From SF Gate...
“Obama is the worst thing to ever happen to this country,” declares the wealthy, rakish, silver-haired Newport Beach white guy to his small group of perfectly tanned 50-something females sitting just a few feet away from us at a stunning restaurant patio overlooking the sun-kissed California coastline, just off of Highway 1, as he sipped his pinot and adjusted his wraparound Ray Bans, flush from the economy’s spectacular recovery that has benefitted his exact demographic most of all, stroking his purebred dog and taking various selfies with their $500 phones, oblivious to the furious swirls of irony and hypocrisy fluttering just above their heads.
I laughed out loud. Couldn’t help it; I had just overheard Mr. Newport Beach say something about how Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster (despite how, of course, it’s not), and if America were to somehow actually develop a health care system similar to, say, Canada’s, that would be the end of America for certain; we’d never recover from such a devastating blow. Or something. And then came the “worst thing to ever happen” quip, and I couldn’t hold back.
Sometimes I think they just like to hear themselves bitch...
Friday, November 14, 2014
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Off On a Comet
Jules Verne published Off on a Comet in 1877. Its plot is rather silly, but really no sillier than Interstellar and Gravity. Now one of our surrogate droids is going to fulfill Verne's dream of landing on one of those ominous heavenly objects.
This is a really cool photo from the Rosetta probe that's about to send a lander to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko:
More photos are here.
It's really ironic that we can pull off something as complicated putting a man on the moon almost 50 years ago, and this year landing a space probe on a comet 300 million miles away, yet we cannot manage to keep our roads in good repair, or ensure that all Americans have a roof over their heads and access to decent health care.
That's not a knock against the space program: this country -- this planet -- is rich enough to explore space and take care of all our citizens, if only those self-styled masters of the universe who just spent $6 billion dollars buying the last election weren't such selfish wienies.
This is a really cool photo from the Rosetta probe that's about to send a lander to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko:
More photos are here.
It's really ironic that we can pull off something as complicated putting a man on the moon almost 50 years ago, and this year landing a space probe on a comet 300 million miles away, yet we cannot manage to keep our roads in good repair, or ensure that all Americans have a roof over their heads and access to decent health care.
That's not a knock against the space program: this country -- this planet -- is rich enough to explore space and take care of all our citizens, if only those self-styled masters of the universe who just spent $6 billion dollars buying the last election weren't such selfish wienies.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Americans: 8, Ebola: 0
Remember, before the election, when Ebola was going to kill us all? The nurse in Maine who wanted to ride her bicycle was endangering everyone with her brazen selfishness? The doctor in New York rode the subway and presented a deadly menace to all mankind?
It turns out that, in a country with decent medical care, and in hospitals with competent staff, Ebola isn't so deadly after all. All eight Americans infected with Ebola and treated in the United States have survived.
The nurse in Maine never had Ebola, and, disgusted with the treatment she received, is leaving the state. The doctor in New York is playing his banjo and riding his exercise bike, and will be released shortly.
Ebola is bad. But the CDC has been accurately describing the level of risk. As the president and every other expert in the field has been saying, the real risk is that the disease will continue to grow out of control in Africa, potentially evolving into something that will be more easily transmitted.
That means we need to stop the outbreak in Africa as soon as possible. And that means sending qualified doctors and nurses to Africa to help stem the tide.
If we make everyone who participates in the fight against Ebola feel like a pariah and take away their civil rights, no one will go there. That risks prolonging the outbreak long enough to allow the virus to mutate into something that is as terrible as we're afraid of.
We've been lucky. One of these times an American infected with Ebola will die. But the fight against this disease is like the fight against Islamic terrorists. We don't give up when the terrorists kill a few Americans. Why should we give up and hide because someone got sick with Ebola?
It turns out that, in a country with decent medical care, and in hospitals with competent staff, Ebola isn't so deadly after all. All eight Americans infected with Ebola and treated in the United States have survived.
The nurse in Maine never had Ebola, and, disgusted with the treatment she received, is leaving the state. The doctor in New York is playing his banjo and riding his exercise bike, and will be released shortly.
Ebola is bad. But the CDC has been accurately describing the level of risk. As the president and every other expert in the field has been saying, the real risk is that the disease will continue to grow out of control in Africa, potentially evolving into something that will be more easily transmitted.
That means we need to stop the outbreak in Africa as soon as possible. And that means sending qualified doctors and nurses to Africa to help stem the tide.
If we make everyone who participates in the fight against Ebola feel like a pariah and take away their civil rights, no one will go there. That risks prolonging the outbreak long enough to allow the virus to mutate into something that is as terrible as we're afraid of.
We've been lucky. One of these times an American infected with Ebola will die. But the fight against this disease is like the fight against Islamic terrorists. We don't give up when the terrorists kill a few Americans. Why should we give up and hide because someone got sick with Ebola?
Monday, November 10, 2014
The President Will Move On Immigration
In a recent CBS interview, the president vowed to move on immigration if Congress does not act. The Republicans may have won the most recent election but they are really in a corner on this one. If they act, they will piss off all the Tea Party types. If they don't act, say buh-bye to the White House for the next 8 years.
Worse, if they decide to impeach the president because he "poisoned the well," well....then they might lose all the gains they won last Tuesday.
Worse, if they decide to impeach the president because he "poisoned the well," well....then they might lose all the gains they won last Tuesday.
Movie Critique: Interstellar
Mark and I went to see Interstellar this past Sunday. It's been compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a notion perpetuated by director Christopher Nolan himself.
To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: I saw 2001 when I was ten years old. I knew 2001 inside and out. 2001 was my favorite movie. Interstellar is no 2001.
First, Interstellar is too damn loud. I'm not the only one to make this complaint. A thick percentage of the movie's dialog is completely drowned out by a subsonic rumble that rattles your ribcage. If the director doesn't care whether you can hear what the actors are saying, why have them say anything? In 2001, there were long stretches where no words were spoken. There were long stretches of actual silence and musical interludes that substituted for soundlessness of space.
