This most recent installment, though, does not live up to the first two. It’s not the disjointed and bifurcated plotline, it’s not the shallow characterization, it’s not the reductive themes. I mean, it’s a kid’s movie. These things come with the territory. The whole movie, in fact, builds towards a great climax… and then totally drops the ball.

The movie features a young girl and her single father (which is pretty cool in and of itself), the latter of which is a scientist. For the whole of the movie, they manage to avoid the most common scientists-are-stupid pitfalls that plague, well, everything that comes out of Hollywood. The girl believes in fairies; the father points out that she has no proof of their existence. And without proof, all they are is a fairy tale. There are a few bits where he slips from perfect empiricism, but these are moments where he’s being a concerned and slightly harried single parent, and the parents in the audience feel for him. It’s alright if he strays just slightly, since it’s only because he cares.

As one might expect, the girl meets Tinkerbell and all of Act Two is a “fairies are real!” / “you have no proof of this!” back-and-forth. It culminates when the father shouts, “I don’t believe in fairies!” and Tinkerbell angrily reveals herself to the father. (Importantly, note that no fairy dies at this pronouncement; not only is this a deviation from the mythology, but it’s significant later.) The father promptly catches Tinkerbell in a jar and concludes she’s some sort of “evolutionary mutation” of a bug (hey, it’s Victorian science, let it go). He then races off to London to show off his captured fairy, er, mutated butterfly and win scientific acclaim. The girl and the other fairies fly after him and confront him on the steps of the (never quite explicitly named) Royal Society. And then this exchange happens:

The fairies all fly out, showing the father that they’re not just bugs but minuscule thinking people with wings. The father, who throughout the entire movie has insisted on facts to prove propositions, stammers, “I don’t understand.”

And his daughter says, “You don’t have to understand, Father, you just have to believe.” And the father agrees with her, promises to never doubt her again, and they all fly off happily ever after. They have a tea party.

And in the audience, I desperately wanted to shoot myself in the head.

The father, all throughout the movie, has been insisting, “Proof! Facts! Back up your wild assertions with empirical data!” He gave his daughter a field journal for her to fill, and she filled it with facts about fairies, delivered to her from her first-hand witness, Tinkerbell. He wants, above all else, for his daughter to — stunning proposition, here — know what she’s talking about before she opens her mouth. And in the finale, he is presented with exactly what he has been insisting on and he… decides to abandon everything he stands for and “just believe.”

If this movie had been about the old Hollywood saw of the power of belief (AKA the leading cause of violent death worldwide), then they could have capitalized on the father shouting his disbelief of fairies and having one fall deathly ill. Only enthusiastic clapping of the audience would save her, presumably while the father wasn’t looking, and then they could proceed to the insipid conclusion fully stocked and charged up with that momentum. But they set up the “don’t believe in fairies” pitch and then balked.

If this movie had intended to deride science and empiricism as insufficient, the father could have been a much worse “scientist,” insisting on the fallacy that fairies did not exist because there was no proof for them. Then, when confronted with proof, he might have come to a stunning realization to the tune of, “I never would have thought! What happened to me, what made me stop imagining and believing? Why did I insist that the only things in the world were what I could put my hands on? Oh, I’ve been so wrong!” Such an ending would, of course, run full-tilt into the hypocrisy of Tinkerbell leading what amounts to an industrial revolution in the first movie, somehow proposing that science is morally bankrupt but engineering is just fine despite being, you know, based on science.

But no — the whole of the movie, the father is a pretty straightforward scientist. He wants his daughter to learn about the world around her by observing it and forming her own conclusions. And this is a good thing, in my opinion: a frankly noble hope that I think most responsible parents share for their own children. For most of the movie, he just doesn’t have access to the same data as his daughter, and so comes to a different conclusion. And then their data sets are merged, for lack of a better way to put it, and he sees what she’s seen. And then the movie goes to shit.

How fantastic would it have been if, instead of stampeding off into the moronic wilds of “just believe!” territory, the movie had let the father say, “I don’t understand… I thought they were just insects. But they’re real people, aren’t they? I see that now!” And then instead of the fancy-free tea party that serves as the movie’s denouement, father and daughter could be studying the fairies together, interviewing them and coming to appreciate their fascinating world. They could share something, something concrete and real, something that would help both of them become better people more in touch with their world, solidifying their father-daughter bond and capping the movie with and ending that was not just happy but also looking forward.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the movie had two “Story By” credits and four writing credits. It has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood chop-job. One wonders what the original script might have looked like: was it the “belief uber alles” theme, and later writers softened the stupid scientist father? Or the opposite, where the father is well-meaning but short-sighted, and the events of the movie correct that deficiency? We will of course never know.

And my daughter won’t be seeing this movie again.

One little problem? The Website Is Still Down. It has been down, as far as I can tell (and I’ve been checking), for two weeks.

Is this how the House Republicans are going to deal with unexpected results? They’re just going to shut down the website and pretend like it’s still going strong? If so, this speaks volumes to how connected the GOP is with the American people and how populist it’s willing to be. If the people disagree with the party, the party will ignore them — while pretending that they’re listening.

