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Perhaps more so than any other creative endeavor, moviemaking is in a codependent relationship with technology. The milestone advances in film technology over time – color, Kodachrome, stereoscoping, analog special effects (rear screen projection, etc.), THX/Dolby, CGI, "bullet time" (a modern version of the old time-slice photography trick), and now plug-and-play 3D rigs like RealD – have unavoidably changed movies by altering what is possible. They are part of the numerator in the fraction of a director/producer's vision that makes it onto the screen. Each leap forward has provided us with stunning new films taking advantage of technology to do things that have never been done before…and each has also been an annoying fad in the hands of hacks who don't know what to do with new sounds or special effects except to lay them on thick to overstimulate the audience. Loud noises! Bright colors! Epic battles! Unfortunately a shit movie with incredible technology behind it is still a shit movie (see: every summer blockbuster action movie of the past 10 years).

We all remember the first films to use these tricks to memorable effect: The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (and to a much less deserved extent, Gone With the Wind) for color, Return of the Jedi for THX/surround sound, King Kong for stop-motion and rear screen projection, Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 for CGI, The Matrix for a whole shitcan of audio-visual indulgence, and…as best I can tell, there hasn't really been such a movie for 3D yet. The post-2008 resurgence in 3D has been, in my view, a big scam desperately trying to make crappy movies interesting (Green Hornet, The Last Airbender) and to extract more per-ticket revenue from audiences, justifying an upcharge with claims of added value in the final product. 3D seems to have potential in the right hands, but it does not appear to have found them yet. Compare what George Lucas did with CGI in the christ-awful Star Wars prequels to, say, what Peter Jackson has done with it; unless I've missed something, 3D is still waiting for its Peter Jackson/Lord of the Rings moment.

I must admit that I am incredibly biased and heavily predisposed to like this film from the outset, but I have high hopes that Prometheus might be that movie. Reviews, which have criticized the predictability of the script (Charlize Theron appears to be little more than Paul Reiser's character from Aliens but with boobs, for example) have universally praised two things: Michael Fassbender's android performance and Ridley Scott's use of 3D. By using it mostly to enhance the depth of scenery and backgrounds as opposed to using it to make things explode out toward the audience every 10 seconds, the critics seem to believe that Scott has finally managed to use 3D to make a film better and more compelling than it could have been without the technology. I don't know if this is true, but I've read it consistently enough from reviews of varying tone to believe that it might be. I'll find out on Friday evening.

On a side note, I rarely get excited about movies. In the past year I've probably been to the theater twice. The last movie I couldn't wait to see (to the point of distraction) was The Watchmen, and that was simply because I liked the book so much. But I have had Prometheus-related ants in my pants for weeks now. I was a late bloomer who did not come to appreciate the Alien franchise until I was in my twenties, but I really appreciate it (at least the first two installments) now. The ability of the directors to create fear – not horror, but actual fear – and suspense is remarkable. Anything built up to this extent is bound to be a little disappointing, but I'm really looking forward to seeing if 3D can finally add something to a movie other than nausea and $5.

More than two years ago, this is what I had to say about Citizens United:

Now in the wake of Citizens United vs. FEC plenty has been said about the folly of corporate personhood and the opened floodgates courtesy of the patriotic, non-activist majority on the Supreme Court. There appears to be widespread consensus that this is a bad thing. This is all correct, of course, but here is the thing: you have no idea how fucking ridiculous this is going to get in 2012. We will look back on 2008 as a simpler time.

A decent guess is impossible to generate since we are in uncharted waters from this point forward. An obvious guess would be another 100% increase; I think that will be a baseline. The campaigns themselves will double the $1.5 billion spent by all contenders in 2008. How much will corporate groups – not to mention various other tax code loophole groups – toss on the fire? Another $3 billion seems like a reasonable guess, equal to the amount that the candidates spend on the books. I think that's an understatement. $10 billion? $20 billion? More? It's not out of the question. I could just be a pessimist, but I think we are in for something so grotesque and ridiculous that we'll scarcely be able to grasp it.

Given what just happened in Wisconsin, I think we're beginning to get a clearer picture of what elections will look like when conducted in the midst of a tsunami of unregulated corporate money. Did money make a difference in the outcome? That's hard to say definitively. But we certainly are entering uncharted waters and if we needed yet another way to make the electoral process seem rigged, inaccessible, and futile to the ordinary voter, rest assured that we have found it.

Of all the disheartening aspects of our modern public discourse, nothing saddens me as consistently as listening to people who are proud of their own ignorance. I'm not exactly a strong proponent of a Japan-style Shame Society, but being ignorant is one of those situations in which a little shame can be a valuable tool for self-improvement. You can only watch someone proudly assert that the world is 6,000 years old and Science is wrong so many times before hope for the human condition begins to fade. Ignorance is an easy problem to overcome if an individual is willing to learn. If not, though, it only gets worse.

