Topic: Virtual Reality
I just updated WAR FLAGS, my website devoted to military and naval flags of the world, past and present. Check it out!
Posted by tmg110
at 1:16 PM EST
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I just updated WAR FLAGS, my website devoted to military and naval flags of the world, past and present. Check it out!
When jolly old Saint Nick comes down your chimney this year, better have a breathalyzer handy: Drunken Santas Terrorized Lower Manhattan.
Thousands of drunken Santas terrorized Lower Manhattan when they flooded into the neighborhood for SantaCon earlier this month, openly flouting public drinking and urination laws, locals say.
Angry residents attended Community Board 1's Monday night meeting to complain about the latest incarnation of the annual pub crawl, whose participants have been allowed to grow more rowdy every year, they say.
"There was public urination, people vomiting all over the place, open containers and no police," said John Fratta, chairman of the Seaport/Civic Center Committee which plans to send an angry missive to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and the 1st Precinct complaining about the lack of enforcement during SantaCon.
Are they absolutely sure this wasn't an Occupy Wall Street protest…?
There are times when a book or movie—not necessarily great in itself—captures the mood of the moment, reflecting and magnifying society's attitudes, tastes, prejudices, fears or anxieties. Such a movie is Death Wish, a workmanlike Charles Bronson vehicle, directed by Michael Winner, that caused a nationwide sensation and became a smash hit when it was released in 1974.
Death Wish, based on the novel of the same name by Brian Garfield, tells the story of Paul Kersey, a successful New York architect whose life is torn apart when his wife and daughter fall victim to a home invasion. The wife (Hope Lange) is kicked to death by the trio of thugs (one played by a young Jeff Goldblum) who’ve forced their way into the Kersey apartment. The daughter is raped and beaten. She survives only to lapse into a state of catatonia. The grieving husband soon discovers that there’s little that the police can do to identify and arrest those responsible.
In the mid-Seventies, violent crime was a major social and political issue. The streets and public parks of big cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles were infested by vicious street criminals; assault, armed robbery, rape and murder were depressingly common occurances. The mugger was the iconic figure of the age and such outrages as the vicious attack on Paul Kersey’s family were only too common.
Thus Death Wish zeroed in on a widely experienced state of anxiety, fear—and anger. The pain and suffering inflicted by violent crime were bad enough, but worse perhaps was the pervasive sense of helplessness produced by life in a lawless society. It was obvious to the average citizen that the police could not protect him. If he fell victim to a mugging or assault, the cops would probably not catch those responsible. And if they were caught, it was very unlikely that the courts would give them much more than a slap on the wrist. Things were not quite that black and white, of course, but that’s the way people perceived the situation in 1974.
All this explains why audiences cheered and applauded when Paul Kersey, instead of resigning himself to life as a victim, took up the gun and started shooting street criminals.
Death Wish isn’t exactly a revenge movie, for Kersey doesn’t go looking for the thugs who destroyed his family. Rather, he becomes a vigilante. His mission: to fight violent crime. His method: simplicity itself. Kersey merely slips a pistol into his pocket and takes a stroll in a dangerous neighborhood or park. Inevitably, he’s accosted by violent street criminals, whereupon he produces his pistol and opens fire. Needless to say, after gunning down three or four muggers, the Vigilante becomes a folk hero to the long-suffering citizens of New York. (Cue loud and prolonged audience applause.)
Why this enthusiastic and somewhat disconcerting audience reaction? It derived, I think, from the fact that Kersey, as played by Bronson, is presented not as an action hero but as Everyman. He’s not a violent guy by nature; indeed, he served in the Korean War in the Medical Corps as a contentious objector. He could be your next-door neighbor, your dentist, your brother, your uncle, your father. But the traumatic shock of the assault on his family turns him into the Vigilante. It’s intimated in the film that Kersey is a bit deranged. Well, who wouldn’t be, after what he’d gone through?
In Death Wish, the movie and the moment met with a bang. A number of similar films have been made since then (including four highly inferior Death Wish sequels) but none of them resonated with mainstream America as this one did. (Incidentally, the critics of the time hated Death Wish for all the usual left-liberal reasons. A lot they knew!) It’s not a great film, but it’s a good one and it has held up well—thanks in part to Bronson’s excellent performance, which was possibly the best of his career. If you’ve never seen Death Wish, it’s currently available on Netflix. (I watched it last night.) If you have seen it, now is the time for a second look. Death Wish is one on the most politically incorrect movies ever made—and I mean that as the most heartfelt of compliments.
