The 4400 (2004) vs 4400 (2021)

So long ago, Another life

I could feel your heart beat

It's not a dream, remember us

I can see it in your eyes

We'll find a place in time

A place in time beyond the sun

We'll find a place in time

A place in time to call our home.

~10/28/2021~

2004 a show called "The 4400" aired, it was a mix of sci-fi and mystery. The plot was that 4400 people had suddenly appeared - people from all times and places on earth, thought to be dead, missing, lost - and also they had super powers, well - some of them did. 

Mostly it was a charter driven show, people trying to connect/reconnect with each other, with the mystery - was this aliens? The first season ended with a cliff hanger, making us think that - yes - it was aliens.

It uh, it wasn't. It was time travel. This was us, from the future. Okay... sure but what was the source of the superpowers? When did this happen, why these people? That question sort of got pushed to the side as season 2-4 were about interducing a drug that caused people to gain super powers - or die. 50/50 chance either you took the drug, and died, or you took it, and gained super powers. We really never got a clear answer to as when/how/why these 4400 were chosen at some nebulous point in the future, just that now, half the city had taken the drug and died and the other half had super powers. 

Season one was simply the best, and it went down hill - it was kind of clear that the writers didn't know where this was going, and by the time s4 rolled out and it was about the drug, the show had ended, canceled. For me, I enjoyed it, the music in the intro really got you ready for a ride. It was a good sstory, not great - that had some sci-fi ideas, some super-hero types, but in the end it was about people.

Well, we are clearly out of original stories and ideas - so hey, time to reboot this, at least Hero's when it came back did so with cast from the original. This is a full reboot. Same idea... well.....

Here are the two descriptions of the TV show:

(2004)

"4400 centers on the return of 4400 people who, previously presumed dead or reported missing, reappear on Earth. Though they have not aged physically, some of them seem to have deeper alterations ranging from superhuman strength to an unexplained healing touch. A government agency is formed to track the 4400 people after one of them commits a murder."

(2021)

"4400 overlooked, undervalued, or otherwise marginalized people who vanished without a trace over the last hundred years are all returned in an instant, having not aged a day and with no memory of what happened to them. As the government races to analyze the potential threat and contain the story, the 4400 themselves must grapple with the fact that they've been returned with a few…upgrades, and the increasing likelihood that they were all brought back now for a specific reason."

Oh. So.

We going woke then?

Are we? I mean, lets give it a chance. Maybe I'm over-reacting to it. So I watched the first episode.

...

.....

SIGH.

They are really pushing hard to make this some sort of commentary about race right from the get go. We have charters from the 50s saying how they protested and such and thought that it would be "much better then this" and "it feels the same way" - we have the cops who are acting like jerks for the most part, threating violence, being bullies, we have the preacher give a speech that might as well be Malcom X or Marten Luther King Jr. giving a speech to calm people down. 

Yay. Other then that - is it GOOD? Well, I cringed at the efforts of trying ever so hard to make us aware that they are facing injustice - that even the woman cop who is black is part of the problem because she is on the side of "the system" - sigh. Why? I don't know. Okay, over looking ALL THAT - I kinda like some of the people we were introduced to, we have a healer we have someone that can move objects with there mind, and we have a nice ending cliff hanger that made me want to see what happens next.

And... I will - I'll give it one more episode to prove itself before moving on, because maybe they just did this for the pilot, maybe it will not be lame and broke and boring and woke.

....and maybe lobsters will learn to fly. I'll update this post when I've seen episode two rather then make a new blog post just for it - so whatever follows is from THE FUTURE! 

------

11/2/21

Episode 2 continues to push the idea that the cops are overbearing and that the system is unfair, but does pull back on the overtones that ep1 set forth. Perhaps, maybe, I was quick to judge this. They are developing the charters into people we care about, at least - so there is that.

