Almost 2 years ago I wrote a comment on Simplicity’s old anime blog about Obama and politics on the night of Election 2008:

“There’s a part of me that is quite happy to see [Barack] elected because he’s african-american. I think it’s an important moment for our country. If he puts the country in front of party politics then we should be okay. However, if he allows congress to pass alot of left-wing bills then he’ll make the same mistake that Bill Clinton made and we’ll see the republicans take back congress in two years.

The other reason that I’m partly happy that Obama won was that the republican party lost it’s way once they got control of congress and the presidency and they needed something to snap them back into shape. This, I think, will be it.”

And sitting here the day after Election 2010, I’m feeling quite happy at little ol’ me getting this election almost completely right 2 years previously when many “experts” still didn’t get it right a couple of months ago. Congress and Obama did pass a lot left-wing bills and as a result, the Republicans almost took back both houses of Congress. The Republicans were also snapped back into shape; shedding it’s “Democrat-lite” stance that it held for the last decade and returned to their core values of smaller, less intrusive government and fiscal responsibility. As an added bonus, because it was the Tea Party movement that was largely behind this shift, we saw the further diversifying of the Republicans.

I’m also extremely happy at getting it right since it means the federal government won’t have the chance to make things even worse for the next two years and that might just allow the people to do the job the government can’t accomplish and get us out of recession and back working again. (Though Ben Bernanke’s desire to turn US currency into funny money could do the job that Obama can no longer do.)

Even if I was completely right and the Republicans had won back the Senate, I don’t know how far they could go in fixing the problems that Obama created in these past two years with Obama still being  President. The only route that looks open to them is to try to control the purse-strings of the federal government, even if that means shutting down the federal government. Though the courts could still throw out the biggest drag on the economy that Obama enacted.

In closing, expect normal anime posts to resume shortly – I don’t like going off-topic here but I’d been so looking forward to this election that I need to write this post before moving on. What the country does in Election 2012 is a murkier subject. If the economy improves significantly and people attribute it to the actions of Obama then he will get re-elected, no question. If the economy gets worse or gets better with the perception that it was the Republicans that did it then Obama will probably not get re-elected. If the economy continues to stagnant, the presidential election will depend on how voters assign blame for the stagnant economy, how well the Republicans have stuck to their core and the quality of the individual candidates. I think the economy will continue to stagnate without Republican intervention.

I think the Republicans are on track to keep control of the House and gain control of the Senate in 2012, if they can stick to their principles and show that these principles are what the country needs. As for who the Republicans will nominate for President, I think the best choice would be a conservative governor that stuck to his/her principles and gotten their state going in the right direction. It gives the most convincing argument why they should be the President and executive office experience is a better training ground then the Senate for the Presidency. I personally like Huckabee as my pick though Christie, the governor of New Jersey, is starting to really interest me as does Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana.

EMP Pulse for the win!

It’s time for yet another entry of finding odd things to enjoy in an anime. This time the target is the final episode of High School of the Dead (HOTD). This time I’m limiting myself to mentioning only two small scenes. Any more and I run the risk of going into full rant mode about the problems and observations I had about the show. (I really, really want to complain about how implausible the HOTD zombies would be at causing the level of chaos seen in this show.)

Several years ago I watched a documentary on the classic Looney Tunes cartoons and one of the most memorable parts was a short discussion about how the animators would often distort how people and animals were drawn to heighten the sense of motion. To illuminate the point they showed a clip at full speed and then showed the same clip going at a much slower speed. I was awed by the technical mastery shown in this art form.

I’ve often wondered how a non-human eye would perceive these scenes. Would their eyes be fooled as well or would they be able to see through the illusion?

I’ve also tried to look for examples of this technique in whatever animated show I watch since first watching this documentary and it fairly frequently, especially in high-quality animated shows. The last really good example that I can remember was in episode 15 of Bakemonogatari. It was a short scene when Shinobu did a series of quick somersaults before sinking her fangs into the shoulder of the cat-spirit possessed Tsubasa Hanekawa. The movement literally felt like it popped out of the screen. I wanted to do a frame-by-frame shot to show how awesome this was done. However, one of my desires when running this blog is to keep it SFW and when I started capturing the individual frames I realized that Shinbou decided Shinobu was fine using a band-aid as a pair of pantsu. So, I had to scratch that post and look for another example.

I didn’t need to wait too long; Madhouse (which figures actually) gave me a really good example in episode 12 of High School of the Dead. The scene was towards the end when the mechanic twirled a wrench as he got ready to fight the zombies. My eye caught this, even as my mind was wondering why leaving behind the mechanic was a good idea. So, the first clip is of the scene in question going at normal speed (or as close as I can get it) and the second is the same frames slowed down.

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Cool, isn’t it. I especially liked how when he grasped the wrench at the end they actually make the wrench disappear for a couple of frames and let our eyes fill-in the implied movement.

The other scene tickled the political side of me. I know it’s generally a bad idea to bring up politics online but the last time I did here, I remember being surprised by the civility of commenters so I’ll hope for the same civility. The scene in question is at the beginning when they show the combined effort of Japanese and American forces trying to shoot down the four nukes that were launched in the last episode. I don’t think this scene was originally conceived as a sly dig at Obama (unless it comes from source material done since his election) but I couldn’t help but see it as one.

There hasn’t been a lot of coverage of Obama’s foreign policy but one of the few concrete things he’s done in this arena is stepping back from Bush’s planned nuclear missile defense shield. Why he thinks this is a good idea, I don’t know. The need of a system like this is so plainly apparent that many countries, not just the United States, want to be included. One of these countries is – surprise, surprise – Japan. They worry enough about it they are actually funding a significant portion of the development and I don’t blame them, they live so much closer to North Korea and have had missiles shot over their country.

Like I said, I don’t think it necessarily was a critique of Obama but, nonetheless, that scene only needs a slight alteration, North Korea being the source of the nukes, to be completely relevant to a real life scenario and showcasing the need for a nuclear missile defense shield.

Sadly for Japan in HOTD, one of the ships were zombie infested and didn't stop the nuke in question.