RibbleRabble

I rewatched the original trilogy of Star Wars recently and a nagging question kept popping into my head, "Yeah, but are they evil" every time people alluded to the "evil" Galactic Empire. Sure, the military guys are all English and nobody's pretty-looking, but aside from that, they all seem pretty down-to-earth. Some systems don't agree with the Empire, but hey, that's how government works. You won't even find a government on Earth that is unanimously beloved by its people.

I don't applaud the Emperor's subversive tactics by any means, and Vader isn't much better when it comes to what he does to people who fail him. In the end, it works-- at least for a while-- because it's undeniable, though, that while the Emporer gets his jollies off on power, he's relatively lax on infringements of personal liberty. In Return of the Jedi, the Emperor simply lets Luke come to him as opposed to going planet to planet interrogating people and shit. Instead, he gives Luke the opportunity to have audience with the Emperor and to even have a position on his staff-- so long as he acts like a human as opposed to some holier-art-thou Jedi. Prior to that, when Vader is searching for the rebellion , instead of invading planets and blowing shit up, he simply sends harmless probe droids to see if they can find anything. It's not just the Rebellion, either, because we can clearly see in Empire Strikes Back that the Empire realistically doesn't give a shit about Lando's Cloud City and all of their shenanigans until they start harboring terrorists. In A New Hope, the people who die are Luke's Aunt and Uncle as well as the robot-stealing Jawas; for, the main reason they all are killed is because they could have easily been in possession of stolen droids, or worse: the plans to the Death Star.

This brings up a good point, because I don't know about you, but if I knew that some random, possibly malfunctioning droid was walking around with highly-classified, highly-detailed technical plans that could be used by any joe schmoe to build a nearly invincible planet-destroying monstrosity, I would take every precaution to see to it that those plans were recovered immediately-- no matter what it took. I'd say the equivalent for modern society would be some schizophrenic dude running around with step-by-step instructions to build as many small, cobalt-salted nuclear bombs as anyone could ever want....

I wanted to start posting some short things that float around in my mind, yet don't necessitate a full blog entry and should be said anyway. So I'll start doing this, too, and call it, "Random thoughts." Anyway, let's get the ball rolling.

• If there's a MasterCard, is there a SlaveCard? It'd be financing meets S&M. Hot.


• The internet is just one big intranet, so why do people still use both terms?


• The majority of noteworthy romances in history involved socially-forbidden acts. That means that hundreds of years from now when children study the best known and most treasured romances of our generation, they will be studying relationships between unmarried couples, unwed teenagers, and gay guys. Everyone will know stories of "Adam and Steve," but like the racists of the 20s, it will follow that members of the psychotic religious right and/or homophobes will merely occupy the body of a despised footnote-- perpetually forgotten in name amidst a sea of groupthink. Do you remember who started the Klu Klux Klan? No, but we most certainly remember the people guys who freed the slaves and "had a dream."


• The progress of the female equal rights movement is probably most easily and accurately measured by the average amount of body hair below the neck of the average American male.

When it comes to music, there are a ton of great songs out there. It seriously pisses me off, however, when I fall in love with a song only to realize that the "you"s and "us"es to which the song refers actually imply God. I think it's because I think that's a cop-out-- regardless of your faith. Simply put, it robs the song of any depth or insight.

I discovered something miraculous today: the way to win almost any argument is by quoting lines from the "Colors of the Wind" song from Pocahontas. I mean, there's obviously the element of surprise when you quote a Disney Indian, but while your opponent is citing Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, you have a modern ace up your sleeve-- lyrics from Pocahontas.

Let's explore a few situations.

In chemistry, we do a lot of otherwise boring things: thermodynamics, reaction rates, and solubility are just a few of the topics. Of course, they're all allegedly essential and can be the difference between millions of dollars in reaction yield. The problem I'm having recently, however, is that overall, I've come to realize one thing: they're all useless.

Yes, that's right. Useless. They're a complete waste of time and money, because they're archaic techniques-- things that only old scientists in old, dark labs from the 1800s still practice. Today, we have a much better technique for increasing reaction yields that was invented in the 1970s. Even better, it's spurred creative development on multiple fronts, exceeding some of the greatest developments in the fields of neuroscience. It's a more practical alternative to antiquated scientific methods that instead involves a remarkably non-scientific approach. It's so ingenious, I think it should be published in Nature or Science right on the front page. You might even be able to patent it.

So what, exactly, is this new method? It's actually rather simple: the War on Drugs.