So, this era of more "woke" - well what is that word anyway? I'm not sure, its part of the new lexicon that I am trying to understand - everything about the "woke" is race related - or sex related, its a changing of who a person is to the color of the skin - it says its about equality, but its not. Going "woke" is something that happens to comics, series, anything - its when they make a charter suddenly be gay - then write the story around that, rather then making the charter be good then that they happen to be gay - its an agenda to push "identity politics" - you are just that one aspect - you are a victim - that sort of thing. Its the bi-sexual Superman (who is actually Superman's kid why not call him Superman Jr.? Also he looks just like Superman). The problem is NOT that the charter is bisexual - its that its a sudden change from what always was - Thor was always a guy, now he is going to be a girl. Why? Give them a new name then! Ah whatever comics. Its the "hey look you got a gay person!" - like so? This is what is known as virtue signaling - its a token "representation" - there is this idea that everyone needs to see "someone like them" in the media, movies, comic, etc. Okay, but - where is the wheelchair bound superhero then? Where is the not super attractive person?

Its not about having one of every sort of human on screen or in a comic - that is obvious to me at least - so what IS the agenda - if indeed there is any agenda? Its unclear. However the "woke" shows/comics tend to not be any good - and you can tell, (Ghostbuster 2006 reboot is an example of the "woke" movie).

So - is THIS show woke? I don't know. Its to well written so far. Why have it be "all" minorities? I have no idea - the original cast had more diversity then this - so if anything this is less of a woke because, for some they will not see themselves on screen.

So I complained about something that, in the end I find to be something worth watching - it might turn me off at some point, but it gets the pass for now. Perhaps complaining online is me yelling into the void.

However, I'm not going to not complain.

The No True Christian Song!

Oh yes there are lots of ways to deny someone's history when it comes to Christianity 

We will start the trip by taking this slip of bible passages that seem to suggest you were never best buds with Jesus our Lord!

Oh in Matt 15:8 its so damn great cuss its a statement about you! Sure you might have prayed and might have stayed an extra day or two at church - but remember honoring with lips, your heart is far so far away from me - that is what he be - thus sure you might have prayed but you didn't love him that day so you never did stay with Jesus anyway!

Its almost as good as Isaiah 29:13 - that says sort of the same but adds to the frame that your worship was also so lame!

Now let me reflect upon James 1:26 just for some kicks as this could be used on some Jesus lover dudes who I know are just to rude for it says that if your tongue is bad then you have been had because your just a cad and for you Jesus is just a fad!

Oh yes there are many ways to deny someone was a Christian- this is important to understand so you can wave your hands to wave away cogitate disarray!

First John, not the second one but the very first one says in 2 colon 9 if you hate the other believer then you are not in the light it says nothing about hating non believers so that might be alright!

Titus! TIT IS! No I mean... Tides are us. Wait no. Anyway, TITUS 1:16 says your faith is just a dream if your works show you unclean so if what you do is not about Jesus then you are just a man and not a follower then!

Back to the first John again, cuss boy oh man he had a lot to say if you don't do what your told to do by God above then oh boy, your going below, so long bye bye bro, your telling a lie so I guess go and die, but that is just the thing he said in 2:4! 

Hold on to your cat first Johns at it again, 3 and 6 basically says that if you keep on sinn` then you didn't know him, so I guess no one is a real Christian!

OH MY WORD FIRST JOHN WHY 3 - 8 THOUGH 10 Its a long passage about how you are not a true Jesus follower dude, it goes on and on to say, all the ways you could fail today, or yesterday to and boo-hoo-hoo, sucks to be you!

Anyway there is more but its kinda a bore let me skip right past Luke and the Corin as well, screw that dude John and Matt can go too just what do you do when you look at who is who all throughout the bible there are ways to figure out who is not a REAL CHRISTAN DUDE.

But of course none of that applies to me - no none of that applies to me, because no matter what I'll say in my brain till I go insane that I'm a follower not lame like you are!

Ha ha ha you never were a real Christian!

Oh yes. Oh yes. Now that I think back. To all of that. I cross my arms and say:

Well I guess you didn't care about logical fallacies anyway - the no true Scotsman - just apparently was not something that whoever wrote the bible understands.

But what else do you expect from a guy who said not to bother washing hands? 

That happened in Mark Seven!

And ~fin~!

Miracles

"Wish I could prove I love you

But does that mean I have to walk on water?"