One of the jarring things about living in the South has been seeing how proud the civic leaders are of things for which they ought to feel embarrassed. They love to boast, for example, about the rapidly growing population and industrialization in places like South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Look at all these shiny new factories! Take that, Detroit! Victory is ours!

Of course the reason that the Bible Belt is the new Auto Belt (among other major industries) is that these states are willing to hand employers billions in tax abatement, free infrastructure upgrades, and other "incentives" – in other words, we're winning the race to the bottom. And while it is spoken of only in euphemistic terms like "motivated workforce" or "right to work state", one of the big draws is that unemployment is high, the workforce is docile in the extreme, and people will work for pretty much anything. State and local politicians, not to mention the population itself, crow about the Business Friendly environment, which essentially means that people are ready to stab each other to get a $12/hr factory job, employees won't tell anyone if they get hurt on the job, and the state won't do anything about it even if they do. What employer doesn't cherish being able to use a line as effective as, "If you're not happy, I've got 20,000 people on file who want your job."

That's not an exaggeration. When I see a headline like "20,000 apply for 877 Alabama Hyundai plant jobs" I almost have to feel bad for said Alabamans on account of the fact that they elect people who see this as a victory for the state. Alabama lures Hyundai, much as Georgia lured Kia and South Carolina lured BMW, using the same techniques that bring manufacturing to Mexico from the US, to Eastern Europe from Western, and to China and Southeast Asia from the whole world.

So congratulations, Alabama. You're the Bangladesh of the United States. Your population is poorer, more desperate, and less assertive than anywhere else in the country. That's quite an accomplishment. Maybe it's time to update the state flags again; I'm thinking a job applicant bending over with his pants around his ankles and a big, inviting grin might be appropriate.

Many viewers expressed disappointment with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the Bill Murray / Wes Anderson follow-up to the wildly successful The Royal Tenenbaums. That I enjoyed the movie as a whole is beside the point; even if it was terrible, this made me laugh harder than any single scene from a movie made in the last decade:

For the audio-less, the Zissou crew has pilfered the workplace of his professional enemy Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum). After a series of events brings Hennessey to Zissou's ship, he spots his stolen coffee maker and demands to know why they have it. After a short pause to consider potential lies and excuses, Bond Company Stooge Bill Ubell (Bud Cort) shrugs and says "Well, uh…we fuckin' stole it, man." Despite having been robbed, even Hennessey must appreciate the straightforward nature of this response. Never before have we seen a bond company stooge stick his neck out like that.

We can all appreciate the value of honesty in tense situations. In my professional life I much prefer hearing "Uh, I slept through the exam" to some melodramatic fiction about dead relatives or life-threatening illnesses. There's rarely anything to gain from lying, primarily because lying usually is quite transparent. Good liars are rare. For most people, lying accomplishes little beyond insulting the intelligence of the listener.

This is at the forefront of my thought process as I watch Florida's latest attempt to pull ahead of Arizona in the race to see which state can get back to the 19th Century first: yet another blatant attempt at voter suppression. Despite a Federal Court injunction (Nullification! States Rights! Loud Noises!) the Secretary of State continues to send letters to registered voters demanding proof of citizenship within 30 days. Leaving aside the obvious "Huh?" of putting the burden of proving their eligibility on voters, Florida's ingenious methodology is to compare Social Security records with state drivers' license databases. Since it's, like, totally impossible for anyone to become a citizen and register to vote after getting a license, that should be foolproof and result in no false positives.

No one is surprised. I mean, voter suppression is an integral part of the modern GOP playbook. True, Florida is taking it much farther than usual – shutting down early voting locations, indiscriminately purging ex-felons, targeting Hispanics (while magically missing all of the Cubans) – but this is standard operating procedure at this point. I'll give every reader a dollar if we don't have another round of fake robocalls as Election Day approaches. The media will barely bother to mention it (try to find stories about the Florida purge outside of the state), although we'll certainly hear about it if two black guys stand in front of a single polling place in Philadelphia again.

We get it. This is how it works. It would be nice, however, if the GOP could spare the rest of us the bullshit about "voter fraud". Aside from their repeated, decade-long inability to come up with actual examples that would be prevented by their proposed changes in the law, we know they don't really care about fraud per se. If we suddenly uncovered cases of teabaggers voting twice, the GOP would trip over itself to excuse it. So the best course of action would seem to be to carry on and own up to their motives. Don't feed us the fraud story when Florida Republicans threaten the League of Women Voters out of registering college students – just say "We want fewer college students to vote." Don't make up ludicrous tales of illegal immigrants swarming the polling places – just say "We're hoping fewer Hispanics will turn out." Don't pretend that clerical errors resulted in some mildly overzealous purging of the voter rolls based on criminal records – say "We don't want black people to vote." Stop with the winking and the nudging and the grave warnings about voter fraud. We know what you're doing. It's really obvious.

