Arcane (2021)

The story opens in the wake of a battle on a bridge.  Vander, hulking man with steel gauntlets for weapons, escorts two newly orphaned girls away from the carnage.  The girls are Violet "Vi" and her younger sister Powder.  They are from the undercity of Zaun, which is the poorer section of wealthy Piltover.  Some years later, Vi has assembled a crew to sneak into Piltover and steal.  Their target proves to be the lab of a budding scientist who has been tinkering with magic, something long feared.  That they successful abscond with magic crystals triggers a strong response that sees enforcers invade Zaun to recover the crystals.  Meanwhile, Silco has been doing his own experiments with a drug called Shimmer that grants superhuman strength and speed.  The heightened tensions explode as competing factions clash for control of Zaun, threatening to create a rift between Vi and Powder.

In Piltover, Jayce Talis, the aspiring magic scientist, is facing potential banishment for daring to experiment with magic.  The world was brought to its knees by reckless magicians and Piltover had banned it as too dangerous.  Can he muster support from the council - notably Cecil B Heimerdinger - to not only avoid banishment but to save his research?

This is only the first act in this epic story.  The competing goals of the various characters lead to constant clashes that don't require good and evil or right and wrong.  These are solid characters with biases and dreams.  The writing is strong and at no point are characters required to do stupid things to advance the story.  That there are so many factions that find themselves sometimes allied and sometimes enemies is impressive.

On the negative, there is an inordinate number of strong females.  They aren't the usual Mary Sue (e.g., Rey Skywalker), so each of them has faults and make mistakes.  However, it was odd to see Piltover's sheriff as a woman, Silco's righthand thug as a woman, the muscular and scarred warlord as a woman, and Vi as a pugilist who takes on men who are twice her size.  Yes, this is a fantasy steampunk setting, but size and muscle mass is clearly a thing here.  There are a lot of masculine women in this world.  And, of course, there is the promise of a lesbian relationship should the series continue.

The series is based on a popular game called League of Legends.  Many of the playable characters from the game are central here, including Vi, Jinx, Jayce, Viktor, Ekko, Heimerdinger, and Caitlyn.  Each character has their special abilities and traits, which are faithfully reflected in the show.

Highly recommended.

Jabberwocky (1977)

Taking Lewis Carroll's poem as an inspiration, Terry Gilliam's first non-Monty Python film sets the ground for his future films.  The hero, Dennis Cooper (Monty Python alum Michael Palin), has dreams of marrying the shrewish Griselda.  His plans go awry when his father disinherits him; Dennis is forced to find a place for himself in the capitol city where King Bruno the Questionable reigns.  Through a series of mishaps and dumb luck, Dennis finds himself questing with a knight named Red Herring to slay the monster that terrorizes the kingdom.

Like his later films, there are outlandish outfits, capricious killings for petty causes, crumbling edifices, claustrophobic settings, bizarre customs, counterproductive commands from leadership, almost universal incompetence, and a hero who is mostly out of his depth.  Though he is the hero, Dennis is hard to like.  His infatuation for Griselda is pathetic rather than comical.  That he is so clueless to the fact that she has no interest in him is sad rather than funny.  The merchant class are portrayed as villains who want the Jabberwock to continue its rampages since the price for their goods is inflated and they have grown immensely wealthy.  In search of a champion, King Bruno holds a joust - to the death! - in which the last survivor will set out to slay the beast.  Why not send a host of knights?

Though it feels like a Terry Gilliam film (e.g., Brazil, Time Bandits, 12 Monkeys), it is missing a likeable character to follow.  There is plenty of crazy, but very little charming.  Dennis Cooper is an oaf who fails his way into a princess bride and half a kingdom, and the result is bland and disappointing, whereas competent and likeable Sam Lowry fumbles into a dystopian bureaucracy that lobotomizes him, and it is brilliant!

Watch Brazil instead, which also has Michael Palin in a much better role.

Pumpkin Ahoy!

Odd story of the day: Duane Hansen of Nebraska paddled 38 miles down the Missouri River in a hollowed-out pumpkin.  The resulting 'boat' was christened Big Bertha.  Hansen crushed the previous pumpkin distance record of 25.5 miles, set in 2018.  Doubtless, there is an aspiring pumpkin-naut who is even now growing a great orange gourd with dreams of paddling 40 miles or more.

The Last Soviet

"Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep."

