on assumptions that no one actually agrees on in the first place. I think high speed rail will put food on the table by invigorating the economy through cheaper and faster transportation of goods and workers. If the VRE was a high speed rail that could be relied on, I might consider living farther from my place of work. This would help invigorate the economy in the poorer parts of the state in the same way that highways invigorated economies when they were built. It would be great if private companies would build and maintain these railways, but they aren't doing that, so the government needs to.

Obama's whole premise is that, since the free market has failed us, since the government was run into the ground by the previous administration, since other countries are leapfrogging us in areas that will be vital to the 21st century, we have to do something. Do you disagree with that premise? Why?

Obama's plan is to put money into education and emerging technology markets, while at the same time creating a market more conducive to responsible and fair lending. Do you think we shouldn't do that? Why? What do you suggest instead? Why is that different from what's happened the past ten years, and why will it work?

Think. Then post.

Massholes

So, Ted Kennedy's seat goes to the Republicans. Republicans interpret this in the only way they know how ("EVERYONE has an irrational hatred of Democrats!"), and columnists call it a referendum on Obama. I'm inclined to agree with them, if only indirectly. This election is a referendum on the leadership in Congress. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had the entire government on a silver platter, and couldn't manage to do anything with it. They allowed special interests and morons to dominate the health care debate over the summer when they should have had something concrete worked up. They allowed irrational fear-mongers scream about bureaucratic health care and death panels while they did nothing to extol the virtues of what they were trying to do. They failed to pass clean energy legislation. They failed to reign in corporate payouts. They failed to do anything about education, labor, trade, or immigration. In short, they did not strike while the iron was hot, and now they look like asses.

So what does Obama have to do with this? Very little. And that's the problem. He stepped back to allow these jackasses to take the lead. Maybe he was scared of repeating Clinton's mistakes, and being rebuffed if he handed them a cut and dried agenda. Maybe he was starry eyed because of the seniority of Reid. Who knows. The fact is, Americans didn't want Reid or Pelosi to shape the agenda - they were put in leadership positions by Washington politicians. Americans want Obama to shape the agenda, and I hope this election serves as a wakeup call to the White House that they need to get off their asses and start putting people's nuts in a vice.