I've updated my year-end über-list to reflect my recent viewing of two noteworthy films: LOTR:ROTK and Lost in Translation. I don't have much to say about Return of the King other than that it was great, met all expectations, etc. They even chopped out the anti-climactic Scouring of the Shire (but this is controversial of course), and didn't flinch on Frodo at the end of his quest. Gollum was fantastic. I would love to have one of those for a pet. There's some disturbance in the lit-geek force over Aragorn's Henry V speech, but I didn't mind it -- it's a convention and a tradition, and sometimes those aren't bad; also in the SF-geek force over the oliphants looking like the ATATs from The Empire Strikes Back, but that's being too harsh I think -- of course they looked like that. How else would they look? The Aragorn-Eowyn-Faramir love triangle (more a series really) could have been resolved a bit more clearly; Aragorn looked like a bit of a bastard at the end, which was unnecessary, and it wasn't ever established that Faramir had any interest in her or Eowyn in him. The Eowyn character suffers for this, comes off looking desperate if you manage to notice her and Faramir together at the end (not that Tolkein treats her with much more kindness, but female characters were never his strongest area). The World of Men finally figured out how to use artillery (I was getting worried that the orcs had better engineers) in the form of trebuchets scattered about Minas Tirith, but still lacked a blacksmith with enough skill to build a portcullis. Nonetheless the battle went better than expected. 9of10 for this film and for the entire achievement (which I guess should come in around 11 hours after all the deleted scenes are restored). Now for The Hobbit....
I don't know if the White House has a new science advisor or if GWB just now started listening, but a moon base is the first best step to getting out deeper into the solar system. Launching from the moon -- assuming reasonably cheap access to it in the first place -- completely changes the engineering constraints required for constructing space vehicles. The ultimate end should be an entire fabrication and manufacturing plant on the moon (thus practically ensuring the evolution of Luna City). Of course there's the issue of water....
Cheap access to space is the first big concern, and NASA's proposed $10 Billion Orbital Space Plane (which amounts to little more than a space station delivery van) isn't going to provide it. Perhaps they should consult Burt Rutan, the Space Frontier Foundation, and other alt/space projects. Or better yet, privatize the whole enterprise. Turn it over to Delos Harriman (we can live with the advertising).
The unmanned programs are still doing extremely well, and NASA-JPL should be congratulated on their Mars probes; the photographs of alien landscapes have begun once more to ride their way home from rover probes, this time from Spirit, which landed on a wide flat plain (Gusev Crater) whose most interesting characteristic is a slight depression in the ground (Sleepy Hollow). I have to assume there were compelling enough scientific reasons to send it there (they think this area was once covered by water), but a few good shots of Olympus Mons would do a bit better for publicity. At least it will drive around a bit, check out the landscape, pick up some take-out.
But the manned programs continue to stagnate, with NASA down to three shuttles and a greater obligation to make them fly safely. While somewhat newer than Columbia was, they are also worn, and in need of overhaul: all the best parts blew up in February. And NASA has shown little effort toward fixing their organization. STS-107 was avoidable: the foam insulation that caused the loss of the shuttle was known to be problematic for at least six years. Problems similar to the catastrophic one last February struck Columbia during STS-87 when external tank foam hit some tiles during launch. NASA engineer Greg Katnik's post-flight inspection reported "Because of NASA's goal to use environmentally friendly products, a new method of 'foaming' the external tank had been used for this mission and the STS-86 mission. It is suspected that large amounts of foam separated from the external tank and impacted the orbiter." (Similar damage was observed on the STS-86 vehicle.) Obviously the problem wasn't corrected and the shuttle kept flying, ill-fated wing on an unheard prayer.
The Green House strikes again! With NASA more concerned about environmentally friendly products than about the safety of its crew, one has to wonder if the modern American culture is even capable of getting back to the moon.