When we are older, you'll understand

It's enough when I say so

And maybe some things are that simple"

(Simple and Clean)

Miracles are impossible to logically identify even if they exist.

I've talked about this topic before, but - I think it is a worth a re-visit. The issue is that a miracle is defined in such a way that it could not ever be proven without logical fallacies.

Google has miracle defined thus:

"A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency."

The problem as I see it comes in the event not being explicable by natural/scientific laws - since we do not know all said laws - then how could we ever hope to say any event was in fact, a miracle?

At best what we would be doing is appealing to personal ignorance &/or personal incredulity.

"We have run out of ways to test this... must be a miracle!"

"I can't think of any other way then miracle to explain this."

"I can't believe this would be anything BUT a miracle!"

Since we would have to use at least one logical fallacy to GET to the conclusion that means that our conclusion would not be one we could ever get to via logic, because of the fallacy! So we would never, ever be able to say that a miracle was in fact, a miracle. This is a problem for identifying one.

However, there is also the fact that no one seems able to point to a thing and say "There is a miracle" because nothing that people point to seems to be anything miraculous at all, everything seems to have a mundane expiation - at best. Critical questions asked about so-called miracle events are simply glossed over, ignored, hand-waved away. So we do not even HAVE a man walking on water to examine - but if we did - we might find he is doing a trick, rather then a miracle.

So - the believer in miracles washes these facts and logic away by simply saying they have faith.

That is all they have.

Faith.

Not facts.

There is no evidence and can not be evidence of a miracle given what it is said to be due to logic. Of course, one day we might know all the things and in fact be able to then identify (X) as a miracle because we KNOW there are no other expiations for it... but we are far from that, and I doubt even if we got there that we would be satisfied with "miracle" for maybe we do not know all the things after all.

Maybe a miracle is just magic.

It only exists in the mind.

A hope. A desire. A wish.

And maybe that is okay. Its fine to dream, but you still need to wake up and do things!

CRT will be the straw that breaks...

 This CRT nonsense will be the end of us all.

School Board Madness edited

Full video of School Board Madness from above link

More madness

Look, whatever the bleep they want to call this utter nonsense - its racist. That is what it is. CRT and/or DIE models and/or whatever names they want to label them as (Hey its not Creationism its ID!) is pure madness that is marching right into our schools - and those that try to stop it, of course are trying to be shut down. This should be something that the left yells about as well as the right - but goodness the CRT somehow has worked its way up to Obama wondering why we are focusing so much on CRT (rather then other issues) "Nothing to see here, move alone" eh?

Insanity and madness.

All I can say is that. Oh I can make videos I guess, but I'm a very small voice.

I want to effect real change - but I have no idea how.

We found a tiny kitten - this proves there is no loving god.

"So don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to God than a whole flock of sparrows"

Matthew 10:31

Yeah, right.

So my brother heard a tiny sound when doing his job, inside a storage unit he found a tiny orange kitten. Alone the kitten yelled for its mother who was simply gone. Alone, this kitten had starved for at least a day, perhaps more. So, of course, he brought it home to take care of.

Both he and his wife have been waking up every 2-3 hours to feed the kitten, take care of it, and love it. This will keep going until Monday when the animal shelter is open so it can be taken there. Money spent to feed it, money spent to care for it, time & energy - worry over if its doing well, all for a small kitten.

My brother said "I couldn't just leave it to die."

But apparently god could.

Oh I'm sure someone religious might object that god lead my brother to find the kitten to take care of it, but there are thousands upon thousands of other creatures great & small out there with no one to take care of them, dying slowly from thirst & starvation, suffering. As god does nothing.

Then there are the humans, same story - countless billions have died that otherwise could have lived. As god watches. Doing nothing.

All this suffering proves, beyond a doubt to me - that god could not be loving. If it loved, it would do something, and we are told that god can do anything - yet it does not. It lets all the things suffer.

Some claim this is all due to people rejecting god - as if that somehow shifts the blame away from god, it does not. God made the system - its god's fault it sucks.

