Author: CineMan

Summaries- thesilentbutdeadlycineman

The  Mormon Baptism of Anne Frank

It seems counterintuitive that Anne Frank, the well known Jewish Holocaust victim and author of a best-selling diary, be baptized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons). And yet, it has happened, multiple times.

Violating a 2010 pact between Jewish Leaders and the Mormon Church, which stated that the church would prevent proxy baptism requests for victims of the Holocaust, a Mormon temple in the Dominican Republic did what it wasn’t supposed to do, and baptized Frank. If searched up on a Mormon-exclusive database that is used for genealogy and to submit a deceased person’s name for the chance of a proxy baptism, Frank’s name will show up with the word “completed” next to the words “Baptism” and “Confirmation”. This all seems outlandish, but it isn’t the first time to have happened.

From 1989 to 1999, Mormons have given Anne Frank’s name over a dozen times to be included in proxy rites, with the ritual  actually being carried out at least nine times.

Mormons posthumous proxy baptisms for Holocost victims and Jews who are not directly related to them have persisted, even after Mormon and Jewish leaders came to an agreement in 1995 for the church to stop these types of baptisms, with only if the victim or Jew in question was a direct ancestor of the submitter  being allowed. This makes Frank’s baptism even more shocking, as she was an unmarried teenager with no descendants. Another similar incident involved Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. Even though she is still a living Holocaust survivor who helped campaign for the 2010 pact, she was recently submitted to the database as “ready” for the posthumous proxy baptism.

All that the Mormon Church had to say about the matter was that it keeps its word and that there is a firm commitment not to accept the names of the victims for proxy baptism. Only time will tell if this statement is true.

The Counterintuitive Nature of Armored Planes and The World

It seems counterintuitive that planes be armored only in the places where there weren’t any bullet holes after a dangerous mission. And yet, once looked into, it makes perfect sense.

Common thinking would be that the areas where the planes were penetrated by bullets would be where to put the new armor. Clearly, those are the places that attracted the most fire, and therefore needing  the most protecting. This is fairly obvious, but also quite wrong.

If a plane makes it back to its base safely, even with  bullet holes in certain areas, then there is the proof that those damaged sections are not very dangerous to the pilot. If the wings are filled with bullet holes, but still operate well enough for the plane to land, then they do not need to be armored up.

This leaves the places in need of armor as the ones that barely or don’t have any bullet holes. These are the places that are exposed and can cause a greater threat if damaged. Planes with bullet holes in these places never come back.

Armored planes, however, are not the only examples of counterintuitivity in our world. Take a situation with an Air Force flight instructor and his two students. The one students who performed brilliantly the maneuver the first time, was  statistically shown to have performed has well the second go round. However, the second student, who was yelled at after screwing up the initial maneuver, was shown to perform the second maneuver much better.

Likewise, people tend to go to the doctor only when their illness has gotten really bad. Once over with the appointment, they feel much better. It isn’t always because the doctor did something, however. Sometimes it is a natural psychological consequence that people experience due to the appointment.

A final example has to do with how weak people are at calculating how much variance there is to the things that take place during the day. Not every natural variance in life has a reason for it, but people still enjoy making up reasons anyways. It’s in our counterintuitive nature.

The Mundane Death… By Shower

It seems counterintuitive that a death by shower can be more important than a death by gunman. And yet the truth has a tendency to appear this way.

As Americans, we always obsess over the wrong happenings, failing to watch for the real dangers in the process. We exaggerate the risks of events that are beyond our control and that will cause our deaths in spectacular fashion- gunman, plane crash, genetically modified crops, etc.- while underestimating any of the risks that may come from events that we have total control over.

A common cause of death in older individuals is falling , whether in a shower, down steps, or from a ledge. Another death is caused by the falling of a dead tree over a tent housing campers. Even though the campers knew that the tree was dead, they decided to take their chances and set up camp right under. This type of careless behavior leads to the deaths of many people.