An honesty-first policy won't change any outcomes, but it certainly will be refreshing.

In the past decade the publishing industry has seen a minor boom in what I like to call "Noun Books", non-fiction books written about a single object or item that appears to be simple and uninteresting but, the author reassures you, actually has a fascinating back story. Mark Kurlansky appears to have kicked off this trend with the surprise best-seller Salt (followed by Cod), which inspired a host of imitators from Spice to Banana to White Bread to Dirt. One of the few truly excellent ones, in my view, is Susan Freinkel's Plastic: a Toxic Love Affair. The overly trashy title misrepresents what is actually a detailed and interesting look at possibly the most transforming discovery of the 20th Century.

Plastic is so important to understanding our society because it essentially created, or at the very least made feasible for the first time, the modern culture of the disposable. Without it, the vast majority of the common single-use products – and there are a shocking number when you really think about it – would not be economically viable. As this recent discussion (responding to a recent lecture by Freinkel) emphasizes, we rarely pause to consider what such products used to be made from. Two of the most common disposables (pens and cigarette lighters) became disposable simply because we lose them so frequently – or do we lose them more frequently because they're disposable and we don't care? Syringes being single-use makes sense. Diapers, plastic kitchenware, and razors are a function of laziness, if you're a cynic, or the desire to make life easier and more pleasant if you're trying to be positive. But the biggest disposable isn't a product per se but the entire universe of packaging. Plastic bottles dominate the beverage industry, plastic packing materials are integral to shipping,and everything comes swaddled in plastic, plastic, and more plastic.

I'm having a hard time envisioning what a lot of products would end up looking like without plastic packaging. The most obvious answer would be a lot more tiny cardboard boxes. After all, no one's buying a toothbrush with a head that is exposed to all and sundry. Products in plastic dispensers – deodorant or cooking oil, for example – would end up in metal canisters (or glass bottles! Like Prell!) Of course these alternatives are more costly but more durable and potentially easier to recycle/reuse, so once again we're trading convenience for a continent-sized mound of plastic that biodegrades at rates best measured in decades?

Zinc! Zinc! Come back, Zinc!

At the risk of channeling the famous Simpsons instructional film "A World without Zinc", it's difficult to imagine a world without plastic. Despite the ample evidence to the contrary, a part of me believes that it might be a better one in a strange, Luddite way.

Today was almost one of those exhausting, soul-crushing essays you all love so much, but at present I lack the emotional energy to finish it. Instead, some quick musings on China triumphalism in the media. To a lesser extent the same points apply to India, although there are some key differences.

If you even occasionally consume news these days, you might be as sick as I am of the "Rise of China/India" narrative. It dominates publications like Time and U.S. News, making readers feel as though they have learned something useful about foreign policy even though it is largely empty calories. Nothing says "Deadline approaching" quite like this story; blah blah emerging middle class, blah blah biggest economy in the world by 20XX, blah blah new superpower. How many times do we need to read this? More importantly, is anyone planning on questioning the underlying assumptions?

Yes, China is a large and rapidly growing economic power. The storyline encourages us to see it as The Next Superpower. The commentators see a military, population, and economic colossus that will soon dwarf the United States and EU. I see a country with staggering problems that has mastered the art of mortgaging the future for short-term gains (as has the United States, of course). I see a country, middle class with shiny new luxury cars aside, that is overwhelmingly poor and unindustrialized outside of urban areas. I see a country that has polluted itself and exhausted its natural resources on a scale that makes the U.S. look like it is run by Greenpeace in comparison. I see a country with a population that it will struggle to feed at current rates of growth and a booming economy based on its status as a Third World plantation for cheap labor; multinational corporations are heavily invested in China, but they're keeping one eye on the emergency exits at all times. I see a government that lives in the past, understands the outside world only haltingly, and is paranoid beyond belief. I see a large military armed to the teeth…with indigenous knockoffs of 1970s-vintage Soviet equipment.

I'm the farthest thing from a China expert and I may be wrong with some or all of these characterizations. My point is merely that the basic narrative with which we're being repeatedly hit over the head does not hold up very well to even casual scrutiny.

The political environment has been made slightly more tolerable over the past year by the crippling blow dealt to birtherism by the President's long form birth certificate. All but the most hardcore right wing conspiracy theorists – the "No Planes" part of the far right, if you will – have abandoned the idea that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii. This is not to say, of course, that they have accepted his legitimacy as an elected official or as an American. Using the Conservative Scientific Method (start with the conclusion and work backwards, disregarding any evidence to the contrary) it is still perfectly logical to conclude that Obama is an interloper and a fraud. If he wasn't born in Kenya, then he must have been raised Muslim. If he wasn't raised Muslim, then he must have cheated his way into college. If he didn't cheat his way into college, then Harvard only took him because he was black. And so on. The conclusion always remains the same even though everything leading up to it changes: He is Not One of Us. He is a hoax. He is illegitimate. Somehow.

