View 726 Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Over the weekend, we recorded Hemingway and Gellhorn, the HBO movie about Ernest Hemingway and his third wife Martha Gellhorn, and watched it last night. I’m not sorry to have seen it. There was little remarkable about the performances except that Nicole Kidman showed great versatility in being both younger and much older than her present age. If you like sex scenes there were plenty of them, not quite hard core but certainly what would have been called pornography only a few years ago. They went on longer than I cared for, but there were plenty of them with lots of intensity. The real life Martha Gellhorn once made a point of saying in interviews that she didn’t enjoy sex, and Kidman almost says that in her comments to the viewers done, supposedly, thirty years after Hemingway’s death, but that hardly comes through in the sex scenes.

Much of the film takes place during the Spanish Civil War, and much of it purports to be an objective account of the war as seen by Gellman and Hemingway, who were of course Republican sympathizers and dedicated anti-fascists. Neither Gellman nor Hemingway was a member of the Communist Party, but both were ardent supporters of the Republican side during the civil war, and their reporting from Spain contributed to the nearly universal intellectual view that there is only one respectable view of that war, and anyone not for the Republican cause must be a fascist sympathizer. This is of course the communist party line on the war, and it has been so successfully promulgated that few know there is any other possible view.

In the real world matters are not so simple.

The film shows John Dos Passos and other western intellectuals, all supporters of the Republican cause, and it does show, without much emphasis or explanation, some of the actions of the Russian communists who operated as allies of the Republic. It shows Nationalist atrocities in plenty, but barely mentions the communist operations against the anarchists and their frequent purges. There is no mention of George Orwell’s accounts.

It is highly unlikely that neither Hemingway nor Gellhorn was aware of the violent divisions within the Republican cause (at one point a near civil war between POUM and Communist forces). There is some hint of these activities, with John Dos Passsos’ friend shown kidnapped by NKVD agents causing Dos Passos to question the Russian involvement, but it is not given much emphasis. Actually, Dos Passos moved from being a committed left wing writer to a libertarian position. He retained much of his sympathy for the IWW and some of his old comrades, but also recognized that not all good comes from the left, and in fact the old slogan that there is no enemy to the left was false and dangerous. The result of all this, not mentioned in the film at all, is that Dos Passos wrote Midcentury, his last and some would say his greatest novel. Like his earlier trilogy collectively called U.S.A., Midcentury is a “collage”, consisting of many scenes and viewpoints woven together to form a story as seen from many angles. I read it as an undergraduate and it had a great influence on me, presenting a viewpoint I had not seen before. The film merely dismisses Dos Passos as having moved to the right. That too is the standard left view – Dos Passos has become an unperson in modern academia, and Midcentury is never discussed in intellectual society.

But Hemingway and Gellhorn does a reasonable job of showing the standard intellectual view of the Spanish Civil War, and particularly the period before the Hitler-Stalin pact that united the Communists and the Nazis. That happened after the Franco victory in Spain, when Hemingway and Gellhorn were together. The film makes no mention of that pact and what followed with communists proclaiming the fall of Paris to the Wehrmacht as the victory of the working class. If Hemingway or Gellman has ever written of that event I am unaware of it. It was traumatic to many left wing intellectuals, and played a massive role in converting Trotskyite leftists toward libertarianism and what became “neoconservatism”.

The film is, as nearly all major films are, mostly sympathetic to the left wing cause, and while purporting to show a distance between the communists and the anti-fascist popular front, it doesn’t do much of that, and shows none of the stresses that resulted from the massive change in the party line the day after Hitler invaded Russia. Of course there is no reason why a biographical film should cover such intellectual events unless they impacted on the principals: but one does wonder why there is so little information on that period in the lives of Hemingway and Gellhorn. They were certainly together then.

All told it’s a good film with good performances, and shows something of the intellectuals in America in that formative period. And if you like sex scenes, there’s plenty of them. Maybe Julianne Moore will be jealous.

View 726 Sunday, May 27, 2012

Memorial Day Weekend

I found the following at Chaos Manor Views for May 26, 2003.

In Memoriam. RIP

"It was a noble cause."

    Ronald Reagan, on the Viet Nam War.

And indeed, a million people did not flee South Viet Nam until it fell; but for many years, there are those who fled to South Viet Nam from Tonkin.

Freedom is not free. It is bought at a high price. It can be squandered cheaply.

I also found this essay on our Iraqi adventure. When Bush Sr. entered the White House as president he fired every Reagan supporter he could identify, so there were few left to listen to people like me when we went into Iraq the first time, and fewer when Bush II was inaugurated. Even so, I wish someone had listened back then. I suspect the United States would be better off.

We mourn our dead, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On establishing democracies:

If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.

Benjamin Disraeli

Government by public opinion poll is about the same as plebiscitary democracy. America was established as a Republic. The States could have democracy if they so chose. The Federal government had not that power and for good reasons, the Framers in 1787 having already known what Disraeli tried to tell Parliament some fifty years later.

On that subject:

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Sunday indirectly confirmed recent remarks by the Ambassador to Israel that the U.S. is “ready from a military perspective’’ to stop Iran from making a nuclear weapon if international pressure fails

http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/panetta-u-s-is-ready-to-stop-iran-from-creating-nuclear-weapons-20120527

It may become a very hot summer.

My 40” Samsung television has developed a strange problem: when you turn it on, it fails to find a valid signal source, and it won’t listen to the controls. Over time, it will suddenly work for a few seconds, then go off again. This continues for about fifteen to twenty minutes after it will suddenly act as if nothing were ever wrong, and operate perfectly after that although it doesn’t always listen to the TV clicker (nor to the cable clicker when it is being told to act as if it were the TV clicker). The cable clicker works, digital recording works, indeed the TV works just fine, and of course the simplest remedy to our problem would be simply not to turn the TV off. For reasons I won’t go into, I’m generally not so comfortable with doing that..

TV’s similar to our four year old Samsung now sell for about $500, and since I doubt that anyone repairs televisions any more I think it is probably time to replace this one. When we went online to look at modern TV we were offered a bewildering variety of High Definition sets at around 40” diagonal (which is plenty big enough for our TV room, some Samsung and some “major brands at prices too low to advertise”, some LED and some Plasma, and I have to say that I now wish I had gone to CES this year.

I thought while we were at it we’d replace the bedroom TV, a very very ancient flatscreen low definition 20” TV with something around 25” HD at whatever low price we can find.

It used to be that the guy I’d ask advice from on this would have been me, but I haven’t paid much attention to that end of the electronics revolution for a while. I’ve never been much use as a judge of audio quality, and as far as I am concerned the 40” Samsung HD we have is at least Good Enough in both size and video quality, so I’, more interested in reliability and price than blacker blacks and other such things. Recommendations appreciated, but please, either know the subject or have personal experience worth sharing; my mailbox is pretty full lately, and every day I have to write yet one more set of rules for my spam filters. Who’d have thought I’d be getting hundreds of emails ostensibly from myself about Rolex watches (or at least they say they are about Rolex watches; whatever they are, they get deleted if they are “from” me and mention Rolex… All the rules slow my mail reception down something awful, but the good part of the computer revolution is that the electronic brainpower keeps getting better and better..

Anyway. If you know much about 20” and 40” TV sets please let me know.

Actually, since I wrote that I sent copies to a few friends and Marty Winston has pretty well brought me up to date on this stuff. LED sets cost about $40 more and last years longer. As I suspected, nobody repairs TV’s now – I can remember going down to the drug store and using the tube tested to find out what was wrong with my old TV and that would take care of its problems as long as the bottle hadn’t died. And I lugged an early color TV to a repair shop. Now it’s just pointless. It costs about the same to repair a TV as to buy new, and new is better. Moore’s Law in action. So we’ll be off to see what looks good and replace the TV with something about the same size but better.

Doesn’t mean I won’t read comments from readers, but there’s no necessity unless you know some reason to challenge Marty on those conclusions.

All this will be in an upcoming column, and yes, that’s overdue. We really like our new Sandy Bridge system built in the stunning Thermaltake box, and we’re set to build an Ivy Bridge system for Windows 8 sometime along the line. I need to write up Alien Artifact (named because of the Thermaltake box, actually). Here are two views of Alien Artifact in action, complete with a solid state USB 3 external drive. The case is well designed for access, convenience, and air flow, and is very quiet. I’ll have a full report presently.

While I was looking for photos I found some shots I took of Sable after she went to a new groomer last week. Her old groomer has lost her lease and closed, and we had to find a new one, which in fact worked out well. Here’s Sable just home telling us about her experience.

The final result was pretty good. Sable likes the place. I used to wash and groom our dogs – Huskies all for the past three decades – myself, but over time that got a bit harder to do, and wasn’t particularly kind to the dog, so we have it done now, not as often as we should probably, but Sable looks pretty good. We sort of judge the quality of the place by her attitude when we take her there – if she doesn’t seem eager to go in after her first experience we look for somewhere else – but this time it was really interesting. As soon as we got to the parking lot, a place she had never been before, she got eager to get out of the car and go in there. We think she must have smelled happy dogs. Whatever it was, she likes the place, and she looks pretty good.

If you were looking for something to worry about, try this:

Backdoor found in Chinese-made US military chip

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/sec_news.html#Assurance

—

Eric Smith

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

Bjarne Stroustrop, Developer of C++ programming language

View 725 Friday, May 25, 2012

The Space Station has caught the Dragon by the tail. It’s the first instance of the success of the new NASA policy. A long time ago some of us said that NASA shouldn’t be running operations, they should create markets and let the industry take care of the rest. The government doesn’t operate the railroads, or the airlines, or the trucking industry, even though a great deal of rail, airline freight and passenger, and highway freight is government stuff. Fort Hood doesn’t operate trucking lines to go out and bring food to the mess halls. It pays for delivery. Thus should it be with NASA, and this was the 1980 recommendation of such outfits as The Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy – sometimes known as one of Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet groups” that wrote the transition team papers on space policy for the incoming Reagan Administration of 1981. One of the papers in that report was “How to save civilization and make a little money,” by Art Dula and Larry Niven after a discussion with the full panel. It outlined how to create a commercial space policy.

Congress passed the Commercial Space Act of 1988 with the purpose of encouraging commercial space development. It was followed by other Commercial Space Acts, and the transfer of commercial space regulation to a special section of the FAA, and over time a generally more favorable atmosphere for commercial space. Henry Vanderbilt’s Space Access Society and other such outfits have annual meetings. Space X, X Corp, Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, Kistler Aerospace, Carmack’s Armadillo Aerospace, and a whole raft of private space companies, some big, some small, some successful and some not so much so have sprung up. The engines of capitalism were turned on, and the successful docking of the Dragon is a major step in the renewal of interest in space.

Government arsenals can do great things. Projects organized to implement a strategy of technology can be very successful, as witness the X projects, and for that matter Apollo; but projects don’t build industries. The best thing government can do to build industries is to provide certain markets, or in the absence of markets, prizes. Of course we’ve said all this before, and many times. See ACCESS TO SPACE.

This is just the first step, but it’s a big one. I have been asked by a colleague why this is different. NASA paid for this, didn’t it?

Yes, but not in the old NASA way, with cost-plus contracts and with NASA trying to run things as they did with Space Station. Dragon wasn’t designed at Marshall or in Houston, and NASA inspectors weren’t wandering around the factory floor and insisting in “testing” components (as Marshall did with the tanks for DC/X, which they managed to break and had to weld back together – it was the failure of the weld that caused DC/X to burn up, thus ending the DC/X threat to NASA’s plans). Just as NASA doesn’t operate the trucks that deliver the chow to Fort Hood mess halls, it’s not NASA’s job to build and fly the Falcon and Dragon. They just collect the cargo. And that cargo was delivered.

It’s a first step but it’s a big one.

Hurrah!

This is supposed to be “Everybody blog about Brett Kimberlin Day” but since I never heard of Brett Kimberlin I can hardly do that. More interesting is that looking for Brett Kimberlin gets a little complicated. His Wikipedia entry is gone, gone gone, although there is considerable controversy over why. It does not seem to be controversial that he was convicted of domestic terrorism and sentenced to 50 years, but was released on parole after some 17 and is out now, possibly unsupervised. He seems to have generated rage among some – see http://wormme.com/2012/05/25/you-are-not-a-terrorist-brett-kimberlin/—as an example – and he is certainly no favorite of Glenn Beck — http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/05/25/glenn-talks-to-bloggers-about-brett-kimberlin-terrorism/ – but finding a news report about him is a bit more difficult. He seems to have friends, some powerful, as well as many enemies. http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/05/speedway-bomber-brett-kimberlin-threatens-blogger.html 

I’m not sure I have ever come across a situation in which someone this controversial has no Wikipedia entry. It may say something about Wikipedia and it may not. Of course one cannot rely on Wikipedia since articles there change like dreams, but it can be a good place to start.

T H White (Sword in the Stone) wrote a charming novel suitable for children although it’s not really a children’s book: Mistress Masham’s Repose. There is a Kindle edition and I strongly recommend it not only to all my readers who have children of ten or older, but to readers who like a good story. It is full of White’s observations about the world. One of the characters in the book is The Professor, who has spent his life verifying quotations. He would have greatly enjoyed the Internet, I suspect. Incidentally, children who read this book will not know it’s not a children’s book; like Sword in the Stone there are a number of levels at which it can be read, and most people like every one of them.

Aside: Mistress Masham’s Repose is a fantasy, whose premise is that a small colony of Lilliputians were brought to England in the 18th Century by Lemuel Gulliver after his travels; they were exhibited in a travelling carnival until they escaped and took refuge in a small folly in an island on a great English estate, where they have lived in seclusion ever since. The story is about a little girl who discovers them, Since it’s a Tim White story, you’ll believe it without much effort and be disappointed to realize when you’ve read it that it was just a story. (Or was it? White seemed to know many things…) The Wikipedia article on the book will tell you more.

Anyway have a good weekend. I’ll try to get out a couple of mail bags. I’ve been working on fiction.