Unilateral Disarmament

You have to love the Republicans.  They have just won a landslide victory for no other reason than they are not the Democrats.  In that case, I suppose it would be more accurate to say the Democrats suffered a crushing defeat, a rejection of their policies that have given us an anemic economy and a pathetic world standing.  Clearly, the voters want a change in direction.  Therefore, before the new Republican majority takes office in a month, let's pass a budget that will last through September.  What?  Are you nuts?  No, you are spineless Republicans.

Why would the Republicans allow the lame duck Democrat Senate to be involved in a long term budget?  It is not going to reflect Republican spending priorities.  It isn't going to defund Obamacare.  It will be a status quo ante budget that will take the power of the purse out of the incoming majority's hand until October.  Why?  First, fear of a shutdown.  Yes, the Republicans are so terrified of a shutdown that they will do just about anything to avoid it, even if that makes the election meaningless.  Obama knows this.  He will veto the government into a shutdown and then blame Republican intransigence.  That's what I would do!  Duh!  If the Republicans can't answer that, then the election is meaningless.  Second, the Republicans want to spend the money.  What is the point of taking over a multi-trillion dollar government and then reducing the amount of spending?  Sure, that's what the voters want but they don't know how much fun it is to spend it and have people come on bended knee to beg for grants and tax exemptions.

 

It is funny that many Republicans have criticized Obama for taking military action off the table when negotiating with Iran, declaring that such can only embolden Iran and weaken our position.  Are they oblivious to the parallels with government shutdown and impeachment?  Never take it off the table unless you get something in return.

WMDs in Iraq

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/middleeast/thousands-of-iraq-chemical-weapons-destroyed-in-open-air-watchdog-says-.html?mabReward=RI%3A7&action=click&contentCollection=Energy%20%26%20Environment%20&region=Footer&module=Recommendation&src=recg&pgtype=article&_r=0

Yes, all these years later, the New York Times discovers that President Bush was not lying when he said Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Not only were thousands of such weapons destroyed by the US Military during Bush's term, but many have been destroyed since Obama became president.  I would say that he must have known about the WMDs once he became President but it always seems he gets his briefings by reading the papers (e.g. IRS Scandal, Obamacare Rollout Fumble, Jonathan Gruber, etc.).

President Bush crippled himself and his party by not disclosing this at the time.  The constant refrain of "Bush lied, people died" was left unchallenged and it took hold.  I have spent years saying we found chemical and biological weapons.  It has been to no avail since I have changed no minds.  The story that none were found sank into the consciousness of America and now, even after this revelation, I don't think that will change in my lifetime.  It is too late.  Much like Joe McCarthy has been tarred as a villain despite being proved correct in his claims of communists in the government, the WMD story will remain Bush lied.

Lack of Transparency a Benefit

Here is a great clip from one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act:

http://dailysignal.com/2014/11/09/caught-camera-obamacare-architect-admits-deceiving-americans-pass-law/

If the legislation had been clear on what it would do, it would never have passed.  Without deception, Obamacare could not have been foisted on the country.  And even with the lack of transparency and repeated lies (e.g. "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan"), the law still only passed thanks to legislative legerdemain.  The state of Massachusetts, a liberal bastion that hadn't elected a Republican Senator in decades, elected a Republican who ran on the slogan of being the 41st vote to stop Obamacare!  And still the Democrats pushed it through and Obama signed it.  They knew that the people didn't want it.  It was a power grab, an opportunity to take control of a huge portion of the American economy.

 

Once again, this should be an object lesson.  Politicians are rarely interested in serving the people.  They are more interested in getting more and more power to tell the people what they must do.  The Founders knew that government was more likely to be an oppressor than a benefactor.  The bigger it gets, the more tyrannical it can afford to be.  What Gruber said here reflects the thoughts of President Obama.

Republican Victory? Meh.

Much is being made of the Republican wave in yesterday's elections.  The Republicans won the Senate, increased their numbers in the House, and won governorships in 3 blue states.  Does this mean things will change?  Maybe.  Mitch McConnell, the new Majority Leader, said he plans to use the power of the purse.  That would be the power that the Republicans won back in 2010 and have repeatedly failed to capitalize upon.  Yes, the Democrat Senate torpedoed efforts to defund Obamacare and to hold the line on this spending or that.  The Democrat Senate also refused to pass a budget because that would require compromise, so we have spent the last 4 years on continuing resolutions.  But now, with a Republican Senate, the Congress will finally pass a budget.  Which Obama will almost certainly veto.  And the Congress will be unable to override.  Which will lead to a looming shutdown.  Oh, Mitch McConnell declared he would not allow a shutdown.  Therefore, if Obama threatens a shutdown, McConnell has already announced his intent to cave.  Yes, this is so much better.

As I have said before, the Republicans are spineless.  They will not use the same tactics that Democrats have used against them.  Look for rule changes to re-empower the minority in the Senate rather than allow Harry Reid to suffer under the rules he imposed on the Republican minority.

I have railed against Obama for telling ISIS that US ground troops would not be deployed or telling Iran that a military option was off the table with regard to their nuclear program.  It hamstrings your ability to reach a diplomatic solution.  Criminals surrender to the police because their is a credible threat of force.  Imagine if the police declared that they would never draw a gun or a club to subdue a perp.  Would that increase or decrease the likelihood of someone resisting arrest?

Obama has crippled his foreign policy by publicly announcing what is and isn't on the table.  Mitch McConnell has done the same even before he has taken power.  By declaring what you won't do, you assure that that is what your opponent will force you to do.  If I was Obama, I would absolutely veto everything to the point of government shutdown and watch the Republicans cave.  Duh!  And, if I was Putin, I would poke and prod to see just how 'flexible' Obama is after his last election.  If I was Iran, I would gladly let Obama browbeat Israel and 'negotiate' with me while my nuclear program advanced unimpeded.

 

This election was a rejection of the current path of the country and therefore Obama's policies.  If it had been a rejection of Republican intransigence, one would have expected a different result.  When Bill Clinton suffered a no-confidence vote in 1994, he triangulated and struck a path down the third way.  That was more spin than truth but he did compromise.  Obama did not compromise after the "shellacking" of 2010 and he won't compromise now.

 

Two thirds of voters say the country is on the wrong course, which surely guided their vote.  With a Republican Congress, we will still continue down that wrong course but there will be a bit more use of the brakes.

Terrifying Ignorance

The following link worries me.  How one can be in college and not know this stuff is baffling.  Interesting that they all knew the pop culture questions.

http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/11/completely-clueless-week-at-college-insurrection/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LegalInsurrection+%28Le%C2%B7gal+In%C2%B7sur%C2%B7rec%C2%B7tion%29

Ebola

A second nurse from Dallas has come down with Ebola.  She has been flown to Atlanta for treatment.  The first nurse has been transferred to a facility in Maryland.  Both are under strict quarantine to prevent further spread.  Of course, they both contracted it from Thomas Duncan who was in quarantine.  Not a very effective quarantine, it turns out.  Mr. Duncan's family have been quarantined in their apartment for weeks though they have yet to exhibit symptoms.  What can we conclude?  Quarantine is the best known method for preventing the spread of the virus.