NASA's after-disaster report admits that "The organizational causes of this accident are rooted in the space shuttle program's history and culture, including the original compromises that were required to gain approval for the shuttle, subsequent years of resource constraints, fluctuating priorities, schedule pressures, mischaracterization of the shuttle as operational rather than developmental, and lack of agreed national vision for human space flight." This is tantamount to admitting that the shuttle should never have flown for so long, that dumping money into keeping the program afloat was misspent, and that the real problem is one of direction. Instead of continuing to waste money and the talent and hard work of around 21,000 people on this antique vehicle, the agency should have invested in future technologies, it should have developed SSTO vehicles and worked on low cost space access (it costs the same today to put a human into space as it did 30 years ago), it should have advanced to the future rather wallowed in the great achievements of the past.
But current NASA administrators obviously don't see it that way, and for the most part have returned to business as usual (i.e. self-preservation). They have managed to focus the public's attention on the specific cause of the disaster, proving that their bright engineers will have the problem licked in no time, while doing nothing to reform the agency's general problems. There is too much money involved for that to happen: money to employ those 21,000 people, money for United Space Alliance (Lockheed-Boeing) and its subcontractors, money for the constituents of Florida and Texas legislators. Money sometimes oils the wheels of progress, but just as often it stops them altogether.
Hopefully politics can once again oil those same wheels, and this talk of returning to the moon isn't just another opinion survey sponsored by election-year angst. Strong political directives might force the agency to change the way it operates, return to its roots, and become more practical. Hopefully GWB and his science advisors are aware the problems exists.The Belgian high court has thrown out their case against Tommy Franks. What a relief for the retired general! It seems the court decided it didn't have any jurisdiction over the case. Imagine that!
After the so-called Universal Jurisdiction laws went into effect a spate of lawsuits were filed against Americans for "war-crimes," and despite all the guffaws and chuckles from the other side of the Atlantic, didn't abate until Don Rumsfeld paid a visit and told them to knock it off or he'd move NATO to Warsaw. The media spin on the event was that American leaders feared indictment by the "world community" and arrest while on diplomatic missions to the EU. The truth is simply that the US permits no outside sovereignty over itself. <--that's a period.
Historically Belgium is one of the world's great battlefields, where other mightier nations clashed -- the French, the Germans, the English, the Dutch, the Americans, have all fought wars in Belgium while the Belgians cowered beneath their tables. This has more to do with location than anything else, which is probably why NATO headquarters was put there. Confusing that centrality for influence, Belgium was eager to foist upon the world its own sense of moral superiority, figuring it could declare a world court and then chastise acquiescence out of any country that didn't bow down to it; they wished to become a great power by election, by smug committee, by speaking loudly (by acting French in other words).
But ultimately no court has any jurisdiction where it lacks the power to enforce its rulings. Belgium's success in 2001 in convicting a few Rwandan thugs was possible only because greater powers -- those with authentic jurisdiction -- either supported the effort or didn't much care to block it. But confronted with the possible indictment of American statesmen and military leaders like George Bush, Colin Powell, Dick Chaney, and Tommy Franks, that conceit was brought to the litmus; the court had been given the Hobson's choice of either backing down or foregrounding their impotence: what would they do if the Americans kept laughing after the verdict was cast? There was nothing they *could* do. In 2003 the Belgian Government agreed to a face-saving compromise carefully worded to the effect that such "universal jurisdiction" laws would fall victim to suits brought solely for political agendas; and now the court only hears cases pertaining to Belgian citizens.
It must be frustrating for the Belgians, so convinced of their right and so lacking of a world where might doesn't make it. The same must go for the United Nations, whose Security Council is more fond of passing resolutions than enforcing them. They must feel that the Americans keep ruining things for them, messing up their sandbox, puncturing their helium balloons. But all the claims made by continental political philosophers aside, the world still and probably always will be governed by the capacity for and application of force. Belgians, like everyone else, don't have to like it, but they obviously have to live with it.Here's a great site concerned with the technology used during WWII. Looking around in there I realized that, strange as it may seem, the Germans never issued a shotgun to their infantry. They seem to have had an aversion to it in WWI as well (and specifically to the Winchester 97 favored by our American cowboys). To persist in not seeing the utility of a combat shotgun seems odd at first; but the biggest manufacturers at the time were Winchester and Remington (US companies), and German manufacturers like Sauer mainly built large, heavy custom things with lots of engraving ("best guns") for aristocrats to shoot at grouse, so maybe they didn't have an industrial process for producing them. Maybe they just didn't want them?
