Tuesday, December 27, 2016
In which I leave the house and go see a movie
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
The heroine, played by Felicity Jones, is in the center of the frame. She's actually 63" tall. The most engaging and interesting character is a re-tooled Imperial droid, K2-SO.
A long time ago, in an Atlanta, Georgia you would barely recognize, I saw the original Star Wars (1977) at the Tara Theater on Cheshire Bridge Road. We went to an early showing. The next screening, the line for tickets tracked twice around the building. I enthusiastically went to see the Empire Strikes Back (1980) which introduced a new character, Lando Calrissian, the only black man in the galaxy.
They finally got poor Lando some company in Return Of The Jedi (1983).
I was even there for Episode I (1999), starring the great Liam Neeson and a much less memorable Ewan McGregor. The villain was Darth Maul. Subtle.
By this time of course, the franchise was beginning to wane under its creator's fundamentally juvenile worldview. It's hard to believe this is the same man who made THX 1138 (1971).
My previous last attempt at a Star Wars film was to watch Christopher Lee in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005). What follows is stitched around some comments I left at iSteve.
Rogue One (2016) is not bad, and not entirely emblematic of our cultural malaise. I fully expected it to be formulaic and illogical, and my expectations were met–nay, exceeded–so I was able to relax and enjoy the ride a bit.
There's a huge space-air-land battle at the end on the Imperial Resort/Archives Planet that is pretty cool, even suggestive of some professional, technical military input. Steve Sailer notes that most of the time Lucas is just recreating the old World War II movies he grew up with.
Other than that, the movie is the usual assortment of Star Wars action figures and playsets. Having the series walk backwards on itself for the sake of recycling characters who grew old and died ages ago/forward in time is getting to be absurd. CGI of people such as the hours-ago deceased Carrie Fisher, and of Peter Cushing who's been in the ground twenty-two years, is just jarring. C-3PO and R2-D2 even get cameos for no reason whatsoever. Darth Vader gets rolled out of his nutritive bath, noticeably lacking the graceful, measured movements of the physically imposing David Prowse.
The movie seemed to be aiming really, really young with sloppy plotting and dialogue, cartoonish villains, and busy, fast-paced visuals. And sure enough there were lots of children under age 10 in the audience. Several of them clapped and cheered when Darth Vader came out.
The other thing that struck me is how unremittingly business-like this gloriously diverse galaxy of a long time ago and far, far away has become, with a total lack of sexual or romantic tension in the film. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it is (or was) a huge part of adult life and to have nothing like that anywhere in the movie tells me the target audience is adolescents. This isn't low-brow; it's after-school special.
I could make a very long list of all the illogical contrivances:
Why put the directional controls for the transmitting dish out on the very end of an open-air platform a thousand feet up?
Why wouldn’t Head Science Guy like, e-mail the plans to the Death Star, send a thumb drive, take a picture with his cellphone? And wasn’t the whole point to transmit the plans? At one point everybody’s scrambling around, playing hot potato to get a stylized computer diskette on to a cargo ship with Lord Vader one step behind.
Heroine couldn’t take some notes while Dad was talking–this is important?
Why are freaking Sturmtruppen walking around in white plastic that doesn’t protect them from anything--a hit with a mop handle, a blaster, falling twigs?
All that tech to send massive ships at light-speed and Desert Planet is … a desert? And you can put a force field around a whole planet but don’t have enough surveillance to find the single rifle squad fumbling around the landing pads with no ID or credentials?
Pulp-comics level illogic. I’m probably insulting pulp comics.
I mentioned the lack of romance but there is a soulful embrace by the male and female protagonists at the end, right before everybody dies in the nuclear conflagration. There’s a pedestrian explanation for killing everybody off: it’s a prequel and these characters never showed up retrospectively. So again, the series cynically backpedaling on itself to recycle increasingly shopworn characters is becoming absurd and incoherent.
In sum, I wasted twenty-eight dollars on this crap.