The Ebola outbreak is centered in 3 West African countries.  These countries have not been quarantined, which is how Mr. Duncan found his way to a Dallas, Texas.  Great Britain has banned travel from the region.  Why haven't we?  The current panic that is spreading across the country could have been averted if we had a travel ban.  Rather than a ban, the government has decided to check the temperature of travelers from the region, a policy that - if in place at the time - would have allowed Thomas Duncan into the country!  Are we morons?  Moreover, the policy has only been instituted at 5 airports which handle 90 to 95% of the all traffic from the region.  Therefore, we are allowing 5 to 10% of travelers from Ebola-plagued countries to enter the US without even this inadequate screening?

 

What of the CDC director?  Thomas Frieden was part of former NYC Mayor Bloomberg's bans against large sodas.  Here is a man willing to impose policies that will prevent you from drinking too much soda and bringing on health problems years or decades from now but is unwilling to suggest a policy to prevent a virus that has a 50 to 90% fatality rate days after being contracted.  If only he could be as determined to prevent Ebola as he is to prevent obesity.

 

To add to the incomprehensibility of the government response, we are sending thousands of troops to the afflicted regions.  To what end?  Short of killing off anyone who might be infected (which would be immoral and criminal) like in the opening of the movie Outbreak, the military is just going to put more Americans in the path of the virus.  It feels like we are sending the troops in order to claim to be 'doing something' about Ebola.  It may not be doing any good but at least action is being taken.

Foregin Policy Blunder

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11156264/Iraq-asks-for-US-ground-troops-as-Isil-threaten-Baghdad.html

As many predicted, pulling every US troop out of Iraq meant it was virtually certain that all the gains achieved would be reversed.  Such has come to pass.  Unfortunately for Obama, he is still in office.  He withdrew the troops, he proudly ran for re-election on the fact that he withdrew the troops, and now Iraq is crumbling.

We stayed in Germany after World War II until... oh, yeah, we're still there.  How is Germany doing?  We stayed in Japan after WWII until... still there.  Japan doing okay?  What about South Korea?  Still there and it is prospering.  Let's look at the places where we didn't stay.  Vietnam?  It got pretty ugly after we left.  How about Haiti?  We've sent troops to Haiti many times but they always left.  Haiti is a basket case.  With this sort of record, why would we choose to leave?  It was a virtual guarantee of disaster.  But it made for a good campaign slogan for Obama's final election.

 

There are two strategic options for dealing with ISIS.  The first is to fight to win.  That would mean ground troops, tanks, re-established bases in Iraq, and a real war.  The second is to wash our hands of the matter and let the locals sort it out.  Either you want to beat them or you don't.  Now, there are also political options.  Strategic option 1 is anathema to the Democrat-base in the run-up to a midterm election.  Also, option 1 lays bare the blunder in removing troops in the first place.  Strategic option 2 is unacceptable because the American people demand some sort of action in the wake of beheaded Americans.  Thus we have the political option.  We go to war just enough to be 'doing something' but not enough to actually win.

 

The president's rhetoric has sounded hawkish, claiming we will destroy ISIS.  He says that is the goal but he does not provide the means of achieving that end.  He is all talk.  As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words.  Obama's actions, be they with regard to Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, Syria's use of chemical weapons, or a desire to defeat ISIS, always show that his threats are idle.  The thugs of the world have a couple years in which to seize power and territory because Obama isn't going to commit to stopping them.

Boyhood

The movie opens with a 7 year-old Mason Evans Jr. (played by Ellar Coltrane) lying in the grass and staring at the clouds. It ends with that same actor 12 years later stating an inanity that he considers profound. That is the shtick of this movie. Over a 12 year period, the same core of actors filmed for 46 days, so about 4 days a year. To watch the kids grow up before you it pretty cool but that doesn’t make a film; that makes home movies. If this exact same film was made all at once with multiple actors playing Mason at the various ages of development, it would be widely panned as a boring, going nowhere coming-of-age stinker. The shtick is all this movie has.

Mason starts off as a cute kid but develops into a lost teenager who looks surprisingly unkempt but somehow attracts hot girls. So many scenes go nowhere. At one point, we see Mason being bullied in the boys’ restroom and that’s an end of that. There is no resolution, no response on his part, just a move to the next part of his life. By the end, Mason is a youth who seems to shrug his shoulders to show emotion and many of his lines include “I guess” or “I don’t know.”

One message of the film is that fathers suck. Yeah, dads are mostly bad guys, usually drunkards who may even brutalize their wives. Mason’s real father (played by Ethan Hawke) is initially an irresponsible doper who eventually gets his act together. But he isn’t so much a father as a buddy. There is nothing disciplinary about Mason Sr., just a cool guy and big brother figure.

The message on mothers isn’t all that great either. Mason’s mom (Patricia Arquette) starts off as a struggling single-mother but she goes back to school to get a degree for a better job. Along the way, she marries one of her professors (the drunken brute) then, after getting her master’s degree, she marries one of her students (who is merely a drunk). When Mason leaves for college, she breaks down that her life is over.

Why couldn’t he let the characters be apolitical? No, Mason’s parents are both Democrats, his father more vociferously so. His father, who only spends a couple weekends a month with them, decided to spend one of those days posting Obama/Biden signs. He even has Mason steal a McCain sign from a yard. Then we have the old man who threatens to shoot Mason for daring to ask if he can post an Obama sign. See, Republicans are nasty, villainous people. Later, we meet an Iraq war vet who says it was a war for oil; he later descends into drunkenness and is written out of the story. See! Look what Bush’s War did to the veterans. However, there was a bit of fun poked at Obama supporters; one young mother explains how she sees herself in a make-out session with handsome Senator Obama.

The cultural references were fun, from Mason’s sister singing Brittany Spears, to Harry Potter excitement, to Lady Gaga, to the iPhone. Shot as it was provided the ability to give a very accurate view of the given year (no anachronisms to be found).

The shtick is all that carries this movie and it didn’t carry it very far for me.

Utah Samurai?

Just read the most unexpected headline:

Polygamist women dressed 'like ninjas' attack home of witness in Utah sex assault case

That caught my attention!  So I read on...

Two armed “polygamist women” dressed like “ninjas” were subdued by a sword-wielding man during a home invasion, according to police in suburban Utah.