Mikhail Gorbachev

November 1987

Mikhail Gorbachev died today, and the Western media is celebrating him as the man who ended the Cold War.  What about Reagan?  No, he was the man who might have nuked the world and only Gorbachev saved us.  How is it that the leader of a totalitarian state has long been hailed as a peacemaker while his democratically elected opponents - Reagan & Thatcher - are painted as dangerous extremists?  The fact is that Gorbachev had the misfortune of coming to power during the final decline of the Soviet system.  He lost the Cold War, but the Democrat and Labour opponents of Reagan and Thatcher weren't about to give them credit.  No, the hagiographies were composed for the loser.  For years, Reagan's refrain was 'We win, you lose,' to the Soviets.  The US economy dwarfed the Soviet economy, and an arms race was like Usain Bolt racing a 10-year-old.  Efforts to keep pace could only result in bankruptcy for the USSR.  Then there was Chernobyl.  That disaster changed the dialogue.  Even Gorbachev decried the shoddy workmanship in the Soviet Union, admitting failings that prior leaders spent decades denying.  While the Soviet people view Gorbachev negatively, he has been quite popular in the West.  By presiding over the destruction of the nation he led, he received a Nobel Prize (1990).  The man who wanted to save Soviet communism, and failed, was lionized.  In retrospect, that was a fair trade.  Even Reagan would agree.

“There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.”

Ronald Reagan

"The role of Ronald Reagan had been deliberately diminished; the role of the Europeans, who, with the exception of Helmet Kohl, were often keen to undermine America when it mattered, had been sanitized; and the role of Mr. Gorbachev, who had failed spectacularly in his declared objective of saving communism and the Soviet Union, had been absurdly misunderstood."

Margaret Thatcher

College Debt for Everyone

Despite questions about whether he has the authority to do so, President Biden has announced a plan to forgive $10,000 worth of student loan debt for those earning under $125,000 a year.  In the case of Pell Grants, that amount doubles to $20,000 forgiven.  Though those who see their debts decrease will benefit, what are the costs?  The money is owed to the government, and it just chooses not to collect.  True, however, it turns a loan into a subsidy.  All those people who did not go to college are now having their tax dollars pay the bills of those who did.  Moreover, those who go to college - on average - earn much more than those who do not.  Sounds like a wealth transfer from the lower end of the income scale to the higher end.  Now everyone has college debt.

Adults took out loans that they agreed to repay.  That many of them pursued fields that would not result in high paying positions after they graduated does not change that.  Perhaps a law should be passed that required colleges to provide projected income based on earned degree before the student starts accumulating debt.  The university already has the money and doesn't much care what happens to the student who earned a bachelor's in underwater basketweaving.  Make the university responsible for debts that their graduates cannot repay.

Unrepresentative Liz Cheney

Liz Cheney (R - Wyoming) lost her primary yesterday and will be leaving Congress at the end of her term.  This comes as no surprise.  Wyoming is a very Republican state.  In 2016, the year she was elected to the House of Representatives, Donald Trump garnered 68% of the votes.  Hillary Clinton received 22% of the votes.  Liz Cheney won her seat with 62% while her Democrat opponent had 30%.

In 2018, Cheney won re-election with 64% vs. 30%, a modest increase in her support.

In 2020, she had her best showing yet, 69% vs. 25%.  However, Donald Trump had 70% support from Wyoming.  As a percentage of voters, this was the strongest support for Trump in the nation.  West Virginia was second at 69%, which might explain Joe Manchin's maverick status in the Senate.

Considering the voting of the citizens she represents, did joining the January 6th Hearings to attack Trump and those who support him look like a good idea?  Was she representing her state by providing 'bipartisan' membership on this one-sided committee?  Yesterday, her constituents gave her their opinion.  She was trounced, 66% to 29%.

In her concession speech, she likened herself to Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln lost elections to the House and the Senate but was eventually elected president.  Wishful thinking.  Like it or not, Donald Trump was the most popular president among the Republican electorate since Reagan.  Her elective political career is over.  Her best opportunity to stay in politics is to become a pundit (e.g., Joe Scarborough) or get someone to appoint her to the bureaucracy.  She has torpedoed her chances of appointment by a Republican in the near term, so her best bet is punditry.

Nope (2022)

The movie opens with a blood-covered chimpanzee on the set of a 90s TV show, Gordy's Home.  Clearly, the chimp has gone berserk.  The point of view is from someone hiding under a table.  The chimp turns, notices, and starts to approach...