Nolan included some of that too; he obviously intended the film to be firmly grounded in realistic science: it starts out like a documentary, with geezers talking about the bad old days (these are actually flashforwards). It is filled with talk of slingshotting past Mars to get to Saturn, relativity, gravitational time dilation, the twin paradox (with a daddy twist), and it was peopled by physicists and astronauts. But, like the recent film Gravity, Nolan just could not stop himself from filling the movie with unscientific and incoherent nonsense, without getting any artistic return for the sacrifice.
Nolan gets almost every bit of science and technology wrong: from agronomy, to astronomy, to remote sensing, to orbital mechanics, to physics, to physiology, and on and on.
The hero, "Coop" Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), is a former astronaut who is now a farmer. Because food is so scarce everyone has to be a farmer, even though crops are automatically harvested by gigantic robot combines. The world has abandoned its future, choosing to eke out an existence of pale, dusty subsistence.
Coop eventually finds his way to a secret NASA installation, where he and his daughter meet the people who have a plan to save the world. I knew this movie was in real trouble when the door from the conference room opened directly into the silo where they were going to launch a 1960s vintage Saturn V rocket.
What is the secret plan to save the world from corn blight? There are two. Plan A: go to another galaxy through a monolith, er, wormhole, that mysteriously pops up around Saturn, and then find another planet where we'll move six billion people. Plan B: same as Plan A except instead of bringing six billion people, bring thousands of fertilized embryos and just one woman (Anne Hathaway) to bear them all.
Now, as a former astronaut Coop would have known in an instant that Plan A is a total crock. You cannot save more than a few hundred or few thousand people through conventional space travel to escape corn blight. Plan B is also a total crock, because -- although they stupidly brought the frozen embryos along -- they didn't bring enough women, or fetal creches, or even supplies to house and clothe and feed a colony raised from embryos.
Nolan is playing us for fools because he's playing his hero as a fool. And it's not just technical errors, it's emotional manipulation as well.
NASA typically takes months and years to train for missions, but Coop — who hasn't flown in decades — goes directly from his farm to pilot a spacecraft to Saturn. Why the rush? Because the director wanted to force an angry and emotional tiff between Coop and his daughter, forcing an abrupt separation. In reality, he would train for months, and there would have been oodles of time for reconciliation with the girl. But the spindly directorial manipulations of his characters' emotions demanded this.
After the launch into space Nolan makes a huge deal of spinning up the spacecraft to generate artificial gravity: the trip from Earth to Saturn will take two years. But then the crew goes into hibernation.Yes, they're just going to sleep for two whole years. Which means that spinning up the spacecraft is a complete waste: lying motionless has exactly the same deleterious effects on human physiology that weightlessness does.
So why do they need to spin the craft at all? To force a gimmicky — and loud — action scene later on, of course. And besides, the Discovery in 2001 was spinning! And had hibernation. And had a computer that said snappy things. So of course Interstellar had to have all that too.
Once they pass through the wormhole any pretense of scientific accuracy is thrown out the airlock. While it took them years to get to Saturn, on the other side they zip around from planet to planet in hours.
The people who wrote this movie do not seem to understand a damned thing about how scientists study other planets. Five centuries ago Galileo saw mountains on the moon. Ninety years ago we knew the basic compositions of the atmospheres of Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, etc. We mapped the surface of Venus with radar from earth fifty years ago. Right now, today, we can analyze the compositions of the atmospheres of stars and even planets light years away.
Yet the only way Nolan's scientists can think to get this same data about potential new homes for mankind was to land on these planets. Even more incredibly and stultifyingly stupid, Coop and friends risk fetching a data recorder (why doesn't it just transmit the data via radio like our probes on Mars?) that is on a planet deep enough in the black hole's gravity well that it suffers a time dilation factor of 1:63,785. Once there, they are surprised to find that the mountains in the distance are actually huge waves of water (fortunately the data recorder had landed in a knee-deep puddle). Disaster ensues, of course, and they waste 20-odd relativistic years of earth time for a few hours of futile idiocy.
And, somehow, magically, they have enough fuel to get out of that huge gravity well and resume the normal passage of time.
Why didn't they just look at the planet from millions of miles away to determine that it was covered with water and uninhabitable? Like we can? Didn't they think to bring telescopes and spectrometers?
Oh, and if you're close enough to be affected by time dilation of the gravity well of a black hole, you're close enough to be killed instantly by the radiation caused by ripping apart of all the gas and dust in the accretion disc as it's sucked into said black hole. And -- without knowing the mass of the black hole, I can't really say this for sure -- I suspect that to get that kind of time dilation you would have to be inside the event horizon of the black hole, or so close that you would never have enough fuel to attain escape velocity.
Anyway, after that debacle they just zip on over to another planet shrouded with clouds made of solid ice that they can just flit by (what keeps the clouds up, I have no idea), to find a homicidal Matt Damon, who lied about the planet he landed on: it has no surface, it's just a bunch of ice clouds. Coop and friends had just looked at "the data" Damon sent back and decided it was their best bet, without seeing any pictures of the planet of the surface of the planet. These people are idiots.
The basic premise of the film, that humanity was in danger of dying out because of corn blight and could be saved by emigrating to another galaxy, is completely flawed. If all the wheat, corn and (ahem) okra died off, humanity would be at no risk of extinction. Would there be disease, famine, war? Yes. Mass die-offs of populations over vast regions? Yes. But we would survive as a species. The population would stabilize at some much smaller, more sustainable value, perhaps in the hundreds of millions.
Even climate change doomsayers don't say that climate change in and of itself will destroy the planet: it will drastically reduce populations of humans and certain species, but the planet, some remnant of humanity and life itself will still be here: the world will simply be much less amenable to an advanced technological society that requires cheap and abundant foodstuffs. The end of the world scenario only occurs if conflicts over land and food escalate into global thermonuclear war.
And, as shown in the end of Interstellar, it is not necessary to go to another galaxy to save the human race: we only need to reach the moon and other planets to establish a permanent human presence beyond the earth. And we can do it with the technology we have right now, without any fancy theory deduced by examing gigabytes of raw data dictated out loud by a computer falling into a black hole and then retransmitted by hand via Morse code through the hands of a watch. Say what?! You read that right. This is completely stupid, and it is the crux of the film.
