Monthly Archives: January 2016

It’s a pity that abandoned houses tend to degrade over time (as reported by The Detroit News).  Otherwise, I’d suggest the government of Michigan, as the responsible party, buy all the foreclosed, abandoned properties in the Detroit metro area and give them to the residents of Flint.  Everyone moves, and Flint becomes a ghost town, a monument to mismanagement by the Snyder administration.

So far, I have not heard the base cause of mistaken decision making.  I’m speculating someone didn’t want to spend the money, which would be attributable to the intrusion of private sector thinking into the public sector – but that awaits the discernment of facts.

[Updated to add a missing word – 7/30/16]

We finished up A Close Call for Boston Blackie (1946) in the last couple of days, part of a series of movies involving the title character ^{(played by Chester Morris)}, a reformed thief, one of which I’ve reviewed recently.  (Before you wonder, no, we don’t have the series, our DVR picks these up at random.)

The previous review indicated a mundane, fluffy bit of entertainment, and, indeed, as Boston and The Runt wave farewell to their cop friends in front of the building housing Boston’s apartment, an assault on a woman takes place across the street. Zounds! In broad daylight, no less!  Their dash to the rescue is not soon enough to catch the arch-fiends, but the lady turns out to be an old flame of Boston’s, Gerry.  She’s unhurt, unlike my teeth, which are beginning to itch already – they’re allergic to predictability.  It’s a bit early, but it is a B-Class movie from the ’40s, right?

But my teeth gain some surcease when Boston and the Runt escort Gerry to Boston’s apartment and they hear a baby squalling – in the apartment.  Without asking how she gained access to his apartment, Gerry reveals the baby is her’s, by her inmate husband, and she secreted him with Boston because the hubby has been paroled and she’s terrified of him.  At some point the police are called.

And then, yep, hubby shows up in a towering rage and a handgun held on all of them.  Will Boston play the hero?  Isn’t it, er, a bit early in the movie to bring together a resolution?

And the door opens a trifle and someone else shoots the husband.  Whoa.  The teeth are much happier.  Gerry flips out and dumps the baby on Boston and the Runt; the Runt takes the baby and legs it out the window as the police come in, wondering what’s going on with gun shots.  Eventually, they find the hubby in the closet.  Lacking a missing suspect, Boston is the default selection.

Still with me?

This is where it really gets interesting.  In a side scene, we learn that the baby isn’t even Gerry’s, but rather the son of criminal, who, with his partner, is going to extort money from the father of the hubby under the guise that the baby is his grandson.

Meanwhile, down at the police station, the cops try to shake information out of Boston, who’ll barely own up to his own hair.  Finally, the assistant to the detective, forever portrayed as an idiot, is left in charge of our eponymous hero, all the while protesting he should be practicing his wrestling moves for the police wrestling competition.  Alone, Boston offers to help him practice, and once again my dental work is in distress.

Briefly.

The cop executes a simple throw, bringing Boston to the floor, who laughs and says he’s impressed, but says he’d like to try again.  Then Boston throws the cop to the floor (rather clumsily, but the cop is rather larger than Boston), and the cop is knocked cold.  Boston laughs, and exits stage right, pulling on coat.

I shrug.  Right?

And then the cop, the idiot who catches on to double meaning word play 30 seconds after everyone else, pops an eye open, laughs, and also exits stage right.

Now that’s interesting.  Because it’s unexpected.

There are more twists, but I will say the writers, or whoever was in charge, failed to take advantage of these surprises to any real advantage.  It is, after all, a B class movie.  (But then, so was Casablanca, yet it’s a classic.)  The cinematography is undistinguished, the pacing basically the same throughout, the acting competent.  But the story at least kept my interest – as each scene unfolded, I asked myself, what will surprise me here?  And they did.  An unexpected choice. A twist showing a new motivation.  Wait, who’s this character?  Oh .. that actually makes sense.

Unlike the latter half of the latest Star Wars installment.

I shan’t go on to any more detail of this movie, but I will say that this reminded me, or, better, clarified for me, a certain nature of story telling.  The clash of two individuals, determined and resourceful, over something, is one of the most important parts of storytelling.  Too often we don’t see resourceful characters; these colorless dudes are called spear-carriers, doomed to carry messages to real people, and then die with a knife in the back.  And showing the resourcefulness in a subplot may be even more important than the main plot, because it shows they have lives, they have thoughts and dreams, they have common decency (“Save the cat!“) – or not.  All those things that make us believe they are close approximations to real people – and that the choices they make, and the consequences thereof, may have application in our own lives.

The editors at NewScientist have picked a curious incident around which to enunciate some worries over the killer robots previously discussed in this thread,  From their leader (16 January 2016, no paywall):

Called COTSbot, it is one of the world’s most advanced autonomous weapons systems, capable of selecting targets and using lethal force without any human involvement (see “Can this starfish-killing robot save the Great Barrier Reef?“).

A starfish-killing robot may not sound like an internationally significant development, but releasing it on to the reef would cross a Rubicon. COTSbot amply demonstrates that we now have the technology to build robots that can select their own targets and autonomously decide whether to kill them. The potential applications in human affairs – from warfare to law enforcement – are obvious.

As an event which can legitimately bring into focus the idea the issues of killer robots need to be confronted – yes. Unfortunately, the particulars of the situation do not lend themselves to a detailed analysis.  The issues of killer robots are numerous, but one of the most salient is proper selection of target, or, on the flip side, the deaths of non-targets – i.e., people who are not fighting. It’s not likely that a COTSbot will run rampant in Sydney, and the natural setting is hardly a war zone.  Given the breathlessness of other news outlets reporting on COTsbot, it’s not easy to suggest that COTSbot should be retired before it ever enters the fight against out of control starfish.

And that obvious argument makes it a little difficult to use this as a stepping stone to the real issues of killer robots.  Will folks really take it seriously?  A quick search of the web didn’t reveal anyone else expressing similar concerns.  I worry, a little, that some potential participants, who perhaps are not employing their strongest cognitive resources, will look at this, transport these arguments into the actual killer robot discussion, as ill-fitting as they may be, and conclude there’s little to worry about.

So this might be a bit of the boy who shouted the wolf was eating the starfish – and everyone stared at the boy and wondered about his sanity.

In contrast to more positive recent reports on the world wide coal situation, Michael LePage continues to beat the drum of worry in NewScientist (16 January 2016, no paywall).  He references an expert:

In fact, while coal use is falling in most rich countries, cheaper prices worldwide have prompted a remarkable coal renaissance, says economist Ottmar Edenhofer of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin, Germany. If just a third of the planned coal power stations are built, we will burn through the remaining carbon budget for 2 °C of warming.

This correlates with this morning’s MPR Kerri Miller show, where a surge in sales of SUVs and trucks is attributed to the precipitous fall in gasoline prices, as is a drop in sales of electric vehicles, and is quite logical, of course: lower prices makes fuel consumption less of an element in selecting what the next new vehicle should be.

So what to do about these planned coal-fired plants?  Well, seeing as they are still in the planning stages, we could attempt to spike the artillery before it fires: send the message that by the time these plants are built, the coal will be expensive, or worse, unavailable.

How can we do that?  I suggest banning the export of coal from the United States.  The United States is not the leading exporter of coal, according to the World Coal Association, but occupies the #4 spot, behind Indonesia, Australia, and Russia.  However, as the most influential nation in the world, a dramatic gesture of this sort – even with loopholes for special situations and that sort of thing – would certainly bring the issue to the attention of other governments.  While we won’t influence Russia, we can certainly influence Australia, who recently replaced a Prime Minister who blew with the wind with a new Prime Minister who is working towards a solution to climate change, and possibly Indonesia.