So, I have to conclude what flows from logic - that if there is a thing that can do anything, it does not love, if it loves then it can not do everything for it does nothing to help all that it could. Its not there, it doesn't care - all we have is each other.

Value each other.

This cute little life that is a kitten will not be our responsibility soon enough, in fact it wasn't - but it was because we care - because we love. Because we can do something so we must.

Yet god - well. If it even exists it simply does not care.

Or can't do diddly squat.

Kitten, the universe might not know about you, but we do. We cared. We tried our best. We removed a tiny bit of suffering in this world for a little bit of time.

That means we are far better then any and all gods.

Thanks for reminding me of this you cute ball of fir.

This tiny dot.

This is it, this area, and no where else, Jesus - son of the only God walked around.

This dot.

Its really just

A tiny dot on the map.

A tiny,  tiny fraction of a very large world, where untold thousands of people lived, loved, played, cried, and died. In other parts of the world, other Gods were celebrated, some new ones were mad, old ones discarded, in other places, no one knew what was going on here at the time. 

To believe that an actual God would put itself in a single location, during a single moment of history.

To believe that - is something I can not do.

Yet, people do believe that.

It frightens me the power of belief.

Yet, our mind can do wonders with belief, once we see it as such, we can turn it creative and make new stories, ones where we do not pretend they are real, yet the story is just as, if not more - awesome then the myth tales of the Bible or other religions text.

This tiny dot could have been anywhere.

It could have been any religion.

It could have been any idea.

Perhaps, somehow we can be a new dot.

Maybe we can be a tiny dot that starts something better.

I think its worth a try.

If we use logic & reason to do so, perhaps it will prevail on this tiny dot we call home.

The bribe.

Picture it, you are offered two doors to choose from, behind one door is all the wealth you could ever desire, an operation that will make your body & mind perfectly well & whole, things to do that will fill you with purpose, music of all kinds, DNA splicing that will make you young again, the romance of your dreams. Everything you could ever want and more. The other door is simply a room with a wooden chair to sit on, a wooden slab to lay upon, some water to drink, and some dry bread to consume.

What door would you choose?

In fact - at this moment do you really have a choice anymore?

The bribe an appeal to motive - appeal to bribery. This logical fallacy seeks to overwhelm your logical motive with an emotional one.

So, do you really  have a choice at this point?

The flip side of this is much easier to understand, intuitively. Argumentum ad baculum.

We understand that a threat to our life, safety, or lives / safety of those we care about forces us to do what the person making the threat (or implied threat) wants to do, but a bribe seems less harsh - more alluring.

The positive seeming bribe is appealing to our carnal tastes, its good smell drags us forward towards the pie that we know we should not eat. Its overwhelms our intellect with desires.

Its just as sinister as its flip side, perhaps more so because we do not necessary see the bribe as a bad thing in this case - "bribe" seems like it should only be used in the context of paying off someone to get away with something - that sort of bribe we see as wrong or illegal, we can picture easily a person offering a police officer money to not write a ticket for example, to "look the other way" - we can understand that it is bad when a judge takes a bribe because justice is then tainted.

However if someone offered us such a "choice" of two rooms with "no strings attached" we might be hard pressed to see the evil of it, or the harm of it, there is no reason to NOT take the thing I most desire is there?

One might argue, of course that getting everything you ever wanted would not feel good - but that is overridden by the thought experiment in that you would in fact feel fulfilled as that is part of the thing you are getting. The point of course is not to try to dismantle the thought experiment but to flow with it, to answer the question of "Do I REALLY have a choice?"

We can understand we do not REALLY have a choice when someone threatens us - then why does it seem hard to see we do not REALLY have a choice when someone bribes us? Perhaps it is just me.

Regardless if the bribe is there, then it is a logical fallacy. 

Yet one could make excuses for taking the room filled with your hearts desires, and a logical process to take that room - of course, yet this does not, and can not negate the fact that it is still not an argument being made by the person/group that is offering the "choice" of the rooms in the first place.

So, a boring dull room behind door number one, or everything you ever could want behind door number two.

Do you really have a choice?

Or is it that choice in this case, is pure illusion?

I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide.