Orlando (an opera review post)

After having said, just this week, what I said about the general director of SFO and more traditional productions of classic operas, here's one that's... not. Which does not change the validity of my statement; the productions have still been trending toward "traditional" rather than "experimental" or "updated" or whatever you want to call anything that isn't set in its traditional setting. But, yes, Orlando gets a more modern setting, and it's a very good thing. I'm not sure how I would have felt about it if it had been done as written. As it is, I'm still conflicted over it.

Orlando is by Handel. Yes, that Handel, the Messiah one. Which means it's pretty. It's also everything that people who have never seen opera think opera is: people singing one line over and over again for five minutes. Okay, maybe three lines, but Orlando is really like that. This could be reduced to a not-even-very-long short story, even shorter if it was dialogue-based.

All that, and it makes use of one of my least favorite writing devices: the deus ex machina.

However!
This production is set during World War II rather than it's original setting, and the opera becomes something much more interesting than having the problem solved by "god" coming down and making everything right. In this case, it's solved by a rather pompous psychiatrist and electroshock treatment. Of course, the electroshock treatment does seem to affect everyone involved, not just the receiver of the treatment, but it's much better than Zeus waving his hands around and making everything good again.

Here's something fun:
My brother, who is six years younger than me, sang in a boys' choir when he was probably about six or seven. Due to his association with that particular choir, I picked up a few tidbits of information about choirs of that sort, the main being that in the not too distant past, even, it was not uncommon for the best of these singers to be castrated before puberty so that they could retain their high-pitched voices into adulthood. Yeah, I'll just let that sink in a few moments...

You ready to go on yet?
Good.

So... Handel had a favored lead male singer who was one of these men who had been castrated to retain his voice, and Handel wrote the part of Orlando for that specific singer. Needless to say, it is, at best, a difficult role for a male to play these days, so SFO cast a woman in the role, which seems to be the norm. I don't know; I haven't done any research on the history of Orlando and at what point it became commonplace to have a woman in the role.

Anyway... None of that has any bearing on the actual opera production. It's just free trivia for you.

It took me a while to get into this one. It starts with this whole thing with the doctor/wizard Zoroastro trying to convince Orlando that he should forsake love and get back to his duty in the war because, you know, he's a war hero, and there are still Nazis to kill. That's probably advice Orlando should have taken because the woman he was in love with was in love with someone else, and so we have a conflict. It's a much more complicated conflict than that, though, more like a love tangle than a love triangle. After awhile, the story got interesting enough to draw me in. It just takes a while when it takes half an hour to cover a few sentences of story.

The set was pretty interesting. They set it in a hospital because Orlando has been wounded and this is where he had been making his recovery. It was, on the surface, a fairly simple set, just a spinning wall that could be different rooms as they turned it from one side to the other. It was very effective.

In the end, I liked it. A lot more than I expected to. It's sort of a stand-in-place-and-sing kind of opera, but the director turned it into a piece that plenty of movement and action. It was good. It helped to pull the audience, or, at least, me, into the performance.

Christina Gansch, who played the nurse Dorinda, really stood out. She was clever and funny and, really, made her role the center of the performance.

I don't know that I'd want to see this opera again, but I'm glad I saw this production of it.

This Is America

Not My Crisis (Existential Violence, part four)

I guess all of this started for me with a thought I've seen repeated all across social media:
This is not the America I grew up in.

Because this is not the America I grew up in. Or, at least, it doesn't feel like it is. Even growing up in the South, where racism was (and is) more than common, we were all taught (at school, anyway) that racism is wrong. I suppose it's not difficult to digest that message as a kid, and I did. I took it to heart. But, maybe, I just got lucky with good teachers...

I have a cousin who used to call the Civil War, the war of northern aggression, and used to argue all the time that it was about state's rights. I'm sure he still believes those things (though I haven't spoken to him in 20 years). Honestly, thinking back, I did get some of that in school, about the state's rights issue, but that was always overshadowed for me by the issue of slavery. It seems that an awful lot of people in the South came away with the White Supremacist message that the North unlawfully stole their slaves, and they have been champing at the bit ever since to get them back.

But it's more than just the racism and the South for me that's causing the disconnect; it's this whole problem with Nazis. While there were conflicting messages going out about the Civil War and racism, there was no conflict on the issue of Nazis. It was pretty standard teaching that Nazis were the ultimate evil and Hitler pretty close to Satan incarnate. People seemed to agree that World War II was an experience we never wanted to repeat. And yet...

And, yet, here we are with Nazis in the White House (and there seem to be an awful lot of them with the name "Stephen;" what's up with that?). And I can't, for the life of me, wrap my head around how we, as a nation, got to this place. Again. It makes me feel crazy, as if I'm the one suffering from the existential crisis.

So I have to remind myself on pretty much a daily basis that this is not my crisis. I mean, it's not my crisis. The problem is not in my head; it's external.

Which does not mean that it's not my responsibility; clearly, I am part of the mass of people who didn't work hard enough 20 years ago to start putting a stop to this assholery. We all let the GOP get to the place where they are today. Well, not millennials. America is not one of the things that anyone can legitimately say that millennials are ruining.

No, that's pretty much just the Boomers, and the Gen Xers who let them get away with it. But they are our parents, and it's difficult for a child, even an adult child, to step up and tell his parent to quit acting like a sociopathic idiot. But it's no excuse. We should have done more to stop this escalation, even though I'm not sure what that more would have been. Certainly speaking up sooner and louder that this shit wasn't okay.

But we didn't... And, now, we're at a crisis point because of it. So many crises...
But the climate crisis is the one that may kill us all, and the GOP seems pretty intent on letting it do just that. You know, for profit. Unless someone shoots us all first, because the GOP also seems just fine with that.

Unfortunately, all of this really comes down to an issue of violence and whether violence will be necessary to restore sanity to the United States. The Right is heavily armed and Trump (#fakepresident) has already been hinting at the use of force to retain his power. And we know that he loves dictators and authoritarian rulers.

Then there's the need to for someone to just make the GOP stop what they're doing. They've become like the disobedient child who doesn't listen because the parent only ever makes threats and never follows through, so the kid pushes and pushes and pushes... And that's what they've been doing for decades, now, and no one has ever said, "Enough!" And it's time for that.

Yeah, I realize that we get the opportunity to do that through voting, but I'm not sure that's going to be enough and in time this time. Or that the GOP will voluntarily relinquish power as they get voted out. They've shown themselves to have more authoritarian tendencies than are healthy for the USA.

Then there's the issue of the growing lack of confidence in democracy, which is not a topic I'm really going to get into right now, but it's disturbing on so many levels, because for more than 200 years America has been Democracy. It's probably that more than anything else that's feeding the existential divide in the United States. How can we be the United States without democracy? Obviously, in my mind at least, we can't.

All of that, I guess, to say that now is the time to really cling to the ideals that America was founded on. Cling to them and stand by them. The idea that ALL men [people] are created equal and that people should be allowed to pursue their own happiness. You know, as long as that happiness is not controlling someone else's happiness, because that's bullshit.

So...
This is not the America I grew up in.
But, then, the America I grew up in was not the America I thought it was.
It's time to make America better than the America I thought it was.

It's a French Thing, But I'll Take It (pictures I like)

Bumblebee (a movie review post)

I haven't made it a secret on here that I have a Transformers bias but, then, I also haven't made it a secret that I thought at least the last two Transformer movies were trash. Though I can't seem to find those reviews now (I'm sure I did them?) through a keyword search, and I don't have time to dig back through my posts individually to find them. Let's just say that the cancellation of the two planned sequels to The Last Knight was well deserved. I'm still kind of boggled that Bumblebee survived the crushing failure of Last Knight.

But it did survive, and I'm so glad it did because it is easily the best movie of the franchise, and I really liked the first Transformers movie a lot, though I have to say that the opening sequence in Bumblebee, the last defense of Cybertron and its fall, is by far the best scene in any of the movies. By far. They managed to perfectly capture the feel of the generation one Transformers in basically every way. And my son nearly exploded in geeky happiness when Soundwave popped up onscreen. The opening scene is worth the movie, and that's saying a lot because the movie is good. I'm very glad I made it to the theater to see it rather than having to watch the DVD release. It's worth the big screen.

All of that said, the movie does have some issues, small ones, but some of them are worth noting. Primarily, the family dynamic in Bumblebee is very similar to the one with Sam in the first Transformers movie, the only deference here is that the dad is a stepdad and Charlie is having issues because the rest of her family seems to have moved on since the death of her father. So, yeah, the protagonist has orphan syndrome, which I could have done without. And, honestly, I'm ready for Hailee Steinfeld to move on to some role other than out-of-sorts orphan. She plays it well, but it seems to be the only role she gets cast in.

Not that I was bothered by the orphan thing during the movie. I didn't think about that until after. Which means the movie did its job and let me suspend my disbelief. I'm sure in no small part due to Steinfeld's expertise in that role.

John Cena was a lot of fun, too, even as the misguided villain. Jorge Lendeborg was also great and played the lovestruck companion pretty well. And, now that I'm thinking of all of this, I'm kind of bummed that this was a one-shot movie (at least at the moment) because I would like to see a lot of these characters again. Even Jason Drucker as Otis, Charlie's younger brother. He was appropriately annoying and oh so 80s with his fixation on martial arts.

But I digress... I was talking about issues with the movie.
I think the biggest one is the plot hole it opened in the series. In one of the previous movies -- Last Knight, I think -- there is a photo of Bumblebee during World War II (or maybe WWI?), but this movie heavily implies that Bumblebee has never been to Earth prior to this trip. It's not explicit, though, so maybe it's not a plot hole at all. Still, it's been bothering me.

Yep, okay, that's about it. Well, other than the movie being pretty standard in terms of plot. But they pulled it off with style, and I'm okay with it. It was a lot of fun, and I'm ready to see it again.

Rebels: "The Last Battle" (Ep. 3.06)

-- "I'm sure everything will go horribly wrong."

Remember that episode of Giligan's Island where the Japanese soldier who doesn't realize World War II is over shows up in a submarine? You know, the fact that he'd been lost for... what? 20 years explaining that he didn't know. Now I'm wondering what he ate that whole time, because it was a tiny submarine. Anyway, he turns up on the island and is still busy being at war. This episode is kind of like that.

Rex, Kanan, and Ezra hit up a planet where Rex believes there's a stockpile of weapons left over from the Clone War, and he's not wrong, but, as it turns out, they've been taken by a holdout of Separatist droids who think the war is still on. And so, too, our heroes, as they stumble into a trap.

The Clone Wars frequently delved into philosophical questions, whole episodes and entire arcs being devoted more to the question being asked than to the action, but Rebels has mostly stayed away from that and, even when dealing with any kind of moral dilemma, it has kept the action first and foremost. And this episode has plenty of action, but it may be the first episode where the questions really are the focus of what's going on. Questions like, "If no one won the Clone War, who benefited?"

It's a good episode. One of my favorites of the series so far. Probably, with its emphasis on Rex and the Clone War, you could even watch it without having seen the rest of the series, assuming, that is, that you've watched Clone Wars.

"We'll be fine. We have a Clone Wars veteran with us."

"We haven't captured anyone in years."

"We haven't captured anyone ever."

The Burr Advice

Obviously, I never knew Aaron Burr so never received any advice from him. I don't really know if he would have uttered the words, "Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for," or not. It doesn't really matter as it's the words I'm dealing with moreso than Burr. Well, moreso than Burr the historical figure. I'm definitely dealing with Burr, the character, from Hamilton.

That said, Burr was a despicable figure, a true scum-of-the-earth human being. And, for what it's worth, I'm willing to go along with Miranda's interpretation of him, on the whole, since it's based on Ron Chernow's book about Hamilton. I would say that Chernow is a more than reliable as a source.

The Burr of the Broadway musical is a conniving piece of trash, a man constantly playing the middle so that he can make sure he comes down on the winning side. A bit of historical curiosity for you: He's the politician who invented going door to door and getting out in the neighborhood, which was not exactly a good thing. He wanted to get people to vote for him because of how friendly he was, how personable he was, not because of what he stood for. He wanted it to be a popularity contest, something like running for class president in high school.

"Vote for me because we could buddies!"

When I was a kid, I was into GI Joe and Transformers. Mostly, I was into the toys, and I collected them and kept them on display in my room. One day, my mom was in my room talking to me about... something I don't remember... when she abruptly inserted, "I wish you didn't have all of these war toys." It was completely out of the blue and, while not exactly confusing, a little confusing.

So I said the logical thing, "Why?"

And she said, "Because if you were ever drafted, you wouldn't be able to tell them you're a pacifist."

Which totally blew my mind. I think I said something like, "Why would I want to tell them that?" I don't really believe in violence as an answer to things, but I'm also not a pacifist. It would never have occurred to me to try to lie to get out of being drafted like, you know, claiming to have bone spurs.

Which brings us back to this idea of keeping your political leanings out of your public life. Not that most of us have a "public" life but, as small as mine is, I do have a public life. The general "wisdom" among my "fellow writers" is that we should keep our politics and our personal beliefs out of our public lives. Rather in the same way that people are saying saying that football players should keep their protests out of sports.

Not that the two things are actually similar. People want football players to keep their mouths shut (or their knees unbent) just so that they don't have to think about what it's like to be African American in America. Writers tell other writers to keep their politics and beliefs to themselves because they'll alienate potential readers if they're open about what they believe.

And that's true. I know that I have lost followers since I started writing politics.

However! The trade off is keeping your mouth shut about the injustices in the world (or, if you're a Trump (#fakepresident) supporter, supporting and praising those injustices). You know why the Nazis succeeded in so much destruction? People kept their mouths shut. People played it safe. People tried not to draw attention to themselves. And you can pfft all you want at this being similar to a pre-WWII Germany, but you can only do that if you're ignorant of the history. Ignorant.

Look, here's the thing:
When I was a kid in school learning about World War II and the Nazis, everyone always said, "Oh, I would never have done that. I wouldn't have kept silent. I would have taken a stand. I would never never never have let anything like that happen or have been a part of it." Everyone said that. But we're in those days right now, the days when people need to stand up and protest fascism and racism and all of the abuses of the Trump (#fakepresident) administration.

Well, for good or ill, all of you out there keeping your mouth shut, we know which side of that equation you would have been on. And all of you out there supporting Trump (#fakepresident), we all know you would have been right in with the Nazi party.
Congratulations on that.

In the end, I'm with Hamilton, "I'd rather be divisive than indecisive; drop the niceties."
Seriously, the Republicans have moved all of this way past "civility." Don't fall for that trap. It's just meant to get you to let them do what they want to do without complaining about it.

Make America Great: Stepping into the Future

While it can't be said that America was ever great in practice, an argument could be made for it having been great in concept. Or, at least, in concept in its own collective consciousness. If that time existed, and I think it did, it was in the post-World War II years and lasted up to around 1970. The assassination of Kennedy and, then, King wounded it, but, really, it was Nixon who drove a stake right into the heart of the idea of American greatness. Then he twisted it around a bit and pissed on the corpse for good measure.

Let's take a quick look at post-WWII America:
First, America had just saved the world. Almost literally. Whether that was actually true or not doesn't matter, because that's how Americans viewed it.
Second, America was helping to rebuild the world, including offering great assistance to peoples who had just been its enemies. Sure, maybe some of that was motivated by the guilt of having nuked Japan but, still, we were doing it.
Third, there was a push toward equality for all. True, it hadn't gotten there, but people began to see it, finally, as a possibility. It brought hope.
Fourth, World War II led the US into a technology boom, which was heightened when Russia launched Sputnik. We had a great focus on education and science and the future, and we really believed that anything and everything was possible.
Fifth, because we believed in the future, we began to build for the future and infrastructure expenditures show it. It was all rather altruistic because it was an idea, not for those doing it, but for those who would come after.

That was the environment the Boomer generation grew up in, one in which there was huge growth, plenty of everything which was handed to them on a platter so they didn't have to work for it, and the future was so bright they had to wear shades. Perhaps, it's no wonder they long for "the good old days."

Of course, their focus is on the physical output of the ideals of a previous generation, ideals they themselves don't hold. They are a generation of consumers and profit and, now, through Trump (#fakepresident), Republicans are engaged in an act of necrophilia. The focus on coal and other dead industries is nothing more than trying to fuck a corpse back to life.

And the worst part? Trump (#fakepresident) is doing it on live TV and twitter for the whole world to watch, dragging us along for the ride. Not that Turkeyneck McConnell, Paul Ryan, and a slew of others aren't humping away with him.

I think the only way to step into the future is to push the Boomers out of power. Probably all of them. Even the "good" ones (and I do think there are some good ones). Leave them to have their orgy of the dead on their own.

It's time to stop letting the future slip away.

Because we are well on our way to not even being on the bus to the future. It's like we were driving that bus, then let China take over, and, now, we're just getting off entirely.

There are so many things on the verge of happening:
Self-driving cars
Flying cars
Sustainable energy
Laser guns! (oh, wait, China already did this!)
a Mars colony
Asteroid mining
Feeding the whole world
Curing cancer
Well, I could go on for a while...

Do you know why none of those things are actually happening? Boomers and their fear of profit loss by not being allowed to rape the Earth and kill species.

It's time to put or focus on the technologies of the future because we can't go there by trying to make coal the fuel of the future. It's the fuel of a long-dead past, and we need to leave it there.

Look, I'm not saying you're ever going to get that personal jetpack, but, if you do, it certainly won't be coal powered. It's time to get rid of the G.Old.P. They are the proverbial weight around our collective neck tying us to the past. Personally, I'm tired of the past.
It's time to step into the future. I want to see it before I'm dead.

The Man in the High Castle (a book review post)

As I've said previously, any good adaptation should make you at least curious about the source material, hopefully beyond, "Oh, it was based on some book," though I'm sure, people in general not being much for reading, that's where most people stop. But not me!

And, well, looking at the list of books PKD wrote, I can see that I haven't read enough of his works anyway.

Let's just get it out of the way that the Amazon series is only loosely based on the book, which is fine when that's what you set out to do and how you present it. The series, being a format which is ongoing, is able to do a little bit more with some of the concepts Dick introduced. But don't think that if you've watched the series that you have any idea of what the book is really about. You should definitely read the book.