I wanted to like Interstellar. The core of it is the relationship between a father and a daughter, and the mysteries of space-time and relativity. That is a story worth exploring. It's just so frustrating how incompetently and arrogantly Nolan and his brother treated their subject. If they had spent just 10 more minutes spit-balling the backstory, they could have made a 2001-quality epic that wasn't filled with idiotic nonsense.
First off, Nolan picked the wrong crisis to hang his movie on. Corn blight would never necessitate going into space, much less through a wormhole to another galaxy. That doesn't mean you can't make this movie, you just have to change things so that it makes sense.
For example, if that wormhole had appeared near earth instead of Saturn — incidentally trashing Coop's career as an astronaut, making it his personal nemesis — it would raise all kinds of havoc here, destroying our satellites, ruining our electrical grid, disrupting the climate, killing our crops and causing violent tectonic activity due to the tidal forces.
Social and political conditions would quickly deteriorate to those depicted in Nolan's movie. The difference being that the presence of a wormhole right next to earth really does threaten the very existence of humanity and the planet itself. Haring off to Saturn will never solve the corn blight problem: studying the wormhole that's about to swallow earth is the only option.
It makes for better special effects too: the wormhole could have been a baleful Eye of Mordor that hung in the sky. It could cause as many dust storms and earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes as any movie maven could want. Positioning the wormhole near earth also eliminates all this pointless travel from point A to point B that plagued Interstellar and made it a ridiculously long three hours.
And then there's the irony: the wormhole that threatens to destroy humanity is the key to saving humanity if we learn its secrets. All the trademark Nolan mind-bending time-warping weirdness that is the artistic crescendo of the film would bear directly on the characters and their salvation, rather than some weird side effect of trying to escape corn blight. And what's really dumb is that at the end of the actual film, the corn blight problem is solved without ever going to another galaxy through the wormhole! All that running around was for nothing!
Did the Nolans consider this scenario and reject it as too abstruse? Do they seriously think corn blight resonates more deeply with the average movie viewer than the earth getting swallowed by a black hole?
2001, despite being almost 50 years old, is still solid technically. It still looks pretty damn good, even though all its special effects were optical and practical, rather than computer generated. It depicts fantastic and impossible events in a way that allows even the most critical viewer to suspend disbelief. You can see why 2001 would inspire a film maker like Nolan.
The knock against 2001 is that its characters are emotionless automata — the computer HAL shows as much emotion as anyone else. But that was Kubrick's intent: the cool, controlled, emotionless astronaut with the Right Stuff was an archetype of the 1960s. You can see why a film maker like Nolan would want to have a crack at a film that puts people and their emotions on an equal footing with the big ideas.
Thus, Interstellar tries to personalize the forces of the universe to tell a story about the love between a father and a daughter, the sacrifices that a father will make to save his family and the transcendance of the human spirit. And that's a noble goal. But you can tell that story without getting everything else wrong.
And it's not just the technical errors. When everything about that sacrifice is a crock and the father is a gullible fool deceived by lies that any comic book reader would see through instantly, you have to wonder whether the director is dishonest, lazy, incompetent, or simply has nothing but contempt for the intelligence of his audience.
When your movie is all about clever scientists and can-do engineers and pilots who are cracking the mysteries of the universe with science, and then you get all the science and technology wrong, and your inspiration is clearly 2001, it's clear you have failed in your attempt at an homage and produced an embarrassingly shoddy imitation.
One more time: Interstellar ain't no 2001.
To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: I saw 2001 when I was ten years old. I knew 2001 inside and out. 2001 was my favorite movie. Interstellar is no 2001.
First, Interstellar is too damn loud. I'm not the only one to make this complaint. A thick percentage of the movie's dialog is completely drowned out by a subsonic rumble that rattles your ribcage. If the director doesn't care whether you can hear what the actors are saying, why have them say anything? In 2001, there were long stretches where no words were spoken. There were long stretches of actual silence and musical interludes that substituted for soundlessness of space.
Nolan included some of that too; he obviously intended the film to be firmly grounded in realistic science: it starts out like a documentary, with geezers talking about the bad old days (these are actually flashforwards). It is filled with talk of slingshotting past Mars to get to Saturn, relativity, gravitational time dilation, the twin paradox (with a daddy twist), and it was peopled by physicists and astronauts. But, like the recent film Gravity, Nolan just could not stop himself from filling the movie with unscientific and incoherent nonsense, without getting any artistic return for the sacrifice.
Nolan gets almost every bit of science and technology wrong: from agronomy, to astronomy, to remote sensing, to orbital mechanics, to physics, to physiology, and on and on.
Why, in a movie that that rails against mendacity and mediocrity, does the director settle for mendacity and mediocrity in his story-telling?The premise of the film is that the world is suffering from sort of blight that is killing all the crops. Dust constantly sifts down from the sky, and there are huge dust storms, yet we never see where the dust is coming from, everywhere the characters go there are endless fields of bright green corn. Wheat no longer grows, and all the okra (seriously, okra?) has now died off as well. The only crop left is corn. And that's on the way out too.
The hero, "Coop" Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), is a former astronaut who is now a farmer. Because food is so scarce everyone has to be a farmer, even though crops are automatically harvested by gigantic robot combines. The world has abandoned its future, choosing to eke out an existence of pale, dusty subsistence.
Coop eventually finds his way to a secret NASA installation, where he and his daughter meet the people who have a plan to save the world. I knew this movie was in real trouble when the door from the conference room opened directly into the silo where they were going to launch a 1960s vintage Saturn V rocket.
What is the secret plan to save the world from corn blight? There are two. Plan A: go to another galaxy through a monolith, er, wormhole, that mysteriously pops up around Saturn, and then find another planet where we'll move six billion people. Plan B: same as Plan A except instead of bringing six billion people, bring thousands of fertilized embryos and just one woman (Anne Hathaway) to bear them all.