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Merry Christmas to all
Bashar visits Christian village outside Damascus on Christmas
Christmas celebration in Aleppo:
Link: Children from a Shia orphanage sing Christmas carols at a Beirut cathedral
Bartella, Iraq, October 22:
Hussam Matti knelt to the ground, grabbed two fistfuls of brown-gray sand and poured it over his head. The grains mixed with the sweat on his brow as he stood up, smiled and threw up his arms....
“This is the earth of Bartella,” he shouted. “This is our land.”
But for Matti, despite the dangers, it was nothing short of a homecoming.
“In these two years I died. The 32 years I’ve lived so far — you can forget about them. Today I’m born,” he said, as he and his comrades, all members of a Christian militia known as the Nineveh Plains Force, lashed two pieces of timber to make a cross.
They carried it to the top of Mar Shmony, a church on the town’s eastern flank. There, ringed by counterterrorism service members who urged them to watch for sniper fire, they hoisted the cross over the church’s dome and adorned it with an Iraqi flag. One man, with a touch of ceremony, placed a nativity scene set he had fished out from the wreckage of the church at the cross’ base.
A multi-credal nationalism emerges across the Middle East, in opposition to Wahabbist hegemony funded by the Saudi and Qatari royals.
Elsewhere, remnant Anglicanism sputters on:
At the end the Vicar paused, beamed at us, and prepared to give us our Christmas blessing, at which point the organist launched into the cheerful tunes of dismissal. I commiserated with her [ouch. and we were doing so well] over a drink later. “I was only going to say Merry Christmas” she lamented. I assured her that her intentions had been sensed by the congregation, but that our services moved in a mysterious way.
In terms of demographics, the congregation of about 45 souls had the one young girl who read the lesson, her 19 year old brother, one 30 year old, but was otherwise skewed in the 45 to 93 years old direction, with a peak towards the latter years. There was one farming couple, one neighbour whose grandfather served in the Great War, but few of the rest had been born in the Parish. All congregants were Anglo-Saxon.
Leaving the church, a celebrant said it felt as if this was one of the last village services, and the end of an age.
In Church Going Philip Larkin worried,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was.
It's all about Who lives Where. And Christianity depends on living, breathing, worshiping Christians. And when it's gone, it's gone.
Labels:
blood and soil,
catholic faith,
nativity
Friday, December 9, 2016
"America's Yeltsin Era..."
Steve Sailer observes that American life expectancies are dropping. Ilana Mercer touches on the same theme here: The Curious Case of America's Waning Whites.
The immediate causes appear to be obesity, car wrecks (likely more distraction from electronic devices), and drug overdoses. There is probably also a blip from black men shooting each other. Of course, we are also importing more impoverished and dysfunctional humans.
How can this be, in a time of endless cheap calories, cheap credit, and cheap entertainment? Obviously, the spiritual nourishment is missing, in the absence of which you're just working to have enough money to pay taxes and buy food and housing so you can rest up and eat to work to make the money to pay the taxes, etc.. Disposable income is spent on entertainment, psychotropic drugs, booze, and the ersatz tribalism of sporting events. Some will save for the future, most won't. People were meant to do something other than merely exist, but their metaphysics and their heroic legends have been taken from them. Anglo-Americans, among others, have chosen atheism or rootless Protestantism, secular democracy, and the marketplace over things like tradition, family, nation, and it is coming back to bite them.
I have a lot of immigrant acquaintances, and my perception is that one of the greatest gulfs between them and me is who our heroes are. The American mythos–characters like Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, the Last of the Mohicans, and actual men like Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett–is being scrubbed from the culture to make the new arrivals more comfortable. It is being replaced with people like Rosa Parks and St. Martin of Atlanta (because, of course, recorded history did not actually start until 1965). The Pakistani who set foot on the tarmac thirty minutes ago must be assured that he is every bit as American as somebody whose family came ashore with John Wesley; nay, since we’re a Nation Of Immigrants, even more American due to his greater immigrant-ness! Founding stock Americans are becoming a people without a past and, as they are endlessly screamed at, no future. Hopefully Trump buys us some political and cultural space before the post-Modern Future arrives in earnest.