A few notes:

• Note that “300,000 Americans have visited” the site. No mention of how many people actually registered an account or materially participated. Given that there was only 16% more votes than visits, and I personally have voted on over a hundred ideas (the interface is built for this sort of down-the-list click-yes-or-no voting), we can assume that their participant pool is rather small, perhaps smaller than 5,000.
• Their flagship idea is for a Balanced Budget, the “top” idea in the “Fiscal Accountability — Spending” category. It’s not clear if this idea has the most votes “for” it, the most discussion on it, or even the most votes pro and con. It’s just the “top” idea. For all we know, “top” may be defined as “the one we liked best.” Also note that it’s not even the top idea in Fiscal Accountability, the top-level category, but in a subcategory thereof. One wonders what the top idea is in all of Fiscal Accountability.
• No mention about anything that conflicts with conservative assumptions. Unsurprising, especially in the first salvo of emails, but will we ever see the builders of this site say, “You surprised us with your opinions on this issue?” If not, it underscores the real purpose of this site — a noise machine — rather than the populist appeal to citizens’ opinions that it masquerades as.
• I’d do some fact-checking, but the site seems to be down. Are they the target of an actual, malicious attack, or did they just not plan for the deluge of traffic that their email would generate?

From their topics — American Prosperity, Fiscal Accountability, American Values, and National Security — and the subtopics (too myriad to list here, but “Strengthening Families” and “American Competitiveness” are my two favorites), they seemed to assume that they would get a resounding ratification of neocon principles. Inside their little bubble, of course, the whole nation was behind them in opposing the creeping socialism and rampant immorality being forwarded by the Other Party.

Was it naive for these Republicans to assume that the internet would welcome them, participate positively and genuinely, and well, not mock them mercilessly? Yes. Yes it was. The day that the website launched, America Speaking Out was deluged with joke and prank posts. The servers groaned under the weight; most links came up with a “too many Americans are speaking out right now” error messages. The website did not find its intended audience — the legions of angry populists the House Republicans were assured were out there. Instead, it found the internet.

However, something interesting happened after the yuks have died down. The ideas submitted on the sensible side of ridiculous started picking up more responses and votes. Some of the folks who hit up the site for laughs stuck around to air their actual beliefs. After a few days, America Speaking Out miraculously transformed into what it was intended to be: a forum for the proposal and discussion of ideas about United States Government. The only problem? The people on that forum are still not the target audience.

With over 1,700 votes, the most popular ideas, with Yea votes profoundly overpowering the Nay votes, are to legalize same-sex marriage and marijuana. Other ideas get even more aggressive, denouncing the idea that the U.S. is a Christian nation and calling for churches to lose their tax-exempt status. Subsidies to farmers should be eliminated, others propose, and the military cut by half. One assumes, at least, that the people proposing and voting for these measures are not the people that the site’s builders were expecting to hear from.

Of course there are a handful issues that you might expect from an ostensibly conservative forum. Illegal Immigration gets a lot of torches and pitchforks waved around (tempered by ideas to make legal immigration actually feasible); there are some popular anti-earmark topics (because government spending in your district is pork; government spending in my district is necessary and innovative). However, even these subjects with broad cross-spectrum appeal are pulling in 600 votes or less. The big votes are for the topics that do not and have never appeared on the GOP’s agenda or platform.

Which raises the question: will the GOP, or at least the House Republicans who built this site, act on any of the ideas proposed on this site?

The most cynical answer is that the builders never intended to take the results of the site as direction; the site was always intended as yet another way to stir the pot of discontent, to imply that the current administration was so out of touch with The People that a whole website had to be created to bridge the gap. In the coming months leading to elections, we will see GOP politicians pointing at the site and claiming it provides support for their positions when in fact it overwhelmingly does not. Launching the site was showboating, and there are more opportunities for showboating on the horizon. While I’m positive that some of the builders and promoters might fall into this camp, I’m not sure I’d buy that they all do. Some of these politicians must have hoped for something to come out of this investment.

The less-cynical and probably more realistic answer is that the GOP will look over the results with a highly critical eye and a strong filter. “Hundreds of respondents support same-sex marriage? Bah, must be the liberal bias of internet hoodlums. But look at this idea about illegal immigration.” In which case we’ll see the cherry-picking of data that we’ve come to expect from Republican operatives spouting talking points. They’ll merrily cite numbers when talking about those damned illegals and just neglect to mention that whole church-and-state thing that was twice as popular. Or this experiment might be quietly killed in another five weeks; after all, for all the traffic generated, there are less than two thousand registered users. Not exactly a significant portion of the nation’s demographic.

But it’s at least amusing to consider the least-cynical answer, where one or two of the site’s builders take the feedback to heart. What happens when a modern Republican candidate starts insisting on the separation of church and state, supports same-sex couples’ right to marry, proposes deep cuts on the military, works to increase transparency on federal spending, and simultaneously strengthens border security while streamlining the citizenship process? Would they find support in their districts? Would they find that their constituents agree, that the site has miraculously found common sense proposals that win votes? Would they be able to find the sources of funding that complement those positions, and would they be able to work with anybody at all on Capitol Hill? What would that look like?

It’s a pity we’ll never find out.

As the image above rather clearly shows, Meghann has shaved her head! She’s donating the hair to Matter of Trust, which will use it to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently human hair is really good at sopping up oil.

When asked for comment, Meg said, “I needed a haircut anyway.”

Which only goes to prove the well-known axiom: any religious ceremony can benefit from the addition of pyrotechnics.

or

or

This thing? This thing is fantastic.

“Faith is trust that the power of love will make the world a better place, and God is a personification of that power.”

I like this. A whole lot. Defined positively, forward-looking, self-aware, functional. I could say more, but it would be pages long.