Now, as a former astronaut Coop would have known in an instant that Plan A is a total crock. You cannot save more than a few hundred or few thousand people through conventional space travel to escape corn blight. Plan B is also a total crock, because -- although they stupidly brought the frozen embryos along -- they didn't bring enough women, or fetal creches, or even supplies to house and clothe and feed a colony raised from embryos.
Nolan is playing us for fools because he's playing his hero as a fool. And it's not just technical errors, it's emotional manipulation as well.
NASA typically takes months and years to train for missions, but Coop — who hasn't flown in decades — goes directly from his farm to pilot a spacecraft to Saturn. Why the rush? Because the director wanted to force an angry and emotional tiff between Coop and his daughter, forcing an abrupt separation. In reality, he would train for months, and there would have been oodles of time for reconciliation with the girl. But the spindly directorial manipulations of his characters' emotions demanded this.
After the launch into space Nolan makes a huge deal of spinning up the spacecraft to generate artificial gravity: the trip from Earth to Saturn will take two years. But then the crew goes into hibernation.Yes, they're just going to sleep for two whole years. Which means that spinning up the spacecraft is a complete waste: lying motionless has exactly the same deleterious effects on human physiology that weightlessness does.
So why do they need to spin the craft at all? To force a gimmicky — and loud — action scene later on, of course. And besides, the Discovery in 2001 was spinning! And had hibernation. And had a computer that said snappy things. So of course Interstellar had to have all that too.
Once they pass through the wormhole any pretense of scientific accuracy is thrown out the airlock. While it took them years to get to Saturn, on the other side they zip around from planet to planet in hours.
The people who wrote this movie do not seem to understand a damned thing about how scientists study other planets. Five centuries ago Galileo saw mountains on the moon. Ninety years ago we knew the basic compositions of the atmospheres of Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, etc. We mapped the surface of Venus with radar from earth fifty years ago. Right now, today, we can analyze the compositions of the atmospheres of stars and even planets light years away.
Yet the only way Nolan's scientists can think to get this same data about potential new homes for mankind was to land on these planets. Even more incredibly and stultifyingly stupid, Coop and friends risk fetching a data recorder (why doesn't it just transmit the data via radio like our probes on Mars?) that is on a planet deep enough in the black hole's gravity well that it suffers a time dilation factor of 1:63,785. Once there, they are surprised to find that the mountains in the distance are actually huge waves of water (fortunately the data recorder had landed in a knee-deep puddle). Disaster ensues, of course, and they waste 20-odd relativistic years of earth time for a few hours of futile idiocy.
And, somehow, magically, they have enough fuel to get out of that huge gravity well and resume the normal passage of time.
Why didn't they just look at the planet from millions of miles away to determine that it was covered with water and uninhabitable? Like we can? Didn't they think to bring telescopes and spectrometers?
Oh, and if you're close enough to be affected by time dilation of the gravity well of a black hole, you're close enough to be killed instantly by the radiation caused by ripping apart of all the gas and dust in the accretion disc as it's sucked into said black hole. And -- without knowing the mass of the black hole, I can't really say this for sure -- I suspect that to get that kind of time dilation you would have to be inside the event horizon of the black hole, or so close that you would never have enough fuel to attain escape velocity.
Anyway, after that debacle they just zip on over to another planet shrouded with clouds made of solid ice that they can just flit by (what keeps the clouds up, I have no idea), to find a homicidal Matt Damon, who lied about the planet he landed on: it has no surface, it's just a bunch of ice clouds. Coop and friends had just looked at "the data" Damon sent back and decided it was their best bet, without seeing any pictures of the planet of the surface of the planet. These people are idiots.
The basic premise of the film, that humanity was in danger of dying out because of corn blight and could be saved by emigrating to another galaxy, is completely flawed. If all the wheat, corn and (ahem) okra died off, humanity would be at no risk of extinction. Would there be disease, famine, war? Yes. Mass die-offs of populations over vast regions? Yes. But we would survive as a species. The population would stabilize at some much smaller, more sustainable value, perhaps in the hundreds of millions.
Even climate change doomsayers don't say that climate change in and of itself will destroy the planet: it will drastically reduce populations of humans and certain species, but the planet, some remnant of humanity and life itself will still be here: the world will simply be much less amenable to an advanced technological society that requires cheap and abundant foodstuffs. The end of the world scenario only occurs if conflicts over land and food escalate into global thermonuclear war.
And, as shown in the end of Interstellar, it is not necessary to go to another galaxy to save the human race: we only need to reach the moon and other planets to establish a permanent human presence beyond the earth. And we can do it with the technology we have right now, without any fancy theory deduced by examing gigabytes of raw data dictated out loud by a computer falling into a black hole and then retransmitted by hand via Morse code through the hands of a watch. Say what?! You read that right. This is completely stupid, and it is the crux of the film.
I wanted to like Interstellar. The core of it is the relationship between a father and a daughter, and the mysteries of space-time and relativity. That is a story worth exploring. It's just so frustrating how incompetently and arrogantly Nolan and his brother treated their subject. If they had spent just 10 more minutes spit-balling the backstory, they could have made a 2001-quality epic that wasn't filled with idiotic nonsense.
First off, Nolan picked the wrong crisis to hang his movie on. Corn blight would never necessitate going into space, much less through a wormhole to another galaxy. That doesn't mean you can't make this movie, you just have to change things so that it makes sense.
For example, if that wormhole had appeared near earth instead of Saturn — incidentally trashing Coop's career as an astronaut, making it his personal nemesis — it would raise all kinds of havoc here, destroying our satellites, ruining our electrical grid, disrupting the climate, killing our crops and causing violent tectonic activity due to the tidal forces.
Social and political conditions would quickly deteriorate to those depicted in Nolan's movie. The difference being that the presence of a wormhole right next to earth really does threaten the very existence of humanity and the planet itself. Haring off to Saturn will never solve the corn blight problem: studying the wormhole that's about to swallow earth is the only option.