Labels:
anglo-america,
angry white guys
Saturday, December 3, 2016
Not Great, not Holy, and not Conciliar
The Bulgarian Patriarchate didn't use the term "ludicrous," but they might as well have.
As a refresher, I previously posted on this proposed pan-Orthodox Synod, a conciliar, authoritative meeting of all the Church's Patriarchs, here and here. With characteristic prescience, I observed that the only issue that actually mattered--the status of the so-called "diaspora" Churches--was all but absent from the Council's agenda, and there was no consensus on this and other ecclesiological disputes. Theologically, the Faith was declared at the culmination of the Seventh Council, so there is nothing left to talk about there. Hence, the Council's work product was, and could only be, a collection of aspirational statements on administrative and external matters, which a number of hierarchs refused to endorse. The Council made no attempt to address Antioch's protests over Jerusalem's incursions into her territories, the Orthodox Church in America was shamefully ignored, and zero progress was made on the status of the "diaspora" Churches. Four venerable, autocephalous jurisdictions refused to participate, which should have shut down the Council right there.
What are the broader lessons, for people not concerned with Orthodox Christian arcaneum?
1. Sovereignty: Don't let your reach exceed your grasp. The Ecumenical Patriarch, the (post-Schism) First Among Equals, commanded his brothers to listen and attend. Four of his brothers told him to go pound sand, which means he is no longer the First Among Equals. I do not envy the Greek Patriarch.
Everybody wants to be the He Who Answers To Nobody. There are a lucky few in that category, but when they have to remind people that they are the sovereign, then Sovereignty has started slipping away from them.
Here's Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, finding out he's no longer the sovereign.
I'm not saying the Ecumenical Patriarch will meet Ceausescu's fate, and he's still sovereign over his Patriarchate, but he's no longer the First Among Equals even if people don't realize it or are too polite to mention it.
2. Substance: Focus on what matters. Everybody wants peace, harmony and good will, but human affairs return endlessly to the question of Who gets to live Where and run the Institutions. A few vestigial Greek bishops run Alexandria and Jerusalem, for now, but the actual Egyptians became Copts, and the Jerusalemites are increasingly restive Arabophones. Everybody says, "There is neither Jew [ha!] nor Greek," but nobody acts like it. Canonically, a single hierarch should be presiding over the territory of the United States. The facts on the ground are the OCA, the Antiochians, and the Greeks (and the Serbians, and the Romanians) have staked out their respective jurisdictions and remittances, and nobody but nobody is going to change that. Why is this? Why do people cling to a certain jurisdiction or particular praxis? There may be a non-prescriptive solution if we'd ask the right questions.
The inability of the Ecumenical Patriarch to command a Great Council knocked out the substance, so this became a Parish Life Conference for Orthodox hierarchs. Nice and all, but not substantive. Dignity, like Sovereignty, must be jealously guarded; don't waste time on frivolous matters.
I tried to come up with an elegant trinity of points but these two are all I could muster.
Labels:
Antioch,
ecclesiology,
OCA,
Orthodoxy
Friday, November 25, 2016
SCALE
The modern world tells us, always and everywhere, that bigger is better: GDP must continually grow; cities must perforce become higher density, and literally higher; globalism good/nationalism bad. Greater efficiencies can only result from growth.
Huh. I haven't heard about that last one so much.
Over 5.7 million people live in Atlanta and its metropolitan area. We are in the middle of a building boom. More people, more jobs, and more luxury cars than I can ever remember seeing in my lifetime. Atlanta also has a sales tax of eight cents on the dollar. On November 8, voters approved an increase to 8.9 cents on the dollar.
For MARTA, Atlanta Beltline, a TSPLOST-boosted future is looking bright--Officials promise that $2.8 billion is coming for a more livable, functional Atlanta
I voted against the sales tax increase because I figure with an 8% sales tax and thousands of people moving in, you can find the money for infrastructure somewhere. If you're interested, you can get a copy of the City of Atlanta budget for FY 2017 here. I'll summarize: the City is rolling in dough. And like just about any other enterprise, personnel is the biggest expenditure. Most of this projected $2.8 billion will go not toward actual infrastructure, but to the human resource and logistical tail for infrastructure.
So it seems that even with more people moving in and paying property and sales taxes, the City must still raise rates because it has to pay more people and build more infrastructure to manage its growth. Unit costs are going up, not down. Diseconomy of scale.
Thursday, November 24, 2016
Graphic content
Friend of the blog Porter posted some reflections on the spectacle of African migrants mistaking a Tunisian fishing vessel for a European "coast guard," that being those ships deployed off the African coast to guard against foreign invaders not getting to sufficient depth for rescue for subsidized, purposeless existence in Europe.
Apparently, the migrant's method is to steer these inflatable, ludicrously over-sized dinghies with an outboard smaller than a bass boat's a few miles off the coast, get in sight of one of these ironically named coast guards, then scuttle the boat to guilt Europeans into rescuing your sorry ass. In the following video, things go horribly awry when African migrants mistake a Tunisian commercial fishing vessel and its crew for people who actually give a shit.
The end result is Africans bobbing lifelessly in the Mediterranean like lemmings in a flood, unmourned, uncelebrated, unburied.
Now, contrast sympathy for these drowning Africans with the bemused insouciance of the Tunisian chronicler, recording the carnage from the spotless, uncrowded deck of his employer's boat. The narrator films the dinghy's approach, its deliberate gutting, and raises his voice tepidly at the migrants trying to scramble up the hull. He then wanders below, presumably to alert his utterly indifferent countrymen to this unfolding tragedy, then strolls back up, across the impeccable decks, under the unlowered lifeboat, the better to point out bodies in their death throes. Insh'allah my friends, life is a bitch and then you die.
There is plenty of journalistic firepower being deployed on the Refugee Crisis but one aspect I don't hear much about is what happens on dry land at the actual borders of, say, Tunisia. I suspect it involves weapons and terse commands as opposed to cell phones and languid gestures, and Europe's future neurosurgeons either flee from a gauntlet of rifles and billy clubs or, if they have sufficient baksheesh, are cynically spirited to the coast to go be someone else's problem.
Actually, we do know some details of this human tidal wave from the New York Times' own Tom Friedman, back in April 2016:
(Apologies for the .jpeg format. The NYT doesn't like its content copied.)
Friedman blames, what else, "climate change" even as he observes but does not perceive the high time-preference, the fatalism, and the polygamy that generate these waves upon waves of surplus men. He even acknowledges--one gets the sense, grudgingly--the solution staring everybody in the face: improve local conditions. Of course, Friedman again observes but does not perceive the cycle of Africa's doom loop: modern crop yields and Western medicine enable large families; large families mean more slash-and-burn; more slash-and-burn erodes away or de-nutrifies through lack of stewardship; the resulting scarcity drives migration. Lather, rinse, repeat.
On this day, I'm thankful to be the product of K-selection, and pray to God we have the good sense to keep r-selection away, behind walls and across oceans, where it can work itself out in its own fashion.
Apparently, the migrant's method is to steer these inflatable, ludicrously over-sized dinghies with an outboard smaller than a bass boat's a few miles off the coast, get in sight of one of these ironically named coast guards, then scuttle the boat to guilt Europeans into rescuing your sorry ass. In the following video, things go horribly awry when African migrants mistake a Tunisian commercial fishing vessel and its crew for people who actually give a shit.
The end result is Africans bobbing lifelessly in the Mediterranean like lemmings in a flood, unmourned, uncelebrated, unburied.
Now, contrast sympathy for these drowning Africans with the bemused insouciance of the Tunisian chronicler, recording the carnage from the spotless, uncrowded deck of his employer's boat. The narrator films the dinghy's approach, its deliberate gutting, and raises his voice tepidly at the migrants trying to scramble up the hull. He then wanders below, presumably to alert his utterly indifferent countrymen to this unfolding tragedy, then strolls back up, across the impeccable decks, under the unlowered lifeboat, the better to point out bodies in their death throes. Insh'allah my friends, life is a bitch and then you die.