Shotguns were used heavily in the US Civil War for obvious reasons (farmboys called to arms and not given any standard arms to bear took down the old scatter gun from over the mantle), but the first true military shotgun was the Winchester Model 1897 (12 gauge six-shot (5+1) outside-hammer slide- (pump-) action 20" barrel), which was a bayonet-ready version of the first great pump-action shotgun loaded with No. 00 nine-pellet heavy buckshot (ouch). Earlier models had a lever action like that of a rifle, but couldn't handle shells as smoothly as cartridges: there were frequent jams, it left a thick black powder residue, and the lever-action was tiring. Labeled a "trench gun" by Winchester (they also marketed a "riot gun" to law enforcement), the M97 came to be known as the "trench sweeper" in WWI. It was issued quietly by the Army primarily for guarding prisoners, but it inevitably found its way to the trenches for close-combat support. Imagine a soldier armed with one of these things: he keeps the trigger pressed back and just works the slide cowboy style, sends the equivalent of 54 spread out .33 caliber projectiles at his target in the space of a few seconds. Nothing lives through that, and death is not necessarily fast. In fact, the Winchester 97 left such a mess in 1918 that the Germans attempted to have it banned via Geneva convention, claiming it caused unnecessary suffering (as if starting a war didn't).
Fourth and 26! Here's a tee-shirt version of the sweat-shirt I saw out in the wild. I assume people are painting 4:26 signs today to hold up tomorrow. John 4:26 proves a bit of a disappointment though, unless you want to equate a football player with Jesus: "Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he." I guess it's worth expecting. Mark 4:26-29 is a bit better: "And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground;" etc., which is used as the epigraph for a famous novel (Dostoevsky?). Hitting F3 from the top of my handy King James.txt, I find that Exodus 4:26 proves particularly inappropriate (if rather comical): "So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision." Deuteronomy 4:26 has that cool psycho Old Testament thing going on: "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land whereunto ye go over Jordan to possess it; ye shall not prolong your days upon it, but shall utterly be destroyed." That part of the Bible is too Pulp Fiction now though (interesting, that). One can always count on Proverbs: "Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established." But my personal favorite is Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians 4:26: "Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath." Now that's self-righteousness!
This sort of behavior reminds me of the old folkloric attempt at nominating a Western I Ching in Virgil's Aeneid, where you would ask any personally important question, then open the Aeneid to any line, and there would be your answer. This kind of guerilla interpretation never really worked for me, but it's worth a try, so... Here's what I got: "But you wear robes of saffron, ornamented and gleaming purple; you like laziness, and you delight in dances; and your tunics have sleeves, your bonnets, ribbons." Hmm... apparently I'm a Phrygian woman.... I do like laziness though....Lest we all forget (as I did before reminders from the very loud girl in the instant messaging window who watches television like a low-rent Roger Ebert), last year's State of the Imperium was principally concerned with Iraq War Justifications (collectively known to the initiated as Yellow Cake Mix), but also padded out with concerns about African AIDS, satisfied predictions of economic recovery, hopes for tax reduction permanency, a plan to eliminate double taxation of dividends, affordable health care (for all Americans!) through medical liability reform, energy independence, and an amusing doodle of a hydrogen powered car.
Unfortunately tonight's parallel will be the Moonbase and Mars trip, which in the context of GWB-speak will seem outrageous. We'll also hear about Homeless Saddam and Iraqi Republicans, and we'll collectively welcome millions of new quasi-citizens from Mexico into our Burger King drivethrough windows while emailing high-tech jobs to India. We will not hear that personal bankruptcies have achieved another all-time high, or that consumer debt has surpassed $2 Trillion.