The obvious premise of the book has to do with what the world might be like if the Axis powers had won World War II. That's a frightening thought, isn't it? What would the world be like under a totalitarian rule that covered most of the planet? It's a theme that unexpectedly resonates with our current political climate. Unexpectedly, because we all thought we had put that kind of shit behind us long ago, but here we are with a president (#fakepresident) with all of the leanings of a fascist dictator. If only, you know, people (Democrats) would just get out of his way and let him take over the world.

But I digress...

The book is fascinating on many levels, but Dick's use of language is one of the most interesting aspects. The characters are loosely grouped into two categories: the Japanese and the German, though the individual characters are not necessarily Japanese or German. When the focus is on one of the characters in the Japanese group, the prose (not just the dialogue) is stilted. There's a noticeable lack of articles. The dialogue and prose when centered on one of the German-side characters is fairly standard. There also seems to be a difference in thought processes from one side to the other, but it's possible that's just the prose speaking.

Then there are the characters: a Jew hiding out in Japanese territory under an assumed name, which is still not safe, because the Japanese and Nazis are ostensibly allies and it's routine for Jews to get sent to Germany for extermination when discovered; a "white," which is how the Japanese think of Americans in the part of America they control (just a white), small business owner who is enamored of Japanese culture and thinks they deserve to be in charge; a Swedish businessman on a trade mission to San Francisco; and more, but that should give you a taste. Almost none of the characters are precisely what they seem, though, an experience possibly like pulling on a rope only to find out it's a snake as it gets closer to you.

There's also a question as to what is or what constitutes reality, something Dick frequently does. You can see this just by looking at the basic question, "What would it be like if the Axis powers had won World War II?" But, within the book, there is a book which asks the question, "What would it be like if the Allied powers had won World War II?" The different perspectives on the answer to that question are interesting, to say the least, and they're not always what you would expect.

Maybe not as much as, say, 1984 or Brave New World, but this is definitely a book for our time and definitely worth a read. And I'm again reminded that I should really explore of PKD's works.

Dunkirk and the Slow Death: A Movie About Nothing

Christopher Nolan proves once again how easily dazzled people are when something seems deep, because, I suppose, Dunkirk seems like a deep movie, all about the desperation of war and whatnot; but, really, Dunkirk is a movie about nothing. It is a movie that says nothing. It is a movie that does nothing. Well, nothing other than lazily follow the pseudo-protagonist around as he spends the movie running away.

In fact, nearly the whole movie is about running away. It's a movie about running away that is capped off by Winston Churchill's famous we-will-fight-them-everywhere speech.

I know. That's so deep. Except that it's not.

It also contains a bunch of purposeless non-linear elements. And don't get me wrong; I have nothing against non-linear story telling... as long as it serves the purpose of the story, but this felt more like it was there because people expect it of Nolan. You know, it's his signature thing so he has to include it even if it doesn't belong in this movie. So what we get is incongruous shots of a mid-day dog fight cut with scenes of a ship sinking in the middle of the night.

Oh! But maybe that's deep!
No, not really. It's just sloppy, bad story telling.
And that doesn't even touch on how we cut back to the same dog fight toward the end of the movie but seen from a different character's perspective.
Basically, the whole movie is out of sequence. None of it serves the story. And some of it is actually conflicting.

But, you know, Nolan is so deep.

I'm not even going to talk about the acting. Generally speaking, the actors all seemed bored. I think Nolan wanted them to seem bored, so I suppose that's good acting, but it makes a movie that comes in at only about one hour and forty-five minutes feel like you were watching it for three. But, maybe, my problem was that I didn't watch it in the theater. I wasn't fully immersed in the bigness of it.
Except that it's really a small movie.

Look, let's use the potty meter to measure this movie. In a good movie, you don't want to have to get up and go to the bathroom because you're worried you might miss something but, in this movie, you could have gone to take a nice long dump and come back to find that you missed... nothing at all. Maybe some more guys died, because people keep dying all around the pseudo-protagonist, but it's almost certain you wouldn't have missed any important dialogue because there's really not any. Hmm, now I'm wondering how long the movie would be if you kept only the bits with dialogue. 20 minutes?

The biggest issue with the movie is that it is very unclear about who the enemy is. Or any context about what's going on at all. Sure, maybe Nolan just assumes that everyone should know enough about World War II to supply that for themselves, and maybe everyone should, but it's abundantly clear that a vast amount of people don't know anything about World War II and have no context for what's going on. Shithead Nolan couldn't even identify the Nazis as the enemy in the opening text. No, he just says, "They're surrounded by the enemy."

What the actual fuck, Nolan? You can't do better than that? What enemy? Aliens? Goblins? Ravaging hordes of barbarians? No, it was Nazis, and you should have been clear about that.

But, then, it's painfully obvious that this was your go-to for trying to win a best picture Oscar after losing with Interstellar, an artsy movie about WWII. But this movie shouldn't have been nominated at all. It's just a hollow piece of chocolate that is ultimately disappointing because it has no substance. Bad chocolate, at that.

Repeal and Replace

The Republicans have been talking a lot, lately, about "repeal and replace," not that they have any good plan for that. It's just all about their rabid drive to undo everything the black man did while he was in the White House. They're really a sad, pitiable lot, but I'll wait to pity them once they're no longer in control of things, because, right now, they're rampant destruction of everything good needs to be stopped. [Seriously, it's a government BY the people and FOR the people, but Republicans seem intent on handing everything over to corporations and greed.] Okay, no, I will probably never pity them just like I don't pity anyone who was a Nazi during World War II.

Okay, I'm getting off topic...

Now, just a little more than a week into Trump's presidency and all of the horrible things he's been doing (seriously, he's turning us into the playground bully, and Mexico is his current target to punch on and steal lunch money from (except he calls it "wall" money)), I think it's time for a new approach to Trump's administration.

See, what I've been seeing is people starting to focus on the 2018 midterm elections, and that's good! But I don't think it's good enough or soon enough. Trump's first week was a disaster, and, personally, I'm not into waiting two years before we can begin to mount an effective campaign to stop him. So I think it's time for us to have our own "repeal and replace" strategy.

Before I go on, yes, I know I live in CA and that I'm getting off easy with this idea. I mean, California is THE state setting itself up to be the opposition force to Trump and his agenda. And, well, we have the weight to do it as the 6th largest economy in the WORLD and being a state that gives more to the federal government than it gets back. HOWEVER...

It's like this, the thing that our congressmen, especially those in the House, want most, generally speaking, is to be re-elected. They spend, especially those in the House, inordinate amounts of time on that rather than just doing their jobs. Especially Republican congressmen considering they've spent most of the last decade almost literally doing nothing. So, while starting now on campaigns to get Democrats into office during the 2018 elections is a really good thing, that's still two years away, and incumbents tend to have an advantage during elections.

I don't think we need to wait. It's time to "repeal" some of those congressmen. That sounds so much better than "recall," don't you think? "Sorry, Ted Cruz, you've been repealed." Wouldn't that make such a great headline.

The hitch is that there is no mechanism for that... and it has never happened before. BUT!

Hey! Don't turn away from this just because it sounds impossible. Our government is still, theoretically, by the people and for the people, so, if we the people want a thing done, if enough of us get behind having that thing done, it should be possible to have that thing get done. That said, it's time for a movement to put into effect a recall mechanism, a repeal mechanism, for members of congress.

Some of you are thinking at this point, "Why don't we just go straight for the President?" Two reasons:
1. I think that would be much more difficult and wouldn't produce the desired result.
2. If Trump gets removed from office, that will leave us with Pence, who is possibly worse than Trump. No, he wouldn't spend his time trying to build an implausible wall; he would spend his time doing horrible things like funding conversion therapy.

Wait, wait! What's the desired result?

Well, the ideal result would be putting a mechanism into the Constitution to repeal congressmen. And, yes, that would take a long time, I'm sure, but, in the short run, it would let some Republican congressmen, especially those in the House, know that we are really, REALLY serious about opposing Trump and opposing the whole Conservative agenda that's set to turn our country back more than half a century, destroy the environment, and, possibly, involve us in some major confrontations if not all out war. Republicans who want to get re-elected are going to start listening to their constituents rather than toeing the Republican line. In fact, some of them might start doing the equivalent of grovelling to try to keep their seats.

Trump came into office on this whole idea of change and shaking up the establishment, something he's done NOTHING of. In fact, he's done the opposite by making the government even more establishment and by handing even more of it over to corporations. Now, it's time for us to be the change and to cause the change. It's time to stop Trump, and the best way to do that is stop Republicans. And it's time to do it now.

You Can't Have It Both Ways

Most of you reading this can probably remember back to September 11, 2001. You remember the shock and horror that we -- and I use that term globally, because the whole world was shocked and horrified -- all felt. Shocked because no one could understand why anyone would do such a thing. Horrified because we couldn't understand how it had happened. Why it had happened...