There is plenty of journalistic firepower being deployed on the Refugee Crisis but one aspect I don't hear much about is what happens on dry land at the actual borders of, say, Tunisia. I suspect it involves weapons and terse commands as opposed to cell phones and languid gestures, and Europe's future neurosurgeons either flee from a gauntlet of rifles and billy clubs or, if they have sufficient baksheesh, are cynically spirited to the coast to go be someone else's problem.
Actually, we do know some details of this human tidal wave from the New York Times' own Tom Friedman, back in April 2016:
(Apologies for the .jpeg format. The NYT doesn't like its content copied.)
Friedman blames, what else, "climate change" even as he observes but does not perceive the high time-preference, the fatalism, and the polygamy that generate these waves upon waves of surplus men. He even acknowledges--one gets the sense, grudgingly--the solution staring everybody in the face: improve local conditions. Of course, Friedman again observes but does not perceive the cycle of Africa's doom loop: modern crop yields and Western medicine enable large families; large families mean more slash-and-burn; more slash-and-burn erodes away or de-nutrifies through lack of stewardship; the resulting scarcity drives migration. Lather, rinse, repeat.
On this day, I'm thankful to be the product of K-selection, and pray to God we have the good sense to keep r-selection away, behind walls and across oceans, where it can work itself out in its own fashion.
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Everybody always ends up agreeing with me
Georgetown political science professor Joshua Mitchell, via Marginal Revolution:
There is another reason why the Republican Party could not contain Trump, a perhaps deeper reason. Michael Oakeshott, an under-read political thinker in the mid-20th century, remarked in his exquisite essay, “Rationalism in Politics,” that one of the more pathological notions of our age is that political life can be understood in terms of “principles” that must be applied to circumstances. Politics-as-engineering, if you will. Republicans themselves succumbed to this notion, and members of the rank and file have noticed. Republicans stood for “the principles of the constitution,” for “the principles of the free market,” etc. The problem with standing for principles is that it allows you to remain unsullied by the political fray, to stand back and wait until yet another presidential election cycle when “our principles” can perhaps be applied. And if we lose, it’s OK, because we still have “our principles.” What Trump has been able to seize upon is growing dissatisfaction with this endless deferral, the sociological arrangement for which looks like comfortable Inside-the-Beltway Republicans defending “principles” and rank-and-file Republicans far from Washington-Babylon watching in horror and disgust.And, I'd add, that pointing and spluttering in horror and disgust explicitly adopts the terminology and moral framework of the Left. Operationally, "conservatism" is not actually conservative.
Since at least the Great Society Democrats have been telling their constituents, “Here’s what liberalism can do for you.” Republicans seem to endlessly ask their constituents what can they do for conservatism (“Donate to my think tank!” “Buy my magazine!” “Vote for me!” “Sign up for this war!”). Their (overwhelmingly white) base duly votes for the Republican’s limited government-fiscal prudence-meritocracy platform, then watches as government, budget deficits, and political correctness all increase. Nothing the base voted for is actually accomplished, and the perception is these platitudes are being mouthed solely to get comfortable sinecures.
Immigration exposed this cozy scam. Immigration is extremely problematic for proletarian and petit bourgeois communities. But the same people who left the Democratic party to vote for Reagan have to listen as people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham call them bigots for not wanting their voting power and economic clout diluted and their children made strangers in their own country. When the battle lines started getting drawn, the Republican leadership proudly linked arms with the Democrats and did the bidding of their donor class. Donald Trump spotted that disconnect-–an electoral $100 bill lying on the floor–-and like the ruthless Scots-Irish businessman he is, grabbed it in both fists. He made his campaign all about, “Here’s what I’m going to do for you,” and rode it to ultimate victory.
Any of the other Republican candidates could have done that, but they didn’t. This was vindication of the Sailer Strategy: if you want conservative electoral victory, you need to support conservatively-inclined people. Affordable Family Formation: keep the land cheap and the wages high, because that’s what gets families started and married people with children tend to incline conservative. This may require abandonment on occasion of precious, precious principle but like the Democrats realize, this isn’t about principle, it’s about winning. That’s how they captured the institutions.
In a diverse society, it’s not what your candidate supports; it’s whether they support you.
I called it, here, and here.
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