Progressives would rather not be reminded of how their ideological forbearers fawned over dear old Comrade Stalin and the totalitarian death machine that he constructed. (See Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror for some really disgusting examples of how British and American leftists tongue-polished Stalin’s boots.) But such deliberate amnesia has its risks, as this story in the Weekly Standard makes painfully clear:
Wendy Sherman, undersecretary of state for political affairs at the State Department, had some rather nice things to say about the reclusive Kim Jong Il, the dictatorial leader of North Korea who died a few days ago. She had met the rogue dictator, Josh Rogin reports, when Sherman “served as State Department counselor and North Korea policy coordinator under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, [and had] traveled to Pyongyang with Albright in 2000.”
An NPR obituary quotes the high ranking State Department official as saying that “He was smart and a quick problem-solver,” and that “[Kim Jong Il] is also witty and humorous. Our overall impression was very different from the way he was known to the outside world.”
As Lord Acton so very aptly observed: “In the wake of every tyrant comes an apologist with a sponge.” Wendy, you are a total idiot. And incidentally, I was not at all surprised to learn that you hold a master’s degree in social work from the University of Maryland.
Goodness gracious me! I’ve just learned that a whopping 48% of the population of the United Stares are either “poor” or “near poor.” No wonder the Occupy Wall Street mob is up in arms. This is outrageous!
Now you may think that so many people are poor or near poor because of those wicked One Precenters, who are taking advantage of bad economic conditions to fleece the vanishing middle class. That’s certainly what the Obama Administration would like you to believe. But guess what? That’s not the reason why nearly half the nation’s population is in or near poverty. What happened was that Barry and his merry tricksters changed the definition of “near poor” in such a way as to inflate the total. As Robert Rector explains in this blog post for NRO:
Traditionally, a U.S. household was considered “low income” or “near poor” if it had income below 200 percent of the official poverty income thresholds. The Obama administration has raised those income thresholds and thereby transformed the way the government measures poverty and near poverty.
Under President Obama’s new definitions, a family of four in Oakland is “near poor” if their annual pre-tax income is less than $89,700 plus medical insurance. In metropolitan Washington, D.C., the near-poverty line became $80,500. In New York, it’s now $78,500; in Boston, $68,900; and Chicago, $68,600.
One result: The income level for “near poverty” is now very close to the median household income in most communities. (Median income means half the households have more income and half have less.)
Imagine, a family of four with an income close to $90,000 is “near poor” in Obama’s America! This statistical fan dance is obviously intended to provide justification for higher taxes on “the rich” and more revenue to squander on “social programs.” And it makes perfect sense. What could be better for progressives than to transform half the population of the nation into pitiful, sniveling wards of the state?
Though the novel, Starship Troopers, is not without its flaws, the best that one can say of the movie, Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven, is that it’s a clumsy attempt at political satire. And the evaluations plunge downhill from there.
Perhaps fancying himself as a modern Jonathan Swift, Verhoeven decided to play to the left-wing critique of Starship Troopers by making the Terran Federation into a quasi-fascist state. To that end, he costumes his actors in Nazi-like uniforms and borrows much imagery from such Nazi epics as Olympiad and Triumph of the Will. Official propaganda appears to be patterned after World War II-era American newsreel footage, posters, etc. The Terran Federation is thus presented as an authoritarian, highly militarized regime—in short, a society almost the polar opposite of the one imagined by Robert Heinlein.
Now I have no objection in principle to a film that takes a fresh look at the premise of a book—but a cheap shot is not a fresh look. Verhoeven’s enthusiastic embrace of the Heinlein-is-a-fascist critique is not only unfair but ludicrous—as crude and dumb as an Occupy Wall Street chant-and-response. He may have believed that he was sending a message, and he did so. The message reads: “I am an idiot.”
And it gets worse. Not only did Verhoeven tart up his movie with a bunch of phony-baloney political messaging, he threw out the best part of Starship Troopers entirely. Gone are the powered combat suits, gone are the advanced weapons and tactics. His future soldiers are armed with conventional assault rifles and their tactics consist mainly of charging back and forth in a disorderly mob while spraying bullets in all directions. Moreover, the highly professional officers and NCOs of Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry are nowhere in evidence. Instead we get the equivalent of gang leaders, e.g. Michael Ironside as the oafish and brutal Lieutenant Rasczak, channeling his inner Freikorps chief. Considering that the movie is set in a future where interstellar spaceflight has become routine, this is plainly ridiculous.
Even the enemy—the thoroughly alien Arachnid race—gets slighted. In the novel, they’re presented as an intelligent species with a human-level command of technology. Not in the movie! The warrior-caste Bugs don’t wield weapons—they just tear the opposition apart with their big, nasty pincers. How the Arachnids even get around the Galaxy is something of a puzzle, since they seem not to possess starships. Again, it’s all quite ridiculous.
It may seem gratuitous at this point to bum-rap the cast, but Starship Trooper’s male and female leads might as well have been deliberately selected to set one’s teeth on edge. Casper Van Dien as Rico sports the Hitler Youth-type looks that Verhoeven was going for, but his acting is wooden. Dina Meyer as tragic love interest Dizzy Flores is comely but totally unconvincing as a rough, tough soldier. Neil Patrick Harris looks like Himmler’s nephew playing dress-up in his Gestapo-like costume and as for Denise Richards, well, by the end of the movie you’ll be rooting for the Bugs to rip that trademark smirk off her face.
Thus Starship Troopers is, on its stand-alone merits, a misbegotten and stupid movie—in which regard, of course, it has plenty of company. What makes Verhoeven’s cruddy little flick so specially deserving of condemnation is the way in which it squanders the raw material that could have been used to produce a really good movie. Shame!
Even after he emerged as a militant, eloquent foe of Islamofascist totalitarianism, I never had much use for Christopher Hitchens. I just couldn't take seriously a man who ranted that Mother Theresa was a wicked woman (because as a Catholic she wouldn't promote birth control and abortion to India's swarming poor), or who waged a long-running jihad against Henry Kissinger on the risible ground that he’s one of history's most loathsome war criminals (because of Cambodia and Chile). Hitchens was brilliant, but it was a brilliance untempered by modesty or intellectual balance.
He rather fancied himself as the literary heir of George Orwell and in fact wrote one of the better books on Orwell’s intellectual legacy, Why Orwell Matters (2002). Hitchens was indeed a fine, forceful writer. But whereas one could have forgiven Orwell for writing about “the moral grandeur of the Left” (a phrase he didn’t use), one can only shake one’s head over Hitchens’ use of the expression (in his book on Orwell). What the former could still plausibly believe circa 1940 is just laughable today, with the horrific record of the Left spattered all over the pages of world history.
The truth is that Hitchens was no Orwell. He was merely a product of Sixties radicalization, very typical in that regard except for his brilliance as a polemicist. His late and partial post-9/11 conversion to the cause of common sense demonstrated his moral superiority to such leftie luminaries as Gore Vidal and Salman Rushdie. But that’s rather a low bar.
Christopher Hitchens and I were born in 1949. Now he’s dead at age 62, having succumbed to the cancer he called down upon himself by a lifetime of unrepentant smoking. He was an interesting if far from attractive figure, and I don’t regret having once described him as “a repulsive toad.” He’d have relished such a thrust.
One of the most hilarious things about the Obama Administration is its bowdlerization of science. As I’ve noted on various occasions since Mr. Wizard and his band of merry tricksters took over the White House, one can hear the capital letter whenever Obama and his claque pronounce the word “Science.” The Prez himself promised to return Science to its pedestal at the center of public policymaking, whence it had been rudely displaced during the Dark Age of W.
Needless to say, what Obama & Co. call “Science” is the opposite of the empirical method of inquiry on which real science relies. Call it political science, to repurpose an existing term: the technique of covering the most dubious proposition with a veneer of scientific respectability. The Left’s mania for “green energy” is a good example of political science in action. Any serious statistical analysis of the various energy resources available to the United States shows that the most readily available and cost-effective options are coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear. Wind, solar and biofuel energy sources, though not to be disregarded, can never do more than supplement the big four. But where has the Obama Administration placed its bet in the area of energy policy, incidentally using our hard-earned taxpayer dollars? Yeah, you guessed it.
Here’s another example of an intellectual fad masquerading as hard science: “behavioral economics.” Contrary to the teaching of traditional economics, behavioral economics claims that people do not behave as rational actors in response to economic conditions. For example, what they’ll do with a tax cut depends on how you hand it out to them. A lump-sum tax cut tends to be seen as “wealth” and is saved or invested; a tax cut doled out bit by bit tends to be seen as income and is spent. Irrational? Sure—but people are irrational! That’s the whole point! Science (with a capital “S”) has proved it. And, of course, there were studies to show that the behavioral economists knew what they were talking about.
Such was the thinking—if you can call it thinking—behind the payroll tax cut enacted in 2009. Andrew Ferguson recounts the Obama Administration’s love affair with behavioral economics in this article, and describes the unhappy outcome:
Not long after the adjustments in withholding took effect, a trio of economists decided to try to figure out how we planned to spend our new money. They surveyed a “representative sample of households,” 500 in all, and simply asked the question. Their findings were recently released.
“Just 13 percent of households,” they wrote, “said that the 2009 tax credit would lead them to mostly increase their spending.” The other households said they were going to save the tax-cut money or use it to pay off debts. Morons.
