movies and philosophers

It seems to me unlikely that much good will come out of putting a cop into the school for an extremely unlikely event while the mean streets of Inland Lake will will have only a two thirds of its constabulary to prevent crime.  I think the students of the school would be better off with the books and teachers and maybe a better building that Beagles regularly votes against them getting rather than having some cop strut through the halls urging them to stay in school and stay off drugs. and to be careful.  .


I'm surprised that Old Dawg doesn't want to step into mire of film criticism.  It seems to me an interesting topic.  I think at one time I had a top ten list of movies, I can recall six of them offhand, Badlands, Fitcarraldo, Apocalypse Now, The Unforgiven, The Last Detail, and Mother.

I thought I made it clear that I don't like pc in the movies so why would I object to the Italian heritage of Godfather?  Oh add Goodfellas to my list.  Actually I like that whole European stereotype thing, French are snobby, English are twitty, Italians are passionate, etc,  Nobody here really discriminates against Europeans, so I don't see the harm and it makes for some good jokes.

I remember a couple good movies that Old Dog recommended to me, the one where the hired gun drinks milk and Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer.


Oh philosophy, there's a topic we don't discuss nearly often enough in the ivied halls.  When I took a course in philosophy each philosopher was given a chapter, maybe twenty pages, and that was quite a bit of stuff to cram into the brain, but then I realized that that was just a distillation of like a dozen books that they wrote, thick books, even more crammed than that chapter, phew.  So I guess I would take issue with the like two paragraphs they are given in the breezy article. 

I never heard of two of two of those guys but I certainly know of Sartre whose girlfriend Nelson Algren craved, and Wittgenstein is one of my favorites even though I have never read a word he wrote.  The thing is philosophy is not science or math, these guys don't have to prove anything they say, it's a lot like what Old Dog refers to as bar talk,  Sartre was a big time commie, Unlike most non-Russkie commies I don't think he broke with Stalin over the pact that he made with Hitler, but wiki tells me that he did criticize their abuses in the satellite countries.  Wittgenstein was a member of the Vienna Circle that gave us Godel, so he was kind of mathematical,  I believe the Tractatus was vaguely about putting language into mathematical terms.  It was a tough book, widely praised by other philosophers at the time though few claimed to understand it or even to have read it all the way through.  And then the guys says, you know what, everything I said in that book is untrue.  Well thanks a lot Ludwig,

Running on empty

Schools can be big places with a lot of entrances and I don't think adding a few cops will make much of a difference except provide a false sense of security.  A few handguns are no match for a highly motivated and deranged mope with an assault rifle, and regular cops aren't trained for that kind of confrontation.  You would need a team, equipped with body armor and well trained in special weapons and tactics (SWAT) to take the guy down, and the collateral damage would be extensive.  I can't think of any practical solution to this mess, and arming teachers is a bad idea.  Weapons training is not trivial, and it takes a lot of practice to stay sharp.  You can be  a good teacher or a good armed guard but I don't think you can be both.  As a former substitute teacher maybe Uncle Ken should weigh in.  Would he have been happy packing heat in his classes?

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Before I get mired in a meaningless discussion of film criticism, I'd like to know which movies meet Uncle Ken's standards of goodness, going back as far as he wishes.  Did The Godfather suck because of its portrayal of Italian-Americans or for some other reason?

And I hope it's not too late for him to delete Buckaroo Banzai from his Netflix queue.  He won't like it one bit.  He shouldn't watch Makkhi either, the film from India about a guy who is reincarnated as a housefly and seeks vengeance on the guy who killed him.

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Although not discussed recently, philosophy has been a recurring topic in the Institute.  I thought you guys might like reading about some philosophers who changed their minds. 
Flip flops

Cops in Schools

I read in our local paper the other day that neighboring Inland Lakes Schools has stationed a policeman in their school buildings during all times when school is in session. The school district only has two buildings, and the cop will split his time between them. Inland Lakes serves the community of Indian River and the surrounding area. Indian River is not incorporated as a city or village, so they do everything through their township government. Tuscarora Township has its own police force, which is unusual for townships around here. Last I heard they only had three or four officers, and now one of them is being assigned to the schools full time. Their chief told them that he can spare one guy for now, but he will want him back when school lets out for the summer because that's his busiest time of year. The school district managed to come up with almost $15,000 to fund this program till the end of the school year and plans to look for a permanent funding source after that. They had a meeting with the public, and everybody agreed that they needed to do something right now and work out the details later. 

Cheboygan had something like that for awhile but, last I heard, it had been discontinued, and I don't remember why. I saw on the TV news this evening that Kalkaska Schools are doing something similar. In this case, I believe that their county sheriff is donating one of his deputies, they didn't say anything about funding. Like with Inland Lakes, this is only temporary until they can work out something permanent for the long term.

In all three cases, the cops are not only there to ward off a terrorist attack. They also will be looking out for any other illegal activity in the schools and teaching drug and safety classes in their spare time. I have never voted for a school millage in my life, but if this one came up, I believe I would vote for it.

movies

I don't know, it seems kind of suspicious to me that a regular google guy would tell you from afar that your computer was infected, or try to sell you a program for three hundred bucks, or monkey around in your computer, but Beagles is closer to his computer than I am, so I'll let him deal with it.


On to movies.