Why did it happen? Why did our government let such a thing as terrorists attacking the country happen? Or, an even better question, how did our government allow the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor. Surely (as conspiracy theorists have been saying for decades), the government knew. And, to bring it up to date, how did the French government allow the Charlie Hebdo massacre? I mean, they had had one of those guys in jail not all that long before. They had to have known!

Someone, somewhere, failed to act and allowed these things to happen because, you know, they could have stopped them. Should have. They should have proactively stopped the bad guys before they had done anything wrong. You know, like in Minority Report. Surely, the government has future-reading psychics hidden away somewhere and know about all the bad things before they happen and are just picking and choosing which atrocities to stop (hmm... and that kind of sounds like what the British did during World War II once they had cracked the Enigma machine).

Look, it would be great if we could see the future and know, for sure, who was going to do what bad thing and when, but that's just not how the world works. Some people will do bad things and some people will only talk about doing bad things, and it's difficult to tell which is which. It leaves us with two options:
1. Catch the bad guys after they do the bad things.
or
2. Toss people in jail (or worse) just because we think they might do a bad thing.

There's this conversation in Captain America: The Winter Soldier about this topic -- actually, the whole movie is about this topic, but there's one particular exchange that really captures it -- between Nick Fury and Captain America:

Nick -- "We're going to neutralize a lot of threats before they even happen."
Cap -- "I thought the punishment usually came after the crime."

I think this is the central conflict not just in the United States but in all of Western culture, right now. How do you balance the need to feel secure against the need for something that is actual just (as in justice) treatment for all people? I mean, it's one thing to shoot a man down who has pulled a gun on you, but it's another thing entirely to shoot a lot of people down for no other reason than you think they might have a gun on them. Or might be thinking about getting a gun.

In general, I think we, as a people, really do believe in the idea of justice, the idea that no one should be persecuted or punished before s/he's done anything wrong. Punishment comes after the crime. However, when something like the Charlie Hebdo massacre happens, we immediately start up with, "Why didn't you stop them?" And that supposes that we should, somehow, not only know that the person(s) was going to do something but that we should also catch and punish that person before the crime has been committed.

Sometimes, it's the same person crying foul over assassinations and drone strikes one day then demanding to know why some terrorist wasn't put away before killing some people. It's not a thing you can have both ways.

And the truth... well, the truth is that some people are going to do bad things, and there's nothing we can do to stop all of them... that is unless we stop everyone that we even slightly suspect. That means, well, that means you, because virtually everyone I have ever known has gotten mad at some point and threatened someone else. So we either have a society with no freedom but total security, or we have a society with freedom and risks where we do the best we can and allow people the opportunity to do the right thing. Yeah, it's a hard choice, especially after an extreme act of violence, but you can't have it both ways.

It's time we make a choice and stick to that choice and uphold that choice. Me? I choose freedom.
Every time.

The Imitation Game (a movie review post)

I'm going to start by saying that The Imitation Game is a great movie; however, it takes a lot of liberties with the subject matter. The broad sweeps are okay, but the details were, shall we say, exaggerated, no, actually, twisted to make the movie "better." It's a little unfortunate, because I'm sure the movie could have been just as good if they had kept to the straight facts (and, yes, I realize the irony there) rather than the dramatic "truth."

That said, Benedict Cumberbatch was incredible. He is really setting himself up as the go-to guy for any anti-social genius type of character. It would be unfortunate if he ends up being typecast as that guy and never gets any other kind of role, though, as good as he is at it. I think I may be becoming convinced he's more than just that.

It's actually very interesting what Cumberbatch did with the part. He started out with a kind of Sherlock level of human interaction and descended into a kind of Frankenstein's monster thing like he did in the National Theatre Live presentation of Frankenstein. It's too bad Alan Turing wasn't actually like that. Eccentric, yes, but he wasn't unfriendly and without the ability to operate in a social setting as the movie showed him to be.

Keira Knightley was also quite good. Well, she was mostly what you'd expect of Keira Knightley, but it was good. She was a good foil to Cumberbatch's portrayal of Turing, which is to say that her character was not quite accurate, either. Joan Clarke was probably quite a bit more socially awkward than she was in the movie but, then, in the movie, it's Joan who mediates between Turing and his team and enables him to work with them, so she had to be socially savvy for that work.

The other actors I really liked were Mark Strong and Matthew Goode. Strong played Stewart Menzies, a person that Turing probably never actually had any contact with, but he was a great movie character and added a bit of a spy edge to everything. Goode played Hugh Alexander, a chess champion who was on Turing's team. Even while I was watching the movie I didn't buy that Alexander was really as charismatic and charming as Goode played him to be, but he was fun to watch in the role.

Of course, the most interesting thing about the movie to me is not the movie at all; it's that the British government kept all of this secret, everything that Turing did during WWII, stuff which helped to end the war, for 50 years. 50 years! And, then, what they allowed to happen to him after the war was just... horrendous. And he was only posthumously pardoned in 2013. It's kind of unbelievable.

The main thing is, though, if you like those little electronic gadgets that you carry around everywhere and use all the time, you have Turing to thank for them. It was what he did during the war that lead to computers. Thinking machines were his thing. In fact, computers were originally called Turing machines.

Basically, I'd say to see the movie; it's worth it for Cumberbatch's performance alone, accurate or not. He might even deserve the best actor Oscar for it, though I haven't decided that for sure, yet. However, once you've seen it, check up on your Turing facts. It's all really quite fascinating.

Abandoned Places: Zoos

Griffith Park Zoo opened in 1912 with all of 15 animals, the second zoo in Los Angeles, the other being the Eastlake Zoo which had been in operation since 1885. By the 50s, it was drawing two million visitors a year. Even so, it was decided that the facilities were underfunded and inadequate and a new zoo, the Los Angeles Zoo, was built not far away and the animals transferred. The Griffith Park facilities have been left as ruins.

Photo by junkyardsparkle and used under the linked license.

Below photos by Don Barrett and used under the linked license.

Riber Castle Wildlife Park (Riber Zoo)

The castle dates back to the 1860s, but it was used as a zoo for about four decades at the end of the 20th Century. Rumors of animal cruelty actually led to raids by animal activists and some animals being released into the wild. Currently, the castle is only a shell.

Belle Isle Zoo

Photo by waxyams and used under the linked license.

Photo by t-dawg and used under the linked license.

Photo by Michael Cory and used under the linked license.

The Belle Isle Zoo is/was in Detroit. There was some scandal involved with the mayor who ordered the closing of the zoo (in order to save the city money). He's in jail; the zoo is closed.

Your bonus photos today are from Zuckerfabrik Greuben, an old mill in Germany built in 1872. But it spent time in the early 20th century as a chocolate factory and as manufacturing plant for aircraft engines during World War II. Its post World War II uses have been less glamorous, and it closed in 1990.

Below photos courtesy of opacity.

Abandoned Places: Ypsilanti State Hospital

The Ypsilanti State Hospital was kind of a rush job. Evidently, the 20s weren't good for the mental health of Americans and by 1930 the existing mental institutions were experiencing some overcrowding. Okay, a lot of overcrowding. So the Ypsilanti hospital was thrown up in Michigan and opened within a year of when construction began. In its first few years, it was one of the only mental institutions in the United States to get favorable reviews based on its conditions for its patients.

That's not a condition that would last. By the end of World War II, two new wings had been added and the hospital was still overcrowded. Perhaps because of this or, maybe, because it was one of the newest facilities, the Ypsilanti hospital was used for various types of experimentation: early flu vaccinations were tested, studies on the effects of milontin, and, um, LSD. During the 50s, the hospital facilities were used for several films about psychological practices, including two about the effects of prefrontal lobotomy.

Perhaps the most interesting thing, though, was some early work and experimentation in group therapy. It seems that during the 50s Jesus was one of the patients at the hospital. Actually, there were three of them. I guess they didn't get the memo about the trinity not all being the same dude, because they were all going for the Jesus aspect. At any rate, Milton Rokeach thought that putting all three of them in a room together, making them confront their delusions, might force them to see reality. That's not really how it worked out, but he did get a book out of it, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

Generally speaking, the 80s and 90s weren't a great time for mental institutions, and the Ypsilanti facility was shut down in 1991 during the push in Michigan to close down all of its mental hospitals.

All photos courtesy of opacity.

Your bonus for today: pictures from the York Street Jail.

Abandoned Places: Vulture Bunker

Travelling back to the Bay of Puck in Poland (remember the torpedo testing base?), we find another World War II era military installation. The Bay of Puck is formed by the Hel peninsula, a sand bar with delusions of grandeur. It actually plays host to several towns and is a popular tourist destination despite the fact that there are times that the peninsula becomes an island, unattached to the rest of Poland. However, it was of strategic importance during World War II, so the Nazis fortified the sucker with the Vulture bunker. Or series of bunkers. Basically, as soon as Germany took Poland, they fortified Hel with these bunkers -- the walls very from four to ten feet thick -- and construction on them was finished in 1939. The bunkers never saw combat.

After World War II, the Polish military put the bunkers to some use, but, at this point, they've mostly been empty and unused for decades.

Photos by Tomasz Jakubowski and used under the linked license.

Your bonus photos today are various abandoned houses in Virginia:

The "Dump House":

The "House of Five Black Doors":

And a church house (okay, a church, so a House of God):