To this end, I have started a whitehouse.gov petition.  If climate change concerns you, I hope you’ll sign it – and spread the word.

We slurped up ONE MYSTERIOUS NIGHT (1944) last night, an installment in the old Boston Blackie series.  The lead, performed by Chester Morris, has an adequate charisma and patter; his partner, “The Runt”, is rather less well used. The police are adequate but not marvelous, as are the various supporting roles.

The plot is rather light and fluffy; when one character bites the dust, it carefully never lets us see his sister, as this would require adding a bit of gravity to an otherwise cotton candy like movie, and we all know what happens when cotton candy is asked to support anything more than helium.

And the dialogue never quite achieves the patter of, say, THE THIN MAN. Workmanlike, it rumbles and stutters along with hardly an ear for the ebb and flow one might look for.

So.  An adequate, sometimes slightly, every so slightly intriguing movie.  Good for a rainy, tired afternoon.

The news about the group in Oregon who busted into Federal lands and claim it’s theirs’ under some obscure interpretation of the law is well known, as is the muted response of the Feds – whether it’s the proper countermove will be judged by history.

But I found interesting this piece from AL Monitor‘s Ben Caspit of Israeli politician Moshe Ya’alon, current Defense Minister, in particular his response to the actions of certain fringe-right wing  settlers:

A new climax has been reached in the current crisis. A group of settlers, including branch leaders and other major figures in the Likud Party, purchased two buildings in Hebron. They entered these buildings under cover of darkness and left two new “facts on the ground.” This is how the settlers regularly operate; they follow a familiar “model” of secretly purchasing property, taking it over by surprise and then conducting negotiations with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which ultimately controls the West Bank, as to whether they can stay there or not.

Mentioned later is the fact that while the purchase is legal, it may be not be “settled” without the IDF’s permission.

Usually an operation involving the evacuation of homes such as this can last weeks, if not months or years. It gets dragged out in the courts, while the validity of the purchase is investigated and it is ascertained whether the owners really made a sale. Discussions ensue over security issues and how the incident impacts Israel’s diplomatic standing. This time, however, Ya’alon decided that it was enough. He heard about the occupation of the homes in real time while conducting his regular assessment of the situation with the IDF’s top brass at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. He then ordered that the settlers be removed, without any delays whatsoever.

They had not expected that. On the night of Jan. 21-22, the IDF forcibly removed the settlers from both homes. The coalition immediately erupted in turmoil, with attacks against Ya’alon launched not only by Bennett’s HaBayit HaYehudi Party, but even by many people from Ya’alon’s own Likud Party (as described by Mazal Mualem). But Ya’alon wasn’t taken aback. He received partial support from Netanyahu, though a day late. Still, Ya’alon stuck to his principles, and he refused to blink.

I have no intention of suggesting the situations are so similar that we should do the same thing.  But it’s interesting and instructive that immediate, decisive actions were taken and were a surprise to the perpetrators who have so little respect for the law.

NewScientist (2 January 2016, paywall) speculates on the future of encryption in “How 2016’s war on encryption will change your way of life,” giving the dry outlines of 4 possibilities:

1. Outright ban.
2. Back doors.
3. Rebellion from the corporate world.
4. Total encryption.

In none of these scenarios does encryption die off; NS believes that our need for, indeed, our addiction to encryption, whether we’re aware of it or not, will overrules any overt or covert attempt to smother it.  Pandora, pretty or not, is out of the box.

Most speculative is their fourth scenario, subtitled “All out encryption beats cybercrime”:

It all started with Ashley Madison. When the breach of the adulterous dating site in 2015 led to divorces and even suicides after profiles were leaked online, people began to wake up to the dangers of unencrypted data. But it was only after a string of further hacks in 2017, including on the UK’s centralised medical record service care.data, that the public started clamouring for protection.

Tech firms continued the encryption roll-out started as a result of the Snowden leaks, while cryptographers stepped up research on new and easier-to-use techniques to protect our data. At the same time, laws were brought in requiring that any unencrypted database be air-gapped – that is, removed from any kind of network – to significantly reduce the possibility of a hack.

The security services protested at first, saying these moves would harm their ability to protect us. But with cybercrime levels nose-diving, the FBI and other enforcement agencies found they had more resources to put into targeted, on-the-ground surveillance, enabling them to tail potential terrorists and foil a number of serious plots threatening the UK and US.

In our more secure world, an elderly Edward Snowden has been pardoned by the US for leaking state secrets, and allowed to return home.

The assertion that cybercrime would fall once everything is properly encrypted is charming, but, unfortunately, a little far out there.  First, it assumes everyone encrypts everthing; second, it ignores the social engineering aspects of cybercrime, where the acquisition of a password is adequate to access data that is otherwise encrypted.  In a world where everything is encrypted, and great value lies in the encrypted, it seems likely that criminals will shift resources into social engineering attacks.

Third, there is an assumption that encryption will remain effective; if someone solves the P=NP problem and proves P=NP, then cryptography, as currently envisioned, will be theoretically vulnerable to attacks.

Fourth, the denial of cryptography resources to criminals, terrorists, and adversarial states is a great lure for those responsible for state security, as communications is key for such endeavours.  Unfortunately, those in the field will tell you that those encryption algorithms developed publicly are the most secure; security through obscurity is more easily destroyed.  On the flip side, acquisition of the keys to an encrypted communications channel can permit silent monitoring of important communications.  This had devastating consequences for the Axis powers in World War II, as documented in numerous history books as well as the movies MIDWAY and THE IMITATION GAME; there’s little reason to think the same is occurring even as we consider the entire topic.

I suspect NS is blue skying a little bit here, but the topic is actually quite central to Internet users these days.

What is, or are, the point of tests?  Is it really just to assess master of material?  So goes the assumption of this article by Aviva Rutkin in NewScientist (2 January 2016):

A new algorithm could both improve your knowledge and do away with formal tests altogether. Developed by researchers at Stanford University and Google in California, it analyses students’ performance on past practice problems, identifies where they tend to go wrong and forms a picture of their overall knowledge.

But I think mere assessment is a little naive.  Tests are, by their nature, pressure-cookers, and the ability to perform under pressure is an essential part of the human experience.  I don’t like it; I hated tests.  But you must recognize they force students to prepare and to perform; those who do neither come to know their failures and adapt – or drop out.

No one lives a stress-free life – so why not prepare for it as a by-product of learning?

I’m a story junkie, so in a word, meh.  Great CGI, of course, loved the idea of working salvage on the remains of a battlefleet, a stormtrooper with a conscience was interesting, some of the new characters were excellent and the new actors seemed to do a good job – but, in the end, to quote my Arts Editor, I was never on the edge of my seat.  Not like the original.  It didn’t have me thinking about it for the next few weeks, unlike, say, THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE, or ART & CRAFT.   Every major plot turn had to turn the way it did, every major decision had to go the way it did – because that’s how such movies are made.  So long as you revel in such movies, full of spaceships and the forces of good and evil, this will fill the niche amply.

But the ending just about makes me gag thinking about it.  Of course Skywalker is waiting for her.  With his back turned.  With a grim, bewhiskered face from which sad wisdom radiates.

Of course.  A chipmunk could have predicted that.

Here’s a little thought experiment.  How about she climbs that mountain, seeking the legendary Skywalker, scion of the Jedi, and what does she find?

The old man, stuck in a hole with a broken leg.  When she asks why he didn’t just levitate out, he replies … I no longer have the Force.

End of film.

Now that would have left the fans clamoring.

As it is, I can’t even remember the name of the bad guys.