Ninjas against a guy with a sword!  Wow, if only this had happened a couple of years ago, it could have been a great episode of Big Love.  Here's the link to the whole story:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/20/polygamist-women-utah-sex-assault-case?CMP=twt_gu

Security Breach

A man jumped the fence and made it into the White House.  How could that possibly happen?  That is a failure of such a magnitude that I have a hard time believing it.  I would sooner have thought someone had gotten into Fort Knox and run off with a few gold ingots.  With this kind of failure, there had best be a handful of firings at the Secret Service.

This is a timely breech of security.  Access to the White House is controlled to make sure that no one who intends harm to the President is allowed to enter.  By the same reasoning, we have borders and immigration laws.  It has been reported that Middle Easterners have been captured crossing the southern border.  Most likely, those who have been caught - and the inevitable fraction who slipped through - are only seeking a better life.  But we don't know for sure.

Scotland Forever

Tomorrow, Scotland will have a vote on whether to break from the United Kingdom.  It is a peculiar development since Scotland didn't eagerly join the UK; I don't think Wales or Ireland joined eagerly either.  The Act of Union (1707) was mutually agreed upon by both nations.  Unlike Wales and Ireland, Scottish kings had ruled in England - the Stuarts - making Union less a conquest than a marriage.  However the Scots were led to union on account of a financial disaster.  It was a time of colonies in the New World and Scotland wanted to share in the bounty.  The country had put itself in great debt for the Darien Scheme which failed miserably.  Between disease and hostile Spaniards, the Panamanian colony of Scots was decimated.  The English piled on the disaster by seizing a would-be trade vessel.  In the wake of the catastrophe, union with England looked better than financial ruin.

Of course, most people probably think about Braveheart and William Wallace.  It has been 20 years since Mel Gibson portrayed a clean-shaven Wallace who supposedly had an affair with Princess Isabella and fathered Edward III.  Enjoyable though that film was, it was mostly fictional nonsense.  However, it did spawn a renewed desire for Scottish independence. 

Based on how the Scots vote for parliament, I suspect they will not be pleased with the end result.  Oh, sticking it to the English might please them and being the masters of their own destiny will be exciting for a while but Scotland is a small economy that has enjoyed benefits from a larger economy.  An independent Scotland will need to raise taxes to maintain the level of government it now enjoys.  Moreover, it might find itself shunned by the European Union lest the EU encourage more separatist movements.  I think independence would benefit them in the long run but be harsh in the short run.

 

Of special note, Sean Connery will come home if the Yes party wins.

Romney Returns

I will be the first to say that I would far prefer to have had Mitt Romney as president for the last two years than Barack Obama.  That said, he had his shot.  He had the best shot of any challenger of a sitting president in more than 30 years.  With a disastrous economy, collapsing foreign policy, and high and persistent unemployment, Romney lost.  Millions of Republicans sat at home rather than go to the polls and vote Romney.  Many of them may be regretting that decision in light of the further collapse of foreign policy (e.g. Ukraine, Iraq, Israel-Palestine) and the still floundering economy but that is not a reason to vote for Romney in 2016.

 

While ads savaged Romney for the death by cancer of the wife of a man who had several years earlier lost his job and health insurance when Bain Capital closed his factory, Mitt ran no such attack ads against President Obama.  There were no ads that the president left Americans to die in Benghazi.  There were no ads about Fast and Furious.  There weren't even ads about the president's numerous golf outings (playing golf was practically a war crime during the Bush Presidency).  McCain ran the same campaign four years earlier and Romney didn't learn from that.  Will he play hardball in 2016?  I doubt it.

 

If he can't get votes against someone with an unimpressive four year record, how is he going to get votes against a blank slate?  There is a reason that neither party reruns a loser.

E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial: 32 Years Later

32 years after I first saw it in theaters, I saw E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial again on the big screen.  I do not recall my thoughts on the film all those many years ago.  Seeing it again, I found it generally entertaining but also a bit silly.  In the opening, we see that E. T. has wandered far from his spacecraft and is unable to get back before it blasts back into space.  Fine, he's got these stumpy legs and walks only slightly faster than a turtle.  However, he did move with astonishing speed under cover of bushes when trying to get back to his ship.  How does that work?  But that is beside the point.  The big issue is that we discover he can fly!  We only see him fly when he is in the basket of Eliot's bicycle but one supposes he could fly without the added weight.  So, if he can fly, shouldn't he have been able to get back to his ship?

You are an alien on an alien world.  You are a highly-advanced being who can make an interstellar communicator out of children's toys, coffee cans, and an umbrella.  You know you are hunted by some of the native population but have managed to befriend several children.  You have the house to yourself while the family is away.  Do you a) work on a plan to reunite with your people or b) get falling-down drunk on the local inebriating drink?  E. T. chose plan b.  Maybe he isn't one of the brighter aliens.  In fact, many of his actions do paint him as a dimwit among star-hopping astronauts.

E.T. builds a distress beacon that will summon his people to rescue him from this harsh world.  Both he and Eliot are ill as they sit in the woods.  Eliot falls asleep.  Does E.T. a) remain close to Eliot and the beacon or b) wander off and fall into a creek for the night to exacerbate his illness?  Plan b it is.

E. T. manages to fake his death.  Perhaps it wasn't fake and his species just resurrects after death.  In any case, he has fooled the dullards that he is dead.  Left alone with only the young boy who is his ally, does he a) quietly slip away with Eliot's aide or b) make a ruckus that will attract the humans but for Eliot's intervention?  Yeah, plan b again.

It does seem that E.T. is an idiot-savant, at once brilliant and then a complete buffoon.  I can just imagine the aliens on the ship muttering about how that half-wit Zreck wandered off again.  They probably decided to leave him behind to teach him a lesson.  "Let's go explore the moons of Jupiter and come back to get Zreck in a few days."  Snicker snicker.

Luckily, it turns out that the humans are also idiots.  You know there is an alien hiding in the neighborhood and use all sort of high-tech gizmos to ferret him out.  You discover his emergency beacon still sending a signal.  Do you a) leave a bunch of guys there in case the ship shows up or b) get totally surprised when it shows up?  Oh, look, it landed in EXACTLY the same spot where it did last time.  Hmmm.

'Keys' (Peter Coyote) has wanted to meet an alien since he was 10.  He is eager to make peaceful contact, or so he tells Eliot.  With that in mind, should he a) move slowly and embody a non-threatening manner or b) arrive in a cavalry of off-road vehicles flashing high-beams and run after any movement with flashlights sweeping the forest like klieg lights?  He chose plan b .

It was funny to see C. Thomas Howell as one of the biker boys and Erika Eleniak - future Baywatch vixen - as Eliot's love interest.  Of course, Drew Barrymore is adorable as Eliot's younger sister.