On the Haywood Ranch, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) gets up before the dawn to feed and exercise the horses.  His father (Keith David) talks about how a movie sequel will save the ranch from financial woes.  Haywood Ranch provides horses for movies.  And then the power fails, and strange things fall from the sky, peppering the landscape like tiny meteors.  Months later, the ranch is not doing well and OJ has taken to selling horses to a local Western theme park called Jupiter's Claim.  Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yuen) is the owner, a former child star who hid under a table when Gordy the chimpanzee went berserk.  In addition to buying horses, he has also made an offer to buy the Haywood Ranch.  The ranch has continued to suffer power outages that even effect battery-powered items like cars and cell phones.  OJ has spotted something soaring in the clouds and hears strange shrieking as it travels.  Emerald (Keke Palmer), his sister, insists they install cameras to get a picture of it, thinking it will be the solution to their financial woes.

As anyone who has seen the trailer would know, there is a UFO stalking the Haywood Ranch.  However, this isn't your standard alien invasion-type movie.  Nope, it is something different.  Entertaining and suspenseful, it is a fine entry in Peele's movie catalog.  Better than Us, but not as good as Get Out.  Kaluuya and Palmer are terrific in their contrast, one serious, subdued, and introverted and the other manic, chatty, and extroverted.  Yuen gets a lot of backstory that is interesting but generally beside the point.  I didn't puzzle out the meaning during the film but had to have it explained via IMDb Trivia and YouTube reviews.  Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), a cinematographer, is recruited to somehow film the UFO.  He brings a crank-powered camera to avoid the power failure issue.  However, his actions are unexpected and not explained afterwards.  He wanted to take the impossible shot and one supposes that he may have.

Good popcorn fun!

Salman Rushdie

In 1988, Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, was published.  The following year, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa for Rushdie's death.  Rushdie spent many years in hiding after the fatwa and there have been assassination plots and attempts.  A Japanese translator of the novel was murdered and other translators have been attacked.  On Friday, Rushdie was stabbed multiple times by a 24-year-old Muslim assailant.

Why is The Satanic Verses so controversial?  It is not primarily about Islam though it does relate the source of the title.  Prophet Mohammad had spoken of a trio of Meccan goddesses as worthy.  Of course, this undermined prior readings and were soon withdrawn with the claim that Satan had tricked Muhammad into offering them.  Thus, they are known as the Satanic Verses.  To claim that Allah was only one of many gods was an unforgivable sin.  David Wood offers an explanation as to why the Satanic Verses are a threat to Islamic theology.

All too often, Islam practices a permanent form of censorship.  Theo Van Gogh, Charlie Hebdo, Samuel Paty, and many others have suffered permanent censorship.

$8.2 Million for Senate Seat

Roy Moore has won a defamation case against a Democratic PAC.  For those who don't recall, Moore was the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama in 2017.  His campaign was harmed by an ad that claimed he hit on teenaged girls at the mall in 1979 and that his behavior resulted in being banned from the mall.  Of course, Moore denied it.  Nonetheless, he lost the race and Democrat Doug Jones was elected.  Now, many years after the fact, Moore has been vindicated (sort of) and the Democratic PAC ordered to pay $8.2 million in damages.  Obviously, this may be overturned on appeal, but it raises an interesting question: if the Democrats had been told in 2017 that it would cost them $8.2 million to win the race, would they agree to the price?  Will this fine deter future defamation or encourage more?

Roy Moore is an odd bird and may have lost anyway.  The teenager in question was 14 when he told her she was pretty but 16 (Alabama's age of consent) when he asked her for a date.  For a guy in his 30s at the time, that's cradle-robbing.  Then again, I wasn't raised in Alabama where this may be just fine.  Let the folks of Alabama decide.  On the other hand, Alabama hadn't elected a Democrat in 25 years prior to Doug Jones; Moore was running in a Republican state and replacing the new US Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

Richard Armour

FBI Raid vs. Phone Call

Not so long ago, President Trump called the president of Ukraine.  During that call, Trump wanted the president to investigate claims regarding Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Vice President Joe Biden calling for the firing of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.  Shokin had been investigating Burisma for corruption.  The phone call was leaked and accusations of quid pro quo and efforts to undermine a potential political opponent were raised.  Soon, an impeachment followed.  Of course, the video of Joe Biden demanding that Victor Shokin get fired or $1 billion in funding would be canceled was somehow not viewed as a quid pro quo.  In any case, the precedent is clear: if you investigate a potential political rival, you deserve impeachment.