It is better for people to let themselves experience “constructive paranoia”, which is the hypervigilant attitude toward any repeated low risks. Many individuals who have already adopted this mindset do so after witnessing the deaths of others due to carelessness.

Don’t let  the hypervigilance  limit your life. Take part in dangerous activities, and live life to the fullest. Just try to make sure that you are paying attention to the little things that could cause some type of serious accident.

Moving Image- thesilentbutdeadlycineman

Deciphering What Happens in Get The Cure

0:01-0:05- The ad seems to be shot in the style of the Cops TV show (handheld camera operated by a cameraman following people in their usual activities). The ad opens up with the audience in the back seat of a car. The interior of the car has little light, which is mainly coming from streetlamps and the camera. The car itself is rolling slowly through a deserted city alleyway during some part of the night. The camera/audience is sitting in the middle seat of the back row. The only other person visible on the screen is an average-looking, somewhat overweight white man in a lab coat sitting in the front passenger seat of the car. He is looking back at us while motioning his hands to the view of the front window, probably talking to the audience about the neighborhood.

0:06-0:09- All of a sudden a man dressed in a pink Hershey Kiss-shaped costume runs in front of the headlights a few feet from where the car is. He briefly stops in shock in the middle of the run, like a deer in caught in the headlights of a truck, before continuing to run across the alley. The driver, seen only by his hands and white lab coat, quickly stops the car. Both the man in the passengers’ seat and the driver jump out of the car. At the same time, the camera man jerks to the right, showing him opening the door and running out to follow the action.

0:10-0:15- The shaky camera (due to the cameraman trying to keep up) shows the two men in the lab coats run furiously in the dim light after the man in the funny pink suit, similar to cops trying to catch a man attempting to evade arrest. Eventually, the two men are able to capture the costumed person as he is trying to climb up a wired fence. They pull him off and tackle him on top of a pile of garbage bags and cardboard boxes.

0:16-0: 23- As the cameraman in walking backwards, the audience watches as the two men drag the costumed man by the arms back to the car. The audience can now see that the man looks like a stereotypical nerd with a slightly chubby face and thick glasses. He is in a giant pink spandex onesie that looks like a cross between a chubby Teletubbie and the aforementioned Hershey Kiss. The costumed vigilante, as he is being dragged back to the car is yelling around, and unsuccessfully trying to escape (In a manner that makes him look like he is a drunk person trying to walk straight).

0:24-0:26- The ad then switches to a white information screen with red words that read, “colon cancer. get the test. get the polyp. get the cure.” Below the words on each bottom corner of the screen, it is shown that the ad is produced by Ad Council, and sponsored by The American Cancer Society (with both accompanied by their respective logos). Finally in the bottom middle of the screen, read words can be seen reading,  “1-800-ACS-2345 or cancer.org”.

0:27-0:28- The ad quickly jumps back to the main action, where the costumed man (probably representing the colon), shouting out to the camera, is seen being pushed into the backseat of the car by the two men in lab coats  (who can be deduced to represent the doctors) with great effort.

0:29-0:31- Finally, the ad returns to the information screen in order to reiterate the point, before fading to black.

Get The Cure | Colon Cancer Prevention | Ad Council

Stone Money-thesilentbutdeadlycineman

                A couple of days ago, if anyone were to ask me what was the concept of money, I would have told them that it is a way to buy or sell items. I would also add that here in the United States, our money comes in the form of individual dollar bills and little metallic coins. The more a person possesses of these forms of money, the richer they are. This country’s current society believes in this concept, accepting it as pretty straightforward. However, the reality is that money is a concept so abstract, that it can either be represented by green paper bills or unmovable stone circles, and still work in the same way.