When first I saw this, I was not the harsh critic I have become.  I liked virtually any movie I saw and never sought out plot holes.  Yes, those were innocent days.  Now all the plot holes, silliness, and inconsistencies are obvious and often annoying.  Still, it was fun to watch it again all these years later.  Strange to think this was the highest-grossing movie of the 1980s, a decade that saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

Impeachment Folly

Again there are calls to impeach the president and I can only shake my head.  Short of Obama gunning down a citizen on camera (who is not a Republican), the Democratically-controlled Senate will not convict.  Therefore, impeachment can only end in failure.  Might the process moderate President Obama's lawlessness?  Doubtful.  No, it will most likely just irritate the voters and boost Democrat turnout.  It is a terrible idea with no path to success.

Does Obama merit impeachment?  Certainly.  It may be recalled that I considered bailing out the car companies as impeachable and no one even considers that today.  He has rewritten immigration law, enforcing the Dreamer Law that Congress declined to pass.  He has rewritten the Affordable Care Act, also without Congressional involvement.  He went to war in Lybia without Congressional authorization; Bush got authorization for both Afghanistan and Iraq.  But, as with criminal courts, the District Attorney should not take a case to trial that it is certain he will lose.  It is a waste of time and money.

What of this lawsuit that the Speaker of the House is pushing?  It is only necessary because the Republicans have proven again and again to be spineless.  The House has the power of the purse.  Nothing can be funded unless a majority of the House votes for it.  Once the Republicans took the House, Obamacare was dead.  Well, it was dead if they had spines.  No, they folded again and again.  The Republicans voted to fund Obamacare because they couldn't make the case that the Democratic Senate was shutting down the government.  Having surrendered the power of the purse, the House Republicans are now going to beg the courts to force the president to enforce the laws that the Congress did pass, not the ones he wished had passed.  Weakness.

What a Tangled Web Government Weaves

Oh, the horror.  The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that the government cannot require religious people to provide something against their religious beliefs just because they opened a business.  Now, rather than having their employer pay for their contraceptives, some women (those who voluntarily chose employment at Hobby Lobby or likeminded corporations) will have to pay for them.  Yes, the horror, the tragedy.  Next, it will be rent, food, car insurance, and cable TV.  What, the employer doesn't pay for any of those?  Huh.

I have long held that the corporation should provide nothing but a paycheck.  How the employee chooses to spend the money is then no business of the business.  You want health insurance, buy health insurance.  You want condoms, buy condoms.  The moment you force others to purchase your desires, it is inevitable that there will be conflict.  Furthermore, if someone else is buying it, the person using it has no incentive to keep costs down.  If someone else was paying the phone bill, will the user pay attention to roaming charges?  No.  This is always the problem with third party payers.  And that leads to rationing, like we see at the VA.  Unable to meet the demand, the VA would force veterans to wait long periods before getting care.

 

How did it come about that healthcare was provided by business?  Government interference in the market.  Yes, the government decided to play around with wage and price controls.  Always trying to find ways around such government meddling, businesses started offering 'benefits' that weren't classified as wages.  Voila!  Therefore, our current mess is the result of previous government efforts to fix things.  It worked out so well that the government needs to fix it again.  And that has worked out so well that President Obama has issued hundreds of waivers, multiple rewrites of the law, delays of enforcement, and accusations of Republican intransigence.

 

Government fixes usually lead to unforeseen problems that call for another government fix that leads to unforeseen problems that call for a government fix.  This process goes on until the government has complete control of an underperforming and wasteful industry, like education or Amtrak.  A better option is to get the government out of these industries (for which there is no Constitutional authority, by the way) and let private companies innovate.

Electoral Shenanigans

Thad Cochran, Senator from Mississippi, recently won a runoff election against Chris McDaniel, a Tea Party challenger.  Of interest, he only won thanks to the votes of black democrats who took part in the Republican primary.  This is one reason I think open primaries are silly since it allows the other party to potentially choose its competitor.  However, those are the rules and it can bite both ways.  So far, so good.  But now it turns out that the Republicans were behind this.  Former Governor Hailey Barbour's nephew was involved in getting black Democrats to vote against McDaniel by selling the idea that the Tea Party candidate would bring back segregation.  Really?

Looking at the numbers, the Tea Party candidate got more Republican votes than Thad did.  It was Democrat voters who gave Thad the win.  That is not good for the party.  Thad will not get those Democrats to vote for him in the November election and these shenanigans may have convinced many Republicans to sit out the election.  Republicans and Democrats will join forces to defeat Tea Party candidates.  Why?

 

Of course, both parties have already said that the Tea Party is "far right-wing" and "racist."  For the uninformed, that is enough.  In fact, the Tea Party generally has 3 goals: Constitutional restoration, responsible budgeting, and economic freedom.  Our government has long since breached the limits of the Constitution but has recently become tyrannical.  The government needs to shrink back to the specified limits of the Constitution.  Next, the overspending has gotten out of hand and the huge deficits spell doom if not reined in.  Lastly, there must be a return to economic freedom.  There has been entirely too much regulation and corporatism (aka crony capitalism) in recent years.  The government should not be deciding which businesses prosper and which don't.  Entrenched politicians of both parties dislike these goals since it inevitably strips them of power.  Few willingly surrender power; doing so is what made George Washington so great.

 

http://www.teapartypatriots.org/ourvision/

Global Warming Hoax Revealed! Yet Again!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html

Who has been saying that it is a hoax so the government can coax more tax dollars out of your pocket?  And who has been cooking the numbers?  A government agency!  If your grants and awards depend on a continued warming trend, you will find a way to make sure the numbers show warming.  However, eventually the truth will out.  Of course, the truth has been out for years but there are so many who are willfully blind to the fact.  Once invested in a belief, it is very hard to let it go, regardless of the evidence.

Email Archiving! What a concept!

Came across this link on Instapundit.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/20/the-irs-had-a-contract-with-an-email-bac

The IRS has had an email backup solution since 2005 with a company that advertises as 'Email Archiving Done Right.'  Huh.  Either this company is going to take a major hit for such a huge - and growing - failure or it might say, "Here they are."

 

Again, the idea that the emails are lost is ludicrous and will only convince the ignorant or willfully blind.  This is an obvious cover-up.  I'm sure the media would be equally understanding if a Republican administration apparently used the IRS to squash opposition and then stonewalled a Congressional investigation.

You don't have mail

There are times when I am astonished at the stories the administration will tell.  As an IT guy who has a basic understanding of email, I look at the story of Lois Lerner's lost emails on account of a hard drive crash as an obvious lie.  We use Exchange at my work.  My email is not on my computer, it is on the Exchange server.  It is also in the inbox to whomever it was sent.  So, unless Ms. Lerner only sent email to herself, one hard drive failure can't destroy any of her emails.  Our server has multiple backups in case of failure and the data is backed up to tapes should the building burn down.  I was doing this sort of backup 16 years ago, which makes it unbelievable that the IRS isn't doing it today.  How many hard drives, servers, and offsite tape backups would have to be destroyed or fail to get rid of Ms. Lerner's emails?  A lot more than the one that is claimed.  This story is even worse since most people must see that it doesn't make sense.  Your average smartphone user can access email on the phone, or on the computer, or even on a tablet.  Most know that if their computer crashes, they haven't just lost all their emails.