On Monday, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.  More than a year and a half after he left office and strangely close to the midterm elections, the Biden Administration didn't merely ask the local authorities to maybe look into misappropriated documents.  No, they dispatched the FBI in force.  Is Trump a potential political rival to President Biden?  Indeed, he is. Looking at the recently established precedent, it seems that an impeachment is in order.  Right?

Luckily for President Biden, Republicans are spineless.  If they do reclaim the House and/or Senate, they will do nothing.  They may hold some pointless hearings, but they won't defund the FBI or the DOJ.  They certainly won't try an impeachment.  If they did impeach, the very media that was cheerleading the Trump impeachments will decry how this one is a threat to our democracy.  The media are mostly organs of the Democratic Party, just as is the bureaucratic state.  If the Republicans had a spine, they would use the power of the purse to starve the bureaucratic state that hates them.  Washington DC votes over 90% Democrat and yet the Republicans keep funding their enemies.

Life of Brian (1979)

Three wise men arrive in Nazareth to find a baby with his mother.  She initially tries to chase them away but changes her mind when they claim to bear gifts.  The baby is named Brian.  The wise men soon realize their mistake and reclaim the gifts and take them to the manger across the street.  Years later, Brian (Graham Chapman) and his mother (Terry Jones) attend a sermon at some mount by a fellow named Jesus.  However, they are far in the back and don't really hear it well.  Brian's mother would rather attend a stoning.  Of course, women aren't allowed at stonings, so she purchases a false beard on the way.  Not surprisingly, most of the crowd is wearing false beards.  Brian sells snacks at the gladiator arena.  While there, he meets Judith (Sue Jones-Davies) and is smitten.  She is a member of the People's Front of Judea, which seeks to eject the Romans.  Brian joins and soon finds himself on a mission to kidnap Pontius Pilate's wife!

Monty Python are together again, finding humor in ancient Israel.  There's the vendor (Eric Idle) who won't sell anything unless Brian haggles the price down, the leper (Michael Palin) cured by Jesus who can no longer survive from alms, the Roman legionnaire (John Cleese) who corrects Brian's anti-Roman graffiti and demands he write it 100 times, Pontius Pilate with an Elmer Fudd accent, Brian being repeatedly mistaken as a messiah, and much more.  Python humor in Biblical times.

Recommended.

The Fountainhead

Howard Roark is an aspiring architect who has no interest in copying the styles of earlier eras.  As such, he is expelled from the Stanton Institute of Technology.  His roommate, Peter Keating, graduates at the top of the class and is instantly hired by the prestigious architecture firm of Francon & Heyer.  Roark finds himself employed by Henry Camden, a formerly prominent architect.  Keating rockets to prominence and success mostly through political maneuvering while Roark eeks a living.  At one point, Roark accepts a job at Francon & Heyer.  Throughout his trials, it is evident that Roark is the competent architect who designs Keating's most successful projects.  Roark is often thwarted by his own intransigence regarding his work.  He builds in his style or not at all.  Though Roark is The Fountainhead, his story is largely told by the people who surround him: Dominique Francon - the woman who loves him, Peter Keating - the man who fears, hates, and admires him, Gale Wynand - a newspaper man who becomes a disciple.  Roark hardly speaks through most of the book, and when he does it is a philosophical lecture to one of his adherents.

Reading the book, it is strikingly visual.  Rand sets scenes with sharp edges and paints her characters vividly.  One can easily see the characters as Art Deco reliefs on the side of Rockefeller Center.  Roark's style calls forth Frank Lloyd Wright, who has often been viewed as a model for Roark.

This is a philosophy book that tackles individualism vs. collectivism, creators vs. second-handers, conformists vs. non-conformists.  Roark is the Christ figure, the perfect individual who is without sin and incorruptible.  He has his adherents and his vocal critics.  Keating, who is a conformist, both hates and admires Roark.  The lead conformist is Ellsworth Toohey, an author and columnist who promotes the mediocre while decrying the exceptional.  It may sound ludicrous that Toohey would gain a greater following than Roark, but he calls for selflessness and altruism.  The unyielding Roark can never be viewed as selfless or altruistic.  Individualism is selfishness personified, according to Toohey.

The book hints at the themes to come in Atlas Shrugged (1957).  Toohey is a self-declared socialist, a perfect cog in the government that caused John Gault to engineer a strike against it.  It is a very long book, but it is never boring.  Roark and Dominique are often difficult to fathom, giving the story the quality of a fable; real people don't do such things.