It makes for better special effects too: the wormhole could have been a baleful Eye of Mordor that hung in the sky. It could cause as many dust storms and earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes as any movie maven could want. Positioning the wormhole near earth also eliminates all this pointless travel from point A to point B that plagued Interstellar and made it a ridiculously long three hours.
And then there's the irony: the wormhole that threatens to destroy humanity is the key to saving humanity if we learn its secrets. All the trademark Nolan mind-bending time-warping weirdness that is the artistic crescendo of the film would bear directly on the characters and their salvation, rather than some weird side effect of trying to escape corn blight. And what's really dumb is that at the end of the actual film, the corn blight problem is solved without ever going to another galaxy through the wormhole! All that running around was for nothing!
Did the Nolans consider this scenario and reject it as too abstruse? Do they seriously think corn blight resonates more deeply with the average movie viewer than the earth getting swallowed by a black hole?
Is corn blight some subtle jab at Monsanto and the monoculture that agribusiness is forcing on the American farmer?The movie's obvious political theme, vilifying those who would just give up on exploration and let humanity sink into mediocrity and oblivion, could be just as effectively be played out in a world that had been ravaged by the tidal effects of a wormhole as a world savaged by corn blight.
2001, despite being almost 50 years old, is still solid technically. It still looks pretty damn good, even though all its special effects were optical and practical, rather than computer generated. It depicts fantastic and impossible events in a way that allows even the most critical viewer to suspend disbelief. You can see why 2001 would inspire a film maker like Nolan.
The knock against 2001 is that its characters are emotionless automata — the computer HAL shows as much emotion as anyone else. But that was Kubrick's intent: the cool, controlled, emotionless astronaut with the Right Stuff was an archetype of the 1960s. You can see why a film maker like Nolan would want to have a crack at a film that puts people and their emotions on an equal footing with the big ideas.
Thus, Interstellar tries to personalize the forces of the universe to tell a story about the love between a father and a daughter, the sacrifices that a father will make to save his family and the transcendance of the human spirit. And that's a noble goal. But you can tell that story without getting everything else wrong.
And it's not just the technical errors. When everything about that sacrifice is a crock and the father is a gullible fool deceived by lies that any comic book reader would see through instantly, you have to wonder whether the director is dishonest, lazy, incompetent, or simply has nothing but contempt for the intelligence of his audience.
When your movie is all about clever scientists and can-do engineers and pilots who are cracking the mysteries of the universe with science, and then you get all the science and technology wrong, and your inspiration is clearly 2001, it's clear you have failed in your attempt at an homage and produced an embarrassingly shoddy imitation.
One more time: Interstellar ain't no 2001.
Sunday, November 09, 2014
A Liberal Landslide
Here's an interesting piece from my local paper on how the Democrats won on the issues but lost with candidates. Some choice cuts.
-Voters approved every initiative to raise the minimum wage (Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, South Dakota). Voters in San Francisco and Oakland approved initiatives to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2018. The good citizens of Oakland and Massachusetts overwhelmingly approved more generous paid sick leave.
-Both Colorado and North Dakota voters rejected measures that would have given the fertilized egg personhood under their criminal codes.
-Washington state voters approved background checks for all gun sales and transfers, including private transactions.
The minimum wage hikes in those deep red states speaks volumes. Perhaps if Democrats grew a spine and stood up for each other, especially the president, they would win more midterm elections.
-Voters approved every initiative to raise the minimum wage (Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, South Dakota). Voters in San Francisco and Oakland approved initiatives to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2018. The good citizens of Oakland and Massachusetts overwhelmingly approved more generous paid sick leave.
-Both Colorado and North Dakota voters rejected measures that would have given the fertilized egg personhood under their criminal codes.
-Washington state voters approved background checks for all gun sales and transfers, including private transactions.
The minimum wage hikes in those deep red states speaks volumes. Perhaps if Democrats grew a spine and stood up for each other, especially the president, they would win more midterm elections.
Saturday, November 08, 2014
Good Words
Regarding the election being a referendum on President Obama...
This election was a weird referendum on Obama. His core supporters voted by not voting. We saw a decline in youth voter turnout. There could be a couple of explanations for this:
-They could be unhappy with the job Obama is doing
-They could be apathetic, believing that they have better things to do than vote
-They may have seen that there was a Republican takeover of the Senate projected and said "why bother?"
For those that didn't turn out to vote, they found themselves not supporting Obama for the policies that he hasn't dealt with. We haven't seen any major work on climate change, we haven't seen any major work on immigration, we haven't seen any major work on student loans. If you're a voter who is unhappy with lack of progress on those fronts, why would you take time out of your day to go out an support someone who doesn't seem to be fighting for your issues?
This pretty much sums up the liberal sentiment towards the president. That's why I think he should go all in on immigration and tell Congress to fuck off. He should do as much as he can within the limits of his executive power. After doing that, he should take a look at all the major issues of the day (jobs, economy, climate change) and push for the solutions that actually address these problems. Because the GOP's only response will be "We stand for...NOT OBAMA."
This election was a weird referendum on Obama. His core supporters voted by not voting. We saw a decline in youth voter turnout. There could be a couple of explanations for this:
-They could be unhappy with the job Obama is doing
-They could be apathetic, believing that they have better things to do than vote
-They may have seen that there was a Republican takeover of the Senate projected and said "why bother?"
For those that didn't turn out to vote, they found themselves not supporting Obama for the policies that he hasn't dealt with. We haven't seen any major work on climate change, we haven't seen any major work on immigration, we haven't seen any major work on student loans. If you're a voter who is unhappy with lack of progress on those fronts, why would you take time out of your day to go out an support someone who doesn't seem to be fighting for your issues?
This pretty much sums up the liberal sentiment towards the president. That's why I think he should go all in on immigration and tell Congress to fuck off. He should do as much as he can within the limits of his executive power. After doing that, he should take a look at all the major issues of the day (jobs, economy, climate change) and push for the solutions that actually address these problems. Because the GOP's only response will be "We stand for...NOT OBAMA."