If these emails really have been lost, it is because someone chose to lose them.  That would be a crime.  Why commit a crime to hold back these emails?  Much like Nixon's tapes, there is something in those emails the administration or the IRS doesn't want revealed.  If this same thing happened in a Republican administration, the media would be howling day and night.  This cover-up is so obvious as to insult the intelligence of anyone with even a moderate amount of tech savvy.

Obama Achievement: Iraq Collapse

Three years ago when the President pulled the entirety of US forces out of Iraq, Vice President Biden declared this a great accomplishment of the administration.  We skedaddled and left the Iraqis to fend for themselves; mission accomplished.  Well, as Reverend Wright might say, those chickens have come home to roost.  Mosul has fallen to a branch of Al Qaeda.

Whether one agreed with the mission or not, thousands of Americans died to secure a democracy in the heart of the Muslim world.  I myself did not like the plan.  Short of a McArthueresque dictatorship, I view nation building as a doomed project.  Nonetheless, we spent years doing it and had more success than I expected.  Then we left.  By leaving, we abandoned whatever 'investments' were made and we see the result.  After WWII, we stayed in Germany.  70 years later, we are still in Germany and it is a functioning Western democracy.  After Korea, we stayed in South Korea.  We are still there.  It is a hugely successful country compared to its neighbor, North Korea.  Look at the difference between the part of Korea where the US stayed and the part that we lost.  After Vietnam, we left South Vietnam.  Catastrophe followed.  The record is pretty clear.

The US has lost prestige under Obama and no one can trust us.  Obama has betrayed allies and appeased enemies.  He has abandoned the idea of US leadership in the world.  Putin has made a fool of Obama and Obama appears not to mind.  Here is a president who was dealt a Straight Flush, discarded it, and asked for 5 new cards.  It is hard to credit this as mere incompetence.  Is the destruction of US foreign policy intentional, thus crippling future efforts?  Who can trust the US now?  We might just elect another Obama and abandon whoever counts on us.

Iran-Contra Redux

For those of you old enough, do you recall the firestorm that ensued when it was discovered that the US was giving weapons to Iran, who then 'intervened' on our behalf to get hostages released?  Hostage-taking was a popular pastime for Middle Eastern terrorists in the 1980s.  This was THE big scandal of the Reagan Administration and it lingered for his second term and into the Bush presidency.  Reagan had proclaimed that the US did not negotiate with terrorists and yet Iran-Contra contradicted that.

 

The Obama Administration has gone one better.  Rather than trading arms to Qatar to get them to convince the Taliban to release Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl (which would have been about equivalent to that aspect of Iran-Contra), the administration has released 5 terrorists from Gitmo who will spend a 1 year parole in Qatar before being released to resume their terror careers.  Much as Iran-Contra was a breach of the Boland Amendment, the Bergdahl-Taliban swap broke the law when Congress wasn't kept in the loop.  Now, if we were trading a handful of mid-level Nazis to get back a General Patton, I might be inclined to support the president.  Instead, we have traded an interior minister/Taliban co-founder, a chief of staff, a provincial governor, a deputy intelligence chief, and a member of a joint Al Qaeda-Taliban cell for a deserter who should be court martialed.  Well played, Taliban.  Well played.

 

Worse still, President Obama hyped this with a Rose Garden appearance.  He's running a victory lap over this?  Is he daft?  The president does stuff like this on a regular basis.  He distracts the media from bad news by provided some new bad news.  There are so many scandals that it is impossible to cover them.  Like a school of fish, it is hard to focus on just one.  The media, which has a short attention span, is never given the opportunity to delve too deeply into a scandal.  What were we talking about before Bergdahl?  Oh yeah, the VA scandal.  What ever happened to the IRS targeting scandal?  Fast and Furious?  Collecting phone records of the Associated Press?  Naming a reporter a co-conspirator to tap his phone?  "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" scandal?  Benghazi?  How about the collapsing foreign policy where the US is being played by Vladimir Putin?  It goes on and on.  There is so much that the populace has thrown up its hands.

Valerie Plame Redux

Remember when Robert Novak mentioned Valerie Plame, wife of Joe Wilson, in an article.  This mention soon became a national scandal that put Scooter Libby in jail and painted the Bush Administration as bullying Wilson's wife to get revenge for his contrary report on Nigerian yellow cake.  As the story goes, Plame was a CIA agent and releasing her name made her a target.  Also, it's illegal to reveal the identity of an undercover agent.  Of course, she wasn't undercover and the law didn't apply.  Also, it was eventually revealed that Richard Armitage - not Scotter Libby - leaked her name to Novak.  But, as mentioned, that wasn't illegal and thus he was never prosecuted.  This faux scandal spawned a movie (Fair Game, 2010).  What we can glean from this is that the press takes it extremely seriously if a CIA agent is revealed, even if that agent is not covert.

 

Last week, the Obama Administration revealed the name of the Afghan CIA station chief, a person who is (was) covert.  Unlike Plame, this is a real leak.  Where is Patrick Fitzgerald?  Clearly, someone in the Obama Whitehouse needs to be jailed and the rest of the administration needs to be harassed.  What, the story is over already?  Didn't the Plame story go on for months and years?  Did someone at least get fired?  No?

 

It is good to see the press showing balance in how they treat a Republican administration vs. a Democrat administration.

 

 

Godzilla

I remember watching Godzilla movies fairly regularly as a kid.  In the early versions, Godzilla was a giant monster bent on the destruction of Tokyo and could not be stopped by any of the high-tech tanks and planes sent against him.  Later, Godzilla morphed into a hero, saving Japan from other wicked giant monsters.  I suspect there was some continuity to that which I have long since forgotten or perhaps never knew.  The new Godzilla is in the later mold.

 

The movie is mostly about the unluckiest family alive: the Brody's.  I suspect these Brody's are somehow related to Sheriff Brody of the Jaws movies.  Joe Brody and his wife work at a nuclear plant in Japan.  Though they don't know it at the time, it suffers a meltdown because of a giant monster nesting beneath it.  15 years later, Joe's son, Lt. Ford Brody, has just come home from a tour of duty - he is with Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) - when he gets a call that his father has been arrested in Japan.  He goes to Japan and ends up at the site of the meltdown just as a giant monster awakens and wreaks havoc.  Heading home, Ford stops in Hawaii, where he finds himself on the battlefield of giant monsters!  But he escapes that and gets back to California just in time to run into a giant monster!  His son is on a bus on the Golden Gate Bridge when a giant monster swims into the bay!  His wife is hiding in a subway station when giant monsters start fighting in the streets of San Francisco!

 

I did like that the monsters feed on radiation.  They like nothing more than some tasty nuclear waste.  Also, they have this natural defense of an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) which dramatically limits the ability of the military to attack them.  There is a scene where aircraft just fall out of the sky and all the lights go out.  I still think a naval gun should be able to take them down but at least there is some reason why the military is confounded by them.  Godzilla is immense.  He is the biggest version to date.  I liked what they did with the jagged plates on his back but his face looks too much like a dog.  It was cool that his emerging from the ocean caused a tsunami.

 

The monster fights really take off in the final act and something about the action reminded me of those Godzilla movies of yore.  Though it was done with topflight computer graphics, the way the monsters crash into buildings just seemed like some guy was in a monster suit.  This was likely an homage to those original films.

 

I went into the movie with low expectations (I saw the last Godzilla movie with Matthew Broderick) and was quite surprise to find it was a good movie.  I expect that Godzilla will return to battle more giant monsters that plague the earth.  I can hardly wait.

Racism according to Kareem

It turns out that since his basketball career, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has become a contributor to Time Magazine.  Who knew?  He comments on how to tell if you are a racist.  If you've ever said that you don't care if someone is white, black, yellow, or purple, he suggests that's a hint you may be racist.  He says that the issue may be how we define racism.  Then, in the rest of the article, he fails to define racism.  Awesome.  However, he does list things that he thinks are racist.  Topping his list is that you deny there is racism.  Well, there's a straw man.  No one denies there is racism.  Racism was codified into the legal system prior to the Civil Rights Movement.  That was structural, wide-spread racism that needed to be stamped out.  Today, we have buffoons like Donald Sterling.  The magnitude of that change is profound but Kareem isn't having it.  See, the Supreme Court overturned part of the Voting Rights Act.  Racism!  The Supreme Court has weakened Affirmative Action.  Racism!  Bill O'Rielly says that discrimination is in the past.  Racism!  He offers a 2006 poll (couldn't come up with something more recent?) that showed 49% of minorities think racism is a big problem versus only 18% of whites.  Racism!

Racism today is a pale shadow to what it once was.  How else to explain that a black man is president, that a black woman was Secretary of State under a Republican president, that Oprah Winfrey spent decades as the most popular television personality?  Why is it that immigrant blacks do amazingly well within a generation while native ones struggle?  I would posit that the immigrants haven't spent a lifetime being marinated in talk of racism from people like Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Spike Lee, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  Stop telling blacks that they are victims of racism and slavery and The Man.  Instead, tell them that they can be President, Attorney General, Secretary of State, UN Ambassador, Supreme Court Justice, or whatever else.  Will there be hurdles?  Of course!  It certainly doesn't help that anyone who opposes the president's policies is automatically a racist.  If that is how you define racism, then you will find a lot of racists.  Worse still, any black person who opposes the president is an Uncle Tom or a Race Traitor.

 

To a hammer, everything is a nail.  To someone like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, everything is racism. 

There's no voter fraud

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/03/22/No-Justice-Department-Charges-Against-Ohio-Woman-Who-Voted-Six-Times-for-Obama

Clearly, there is no need for voter ID.  Also, it seems if you vote for the right person, voter fraud isn't a crime.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Our story opens on an alien planet where a figure in a gray robe flees from a temple while the natives chase him, throwing spears on the way. The figure proves to be Captain James T Kirk who had stolen – for reasons never explained – a scroll from said temple thus the ire of the natives. Gee, this almost looks like the opening scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Kirk soon joins Dr. McCoy and the pair continues to run for their lives. What was the plan here? Meanwhile, Spock, Sulu, and Uhura are in a shuttle hovering over an active volcano located next to the temple. Spock is lowered into the volcano so he can plant a device to prevent it from erupting and thus wiping out the natives. Well, things don’t work quite as planned. The shuttle engines overheat and the tether to Spock breaks. Was there a plan here? Simple, we just beam Spock to the ship. Where’s the Enterprise? Oh, it is underwater! Kirk and Bones jump off a cliff and swim down to the submerged SPACE ship. Though Scotty was able to beam Sulu and Uhura to safely before the shuttle crashed, he can’t lock onto Spock except by line of sight. The ship’s current position is a real problem, seeing as there is ocean and continent in the way. What genius decided to park the ship in an ocean? Well, since we are in this really stupid position, the only way to save Spock is to break the Prime Directive (note that was the Prime directive, not the secondary or tertiary directive). The ship surfaces to the natives’ astonishment and as it flies over the volcano, Spock is beamed aboard. And there you have the introduction to J. J. Abrams latest travesty in the Star Trek universe.

Knowing that the objective was to prevent the volcano from erupting and wiping out the primitive natives, what might have been a better plan? Maybe setting the anti-volcano device on a several second delay and transporting it from orbit? Oh, but look at all the awesome action we’d miss! As for Kirk stealing the holy scroll, I am still baffled. Why? My best guess is that he was trying to lure the natives away from the impending detonation. Even so, I have no idea why Bones would be there. Is he particularly suited to running from natives? The sad thing is that it gets worse.

Lacking any original ideas, the writers bring back Khan (i.e. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) as a villain. Khan has magic blood that appears to be a cure for death. Yep, Dr. McCoy synthesizes a serum that revives a dead tribble and maybe a major character that dies in a scene stolen from… Wrath of Khan. I was really annoyed when the last film had Kirk and Scotty beam aboard the Enterprise while it was light years away and traveling at warp speed. This time, we have a personal transportation device that allows the villain to transport himself from Earth to the Klingon home world! Really? Such technology is going to make starships obsolete. Such a technology would massively revolutionize space travel and is far beyond what was possible in Star Trek The Next Generation. As for the starships, warp speed has really gotten impressive. The ship is a short distance from the Klingon home world – which the Klingons seem not to notice – and warps back toward Earth. They have hardly hit warp speed when an enemy ship catches them and blasts the Enterprise. So, where are we? Oh, pretty much in Earth orbit. So the distance from Earth to the Klingon home world is a few minutes at warp speed? Two starships are essentially in Earth orbit and one fires at the other. Earth responds by doing nothing. One of the starships is on a collision course with San Francisco and the response is… nothing. We have all of Earth and the only people who can do anything are the crew of the Enterprise.

Benedict Cumberbatch seems nothing like Khan. First, it is a bit annoying that we have a pasty white fellow playing Khan. But Khan had a combination of charm and menace, a man who would smile warmly while he twisted the knife. Cumberbatch is all menace and brooding.

Scotty goes scouting coordinates that Kirk gave him. He finds a space station there. Amazingly, the space station doesn’t seem to notice him. In a miracle of timing, some ships arrive and enter the space station – Scotty just joins the group and enters unseen. Seriously? This is a military space station and it neither noticed the approach of a shuttle or that the shuttle came aboard. Well, such incompetence probably explains later parts of the film.

So, Scotty is off the ship and Kirk needs a new chief engineer. Let’s see, I have all these engineers down in engineering, one of whom is probably second only to Scotty. So, let’s pick Chekov. Yes, I understand you don’t want to introduce new characters but this still grated.

Spock and Uhura are involved and their relationship is repeatedly brought to the foreground, often with Uhura nagging Spock for his logic and lack of feelings. Umm, you know he’s a Vulcan, right? But, just to prove he’s got feelings, a tear runs down his cheek when a major character dies. Oh, and Kirk cries too when a different character dies. I don’t think William Shatner’s Kirk ever cried, even when those Klingon bastards killed his son. The Spock – Uhura relationship was ill-conceived.

Chris Pine’s Kirk is disappointing. It’s not that I think he should emulate Shatner, but it would be nice if he kept to the character. His Kirk is frantic rather than deliberate, foolhardy rather than brave, and reckless rather than daring. At one point, we see him in bed with two alien women. Really? He has to be convinced not to do something rash on more than one occasion. At another point in the movie, he is faced with the Kobyashi Maru moment where he’s going to lose his ship and crew and his response is… “I’m sorry.” In Wrath of Khan, Kirk repeatedly outmaneuvered Khan but here it is the other way around. Kirk captures him only because he chose to surrender. Kirk survives a spacewalk only because Khan guides him, and Kirk survives secondary villains only because of Khan. Khan plays Kirk the entire time but Kirk blusters as if he is the one in control. Sigh.

The plot is just an opportunity to string together unlikely action sequences. There is an amazing amount of running! It’s all very exciting mindless fun. And that is the biggest problem. Star Trek was never mindless. If anything, the Kirk era of Star Trek was preachy with a morality tale in virtually every episode. Kirk often explained the moral at the end. If there is any moral here, it is that the enemy is us. Yeah. Again with the self-loathing and we made Khan what he is and those chickens have come home to roost. Lovely.

With what J. J. Abrams has done to Star Trek, I am concerned what he plans to do with the other great sci-fi classic, Star Wars. Well, he probably can’t do any worse than Lucas did in Phantom Menace.

Wolf of Wall Street

An actual victim of Jordan Belfort complains that the movie glorifies the wolf's crimes.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10581947/The-real-life-Wolf-of-Wall-Street-behind-the-Scorsese-film.html

This is such a common theme for Scorsese and a big reason why I don't like his films.

The Overrated Martin Scorsese

Yet again, Martin Scorsese has released a ridiculously long film (3 hours) about a miserable human being and it is an Oscar contender, highly rated by the critics, and cleaning up at the box office. I am generally baffled. I have seen many of his films and don’t understand the appeal. I have come to the conclusion that Scorsese’s signature as director is similar to Picasso’s signature on a painting; even complete crap is instantly valuable.

Taxi Driver (1976): I saw this a few years ago and was less than impressed. Our hero is a deranged taxi driver who is baffled that a pretty girl doesn’t want to go to a porno movie with him and thinks he can turn his life around by killing an aspiring politician. That plan falls through but he still wants to shoot somebody so he kills a pimp and his goons. Voila! He really is a hero who saved a young girl from prostitution. There were no characters to like in this film. But see, after he killed a bunch of people, he is a changed man. Look how calm and collected he is now.

Raging Bull (1980): This was the first Scorsese film I saw. It was in the theaters as a double feature with The Elephant Man (sheesh, two black and white films!). I was 13 and didn’t like either film. Jake LaMotta was a real jerk and I couldn’t figure why his wife endured him. This from a 13 year old kid!

The King of Comedy (1982): Here is yet another movie with De Niro as the star, this time with the unlikely name of Rupert Pupkin. Rupert thinks he’s a comic genius and has it in his head that he should get a shot on famous late night show (hosted by Jerry Lewis). To pull it off, he kidnaps Jerry. Yes, another mentally deranged character. Though supposedly a comedy, I didn’t laugh. I’ve never liked Jerry Lewis and yet he is the brightest point in this travesty.

The Color of Money (1986): I saw this when it was in theaters and have almost no recollection of it. About the only thing that I recall was Forest Whitaker hustling Paul Newman toward the end. Of course, it is a movie about pool sharks, not exactly folks of high moral character; in other words, right up Scorsese’s alley. He has a habit of glamorizing morally bankrupt people (more on that later).

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988): How did I see this movie? I must have rented it from Blockbuster back in the day when I’d rent 4 movies a week. Well, here is a telling of Christ in which Judas Iscariot proves to be a hero and Jesus skips out on the crucifixion in order to marry Mary and grow old. I like Willem Dafoe but, at this time, he was almost always a villain so casting him as Jesus was impolitic. And, despite being about Jesus, there are no likable characters. How can that be?

Goodfellas (1990): I somehow suffered through this two and a half hour glorification of really bad people. You know, I felt nothing when Pesci got whacked. He was a bad guy. Sure, he could be funny but he’s still murdering scum. Ditto for our other main characters. Am I supposed to identify with one of these thugs? Scorsese sure wants to impress me with their lifestyle. That tracking shot of getting a front table at the posh club was nothing if not impressive. See the special consideration these mobsters got? Isn’t that cool? Stuck in witness protection, Henry Hill misses the excitement of his old life. What, am I supposed to feel sorry for him?

Cape Fear (1991): Here is one I saw in the theaters as an adult, making it the first of his films that I chose to see. I thought the filming was interesting, especially when Nolte was shaving in the foreground and Lange was in the background yet both were in focus. That was cool and the first I had seen of that sort of thing. However, as usual, I didn’t like any of the characters. This was Juliette Lewis’s big break and I was not at all impressed. How is it she had a long career?

The Age of Innocence (1993): Oh, the tedium! Every setting has to be lovingly explained by narration, pointing out the table settings and the tablecloth and the who’s who stuff. It is like lives of the rich and famous in the late 19th century. Worse, our characters are all so staid and proper that seldom does emotion actually leak through the façade. The characters are so stolid and the setting so sterile that it is near impossible to feel anything for any of these characters.

Bringing out the Dead (1999): Dreary and bleak, this movie was hard to watch. Nick Cage plays a depressed emergency medical tech who goes from one disaster to the next, hallucinating on the way. Gee, why am I watching this? Grim and unrewarding. Oh, but he does manage to fall asleep at the end.

Gangs of New York (2002): OMG, it’s still going! When the movie started, I was interested. And when it came to the big finale where DiCaprio is going to knife Day-Lewis, I was still there. And then he failed. And Day-Lewis let him live. And the movie just kept going. And going. Come on, already! At 167 minutes, the movie is just too long. And yet again, all the characters are thugs and villains. Should I root for the bad guy or the bad guy? Roger Ebert once said a good movie can never be too long and a bad one can never be short enough. Most directors try handing in a final film that is near three hours and the studio will demand huge cuts. Not Scorsese. And it doesn’t benefit the narrative for the films to be so damned long.

The Aviator (2004): This film was so enthralling that I never finished it. I watched about half of it then lost interest. Cate Blanchet made a good Kathryn Hepburn. As far as Hughes, I tired of him and changed channels. Here is one of the great achievers of the 20th Century, a man who broke airspeed records, who designed aircraft, who made blockbuster films, who was a successful businessman, a philanthropist, and yet the biopic bored me. Also, as usual, I didn’t like anyone. Why is it I don’t like any characters in a Scorsese film? How does he pull that off, film after film?

Shutter Island (2010): Though I didn’t have a heads up or read any spoilers, I knew the twist to this film in the first five minutes. In fact, I knew he was the man he was looking for when he looked in the mirror with his freshly washed face. I was sitting in the theater trying to figure out if Teddy Daniels could be rearranged to spell Andrew Laeddis. Of course, it didn’t work because his name is Edward Daniels; used Teddy to throw me. Again, the film is way too long, the setting is filled with paranoia (it is a mental hospital), and everyone is under suspicion. When the big secret is revealed, I was nonplussed. Oh, look, another nutbag for our main character. Gee, you’ve never tried that before. Sigh.

Hugo (2011): This was generally interesting and entertaining though overly slow and, in the end, infuriating. We follow young Hugo, an orphan who finds himself winding clocks in a Parisian train station and trying to avoid the comically bumbling policeman and his dog. During this, he attempts to unwrap a riddle with a little mechanical toy his father left him. Slowly we discover that a humble shopkeeper in the train station is Georges Melies, an early pioneer in film. Suddenly, the film becomes a paean to Georges Melies! Huh? I first learned of Georges Melies in From the Earth to the Moon (HBO Series) and was truly impressed by his achievement. Clearly, Scorsese shares my feelings. However, why not just make a film about Georges Melies rather than this meandering mess that concludes with a thumbnail sketch of the great filmmaker? I suppose this is one of his least bad movies since I liked Hugo well enough.

The average length of a Scorsese film is 133 minutes, he often tells stories about the mentally deranged or criminals, and doesn’t do an effective job of creating empathy for them. Clearly, I am in a minority on this. What amazes me about Scorsese is that I don’t like any of his films. I generally dislike Jim Jarmsch films (Limits of Control was tedious and Dead Man was unwatchable) but I really like Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. The same goes for several other directors but not Scorsese. Somehow, I dislike all his movies, at least the ones I’ve seen.

What do you think? Am I totally wrong? If so, please explain.

Dredd vs. Judge Dredd

Dredd

Judge Dredd made his return to film and I finally got around to seeing it. A massive improvement over the Stallone version (1995). Whereas Judge Dredd sought to tell an epic tale that glimpsed wide swaths of the Judge Dredd universe, it failed to stay true to the characters or the setting. Dredd tackles a day in the life of a Megacity Judge

The particular day follows Dredd as he takes a rookie recruit on her assessment. Depending how she does, she will either washout or become a judge. As it happens, they find themselves stuck in a mega skyscraper (200 stories and 75,000 residents) with every armed thug out for their blood. The standard judge sidearm, the Lawgiver, gets great play through the movie. Dredd himself proves to be a humorless hard ass who talks like Dirty Harry (FYI: Judge Dredd was modeled on Dirty Harry in a futuristic setting). Of most note, Dredd never removes his helmet.

The recruit, Judge Anderson, is a significant character in the comic and is part of the Psi-Division. Here, she is painted as a mutant with beneficial mutations; there is no Psi-Division. This is really her story since she is the one with the character arc. Dredd is law and the law doesn’t need a character arc.

The newer movie lacks the technology of the comic or the Stallone movie. The comic had advanced robotics, flying cars, interplanetary travel, laser rifles, and more. Dredd feels almost modern; much of the missing high-tech is probably for budgetary reasons. One thing that struck me as odd was the ending. Dredd comes upon Mama and she has the building wired to explode if her heart stops. Dredd has already pronounced a death sentence on her. So, stand off? Well, Dredd comes up with a solution that struck me as needlessly risky. I would have just arrested her, had the explosives disarmed while she was carted off to jail. The death sentence can wait a couple of days, can’t it? Mama seems to be of the impression that Dredd must execute her on the spot or walk away and leave her alone. Dredd seems to be of the same impression.

Judge Dredd

The Sylvester Stallone epic was much more ambitious than Dredd, including a vast number of characters and plotlines from the long running comic. His disgraced and imprisoned clone, Rico, plays the main villain though his return is entirely unlike what was in the comic. The robot wars are referenced and a warrior robot shows up as a goon for Rico. Fergee is included as a sidekick though he is entirely unlike the character in the comic. The Angel Gang of the Cursed Earth is tossed into the mix as well.

The technology is more in keeping with the comic, though it does seem interplanetary travel has been nixed; Rico was imprisoned on the moon of Titan, not a penal facility in Aspen, Colorado. The costume was more in line with the comic, with the ludicrous shiny shoulder pads. Dredd had toned down the armor which was probably the better move; what works in a comic is often silly in a movie – I give you The Phantom (1996) in his purple jumpsuit.

The movie has many failings. First, there is the needless inclusion of a comic sidekick, especially since it was played by Rob Schneider. He is rarely funny. Once they get back to Megacity, I have no idea why he sticks with Dredd. Certainly not because they did some great bonding in the Cursed Earth. There is also the fact that Stallone is very unlike the character he is playing. The constant “I knew you’d say that” is meant to be funny but is just silly. He can’t wait to get his helmet off and it stays off through much of the movie. Dredd is the most successful judge in his time and this is repeatedly demonstrated in the comic but Stallone’s Dredd is great because he is said to be great. Another issue is that Rico and Dredd are clones but played by different actors; shouldn’t they both be played by the same actor?

The movie is generally fun but drifts far from the source material. Dredd is a more modest film but does a much better job of staying true to the character and the setting.

Welcome to the Ice Age

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mike-ciandella/2014/01/02/frozen-out-98-stories-ignore-ice-bound-ship-was-global-warming-missi

It is summer in the southern hemisphere.  Shouldn't the ice have melted?  It is entertaining that a ship out to talk about global warming should get stuck in ice.  Poetic justice.  It reminds me of the Global Warming hearing that was canceled last March because of a snow storm.  If this sort of thing persists for a few more years, the climate change lobby will start saying we are headed for a man-made ice age and only new government regulations and taxes can save us.

 

Then there is this:

 

http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/12/31/record-cold-temperatures/4264237/

 

Records only go back to the 1880s and this is only the first time in 20 years that lows outnumbered highs but it is an interesting point on the graph.  The climate is on a cycle measured in centuries or even millennia, not decades.