Perhaps most shocking to the behavioralists, a similar survey of Bush’s 2008 lump-sum tax cut found that 25 percent planned to spend more in response to it. Neither cut was very stimulative, in other words, but the lump-sum was twice as stimulative as the incremental tax cut. People were not responding the way they were supposed to.
You see, it turned out that the Science behind behavioral economics consisted basically of a 2007 study involving 150 college undergraduates. That’s who stood in for the whole US economy in 2009 when the Obama Administration was crafting its oh-so-Scientific payroll tax cut. Too, too funny—or is it?
The Chevy Volt? It’s “a car for idiots” in the view of Audi of America’s Johan de Nysschen. “No one is going to pay a $15,000 premium for a car that competes with a Corolla,” he said in a post on his company’s Facebook page. “So there are not enough idiots who will buy it.”
Here’s what de Nysschen meant. The Volt lists for about $40,000, compared with its competition, compact models ranging in price from $20,000 to $25,000. Fuel savings over the life of the Volt aren’t anywhere near enough to bridge that huge price gap. Even with a hefty government tax subsidy thrown in, the Volt makes no sense from the point of view of the new car buyer. What's more, there are now serious and growing about battery safety. And you wonder why sales of this electro-turkey have been less than brisk?
It’s true that Mr. de Nysschen is an interested party: After all, Audi competes with Chevrolet in the US auto market. And it’s also true that he later walked back his remark, perhaps realizing that one should never refer to potential customers as idiots. But still, it’s hard to dispute the truth of his observation that the Chevy Volt appeals primarily to upscale progressives who seek an enviro-politically correct status symbol on wheels.
Here’s another well-qualified candidate for the Worst Movies Ever list: Starship Troopers (1997), director Paul Verhoeven’s desecration of Robert Heinlein’s classic and controversial science fiction novel.
First, some background: The novel, Starship Troopers, was published in 1959, attracting both praise for its portrayal of future war and condemnation for its supposedly fascist sympathies. The thing that drove Heinlein’s leftie critics up the wall was the novel’s socio-political background: In his imaginary future polity—the Terran Federation—the right to vote, hold political office and qualify for certain jobs, e.g. as a police officer, was restricted to veterans of "Federal Service." Heinlein and Starship Troopers were excoriated for the suggestion that only military veterans should enjoy the privileges of full citizenship. This detail was roundly condemned at the time as “fascism,” a charge that has resounded down the years.
If you actually read the novel, however, you’ll find that Federal Service is not restricted to the armed forces. Everyone has the right to qualify for citizenship by performing government service of some kind. Though the novel focuses on the various military branches, Heinlein does make a point of noting that anyone, even a person with severe disabilities—blindness, missing limbs—is entitled to serve and become a citizen. Furthermore, all citizens and legal residents of the Terran Federation enjoy full civil liberties: freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, etc. Whether such a political arrangement would work in practice is a debatable point, but fascism it’s not.
In the novel, the Terran Federation is at war with an alien race called the Arachnids: a hive society with a collective consciousness. Though Heinlein emphasizes their alienness, he also notes that the Arachnids are an advanced race. They’ve developed interstellar spaceflight and technologically they’re roughly on the Terran level. Rather disturbingly in the eyes of a contemporary, politically correct progressive, Heinlein notes that the war is a literal struggle for survival: either humanity or the Bugs, as they’re nicknamed, will inevitably be wiped out. Heinlein’s Darwinian attitude has given rise to charges of racism—this despite the fact that his Terran Federation is multi-ethnic, with no domination by one race or ethnic group over the rest. Indeed, the novel’s protagonist, Juan "Johnnie" Rico, is a Filipino.
(See here for one particularly egregious misrepresentation of Starship Troopers that typlifies the criticism it continues to attract.)
Heinlein’s description of the weapons and tactics used by his future soldiers—the Mobile Infantry or M.I.—represents SF at its best: a thoughtful speculation about the future of military art and science. The M.I. is an elite organization with some resemblance to the US Marine Corps and some to the US Army Rangers. Only about 10% of recruits make it through the long and arduous training program. In combat, M.I. troopers wear powered armor exoskeletons that enable them to carry more and heavier weapons, move faster and even leap over tall building and obstacles. The Navy of the Terran Federation transports M.I. units and drops them onto the surface of target planets. Heinlein devotes a good deal of attention to the training, equipment and tactical employment of the Mobile Infantry, creating a realistic background for his story. This, probably, is why the novel remains in print and continues to be read.
And the movie? Cinematic special effects have developed to a point where Starship Troopers could have been made into a kickass action flick. But postmodern Hollywood can never resist desecrating a classic. In my next post, I’ll discuss—or rather excoriate—the mess that Hollywood made of Heinlein's novel.