A trend worth looking for is what promises to be an extremely imbalanced ratio of clappers to non-clappers. Perhaps a record imbalance this year?As Glorious Leader attempts to reconcile his departure from the norms of his Party -- convey to them through winks and smiles his true agenda in moving pictures of promises -- let us again consider the state of his political OPFOR now their first trial has ended. With the withdrawal of Gephardt (nobody wanted another Dick in the White House), the field has now settled out to four candidates:
Sen. John Kerry, esq: Massachusetts lawyer, haughty and French looking, Vietnam veteran who threw his Purple Hearts away, graduate of Yale University and Boston College Law, awarded Silver Star, Bronze Star, three Puple Hearts, two Presidential Unit Citations, and National Defense Service Medal, unable to eat a cheesesteak like a man despite being married to the widow of Pennsylvania ketchup magnate John Heinz, has a Brady Bunch family with two daughters from his previous marriage combined with three sons from Heinz's previous marriage. Kerry is presently in his fourth term as Senator from Massachusetts (that's 20 years inside), serves on the Finance and Commerce Committees, chairs the Senate Small Business Committee, and has spent 16 years on the Foreign Relations Committee. Which is to say, anything wrong with the economy or foreign affairs you can lay squarely on Kerry's shoulders as much as on GWB's. That makes it tough for Kerry to criticise the status quo (or at least it should), and provides lots of room for him to stumble toward hypocrisy. Kerry has this attitude, or at least projects a sense of his own elitism, whether genuine or not, that's disagreeable to many people. Given that, one would not have expected him to win down-to-earth Iowa, but that caucus may have been more a reaction to old-man-badgering Dean than anything else: those who followed thier hearts supported Edwards, while those who followed their heads -- believing Edwards without any chance for catching up -- supported Kerry. He's greatly reminiscent of Michael Dukakis, and should have similar odds for gaining the White House. Nonetheless, he's the most Presidential of the remaining candidates, and may now stand the best chance of gaining the nomination.
Sen. John Edwards, esq: North Carolina first term Senator, boyish and conservative looking, funded hugely by the American Trial Lawyers Association (aka Mordor), graduated North Carolina State and UNC Law Chapel Hill, former personal injury lawyer ("Stop that ambulance!"), has won verdicts as high as $152 million helping him to amass a personal fortune of $14 million. Despite the morass of lawyers surrounding him, I like Edwards for remaining largely civil during the pre-primary campaigning (starkly contrasted by his rivals) and not attempting to top the untenable rhetoric that characterized the debates. His Southern accent makes him a rather stronger candidate than Kerry or Dean, and with the sudden momentum of placing second in Iowa may have a much improved chance at the nomination.
Dr. Howard Dean, md: Vermont doctor, angry and clownish looking, says whatever comes into his head then tries to explain it the next day, graduated Yale and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, formerly a private pactice doctor, Governor of Vermont 1991-2002, wants to revoke tax cuts in order to expand public programs. Dean doesn't have a Bin Laden's chance in Texas of becoming President, and after last night's third-place showing in Iowa, one can hope some reason has been returned (or perhaps unearthed) to Democratic voters. Dean himself has become a sort of avatar for the disaffected and angry minority who hate GWB the way most people hate cancer or ebola; much to this commentator's disappointment, Dean played into that role, saw the lure of votes there and went carpe diem at the expense of sustainability, turning a moderately promising record as Governor and moderately promising positions into hyperbolic rhetoric and insupportable views. I now see him largely as the victim of the people running his campaign, who made poor investments for short term gains, and turned Dean into a junk-stock politician.
Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.): Arkansas military commander, Four Star General, graduated first in his class from West Point, holds a master's degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford (a Rhodes Scholar), awarded Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Presidential Medal of Freedom, knighthoods from Britain and Netherlands, honorary commander of the French Legion of Honor, NATO Supreme Commander. Clark looks pretty impressive, but his jaw-dropping resume is undermined too often by the man himself and those who know him. He can't resist making incomprehensible and contradictory statements like claiming he would "probably" have voted to authorize the Iraq war (backed up by testimony he gave to the House Armed Services Committee on the eve of the resolution), then hours later claiming to have opposed the war from the start; professing to believe that Kosovo was worth a war while Iraq was not; proclaiming it fine for India to have all the software jobs ("We'll do other things in this country," he said); wanting Saddam Hussein tried at the Hague rather than Iraq; and promising against all reason that as President he would prevent future terrorist incidents ("I'm going to take care of the American people," he said). At the end of the Kosovo war, Clark ordered a British Lt. General to prevent Russian troops from occupying the Pristina airport, to which the general replied, "I'm not going to start the third world war for you." Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said about Clark's dismissal from his NATO post, that it was due to "integrity and character issues". One gets the sense that Clark is ineptly controlled by some committee that compels him to say things contrary to his honest sentiments: his prevarications, his contradictions, his awkwardness off-the-cuff. The real Wesley Clark -- assuming there is one -- might have made a decent candidate, maybe even a decent Emperor, but his ostensive falseness certainly does question his integrity.In other words, the immediate future of American leadership looks bleak indeed. But there's been some talk about Rudy Giuliani and/or George Pataki in 2008. (Not to mention Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton....) In the meantime Pataki would apparently like to see Giuliani in the NY Governor's mansion after the 2006 election.