Friday, November 07, 2014
Voter Turnout
US News has an interesting graphic up that shows just how bad voter turnout was in the election last Tuesday. Barely 40 percent in Arkansas and Louisiana. Wow. Under 40 percent in Illinois and Florida. Completely pathetic. Basically the only people that turned out to vote were old, white people. No wonder the GOP won so handily.
Republicans have been proclaiming that United States voters have rejected the president's policies. Which ones? The economy is better, unemployment is down to 5.8 percent, the deficit has shrunk, and more Americans have health care. What am I missing?
The only answers I have gotten are a bunch of ideological nonsense.
Republicans have been proclaiming that United States voters have rejected the president's policies. Which ones? The economy is better, unemployment is down to 5.8 percent, the deficit has shrunk, and more Americans have health care. What am I missing?
The only answers I have gotten are a bunch of ideological nonsense.
Thursday, November 06, 2014
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
The Big GOP Win
The Republicans had their day in the sun yesterday winning (for right now) a 52 seat majority to 45 for the Dems. Alaska looks like it will go GOP and Virginia looks like it will stay blue. Louisiana will have a run off in December which Landrieu will likely lose. The GOP also gained 13 in the House. So that makes it 54-46. Republican governors (save Pennsylvania) stayed in office and won big as well.
What does it all mean? Well, a large part of it is voter turnout. People just stayed home or didn't know there was an election. The rest was pure anger, hate and fear of President Obama. The GOP ran on nothing but that and won.
It's going to be interesting to see if the GOP actually works with the president or acts like adolescents. I predict the former because if they want to have any chance of staying in power in 2016, they are going to have to work with him.
What does it all mean? Well, a large part of it is voter turnout. People just stayed home or didn't know there was an election. The rest was pure anger, hate and fear of President Obama. The GOP ran on nothing but that and won.
It's going to be interesting to see if the GOP actually works with the president or acts like adolescents. I predict the former because if they want to have any chance of staying in power in 2016, they are going to have to work with him.
Monday, November 03, 2014
Election Eve
Twas the night before the midterms and all seems lost for the Democrats...
I'm still not changing my prediction. It's going to end up 51 R 49 D. Further, I also predict that the GOP will caterwaul about how this means the country is moving right, hates Obama, and liberals/progressives are over.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If the GOP does indeed prevail, as I believe they will, it will simply be due to low voter turnout. Nikto put up a nice piece yesterday about why people should vote in every election. I've often wondered if compulsory voting would make things better. Part of me thinks it would make things worse.
Go vote tomorrow!!
I'm still not changing my prediction. It's going to end up 51 R 49 D. Further, I also predict that the GOP will caterwaul about how this means the country is moving right, hates Obama, and liberals/progressives are over.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If the GOP does indeed prevail, as I believe they will, it will simply be due to low voter turnout. Nikto put up a nice piece yesterday about why people should vote in every election. I've often wondered if compulsory voting would make things better. Part of me thinks it would make things worse.
Go vote tomorrow!!
Sunday, November 02, 2014
Why You Should Vote in This -- and Every -- Election
There have been several articles, like this one, that say Republicans win more seats in off election years because Democrats are disappointed, unmotivated and disengaged with politics.
Why? Conservatives seem to be driven by fear, and every election year the Republican fear machine cranks into high gear. Remember how Obama was gonna get all your guns? And how the economy was going to be destroyed by the meager stimulus that was passed? And how the deficit was going to cause runaway inflation and all our 401Ks would be destroyed, and the stock market would be trashed because all confidence would be lost. And that Obamacare would be terrible and would we all die?
As always, the Republican predictions of gloom and doom were cow puckey. But they did get lots of conservatives to vote in 2010, which elected a lot of Republicans to state legislatures, which allowed them to gerrymander congressional districts to give them control of the House in 2012, even though Democrats received more than a million more votes than Republicans in House races.
Republicans use scare tactics because conservatives respond to fear and negative emotions such as closet racism and homophobia, anger and hatred. Moderates and liberals respond more to positive emotions, so when things are blah, and everything looks like crap (mostly because Republicans have stymied any sort of progress since they took back the House in 2010), Democrats tend to be unmotivated.
Well, that should end immediately. Because things really aren't all that crappy, considering the twin disasters of the Iraq war and the 2008 recession that Bush left us with. However, if the current crop of Republicans gets any more power, the slowly positive trend of the last six years will be reversed. Because that's how Republicans like it: they intentionally make everything bleak because that's how they keep their power.
The way to change that is to vote. In every election. In particular, in every Congressional election, such as this year's House and Senate races. But it's also important to vote in every other election, especially state legislatures. But also including the boring ones in odd-numbered years for municipal races like city council, county commissioner, and even school board. And don't forget primaries -- primaries pick who will run for the office, and since so few people vote in them one primary vote is worth five to 10 times as much as a general election vote.
Why should you vote in these elections? Because you put the people that you like in positions of power that affect things in your everyday life -- like the quality of the schools, the upkeep of roads and bike trails, noise ordinances, but more importantly who appoints the police chief, who makes the election laws and who runs county clerk's office (where many of the inroads in gay marriage took place).
With all the problems we've seen in recent months in places like Ferguson, MO, it's clear that these "boring" local elections are especially important for people who want to see people of all ethnicities treated fairly by the cops. And the large crop of Republican-sponsored voter suppression laws masquerading as "protecting the integrity of the system" means that your right to vote is in danger as long as Republicans retain control of state legislatures.
These local political offices are where the majority of politicians get their start. School boards are frequently the launching pad for state legislatures and city councils. These offices put candidates in front of the public, giving them name recognition, and attracting the attention of the most active voters in their districts. Those contacts give them the juice to run for higher office.
Running for local offices shows candidates the ropes and teaches them important governing skills. They get used to speaking in public. They learn how politics works. They learn how to talk to people who disagree with them without being disagreeable. They learn to work with others toward a common goal, and to work out mutually beneficial solutions.
Most politicians don't start out famous like Al Franken or Jessie Ventura or Ronald Reagan. They run for school board, then the city council, then the state legislature, then maybe secretary of state or state auditor, then maybe governor or representative or senator. All the while these people meet others of like mind, who they can count on when they want to run for another office.