The latest theory – circulated mostly through forwarded emails from your insane relatives – focuses on a promotional pamphlet printed by a literary agency in 1991. In it, the short bio clip identifies Obama as born in Kenya and raised in Hawaii. This is confirmed real and is not a clumsy photoshop:

The literary agent has stated that this was a mistake. It's not hard to picture a 23 year old assistant editor seeing the Kenyan father and assuming that Obama himself was born there.

"This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me–an agency assistant at the time," Goderich wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News. "There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more."

Nonetheless, anything stating that Obama was born in Kenya is bound to ignite a firestorm. Yet logic would suggest that a birth certificate, along with the other documented evidence, trumps some press release. Compounding the difficulty in making a big deal out of this, most conservatives have already buried the birther theory. But leave it to Breitbart (from beyond the grave) to turn this into a new conspiracy theory:

Andrew Breitbart was never a "Birther," and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of "Birtherism." In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961…

Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama's ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him. It is evidence–not of the President's foreign origin, but that Barack Obama's public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

OK. Here's how it works.

Barack Obama was not born in Kenya, but he said he was in order to move himself up the academic ladder. His grades (which have not been released to the public, an integral part of this theory) at Occidental College were not good enough to get him into Columbia, nor were his Columbia grades sufficient to get him into Harvard Law School. So he lied and claimed Kenyan birth on his applications, which (per the theory) gave him some sort of advantage in the admissions process. Thus "birtherism" was all Obama's fault. People suspected he might have been born in Kenya because he said that was the case when it suited his purposes.

So here are the two potential explanations:

1. A literary agent made a mistake.
2. Obama lied about his citizenship / nationality / place of birth over a 15 year period as part of a conspiracy to advance his academic and professional goals.

Both of these are plausible. Given that, the law of parsimony would lead us to the one that requires the fewest assumptions, unproven assertions, and leaps in logic. In short, which one is simpler? Which is more plausible? It's possible that the "Obama lied" theory is correct. But it seems pretty unlikely compared to the alternative explanations.

If a theory this convoluted is necessary to make sense of your predetermined conclusions, there is a good chance that you're making shit up. That obvious fact is remarkably easy to overlook if you're 100% convinced that Barack Obama is a fraud. The phrase Unnecessarily Complex does not enter into your thinking. You will develop some theory, find evidence somewhere, and substitute "likely" for "plausible" to make sense of it all. And no matter what Obama says, does, or makes public, this parade of inane conspiracies will never stop.

I turned 13 in 1991, so my teenage years overlap the heart of the 1990s perfectly. Let's put it this way: I have an impressive collection of flannels, thermals, and Docs. If I have mastery of any pop culture knowledge, it would be from the 1990-1996 era. These were my junior high and high school years, and not coincidentally my years of peak TV/radio consumption, video game playing, and the like. I recall most things that were on TV, in theaters, or in heavy rotation on MTV/rock radio at the time. With these years alone am I anything other than useless during the pop culture portions of trivia competitions.

Combined with my explicit love for a good old fashioned trainwreck, I have absolutely no idea how I managed to miss the Jim J and Tammy Faye Show. Just so we're all clear…that's Jim J. Bullock, star of 1980s powerhouse sitcoms like Too Close for Comfort and ALF, and Tammy Faye Bakker, ex-wife of televangelist and fraud enthusiast Jim Bakker. Watch this. Please.

OK. A couple things here.

Watching this video clip gives me the overwhelming feeling that I have accidentally consumed a significant quantity of peyote. What is going on here? Is this a real thing or a Saturday Night Live skit? What possessed someone someone to greenlight this thundering shitshow? And most importantly, how did I not know about this when it happened?

The studio audience looks lost, confused, heavily sedated, or all three. They look like someone grabbed them off the street and promised them that it would be fun to sit in a studio audience for some unnamed talk show…only for the show to begin and the enormity of their error in judgment to become apparent. But by then it is too late.

Did this actually happen, or have I been the victim of an elaborate prank? Tammy Faye looks like John Wayne Gacy and Jim J was clearly up all night doing poppers with the sword swallower. I cannot believe that someone involved in the production – which, based on the overall "snuff film" ambiance of this video, could not have been many people – didn't euthanize this thing halfway through the filming. You'd think one of the cameramen or segment producers would just stand up and say "Stop. Everyone stop. Return to your homes." or possibly chaining all of the exits shut from the outside and setting the studio on fire.

What network aired this monstrosity? Are there other things this horrible out there that have escaped my attention? I thought I had the bases covered. I was wrong. After seeing this, I will never be the same.