Hmm, I seem to be interested in politics again. Maybe I'm done now.How about Bush/Giuliani 2004? Cheney's got health problems, and Rudy's been very visible lately stumping for GWB, hanging around New Hampshire at the moment (and if New Hamp-Shire is the mirror Shire, then that would make Mordor what... Colorado?). How about SecState Giuliani? Rumors persist that Powell might bail....
I watched the Dem debate last night and, as usual, took notes automatically (a bad habit I picked up in 'Nam). I'll just transcribe them here:
§ Medikids! Lieberman, normally the most sober and reasonable of the wannabes, proposed a Universal Health Care starter plan for ages 0-25. He'll hand out id cards and everything.
§ Rev Al wants to build infrastructure for the entire third world.
§ Check out Peter Jennings with the hardball questions!
§ Kucinich wants free college for all, free healthcare for all, free universal pre-kindergarten for all (!), and plans to fund all this by cutting the Pentagon's budget by 15%. I read somewhere today that if FedGov implements all of Kucinich's wacky plans it'll cost over $10 Trillion. He must think the Pentagon is built from gold or something. With gold tanks. And gold bullets. And gold Iraqis to shoot them at.
§ Edwards wants to host tea parties with every Muslim, sort of a meet-and-greet to get to know them better. He's sure that will get the terrorists to stop.
§ Rev Al is opposed to state's rights (all of them!), and seems blissfully unaware of how important that issue has been to the Democratic Party for most of its existence. Back when Truman was a candidate there was even a splinter party called the States' Rights Democratic Party (aka Dixiecrats). Rev Al is positive though that the concept expired with the Civil War.
§ Sen. Edwards doesn't know what the Defense of Marriage Act does.
§ Lieberman believes all values must start from religion (but to be fair, he probably hasn't read a lot of Nietzsche).
§ Kucinich doesn't know the definition of "casualty." He thinks there have been 500 of them in Iraq.
§ Kucinich wants to replace all the nuclear power plants with windmills. Dennis Quixote.
§ Both Clark and Kucinich are passionately in favor of government taking care of people. Could you imagine those guys tucking you in to bed at night? Brushing your hair, spooning you applesauce....
§ When Rev Al's not telling a joke he makes no sense. For instance, he doesn't seem to know what the Federal Reserve is. But his jokes are pretty funny.
§ Kerry is proud to have been endorsed by Fritz Hollings.
§ Lieberman takes vows cheaply: he's sworn to "defend to the death" the status of the New Hampshire primary. Mock on, Voltaire!
§ Clark thinks the Taliban are in Iraq. Good thing he had other generals plan out his bombing missions in Kosovo.
§ Dean has tried to swerve right -- like a drunk driver who realizes he's too far over into the wrong lane -- by twice calling himself a fiscal conservative; meanwhile warning fellow Dems not to try to emulate the Repubs. Fiscal conservativeness (along with gun policy) is what I first liked about Dean -- actually it's everything I ever liked about him.
§ Clark and Michael Moore. I hate that Michael Moore!
Who saw this coming? It's Sun's Java Desktop System! They used talk about Java replacing MS, and it never seemed to amount to anything beyond prolonged trench legal battles, but now they've gotten something slightly together: it's a GNOME desktop environment on top of SuSE Linux bundled with StarOffice and Mozilla. They soon plan to start targeting OEMs. What's also interesting about this is how much Sun can be seen to be consciously imitating MS: the look of the desktop theme is WinXP, the Evolution email client mimics Outlook, Mozilla looks more and more like IE, etc. I wonder if MS is worried about this?