Without this kind of background, only celebrities, the wealthy, and the notorious have the kind of name recognition -- and money -- required to win an election. And these celebrity candidates often don't govern very well, because they haven't learned the collaborative skills needed for effective governance.
That's why you need to vote in every election. You need to give the kind of people you want to be running things the support they need to be successful in the long run.
So don't get discouraged by Republican carping and deceit: go out and vote.
In 2012, conservative billionaires spent billions. Karl Rove was convinced they had bought the election, lock, stock and barrel. But they flopped because the people went out and voted in large numbers, proving that every vote counts.
If the people go out and vote again this Tuesday, the Republican takeover of the Senate will be a bust, just like Mitt Romney's 2012 "landslide."
Come on, do it. Vote this Tuesday. Don't you want to see Karl Rove go apoplectic again?
Why? Conservatives seem to be driven by fear, and every election year the Republican fear machine cranks into high gear. Remember how Obama was gonna get all your guns? And how the economy was going to be destroyed by the meager stimulus that was passed? And how the deficit was going to cause runaway inflation and all our 401Ks would be destroyed, and the stock market would be trashed because all confidence would be lost. And that Obamacare would be terrible and would we all die?
As always, the Republican predictions of gloom and doom were cow puckey. But they did get lots of conservatives to vote in 2010, which elected a lot of Republicans to state legislatures, which allowed them to gerrymander congressional districts to give them control of the House in 2012, even though Democrats received more than a million more votes than Republicans in House races.
Republicans use scare tactics because conservatives respond to fear and negative emotions such as closet racism and homophobia, anger and hatred. Moderates and liberals respond more to positive emotions, so when things are blah, and everything looks like crap (mostly because Republicans have stymied any sort of progress since they took back the House in 2010), Democrats tend to be unmotivated.
Well, that should end immediately. Because things really aren't all that crappy, considering the twin disasters of the Iraq war and the 2008 recession that Bush left us with. However, if the current crop of Republicans gets any more power, the slowly positive trend of the last six years will be reversed. Because that's how Republicans like it: they intentionally make everything bleak because that's how they keep their power.
The way to change that is to vote. In every election. In particular, in every Congressional election, such as this year's House and Senate races. But it's also important to vote in every other election, especially state legislatures. But also including the boring ones in odd-numbered years for municipal races like city council, county commissioner, and even school board. And don't forget primaries -- primaries pick who will run for the office, and since so few people vote in them one primary vote is worth five to 10 times as much as a general election vote.
Why should you vote in these elections? Because you put the people that you like in positions of power that affect things in your everyday life -- like the quality of the schools, the upkeep of roads and bike trails, noise ordinances, but more importantly who appoints the police chief, who makes the election laws and who runs county clerk's office (where many of the inroads in gay marriage took place).
With all the problems we've seen in recent months in places like Ferguson, MO, it's clear that these "boring" local elections are especially important for people who want to see people of all ethnicities treated fairly by the cops. And the large crop of Republican-sponsored voter suppression laws masquerading as "protecting the integrity of the system" means that your right to vote is in danger as long as Republicans retain control of state legislatures.
These local political offices are where the majority of politicians get their start. School boards are frequently the launching pad for state legislatures and city councils. These offices put candidates in front of the public, giving them name recognition, and attracting the attention of the most active voters in their districts. Those contacts give them the juice to run for higher office.
Running for local offices shows candidates the ropes and teaches them important governing skills. They get used to speaking in public. They learn how politics works. They learn how to talk to people who disagree with them without being disagreeable. They learn to work with others toward a common goal, and to work out mutually beneficial solutions.
Most politicians don't start out famous like Al Franken or Jessie Ventura or Ronald Reagan. They run for school board, then the city council, then the state legislature, then maybe secretary of state or state auditor, then maybe governor or representative or senator. All the while these people meet others of like mind, who they can count on when they want to run for another office.
Without this kind of background, only celebrities, the wealthy, and the notorious have the kind of name recognition -- and money -- required to win an election. And these celebrity candidates often don't govern very well, because they haven't learned the collaborative skills needed for effective governance.
That's why you need to vote in every election. You need to give the kind of people you want to be running things the support they need to be successful in the long run.
So don't get discouraged by Republican carping and deceit: go out and vote.
In 2012, conservative billionaires spent billions. Karl Rove was convinced they had bought the election, lock, stock and barrel. But they flopped because the people went out and voted in large numbers, proving that every vote counts.
If the people go out and vote again this Tuesday, the Republican takeover of the Senate will be a bust, just like Mitt Romney's 2012 "landslide."
Come on, do it. Vote this Tuesday. Don't you want to see Karl Rove go apoplectic again?
Saturday, November 01, 2014
Obama Still Not Destroying Economy
U.S. Economy Grows at Steady Clip
The economy grew at a solid pace during the third quarter, driven by an uptick in military spending and a drop in imports, showing the U.S. on relatively firm footing as worries mount about a global slowdown. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, expanded at a 3.5% annual rate from July through September, the Commerce Department said Thursday.
Maybe the Republicans should play the Ebola card again...
The economy grew at a solid pace during the third quarter, driven by an uptick in military spending and a drop in imports, showing the U.S. on relatively firm footing as worries mount about a global slowdown. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, expanded at a 3.5% annual rate from July through September, the Commerce Department said Thursday.
Maybe the Republicans should play the Ebola card again...
Friday, October 31, 2014
Thursday, October 30, 2014
The Real Health Problem Isn't Ebola, It's No Sick Time for Minimum-Wage Workers
Everyone in Maine is shaking in their boots because Kaci Hickox went on a bike ride. Hickox, a nurse who treated Ebola patients in West Africa, is fighting the state-imposed quarantine in court, saying that it violates her constitutional rights.
The fear is overblown. She is displaying no symptoms (fever, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from bodily orifices), and Ebola is not contagious until you are showing symptoms.
So far, no Americans have been infected by Ebola except health care workers who deal directly with Ebola patients. And all the Americans who have caught Ebola have survived (though one doctor is still in the hospital in New York).