             So what is the true concept of money? Well, as A. Freeman says, “Money is primarily a medium of exchange or means of exchange. It is a way for a person to trade what he has for what he wants.” This is similar to what I previously thought, and is in a sense true. However, it does not explain the whole truth. As Ira Glass reveals in the podcast The Invention of Money, “Money is fiction… money never existed… No money changed hands, no money vanished… Money is not solid. Its value could disappear.” There is the answer- money is not real. It is an abstract concept used as a medium of exchange or means of exchange and whose value may change. And the money is worth a certain amount because everyone accepts said amount or value. To illustrate this point, let’s travel to a little island called Yap, on which massive unmovable stone currency was used.

            In his article titled The Island Of Stone Money, author Milton Friedman features a quote  by American anthropologist William Henry Furness III about the inhabitants of Yap and their currency, which states, “Their medium of exchange is called the fei, and it consists of large, solid, thick, stone wheels…After concluding a bargain which involves the price of a fei too large to be conveniently moved, its new owner is quite content to accept the bare acknowledgment of ownership and without so much as a mark to indicate the exchange, the coin remains undisturbed on the former owner’s premises.” Money on Yap is represented by these stone wheels, and the transfer of money for purchase is accepted through word of mouth, without these wheels actually moving. Everyone on this island trusts you when you say that you earned your neighbor’s stone after giving them what they wanted to buy. The word of mouth process is accepted, and the idea of lying about the ownership of a stone is generally out of the picture. A popular example of this is a story about a group of individuals who were transporting a huge stone wheel on their ship from one point of the island to another. En route, a storm broke out, causing the stone to sink to the bottom of the ocean. Once the group were able to safely return back to land, they told the people they encountered that they were carrying a massive stone wheel and that it is at the bottom of the ocean. The listeners accepted this account as fact, without seeing any proof, and offered items to the individuals based off how much they believed the stone was worth.  The actual money is never really there, but through representation of stones and accepted word of mouth, the inhabitants of Yap had a working currency system. In fact, the way we use money today is not too different from those of the islanders.

             Instead of giant stone wheels, we use green pieces of paper, metallic circles, plastic rectangles, and numbers on electronic boxes in order to represent and transfer our money. Instead of accepting word of mouth (most of the time), we use quantity and numbers to show the amount of wealth in our possession. Even with that minor difference, the idea stays the same- and the “actual” money never appears. In our society, as an anonymous author points out in their article titled Money and the Illusion of Wealth,  “Over 90% of money is literally created out of thin air via loans and the expectation of debt repayment.” We say that something is so amount, and expect someone else to be able to pay us back with something else of similar value. We are literally picking a monetary price that others generally accept as fact. This is what Ira Glass meant when he said that “Money is fiction.” Money doesn’t exist, but we believe that it does based off what we use to represent it and how much an individual has of those representations.

            In the initial paragraph, I made it clear that if someone were to question me on the concept of money and how it works, I would have given a straightforward answer about how it is the way we as a society purchase and sell items, mainly through the form of dollar bills and coins. Now I realize how narrow minded I was at the time. As I have now shown you,and which I have personally learned about in the past couple of days, money is a concept much more abstract. Yes, it is used as a means of buying and selling. But money also doesn’t exist. We made it up out of nowhere,  decided to use different things in order to represent it, chose how much any given item was worth, and  finally accepted everything as fact. Based off this truth, instead of pieces of paper, plastic, metal, and electricity, we would be able to theoretically accept anything as money. Why not use live animals? I think hair would also be a cool way to represent money. An out of the box idea would be to use live human babies (which would eventually give a new meaning to the phrase “a multicultural world”). Or maybe we could follow the footsteps of another successful civilization and use Stone Money.

Works Cited

             Anonymous, Author. “Money and the Illusion of Wealth.” Money and the Illusion of Wealth. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.

            Freeman, A. “What Is Money?” Economics and Liberty. N.p., 11 Dec. 2015. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.

                Friedman, Milton. “The Island Of Stone Money.” (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.

            Glass, Ira, and Planet Money. “The Invention of Money.” This American Life. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2016