Literally, that is.  This slipped past me, as NewScientist (2 January 2016) reports:

The US government has told NASA to visit Europa in 2022. The latest budget set aside $175 million for a planned fly-by of Jupiter’s glacier moon, but it added a twist: NASA is required to land on the moon, not just fly past. Europa is a promising target in the search for extraterrestrial life, thanks to its liquid water ocean.

Via the Planetary Society, Van Kane clarifies:

“This Act includes $1,631,000,000 for Planetary Science. Of this amount, $261,000,000 is for Outer Planets, of which $175,000,000 is for the Jupiter Europa clipper mission and clarifies that this mission shall include an orbiter with a lander that will include competitively selected instruments and that funds shall be used to finalize the mission design concept with a target launch date of 2022.”

“…$175,000,000 is for an orbiter with a lander to meet the science goals for the Jupiter Europa mission as outlined in the most recent planetary science decadal survey. That the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall use the Space Launch System as the launch vehicle for the Jupiter Europa mission, plan for a launch no later than 2022, and include in the fiscal year 2017 budget the 5-year funding profile necessary to achieve these goals.”

– Final budget law for Fiscal Year 2016 regarding NASA’s Europa mission

While there’s at least eight years until it launches, this has been a pivotal year for developing NASA’s Europa mission. Last spring, NASA selected a rich and highly capable instrument set. This summer, following a design concept review, the mission moved from concept studies to an official mission. And just last week, Congress directed NASA to expand the mission by adding a small lander as well as launch the mission by 2022 and use the Space Launch System. These latter aren’t just suggestions: they are the law.

Whew!  NewScientist made it sound like the landing should occur in 2022 – virtually impossible.  Kane’s post is longish and full of interesting thoughts.  I’ll just quote one:

One aspect of this proposed lander concept is different than those I’ve seen before. Most lander studies have looked at small spacecraft (and this proposal would count as a small spacecraft) that would be carried by the mother craft until just before landing. For the design Berger reported on, lander and its descent stage would orbit Jupiter on their own for months to years before landing. This means that together they are a fully functional independent spacecraft with its own solar arrays for power, propulsion, navigation, and communications. Apparently the cost and mass of adding these functions to the descent stage and lander is a better bargain than adding the radiation hardening that would be required if the lander were carried past Europa 45 times.

So I’m guessing the main craft would survey Europa 45 times, and once a landing site is selected, the lander module moves into Europan orbit (only now exposed to radiation) and the descent stage goes into action.  Possibly the communications will go from the descent stage to the landing unit to the primary craft, which would carry the heftier communications gear required for communications with the Deep Space Network.  Although given how little power is available to the Voyagers and we can still hear them, we could still talk directly – but slowly – to the lander module (but maybe not the descent stage).  But I’m just a hand waver….

Just a quick impression of HEROES REBORN.  First, we caught the earlier HEROES shows on disc, so we know, sort of, what’s going on – we were disappointed by the cancellation after the Carnival volume, so we were looking forward to it.

I was disappointed.

Scope

First, the sweep of the new volume was appropriate to the overall arc of the show.  The focus is on people with amazing powers; it’s appropriate they face a challenge of amazing magnitude.  We saw that in the earlier incarnations, as they faced a corporate government bent on imprisoning them, a rogue power of nearly insurmountable capabilities, and another gone shrewdly mad.

Now the world itself is ending.  That’s a worthy problem.

Characters

But the characters … are not quite as interesting.  Most of the old cast is just gone.  A few are brought back, but play only small, supporting roles – Claire, who could heal any injury, appears only as a corpse.  This is the new generation of Heroes, and while they may start off interesting, I suspect they didn’t receive as much creative, organic attention from the writers as did the first couple of crops of Heroes.  For example, a married couple who loses their son in a disaster attributed to the Heroes (also known as Evos) begin hunting and killing Heroes …. until one day the husband begins exhibiting powers.

It could have been interesting.  Questions of bigotry, the value of the Other, even of redemption, could have been fruitfully explored – although the time pressure of a natural disaster does make such explorations a little more difficult.  The fascination exerted by the character of Sylar in the earlier shows, for example, was multiplied by sending him on a solitary quest where he explores his powers (he can understand how things work), his family history, and the nature of random violence and how it can rebound upon one’s head.  His clashes with other Heroes, his powers, the actions he takes and his character evolving over time – and the actor who portrayed him, Zachary Quinto, let’s not forget – all served to make him a fascinating, popular character.  That complex, yet organic, journey from violent madman to something much like a real Hero, in an arc spanning multiple volumes, really served to tie those early volumes together, while asking and exploring questions concerning how morality binds even the most powerful of Heros as well as men.

But in Reborn, this man (Luke Collins) and wife (Joanne) hunt Heroes, killing with no warning – she shoots them between the eyes with such accuracy you almost wonder if she has powers, too – in vengeance for their dead son.  But then his powers begin to manifest, and does she kill him for being a Hero?  No, no.  Of course not.  He gets to leave.  Menaced, of course.  But she’s too heart-broken to kill him, or have him around.

Predictable.  The bane of bad drama.  And then he confesses that he never enjoyed killing the prey, he just did it for her.  Again, it’s no surprise.   Ah, the guilt!  He’s one note, and because the time arc in this show is just a few days, Luke really has no time to further evolve in response to what has happened to him. In the end, we can’t tell if he loves her or not anymore, and he ultimately kills her when she nearly destroys the last hope of mankind.  I shrugged.  His final sacrifice was predictable from the plot – not from his power, which was not explained in sufficient detail to suggest, even in retrospect, that he could do what he did.

And what of Quentin, a nerdy man, and his sister Phoebe, a dark Hero working for the antagonistic side? He at least surprised me with a nifty bit of betrayal, but in the end, after a bit of impotent shouting, his shooting of his own sister betrays the most powerful message of the series: how do people who may be somewhat different live together?  There is no creativity in his responses, nor can there be, as the crisis is upon them and will wait for no one.  In the end, there’s hardly any lesson which can really be drawn from the shooting.

Casting

Jack Coleman as Noah Bennet, perhaps THE mainstay of earlier volumes, returns to anchor this show, and while his character is no longer as ruthless or amoral, he retains his charm and his knowledge of Heroes in general.  Angela, Matt, René (aka The Haitian) also appear, so we know they are solid; we know their history.  The newer characters vary, some projecting useful ambiguities, others more one-note, whether a shortcoming of the script or the actor is not entirely clear to me.

But what I found particularly interesting was the visual casting.  As dull as the character of Joanne Collins, the vengeful mother, might have been, she has tremendous visual impact, with a unique face highlighted by a hairstyle which, in her grim mood, makes her an agent of Hell, yet when she smiles it merely appears outré; indeed, her husband almost didn’t seem to measure up to her (however, judging purely on looks is certainly a faux pas). Molly Walker, a Hero with a location capability, is both attractive and unorthodox in appearance in a manner accentuating her role.  Oscar, a Hero who causes selective memory loss, is delightfully cast and clothed; I was slightly heartbroken when Vengeful Mom catches up to him.  Katana Girl looked, appropriately, like something out of a cartoon. The new Master of Time and Space is also quite striking, as he was in ONCE UPON A TIME. This may be a problem for this young actor, as he tended to either look fiercely pouty and sarcastic, or slightly puzzled; there was little nuance.

