The Amazing Adventures of BibleMan

For some reason the National Geographic Channel that we had just started to get in the hotel disappeared about a week ago. For a while there was just nothing on that channel until suddenly one day I turned on the TV and what had been the National Geographic Channel, and HBO before that, was replaced by a Christian TV station. I'm still not 100% sure what the name of the station is but it's definitly all religious programming all the time. I've been watching some of it being so shocked that this somehow got put on TV. I can only imagine that it was a mistake at some level. The first show I saw was in some sort of mega church and as soon as I turned it on a preacher was yelling something about soul food. They have an incredibly annoying show about bible study, honestly I think that could at least be interesting in some way but the host just can't go more than three seconds without interrupting his current thought to note how happy he is to have Jesus. There was also some cartoon type show, though I only came in at the end so I didn't really get what it was about. The best show by far though is called BibleMan. BibleMan is supposed to be some sort of super hero, as evidenced by the bizarrely colored plastic suit he is constantly wearing, but his only power seems to be to incessantly quote the bible. It doesn't matter what is happening on the show or who he is talking to he answers every damn question with a biblical quote. If Ned Flanders was a super hero this is the one he'd be.

Speaking of the Simpson's don't worry about me because I got season 1-18 of the Simpson's on DVD for less than $10. They asked me if I wasted season 19 also, but I think I'll bee good with this hundred hours of programing for a while. I also picked up the DVD of a show called Dollhouse which finished its first season on TV about a week ago. You can talk all you want about piracy what goes on in China isn't piracy it's privateering. Back when there were actual pirates, which I guess there still are some of, countries would sometimes give pirates letter authorizing them to commit piracy against some nation, so that they could act as pirates while still staying above the law in some countries. People who did this were called privateers instead of pirates. China runs one of the most authoritarian states in the world if they wanted to crack down on movie piracy it'd be gone in a flash. They not only allow but given the scale must condone the movie piracy here. These privateers of the movie world run huge well stocked shops in the hearts of major cities. Very little escapes the notice of the government and this certainly doesn't. The communists simply figure that there is no reason for them to stamp it out since they didn't have any hand in the creation of these things.

I think the onus has to be more on other countries to force China into cracking down more on this. The scale of what goes on here is simply not comparable to the US. Besides the shops the students download so many programs from the internet it puts every US college student to shame. China has gotten by claiming that like other developing countries this sort of piracy is hard to stop. But in China that's simply not true. China control the internet and people lives in a way that's essentially unparalleled. China unlike even the US could stop this if they wanted, they simply don't want to. The net result is that these people selling the bootleg movies aren't pirates they're privateers. They're doing exactly what the government wants them to do.