Highly recommended.

The Sandman (2022)

In 1916, Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), the king of dreams and nightmares, has ventured from his realm to hunt for a nightmare.  The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook) has escaped to the waking world to become a serial killer.  No sooner does Morpheus find The Corinthian than he is entrapped by an occultist, Sir Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance).  Burgess takes the Sandman's tools - a ruby, a helmet, and a bag of endless sand - and demands that Morpheus resurrect the son who died in World War I.  Morpheus doesn't deign to speak to his captor.  It is 100 years before Morpheus is freed when the enchantment holding him is broken.  He finds that his powers are limited without his tools and he quests for them.  Of course, he knows that The Corinthian is still loose.

This Netflix series based on a popular Neil Gaiman comic book series (1989 - 1996) is interesting but entirely too woke.  One of the common complaints on IMDb is that multiple characters have been race and gender swapped.  John Constantine (the same from the 2005 Keanu Reeves movie) is here Johanna Constantine.  The presence of blacks throughout English history is ahistorical and kind of goofy.  Really, so little of the series takes place in historic England that one wonders why black characters are prominently included.  However, these are small things compared to the LGBT representation and almost universal presence of mixed-race couples.  Johanna Constantine is a Lesbian and her girlfriend is black.   Alex Burgess, son of Roderick, loves Paul, a black man.  The princess - an unspecified British Royal - is seeking to marry Kevin, a black man.  In the diner where John Dee (David Thewlis) misuses the Sandman's ruby, we have a mixed couple (Filipino woman & bisexual black man), a Lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual waitress, and a heterosexual man; just your average random selection of people in upstate New York.  In Florida, we meet a drag queen named Hal who owns a B&B.  It also turns out that The Corinthian is gay, having several opportunities to express his affection.  Probably around 50% of all kisses in the show were homosexual.  Representation, don't you know.

The show has promise but the woke propaganda is hard to overlook.  Clearly, this wasn't present in the source material from 25 years ago.  No, this is something that modern Wokesters injected.  I don't mind the race swapping secondary characters (Idris Elba was great as Heimdall in the Thor movies) but gender-swapping and the flood of LGBT characters is grating.

Skip.

Who Picks What is News?

There is a scene in A Beautiful Mind where John Nash (Russell Crowe) asks Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) to pick a shape.  She chooses an umbrella.  Looking at the stars, he then picks out a number of stars that form an umbrella.  She is impressed and asks him to find an octopus.  This reminds me of the news.  There are countless events that happen around the country and the world every day, but there is only so much room on the front page or the evening news.  Someone has to choose which of those countless events are newsworthy.  Let's just consider murders.  If the media gave every homicide equal weight, the picture that would be painted is thus (FBI Crime Statistics 2020):

Consider that the African American population is 14% of the nation but accounts for 50% of the offenders and 56% of the victims.  Black Lives Matter would have us believe that white cops are gunning down unarmed blacks.  In fact, gang members are killing other gang members.  Given the option between stopping all the cop shootings or all the gang shootings, which would result in a better outcome for the African American community?  What does the news imply?

Of course, the editors must pick and choose among the stories of the day, but it is incumbent upon the news consumer to realize that someone made this particular selection.  The selection inevitably reflects the views of the selector.  If one does not sample news from multiple sources with different points of view, the 'news' is, in fact, propaganda.  That may not be intentional, but that would be the effect.

Minimum Wage is Always Zero

Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.

Thomas Sowell

Whenever someone talks of raising the minimum wage, I think of this quote from Thomas Sowell.  Is it better to raise the wages and thus shove the least productive into unemployment or abolish the minimum and let employers pay what the employee will accept.  No person will voluntarily accept a job that does not make them better off and no employer will hire an additional employee if that does not make them better off.  The minimum wage is just a case of self-declared do-gooders deciding what is 'fair' according to them, without regard to the market, the employee, or the employer.

Along those same lines, taxing the rich does not improve the lot of the poor.  It may please some to see the wealthy punished through taxation, but it harms the economy.  The government is always less efficient in spending money than private individuals.  Had the money remained in the hands of the wealthy, they would invest it with an eye toward profit or spend it on goods, both of which spur growth.  By contrast, government will spend it with no concern of a financial return, which is how we get expensive boondoggles with huge cost overruns.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. 

Abraham Lincoln