This year Ebola has infected 13,000 people in West Africa and 5,000 have died. The death rate appears to be so high in Africa because they don't have the ability to keep sick patients alive long enough for their immune systems to beat the disease on their own. Americans aren't dying of the disease because our hospitals can provide that basic level of care (though the religiously-affiliated hospital in Texas where two nurses were infected was obviously not competent to care for Ebola patients).
Ebola sure does sound scary when you hear the numbers coming out of Africa. But when you look at Ebola in the US, it's much less contagious than many other diseases that infect millions of Americans annually, including flu, pneumonia, measles, mumps, whooping cough, chicken pox, tuberculosis and hepatitis A, B and C. Hundreds of thousands of Americans die from these diseases every year. Some will leave you physically impaired or sterile even if they don't kill you.
Flu alone kills as many as 50,000 people a year in the United States -- 10 times more than have died of Ebola in the world in the last year. But people go in to work with the flu all the time. Why? Because they don't have a choice: they work in low-wage jobs without any benefits -- in particular, sick leave. If they don't work, they don't get paid, and they can't pay the rent or feed their kids.
It's especially bad for people who work in minimum-wage service jobs -- cooks, dish washers, cashiers, waiters, maids, day care attendants, home care attendants -- exactly the people who are most likely to spread disease to the largest number of people.
Hickox isn't demanding to go to a U2 concert or a rave. She just doesn't want to be imprisoned when she is displaying zero symptoms. If she should be locked up for a month on the off chance that she has Ebola, then why shouldn't every American be forced to into quarantine when they (or their children) actually have diseases like flu, chicken pox, mumps and measles, which are much more infectious than Ebola and can have just as serious consequences?
The real health problem here isn't Ebola: it's the lack of sick days for minimum-wage workers. If you're sick -- with a cold, the flu, or Ebola -- you shouldn't be infecting your customers and coworkers.
Companies don't want to give workers sick time because they're afraid workers will abuse it. But that forces honest workers to stay on the job when they're sick. And the rest of America suffers from unnecessary exposure to contagious diseases: millions of decent folks get sick for fear that a few jerks will game the system.
The medical workers who go to Africa to help stem the tide of Ebola are heroes. They shouldn't be treated like pariahs, though they should severely restrict their travel and social contacts during the incubation period.
They should also be compensated monetarily for any losses they might suffer during this period of isolation. And everyone in America should have that same right when they're sick with any contagious disease.
That would make all of us healthier and happier.
The fear is overblown. She is displaying no symptoms (fever, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from bodily orifices), and Ebola is not contagious until you are showing symptoms.
So far, no Americans have been infected by Ebola except health care workers who deal directly with Ebola patients. And all the Americans who have caught Ebola have survived (though one doctor is still in the hospital in New York).
This year Ebola has infected 13,000 people in West Africa and 5,000 have died. The death rate appears to be so high in Africa because they don't have the ability to keep sick patients alive long enough for their immune systems to beat the disease on their own. Americans aren't dying of the disease because our hospitals can provide that basic level of care (though the religiously-affiliated hospital in Texas where two nurses were infected was obviously not competent to care for Ebola patients).
Ebola sure does sound scary when you hear the numbers coming out of Africa. But when you look at Ebola in the US, it's much less contagious than many other diseases that infect millions of Americans annually, including flu, pneumonia, measles, mumps, whooping cough, chicken pox, tuberculosis and hepatitis A, B and C. Hundreds of thousands of Americans die from these diseases every year. Some will leave you physically impaired or sterile even if they don't kill you.
Flu alone kills as many as 50,000 people a year in the United States -- 10 times more than have died of Ebola in the world in the last year. But people go in to work with the flu all the time. Why? Because they don't have a choice: they work in low-wage jobs without any benefits -- in particular, sick leave. If they don't work, they don't get paid, and they can't pay the rent or feed their kids.
It's especially bad for people who work in minimum-wage service jobs -- cooks, dish washers, cashiers, waiters, maids, day care attendants, home care attendants -- exactly the people who are most likely to spread disease to the largest number of people.
Hickox isn't demanding to go to a U2 concert or a rave. She just doesn't want to be imprisoned when she is displaying zero symptoms. If she should be locked up for a month on the off chance that she has Ebola, then why shouldn't every American be forced to into quarantine when they (or their children) actually have diseases like flu, chicken pox, mumps and measles, which are much more infectious than Ebola and can have just as serious consequences?
The real health problem here isn't Ebola: it's the lack of sick days for minimum-wage workers. If you're sick -- with a cold, the flu, or Ebola -- you shouldn't be infecting your customers and coworkers.
Companies don't want to give workers sick time because they're afraid workers will abuse it. But that forces honest workers to stay on the job when they're sick. And the rest of America suffers from unnecessary exposure to contagious diseases: millions of decent folks get sick for fear that a few jerks will game the system.
The medical workers who go to Africa to help stem the tide of Ebola are heroes. They shouldn't be treated like pariahs, though they should severely restrict their travel and social contacts during the incubation period.
They should also be compensated monetarily for any losses they might suffer during this period of isolation. And everyone in America should have that same right when they're sick with any contagious disease.
That would make all of us healthier and happier.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Mitt Romney on the 2014 Elections
So, Mitt Romney was on Morning Joe this AM talking about the 2014 elections. His message?
If the Republicans win back the Senate, then gridlock will end in Washington and bills can start being passed again. What exactly is holding them back now? President Obama? He's still going to be president for the next two years so what will be different?
If the Republicans win back the Senate, then gridlock will end in Washington and bills can start being passed again. What exactly is holding them back now? President Obama? He's still going to be president for the next two years so what will be different?
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Monday, October 27, 2014
In Defense of Obama
Even on a bad day, Paul Krugman single-handedly blows out several bowels a day but his recent piece in Rolling Stone is guaranteed to cause much mouth foaming. The title, "In Defense of Obama," says it all. Here is the executive summary...
Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.
Amen. Check out the full article, folks!
Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.
Amen. Check out the full article, folks!
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