Speaking of Linux, I find fascinating the way in which IBM has begun trying to coopt the Linux name through its new ad series (something about "the open child" -- what a bizarre image!). Most people don't know what Linux is, and even more don't know where it came from, and many of those people will begin to associate it with IBM now. It's like a cattle brand, a big sizzling IBM on the collective bodies of thousands of hackers huddled anonymously around the prairie silhouette of Linus Torvalds. And people object to Microsoft's marketing strategies!Lesbian B of the Two Most Beautiful Lesbians in the Universe has been replaced over in Garden Apartment No. 417. Rumor has it she was an Ice Princess, and in fact Beefy Lou has empirical data to back this claim: he's got a temperature gauge secretly installed in Garden Apartment No. 417 in order to study the indoor climate preferences of lesbians, and according to his graph over a five month period the mean temperature of the apartment decreases by .08 degrees whenever Lesbian B is over to visit. The new lesbian over there -- Lesbian C -- looks a lot like Dorothy Parker. She's not quite in the same league as Lesbian A. Beefy Lou says she snores.
He's over there now stomping around on the roof of Garden Apartment No. 417 with a bundle of AV equipment and a large drill. The cold afternoon wind tugs at his fur-lined mumu. I'd go over and ask what he's up to but with the snow on the ground even I can't be sure of crossing the minefield safely. Beefy Lou has lately become obsessed with the lesbians, ever since Lesbian A changed apartments for the one next door to his. He's got cameras installed from a dozen angles, microphones, motion detectors, a diorama of the apartment layout painstakingly decorated with doll-house furniture and clay models with cut-out lesbian faces taped to their heads. Probing the lesbians' apartment has become Beefy Lou's substitute for sex. He calls Lesbian A "Donna".
Recently I became certain that rodents had begun their own surveillance campaign in the thin half-world between me and the anonymous woman who lives above me. Knocking noises drifted down, sounds of cutting, chiseling, scurrying. They had connected the boulevards between the studs over my ceiling, somehow gained access to the air ducts to rattle between apartments according to concise schedules (they've superseded my alarm clock by twelve minutes) and lain claim to the vertical shafts behind the wallboard (ten feet to drop down onto whatever scraps of dust and wood shavings they'd piled at ground level to cushion their fall). My plan to counteract their encroachment consisted mainly of turning the heat up very high. But then it got too hot in here. Various tiny internal motors overheated after their tiny fans burned out. Storm fronts developed on my window panes. Anyway it turns out it's heat the rodents were interested in from the beginning. So the plan sort of backfired.There remains little cause to pay much attention to the political views held by celebrities, but I feel compelled to note that Clint Eastwood has expressed his own recently, and that they are rational: "I like the libertarian view," he said, "which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live." It frustrates me that a quote like this is so refreshing, and I hope that politicians take note of it the way they do that of other, less sensible public figures.
The problem with rational political views is that they tend to remain silent, so politicians, eager to morph themselves into whatever creature attracts the most votes and the most funding, remain unaware that many people have them. There are far more libertarians in the world than the number of Libertarian Party members implies since libertarians tend to be suspicious of organized groups. A safe assumption is that most voters registered as non-affiliated or independent tend toward the libertarian. Hold on while I jot that down in a memo to John Kerry....
Other useful quotes by Eastwood: On violence: "I grew up watching Bogart and Cagney. Did their violence make me want to shoot somebody? No. To the healthy mind, it doesn't do anything. Those Columbine guys? They were sickos to begin with." On gay marriage: "From a libertarian point of view, you would say, 'Yeah? So what?' You have to believe in total equality. People should be able to be what they want to be and do what they want -- as long as they're not harming people."
That's the key to all rational ethics and values: "Do what you want with harm to none." From that one can extrapolate a rational position on most domestic issues (abortion perhaps being the noteworthy exception). So why aren't any presidential candidates saying it? I have only questions.