Characters

In the end, none of the new characters really stood out for me as characters in themselves.  To a large extent they fulfilled functions of the plot, rather than intelligent agents caught up and, sometimes, struggling against that plot.  Compare to previous volumes, where Matt fought mightily to remain a policeman, despite whatever advantages his mind-reading might bring him, or what the plot might require of him.  Or Sylar, who cut a vast, bloody slash throughout the series as a chaotic creature learning the ways of life as only he could – and bedamned if agents of Primatech, or the government, are after him – they are brushed aside so casually they don’t even always die.  That is a lovely, delicious disdain for the plot.

In REBORN, the exigencies of a civilization on the edge of destruction gives a universal and irrefutable motivation to the characters, and they respond as they must.  This sounds like good drama, and it is not: the responses are logical and predictable.  Great if you’re a logician, bad if you’re a dramatist, as the audience wants a topping of surprise to surmount their logic: not just a nod, but a blink-blink, then the nod, then a good Hmmm.  Remember the Eclipse that slowed speedster Daphne Millbrook down to a crawl (actually, back to her crutches)?  That was a Hmmm! moment.

Not that the writers don’t try, for there are competing solutions to the dilemma: Erica Kravid is a woman hell bent on using the raw power of the Heroes to jump a select group of humans to the future, and there they’ll rebuild.  She’ll stop at nothing, I tell you, nothing – and so she becomes broadly predictable. Everything is sacrificed – morals, family, anything – to achieve her goal of saving the humans and obliterating the Heroes.  One of the interesting facets of the earlier volumes was the obscure nature of the motivations of the antagonists, thus making questionable the limits on their actions.  What was the purpose of Primatech?  What was the goal of the government?  Even the Carnival was not entirely clear as to the limits.  But Erica, she’s saving humanity, so she thinks – although it’s not entirely clear how she knows a catastrophe is on its way.

The competition is more interesting: Angela prophecies two young Heroes will save the day.  At least there’s some vagueness, some questions.  And at the climactic moment, there’s some clever use of the Master of Time and Space.  But in the end, an artificial problem is inserted into the plot, requiring the noble sacrifice of a character.  Unnecessary, and a loss of an emblematic character.  In the end, I wonder why the Master of Time and Space didn’t simply move the Earth out of the way, and then return it when the danger had passed?  He could have called on Ando, the supercharger from previous Volumes, for help – or any large number of Heroes could have been called on for assistance.

Perhaps the most interesting character is a Marine, decorated for bravery which he never earned, who is closest to the old Ando and Mohinder characters in being a man desiring powers of his own; he designs and builds a powered suit, reminiscent of Ironman.  He shows some range of emotion, but the writers never really explore the character; indeed, at the end the suit is gone and he’s exercising his EMT training instead.  Did he discard it purposely?  Did the writers just grow tired of someone who dressed a little like a Mexican wrestler?

But I had almost forgotten: Erica’s hit man, Harris.  This is a character positively wreathed in mystery, someone who can clone himself easily and quickly, and has real fighting skills.  What binds him to Erica?  Is he a machine or a Hero?  He becomes a force of Nature, something unnegotiable, and even when a clone destroyed, you know it’s not the end of him, just a cessation.  He becomes a source of tension who is, unfortunately, lost at the end of the volume.

In the end, the tide of the plot comes washing in and the characters are caught in the riptide, pulled remorselessly into the service of helping civilization survive. No more semi-comic relief (think Hiro and Ando from previous volumes) to highlight the plot.  Just ominous old nature, out to do us in again.

Plot

Which brings us to this plot.  Or have I harped too much?  Let me pluck a minor chord, though, as in the first couple of episodes, the time travel and forced amnesia of Noah injects an enjoyable complexity and mystery.  Why did Noah forget the death of Claire?  Wait, why is René trying to kill Noah?  (Hey, is that a plot hole?  I can’t think of why he would have … since René reappears as a good guy.)   What sort of Power requires this other guy to wear a Mexican wrestling costume?  Will it be kitsch or parody or – oops, that was a lot of blood.

But, as previously noted, it all became predictable.  As our doom becomes imminent and the world begins to break down, one of our saviors is menaced, yet again, this time by Phoebe, who holds her above an abyss, and all I could think was, don’t let her scream, let her say something witty about this being dashedly irritating, or something equally out of character.

Nope.  It was a screamfest.

Special Effects

Adequate.  Awesome storm.  I will register a complaint that the fighting capability of Katana Girl was … visually suspect.  Ragged.  Unconvincing.  She needed a better fight choreographer.

On the other hand, seeing a flight of monarch butterflies on an ice field in the Arctic was effective.

Powers

And no review of a Heroes Volume is complete without mentioning new powers, which in this one ranged from vaguely and disappointingly formed (so what is the world saver doing, exactly?  When she works with the other world saver, what is going on, exactly?  How does being the Master of Time and Space make it possible to generate a force shield?  Compare to how Peter Petrellli’s power to steal other powers was used to temporarily defeat Sylar, a very logical and yet possibly non-obvious application), to Phoebe’s ability to suppress powers around her (sort of a walking eclipse), to the outré ability to insert a human being into a computer game – or take a computer game character out of the game and insert into reality, which was fascinating, if incredibly silly.

In The End

I think the major mistake of this new volume was to have the threat not be human or Hero based, but be a natural disaster.  It brooks no negotiation, moral questions, or anything else of real interest. There’s some interesting questions about how to survive it, yet HEROES is not about surviving natural disasters, or how to be superhumans – it’s about how to be just people, struggling with problems both old and new.  The real antagonist of this volume, a natural disaster, compresses and nullifies the subplots, the thematic explorations, all the little details that made previous volumes more interesting.  No more hard driving senators with hidden powers, obscured government plots, or family spats more deadly than most small wars.   We just need to get the kids to the town in Angela’s dream before Erica’s solution becomes permanent.  All the other bumps in the road were just … bumps in the road.  Does civilization end in this volume?  Of course not.  Angela told us it wouldn’t.  And where would the next sequel go?

Dramatic tension?  Nolo contendre.  The costs of losing to this antagonist were … too absolute.

Music in My Heart (1940) has a plot which may seem strangely reminiscent of the present, as the leading man is an inadvertent immigrant to the United States, brought to States as an infant and knowing nothing else, this deportation of a man with a quintessential American accent may tug at the heartstrings – but don’t be fooled, this is not a serious approach to the problems, whatever they may be, with illegal immigration.

This is fluff, unadulterated cotton candy, from male lead Tony Martin‘s superb vocal control when he sings, to the strangely cold-hot-cold portrayal of the female lead by Rita Hayworth, from the benevolent management of the opera company employing Tony to the family of Rita, a bunch of Italians pretending to be Romanovs from Russia, to whom money is more a distraction from life, rather than a goal.  All could have become a memorable focus of a few movies, but none are dealt with seriously, and the movie is nearly stolen, lock stock and barrel, by character actor Eric Biore, who plays a butler who schemes to steal back Rita from Tony for his own boss, Charles, a man who can hardly see the world for the curtain of money pouring over him.  The plot careens from random coincidence to fortunate meeting, all while no one seems too put out by this any of the unfortunate incidents that befalls them, whether it be a petulant millionaire setting up his future wife to fail, or a man on his way to a ship only to have an accident that makes him too late to catch it.

Is it worth your time?  Depends on who you are.  If you’re a fan of Rita, maybe – her performance is quirky, but perhaps a trifle under-confident.  If you like Tony, or at least his singing, then sure.  And if Mr. Biore has charmed you in other movies, he plays between the keys with a deft skill.

The Guardian’s Damian Carrington gathers up a report on coal consumption and CO₂ emissions in China:

Coal-burning in China is in significant decline, according to official figures released on Tuesday, signalling a major turnaround for the world’s biggest polluter.

The new data is good news for the fight against climate change but bad for the struggling global coal industry.

China saw a huge increase in coal-burning for power and industry in the last two decades but has suffered serious air pollution as a result. However in recent years there has been a surge in low-carbon energy and a slowdown in the economy – GDP growth fell in 2015 to its lowest in 25 years – as China moves away from manufacturing. …

China’s coal use has fallen in 2015 across a wide range of measures and its national carbon emissions are likely to have fallen by about 3% as a result. There was a 3.5% drop in coal production, coal-fired electricity generation fell 2.8% and overall power generation dropped 0.2%, the first fall in 50 years. There were similar decreases in coal-intensive heavy industry such as iron, steel and cement.

Other recent developments were coal imports to China plummeting by 35% year-on-year in December 2015 and the government’s ban on new coal mines for three years.

In contrast, renewables investment in China hit an all-time high in 2015 at $110bn. Overall low-carbon electricity generation – hydro, wind, nuclear and solar – increased more than 20% in 2015.

Continued positive developments – and given the government structure of China, this could move very quickly.  And what about that coal industry?  BloombergBusiness reports

U.S. coal producers Alpha Natural Resources Inc., Patriot Coal Corp. and Walter Energy Inc. have sought bankruptcy protection [in 2015]. …

“As commodity markets fall further, production will have to be cut,” said Christoph Eibl, CEO of Tiberius Asset Management AG, which has $800 million in commodity investments. “Producers will have to go bankrupt.”

InvestmentMine provides this chart on coal prices:

It occurs to me that the front line workers in this industry should perhaps be an explicit target for retraining.  After all, through no fault of their own they are in an industry identified as detrimental to the continued survival of human civilization, after years of being a positive.  They are often ill-paid and very dependent on the industry, so if it goes away, especially because governments have determined that it is damaging our future, then those who labor in the mines should be first up for compensation & training.

Tonight I’m not feeling a lot of sympathy for management and shareholders.

(h/t Michael Graham Richard @ Treehugger.com)

NewScientist’s leader (6 January 2016) covers another problem tied to climate change: global browning:

Now there is a new pollution problem on the horizon: global browning. Like global dimming, it might at first sound almost comical – but like global dimming, it is anything but. All over the world, increased inflows of dead organic matter are making lakes and rivers murkier. The full extent of the problem is still being assessed, but it is likely to be bad news for wildlife. It is also bad news for humans, because it makes water purification more difficult and expensive.

Somewhat predictably, the cause of global browning is also industrial pollution, although not in the form of smog. Instead, it is largely the unanticipated consequence of another clean-up success story: the reduction of acid rain (see “Global browning: Why the world’s fresh water is getting murkier“).

That hangover will eventually dwindle, but browning also seems to be driven by climate change itself. If so, it will be harder to tackle than global dimming. And if we do tackle it successfully, there may be unexpected knock-on effects – as there were with dimming. The pollutants in that case, while generally undesirable, alleviated climate change by reflecting sunlight back into space.

The referenced article is in the same issue, and explores in more detail.

Acid rain began increasing in the mid-1800s as the Industrial Revolution took off, powered by fossil fuels. Burning these hydrocarbons, especially coal, produces sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which react with water in the atmosphere to produce acids. By the 1970s, it was apparent that this was damaging trees and aquatic ecosystems, and governments started enacting legislation to clean up smokestacks. Acid rain began to decrease. But there was an unforeseen consequence. In many temperate and subarctic areas, deposits of sulphur had changed the chemistry of soils, making them “stickier”, says Chris Evans, a biogeochemist at the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council. This meant most DOC [Dissolved organic carbon] stayed put, and didn’t run off into surrounding rivers and lakes. But as soil sulphur concentrations dropped, DOC became unstuck.

In the mid 1990s, Evans and two colleagues were among the first to notice rising DOC levels. A decade ago, their research revealed that concentrations in 22 rivers in the UK had increased by an average of 91 per cent over the preceding 15 years. Two years later, Evans collaborated with a larger group to reveal that rising DOC wasn’t restricted to the UK. Their results, published in Nature in 2007, showed that 522 remote lakes and streams in North America and northern Europe had seen nearly a doubling of DOC concentrations between the 1990s and 2004. They also firmly tied the trend to decreased sulphur deposition, which had halved during the same period.

The result?

The link between browning and climate change is yet to be confirmed, but one thing is clear: more browning is bad news. One survey of 168 lakes in Norway found that while initial increases in DOC were linked to increases in brown trout numbers, continued rises caused the population to steadily drop. The initial benefits were probably due to DOC’s ability to block UV rays and the fact that when it drains into watercourses it often brings phosphorus and nitrogen too, key nutrients that fuel the growth of organisms at the bottom of the food chain. However, DOC levels reach a tipping point when the water turns a deep brown, says Anders Finstad at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who led the study. This prevents sunlight from reaching bottom-dwelling algae and, if the water is dark enough, free-floating plankton. No sunlight means no photosynthesis, and no food at the base of the food web.

From pothole to pothole, it seems.  Sometimes I wonder if we’ll find our way to a relatively stable position.  That would actually be rather unnatural, though.

The GOP appears to be floating further and further from the American mainstream, and even from its nourishing river: Wall Street. Joshua Green publishes a piece in BloombergPolitics concerning how the anti-gay attitude of the chairman of the critical Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises, Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, is clashing with the banking industry:

Garrett’s committee is vital to Wall Street. “The rules of the road for handling money and anything with the SEC go through this committee,” says Marcus Stanley, policy director of the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform. “There’s a ton of money at stake.” In Washington, the committee is known as the ATM, because banks and hedge funds shower the chairman with contributions. After the Dodd-Frank financial law forced hedge funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Garrett, already the recipient of more Wall Street money than almost any other member of the House, got millions more. The banks pay to have a voice, ensure they’re at the table when new rules are discussed, and insinuate themselves into the chairman’s good graces.

Where does the money go?

Much of the money Garrett collects from Wall Street is supposed to be passed along in the form of party dues to the GOP’s campaign arm, where it’s used to help other candidates get elected. So the committee is also important to Republicans because it binds the party with the business community in a mutually profitable arrangement. But back in July, Garrett threw a wrench into this smoothly humming machine.

At a private caucus meeting, he got into a heated dispute with his colleagues by declaring that he’d withhold hundreds of thousands of dollars in National Republican Congressional Committee dues to protest the party’s support for gay candidates. His outburst immediately caused a rift in the caucus. “I was shocked,” says Richard Tisei, a Massachusetts businessman who was one of the candidates Garrett objected to. “The first time I ran, I was nervous my sexuality would be a problem. But everyone was just great. John Boehner, Paul Ryan—they went out of their way to let me know it wasn’t. Eric Cantor pulled me aside and said, ‘You know, I’m the only Jew in the caucus, so I understand better than anyone how important it is to have you down here to broaden and diversify our ranks.’ ”

And this is a problem because the banking industry is progressive on the issue of LGBT rights:

The political fallout from Garrett’s remarks pales compared with the anguish it’s created in some corners of Wall Street. The financial industry ranks among the biggest donors to the Republican Party. But it has also been a pioneer in advancing gay rights.

To summarize the balance of Green’s very interesting article, banks – some of the largest in the nation, are beginning to taper off or stop donating money to Garrett.  While others are still donating, they are under pressure.

While there are certainly gay members of the GOP (the Log Cabin group), the party’s decades long drift to the right and encouragement of the most regressive of attitudes amongst otherwise good people is well-known.  It seems unlikely that it will swiftly change these attitudes, or dump those members who hold them, whether or not they are elected officials.

A political party is more than just about the votes, but money as well – and I’m not talking about corruption.  It costs money to come up with credible foreign policies, military policies, domestic policies — all of these require discussion, meetings, and research.  When a major source of funding to a party begins to dry up because the social policies of the party clash with those of the source, this is a source of danger to the party and, in the case of a major party, the country, because the country benefits from those discussions, these clashes of ideas.

Without that money, we’ll be stuck with more Rubios, Trumps, Bushes, and the rest of the current clown field – candidates and party who think the political clash of ideas is all about saying NO as loud as possible (how many times has the House tried to abolish the ACA while knowing Obama would simply veto the bill?).  And while this may benefit the Democrats, it’s not beneficial to the country in the long term.

It’ll be interesting to see how this comes out in the end.  Will the banks stand by their conscience, or will their wallet – their raison d’être – overcome their distaste and compel them to continue donations?  Will Garrett lose his seat in the next election, to a primary challenger or to a Democrat?  Long shot: will the Democrats take the House next cycle?

This may be one of the most pivotal races in the next cycle to watch.

(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)

The current saga of my Mythryl coding project, the last entry with regards to replacement text in DTDs suggested I would take this approach:

The extSubset production will be handled via a callback function that can then build a new recursive descent parser that knows about parameter entity references and generate a new string with all the replacements accomplished. I have not made a decision about intSubset, or perhaps markupdecl – a solution is not readily apparent.

I ended up abandoning that approach – my first approaches tend to be a little Byzantine compared to the final approach, so it’s not surprising.  However, the final approach (which is a bit of a grim thing to say in a programming project, really) is not much more appealing, as I decided to take the straightforward, but clumsy, approach of creating a new production rule:

pe_reference_replacement’ = p_in 1000 & |ws_i| & is_this “%” & name & is_this “;” & implement_replacement & p_out 1000;

pe_reference_replacement = <(irrelevant_ws & pe_reference_replacement’)> ;

This is in Mythryl using the recursive descent parser’s operators.   In the second production, the <> means 0 or more matching productions, while irrelevant_ws simply means there may be discardable whitespace. Basically, there may be multiple appearances of pe_reference_replacement’, separated by optional whitespace.

The first production uses the operator ||, which indicates the contents are optional, while ws_i is a synonym for irrelevant_ws, so this part is probably redundant (and if you’re thinking, on these two items, My, he’s sloppy – well, you win a prize!).  More interesting, there’s a check for a match to ‘%’, then a name, and then the required semi-colon – this is the definition of a parameter entity.  If all of these are matched, then implement_replacement will be called to actually implement the replacement.

Because implement_replacement is highly dependent on my implementation back end, I’ll just say it puts the replacement text on the input and continues onward for more processing.

References to pe_reference_replacement are now sprinkled throughout the relevant productions.  An example, first from the spec, then the original Mythryl code, then the updated:

EntityDef ::= EntityValue | (ExternalID NDataDecl?)

entity_def = p_in 73 & (entity_value | (external_id & |ndata_decl| )) & seventy_three_p & p_out 73;

entity_def = p_in 73 & |(pe_reference_replacement)| & (entity_value | (external_id & |ndata_decl| )) & seventy_three_p & p_out 73;

Subsidiary productions, where appropriate, also contain sprinklings of pe_reference_replacement as optional accompaniments.  Is this a satisfactory approach?  Barely.  It obscures the the production’s purpose, and it’s prone to errors.  I do not look forward to searching out bugs.  But I was not able to find an approach with a better balance in the limited time I allot to this project.

My first test of this comes from the W3 document itself, specifically Appendix D, entitled “Expansion of Entity and Character References (Non-Normative)“.  The example is labeled as particularly difficult, and is as follows:

1 <?xml version=’1.0′?>
2 <!DOCTYPE test [
3 <!ELEMENT test (#PCDATA) >
4 <!ENTITY % xx ‘&#37;zz;’>
5 <!ENTITY % zz ‘&#60;!ENTITY tricky “error-prone” >’ >
6 %xx;
7 ]>
8 <test>This sample shows a &tricky; method.</test>

(Ignore the line numbers.)  I can now parse this properly and report the expected results (which consist of all of the expected entity values, as well as the proper PCDATA for element test).  Yes, yes, this is hardly complete testing, but I’ve done enough damage today.

Discover reports on a dinosaur dancing ground:

Paleontologists from the University of Colorado Denver discovered a “dinosaur dance floor” in Colorado, where they say ancient theropods scraped deep furrows into the earth as they twisted, turned and kicked in an effort to impress females. The scrape marks were found in the Dakota Sandstone, a layer of sediment laid down around 100 million years ago in the Midwest and West during the Cretaceous period.

The researchers believe that some of the marks represent evidence of mating rituals among a species of dinosaur called Acrocanthosaurus, a large, predatory species of bipedal theropod that could grow up to 38 feet long and weigh as much as 6.8 tons.

That must have been a shattering experience to watch.

Maurice Bedard at LoanSafe.org has a lovely article on the Icelandic banking industry:

Iceland just sentenced their 26th banker to prison for his part in the 2008 economic collapse. The charges ranged from breach of fiduciary duties to market manipulation to embezzlement. …

… Iceland is also noted for being one of the Nordic Socialist countries, complete with universal health care, free education and a lot other Tea Potty [sic] nightmares.

(h/t Ron Anderson)

Which is an interesting reference, because, as Emily Ekins at Reason.com documents, the Tea Party grew out of opposition to the bailout:

Republican members of Congress faced vehement opposition from grassroots conservatives and libertarians opposed to providing taxpayer money to private businesses. And many of these angry grassroots grew into the eventual tea party movement.

So what did happen in Iceland?  Maurice:

When Iceland’s three major banks collapsed, it resulted in defaults totaling $114 billion in a country with agross domestic product (GDP) of only $19 billion. In October, 2008 the parliament passed emergency legislation to take over the domestic operations of the major banks and established new banks to handle them. They did not, however, take over any of the foreign assets or obligations. Those stayed with the original banks, right into bankruptcy.

They then brought charges against several banking executives for fraud and market manipulation, resulting in sentences ranging from four to five and a half years. As the special prosecutor said,

Why should we have a part of our society that is not being policed or without responsibility?

I suppose I’m a little confused as to the difference between takeover and bailout – the institution continues, if with a different name and face.  On the other hand, I don’t advocate their destruction, as the impact on society would be incredibly negative.

Eventually, one could say the Icelandic approach was a balance between saving society pain and punishing criminal failure, while the American approach also preserved society, while paying off the bankers, the class that funded the politicians.

We recently had the opportunity to view the Swedish classic THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957), Ingmar Bergman’s meditation on death.  A large part of the popularity of movies is simply the novelty effect, the exploration of a new topic, or an old topic in a new way. Often, this is how classics are born, and is also, in an entirely different way, why some books and movies (OK, stories in general) have outsized effects on us. To elucidate, I have occasionally found something I experienced as highly stimulating the first time is dull or, more embarrassing, well, embarrassing the second time (Heinlein’s I WILL FEAR NO EVIL falls into this category).  The particular story gains classic status because of newness, not because of deepness; and so one might suspect this is true of THE SEVENTH SEAL.

So, as no longer a carrot freshly dragged from the ground, what is still interesting about THE SEVENTH SEAL?  As a helpful reminder, a Swedish Crusader returning home washes up, with his squire, on a beach near his home, only to meet with Death.  He challenges Death to a chess match, and then goes on his way, occasionally playing a few more moves as he traverses plague-ridden Sweden, searching for his wife, married 10 years ago and not seen since.

Cinematography

Is marvelous.  It’s a reminder, for those mesmerized by color, that monochromatics in the hands of a master can be profoundly striking, emphasizing important details and setting scenes in unforgettable ways.  30 seconds into this film, my Arts Editor muttered, “Wow, this is beautifully done!”  As she’s highly visually oriented, I knew she meant the cinematography.

Characters

Every character permitted to speak has a story to tell; from Death and the Knight, worn out from his crusading, to the acting troupe they meet on the road, all have something to say, even if not enunciated, as their inner urges, from abstract worries about God, to avarice, fear or lust, force them to their actions.  Too many stories are filled with faceless, prolix spear-carriers; here, the spear-carriers are present but are essential landscape, admirable for their appearance and their silence.

The Carts

I actually only mention the Carts, used to haul the Witch to her fiery doom and by the Acting troupe for transportation and housing, because they looked brutally painful to use on those rutted roads; an element of realism in a work beset with realism but seasoned with allegory.  For the careful viewer, the casual brutality of travel in them brings to mind questions of convenience vs environmentalism: could we, if we had to, go back to using horses for travel?  …But I digress.

Death

The personification of Death is not unique to this story, but it remains an unusual element. As a character, he (a pronoun I find preferable to ‘it’) remains within the bounds one might imagine such an entity should inhabit, while still summoning our interest and wonder.  Yes, he harvests the living for his dance, but to what purpose would he agree to a game of chess?  At the end of the movie, we wonder whether he has ever lost; for he has, in order to gain an advantage, mislead the Knight into revealing his strategy.

Is this a metaphor of the inevitability of our own mortality?  May we delay our termination through various human devices, but never abrogate it?  While my interpretation may be easy and even obvious, the questions behind them remain those that most of us will eventually confront.  Death’s willingness to play chess also lets him discuss some philosophy with the Knight, illuminating one man’s inner quest and preparation for the inevitable, and that is of interest to the serious audience no matter what the era or their maturity.

Incoherency / The Death of Skat

We speak here of a story, an ordered set of actions and reactions, or so the manuals on story-telling would have us believe.  Yet in this movie the plague is moving through the countryside.  Death, for all that it is personified, is neither an active nor reactive force, even if he consents to the proffered game of chess.  Even as a gender pronoun, he simply is.  Such is the plague, a mindless random force that eliminates people.

This is what happens to Skat, the satyric actor.  One might say that Death takes a bit of vengeance on him, for in order to escape the fury of a cuckolded blacksmith, Skat fakes his own suicide.  Upon his successful escape, he climbs a tree to avoid wolves and ghosts, and at this point Death appears and, despite the semi-comic entreaties of the actor, proceeds to fell the tree, thus destroying the actor.

But Death evinces no grievance over Skat’s deception; Death’s reactions to the actor’s entreaties merely indicate this is a task for Death to undertake, and if he takes some pleasure in it, it is irrelevant to the finality of the act.  Skat will now dance at Death’s direction.  And this lack of vengeful attitude leads to this conclusion: It’s a random act.

An action without inner motivation.  Not a reaction to another’s.

At this juncture, I thank my friend Ward Rubrecht for directing me to a fascinating article by Galen Strawson on the nature of personal narratives, in which she argues,

‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ Or a fellow American psychologist, Dan P McAdams: ‘We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.’ And here’s the American moral philosopher J David Velleman: ‘We invent ourselves… but we really are the characters we invent.’ And, for good measure, another American philosopher, Daniel Dennett: ‘we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behaviour… and we always put the best “faces” on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self.’

So say the narrativists. We story ourselves and we are our stories. There’s a remarkably robust consensus about this claim, not only in the humanities but also in psychotherapy. It’s standardly linked with the idea that self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life.

I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.

At length, Strawson suggests that some people have strong senses of a personal, coherent story, while other folks are more witnesses to an incoherent Universe – or self.

Similarly, the reaction to the plague will depend on one’s sense of how much the Universe is a story, or a random set of actions in which we attempt to act, senselessly, in some coherent fashion.

Epitomizing this agony, near the end the Knight questions the Witch, a teenage girl named Tyan condemned to be burned for carnal knowledge of the Devil.  As to whether she had actually had contact with the Devil, we are left to decide. From here:

TYAN: But he is with me everywhere. I only have to stretch out my hand and I can feel his hand. He  is with me now too. The fire won’t hurt me. He will protect me from everything evil.

KNIGHT: Has he told you this?

TYAN: I know it.

KNIGHT: Has he said it? [Said forcefully]

TYAN: [Unaffected by the Knight’s forcefulness] I know it, I know it. You must see him somewhere, you must. The priests had no difficulty seeing him, nor did the soldiers. They are so afraid of him that they don’t even dare touch me.

The Knight’s pursuit of the question of God is interchangeable with the question of story: are we part of a greater story, or is our consciousness an evolutionary experiment in the ongoing quest for survival, and our perception of a story – as strong or weak as it may be – a mere illusion in a random Universe devoid of meaning and purpose?

For the viewer for whom their religious persuasion has become part of the bedrock of their lives, questions of these erupt, if ever, with great rarity but with debilitating force, fracturing lives long spent in certain assumptions.  But for those of us who find our religious assumptions more frail, questioned, or even outright false, the subject of meaning and purpose can be devilish if we have failed to find the inner meanings as instructed by the atheists and agnostics of the age.  These eternal questions will attract generations of audiences.  That’s what ultimately makes this such a classic film.

This review contains contributions from my wife and Arts Editor, Deb White.

Congress and select parts of the USA are not the only interested listeners to the SOTU speech.  So is the Kingdom of Jordan, as AL Monitor‘s Aaron Magid reports:

Addressing members of Congress that evening, Obama emphasized, “As we focus on destroying [IS], over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands.” The American leader’s assertion that such dire warnings about IS are misguided directly contradict one of [King of Jordan] Abdullah’s main talking points when traveling overseas.

Over and over — whether at the United Nations General Assembly podium, during an interview with PBS’ Charlie Rose or even in Kosovo — the Jordanian monarch has declared that the battle against IS is “a third world war, and I believe we must respond with equal intensity.” …

Obama’s minimizing of the IS campaign speaks to a fundamental divergence with Abdullah and has led many leading thinkers in Amman to question America’s determination and willingness to, in the president’s own words, “degrade and ultimately destroy [IS].” If the world’s strongest and most advanced military cannot defeat a far inferior and less organized group, what are Obama’s true intentions?

Which speaks to different viewpoints: for the United States, IS is a danger when abroad, and a danger to allies – but for the United States mainland, terror attacks, no matter how horrifying, are not a real threat.

But, for Jordan, they are an existential threat, particularly as IS attempts to don the mantle of fundamentalist Islam, declaring all other sects to be heretic.  They exhibit recruiting success, millitary success, they put into place new governmental systems (lost my reference there, but I know I’ve written about that) … Abdullah has good reason for being quite nervous.

In addition to the battle against IS, nearly five years of fighting in Syria have dramatically impacted next-door Jordan. Jordan has absorbed over 630,000 Syrian refugees, according to the United Nations (one diplomat estimates that Syrians represent about 20% of Jordan’s population), and Abdullah has repeatedly called for decisive action to end the conflict. Yet, in Obama’s brief mentioning of the bloody crisis that has killed some 250,000 people, the US president appeared satisfied with US policy. Obama cites Syria as an example of the “smarter approach, a patient and disciplined strategy that uses every element of our national power” by partnering with local forces — despite the fact that the conflict’s violence has only been spreading.

This might be more serious, yet it’s hard to say what else can be done in Syria in view of our already extensive activities, as this DOD report makes clear:

As of Dec. 15, 2015, the total cost of operations related to ISIL since kinetic operations started on Aug. 8, 2014, is $5.53 billion and the average daily cost is $11 million for 495 days of operations. A further breakdown of cost associated with the operations is here.

In the end, a speech must have a focus, and Obama chose to focus on the United States – not the MidEast.  No doubt, Jordan, the recipient of a multitude of refugees from Palestine (border on the west) and now Syria (border on the north), has good reason to be frustrated.  But this speech was not the place to look for succor.

The Ultra-Orthodox of Israel are a close-knit community which values a good wedding, but often doesn’t appear to be able to afford it.  How do they achieve a good wedding?  AL Monitor’s Mordechai Goldman explains:

In most basic terms, there are two components to how the ultra-Orthodox manage to marry off their children: a system of interest-free loans and restrained consumption (especially compared with the broader society). …

One type of charitable institution actually lends money. Dozens of such banks operate in the ultra-Orthodox community, lending sums large and small, at 0% interest and without commissions or other costs, to anyone who asks. Smaller loan societies deal with amounts up to $1,000, while the larger ones might lend as much as $15,000 to individuals. Charitable wealthy individuals provide the funding for these institutions, hoping to help individuals in need.

Less-familiar charitable institutions for personal savings operate alongside the free-loan societies. When the time comes for depositors to withdraw their money, they also have an opportunity to obtain a loan under extremely favorable terms. For example, the main savings society in the ultra-Orthodox town of Beitar Illit allows families to open a savings account for each child when the baby is born. The monthly deposit is limited to about $30 per child. Twenty years later, when the “child” is ready to marry, the accumulated sum ($7,200) is returned, and the depositor is eligible for a loan double the accumulated amount, at 0% interest and paid back in 80 to 160 monthly installments.

So this informal banking system works to ensure the cohesiveness of the culture – not just make money.  In fact,

The main loan society in Beitar Illit explained that deposits are limited to just $30 per month for fear that if people saved more, they would have more money to withdraw, and the weddings they arranged would become too extravagant. A source at the society who requested anonymity told Al-Monitor, “We reached the conclusion that 120,000 shekels — savings of 40,000 shekels and an 80,000-shekel loan — is a reasonable amount for marrying off a child, including the cost of the wedding and dowry. If we were to allow people to deposit more, they would only waste more. This would be detrimental to our guiding principles of saving money and avoiding unchecked consumption.”

Good?  Bad?  That judgment will pivot on your view of unbridled individualism, which I’ve certainly explored over the years, but have come to distrust bit by bit as the costs – especially those unloaded on the environment, which can neither fight back nor send a bill – become more apparent.  But it’s fascinating to see how various segments of society, as focused by a religious order, pull together to ensure certain customs remain active and vital.

NPR broadcast a story this morning concerning the fairness of forcing non public union members to pay some share of union fees to unions in their workplaces:

It’s the showdown at the Supreme Court Corral on Monday for public employee unions and their opponents.

Union opponents are seeking to reverse a 1977 Supreme Court decision that allows public employee unions to collect so-called “fair share fees.”

Twenty-three states authorize collecting these fees from those who don’t join the union but benefit from a contract that covers them.

The decision later this year will have profound consequences not just for the California teachers in Monday’s case, but for police, firefighters, health care workers and other government workers across the country.

And I thought to myself,

Fine, if you have some objection to the union which you think is fundamental to your very being, then let’s find a way to accommodate you which is fair to all sides.

Since you object to paying a fair share for the work of the union, we’ll eliminate that requirement.

And since the union objects to representing you for free, we’ll eliminate that requirement.

My suggested resolution is that your salary, benefits, and workplace conditions will be based on the lowest offer from the employer.  So if the union negotiates a salary 15% over the lowest offer of the employer, then your salary will be … ah, you understand.

Or you can negotiate for yourself.

I think this is undeniably a very fair approach to the problem for those who think unions are un-American, and for those who simply don’t want to try to reform the union.

Further along in the NPR offering, I see this:

In the Supreme Court on Monday, lawyer Michael Carvin, representing the challengers, will tell the justices that what are technically called “agency fees” are unconstitutional.

“You’re forcing the employee to subsidize somebody else’s speech,” Carvin said. Negotiating a public employee union contract, he maintains, is different from negotiating one for workers in the private sector.

I disagree.  Just as companies lobby, quite often against the philosophical beliefs of their employers, without accusations of violating free speech rights, unions should as well.  And while I played with the notion of permitting the objectors to only pay the costs of the immediate contract negotiation, a good union’s activities should be constrained to those benefiting the union members; differentiation is a fool’s task.

That, of course, is an ideal union; but a good member should be reforming the bad union, not running away from it.

Mr. Carvin then moves along with an emotionally appealing, but basically, idiotic argument:

“When we’re talking about public unions,” he said, “everything they do is inherently a matter of public concern, because every time they get pension, health care and salary benefits, that comes out of the public fisc … so every dollar you spend on health care or salary is a dollar you can’t spend on roads or children.”

You bump up the taxes a trifle and pay the folks educating your kids without stealing from the other chores.  And, oddly enough, paying the teachers better means your ARE spending more on children.

All that said, I’ve never been a union member and probably never will be.  Probably won’t join AARP, either.  Not a joiner at heart.  But, given the disgraceful behavior of employers in the private sector, I do not deny the need for unions, for their ability to bring the viewpoint of the line worker to the table, with regards to safety, salary, and many other matters.  Face it: the workplace is not an easy matter, and leaving it to management, with an overriding interest in profit (in most places), leaves the matter greatly unbalanced.  The smart places embrace unions, in my view.  Unions, for all their flaws, are a valuable addition to the workplace, private or public.

Jon White writes about the sociology of tipping in NewScientist (19 December 2015, paywall) and has a surprising fact:

There are also worrying similarities between tipping and bribery. In a comparison of 32 countries, Magnus Torfason at the University of Iceland found that countries where tipping was most prevalent also tended to have more corruption. “My intuition is that if you don’t have tipping, you don’t have a population that is experienced in informal exchange. That makes bribery difficult,” he says. His native Iceland is a case in point, with little tipping and a strong cultural bias for transactions to be very transparent.

But I’m not sure I’d equate “informal exchange” with bribery; they seem to be rather different.  (I’m also a trifle suspicious of such a small sample size, and wonder about cherry-picking – but that’s not really a worthy thought, hopefully the journal publishing these studies had good reviewers who looked at basic questions like these.)

From the same article comes this:

Tipping divides economists too. Why would you pay more for something when you don’t have to? That’s irrational. Even if a tip is designed to encourage good service, surely the most logical time for cash to change hands is up front. Paying extra after the event makes little sense, especially if you’re a one-time customer in a restaurant or a passenger in a cab whose driver you will probably never see again. What’s going on?

I’ve run across similar statements from and about economists, which has puzzled me a little bit.  In particular, I remember a reference to some classic experiment in which someone is given some money and told they can give some other person any amount that they wish, and keep the rest.   The expected behavior is to give the minimum and keep the rest, yet this does not typically occur; instead, an average of about 25% is given.  Or something like: I cannot remember exactly, nor have I been able to find my reference, or any other good, dependable description.  To me, it seems like these surprised economists (a visual out of FAMILY GUY) should consult with anthropologists – or evolutionary psychologists.  In any case, economists think we’re just calculating machines…

Wondering about world wide corruption?  Here’s Transparency International.  Juicy fact: Afghanistan, ranked 172nd/175, has a score of -1.620813904.  Perhaps a little rounding is in order.

… and not trying to get back into the swing of things just yet.

We’re binge watching HEROES REBORN, actually.