 I don't know what  Old Dog, or anybody, found to enjoy in Hidden Figures.  I don't mind at all if it wasn't true-to-life, in fact I generally applaud that.  But it has to be true-to-life in that we believe what we are seeing on the screen could happen, that this is how real people would act.  Of course there were no real people in Hidden Figures, except maybe the white women bosses, maybe because they were between good guys and bad guys the way I like my movie characters, so they were a little more than stick figures (I loved the way they said more or less, fuck you, and then dropped a huge stack of work on the desk, like bosses everywhere immemorial).  Other than that there was no dialogue, just uplifting speeches, that Kevin Kostner character, gag me with a Sputnik.  I stand by everything else I said, everything that happened, you knew it  was going to happen and how exactly it was going to happen even as you knew this would never actually happen in real life.

I am a big fan of South Korean dark movies (Old Boy) and speaking I guess of Asian films in general Old Dog recommended Hard Boiled to me,  The word that stuck out for me upon reading the Netflix review was thriller.  I hate thrillers.  Way back when I was a lad they tried to sell me young adult books by calling them adventures.  The good guy is going to run into some hard times and then win in the end.  How boring.  Why bother to open the book?

Hard Boiled had cops and mobsters and one guy who was a bad guy, but you could tell he was going to help out  the good guy at the end, you could tell this right at the beginning, and you didn't see anything in his character that would cause this to happen.  These guys had even less character than the stick figures in Hidden Figures, and it was all bangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangbang.  And even if such a thing were to happen in real life, it would never happen that way, shooters just showed up and disappeared and showed up again in no logical pattern.  I think aficionados of this sort of movie would say something like that is part of the fun, but I didn't see any fun.  I was looking out the window at the cars passing on Lake Shore Drive bridge which was much more entertaining.

Oh and it had like 98% favorable on the Tomatometer, Hidden Figures came in at like 95.

Get Out started very well.  Everything was all very normal, except not quite, just a bit off, just a tinge of sinister.  You know we White people are used to being a bit scared passing through a Black neighborhood, but I had never thought of how Black people must feel passing through a White neighborhood, and especially a ritzy White suburb to see their White girlfriend which all the other White people assure you they are perfectly fine with, actually applaud this love crossing racial boundaries into a bold better world, except there is something creepy about the way they say it.

It was all good until they sprang the trap on the guy and then it was just a horror thriller, nothing really going on in the last half except you weren't sure if he would actually break away, which was more than I could say about the other two movies where there was never any real suspense about what would happen.

That's a wrap.  I'll get to art to make us better people or just for its own sake on Monday.

Have a wild weekend Dawgs, and hey, be careful out there.

The Ghost in the Machine

I think I've got this thing figured out, but I won't know for sure until it happens again, if it happens again. The Google machine seems to be occasionally having trouble recognizing my computer, so it wants to send me an authentication code by text message, but I don't have texting capabilities. There are several other options, none of which work for me at the present. It looks like the easiest one for me to accommodate is the one where I establish another email account with somebody other than Google. Google calls this a "recovery email". Then they can send their authentication code to me that way. They have a record of the account I had with the Dish company, but that address doesn't work because Dish discontinued their email service some years ago, which is why I went to Google in the first place.

It was about three weeks ago that this happened the last time. Both times it lasted for two days and then went away. The messages that Google sent me after they let me back in are identical except for the name of the town where the alleged hacking attempt came from. This suggests to me that there is some kind of glitch in Google Land because a human hacker wouldn't be so consistent. Unless the alleged hacker is another computer, a renegade bot that escaped from its handlers and struck out on its own.

That other thing was your classic "your computer is infected" scam. I don't think he did any damage, but again, it may be too soon to tell. He wanted to sell me a program that was going to take 35 to 40 minutes to down load, and I think that's where the bad stuff was. I didn't allow that, and I didn't give him any money, so I should be okay.

When I can't get into my Gmail, I can't get into Blogger either because they are both Google products. I had no trouble with Wikipedia, Face Book, or my news or weather apps.

I don't think I'm even going to try to catch up with you guys, I'll just jump in somewhere as soon as things settle down around here.

Quick fix?

As I understand it, Mr. Beagles' problem lies mainly in accessing the blog, with other computer and browsing capabilities remaining intact, correct?  Something has been compromised, but there may be an easy solution: create a new GMail account and then either Uncle Ken or I could add him as an admin.  This was something I found after digging around in the Blogger help files.  Most login failures stem from something hinky with GMail, so this may be worth a shot before attempting more drastic measures.

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I, too, saw Hidden Figures and thought it was a pretty good story; you could even say I was entertained.  It wasn't meant to be a documentary so I won't begrudge the creators in how they wanted to tell the story.

Film making, especially by the major studios, is a very commercial enterprise and the producers go to great lengths to fill the seats.  Sometimes they make strange casting decisions, other times they tweak the story in service of bigger box office receipts.  And they don't call it HollyWeird for nothing.  A better movie, I think, was Get Out, which addressed racism in a very different way.  The guy who wrote it even won an Oscar the other day.

Although it was released in Europe (and banned in Russia) the film The Death of Stalin has reached American theaters.  If you like dark comedies this may be up your alley.  None of the characters have Russian accents; can you picture Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev?   It reminded me a little of the Marx Brothers but with plenty of political executions.

It's not entertainment, it's boring

A message from Beagles:

I called Google today and they just gave me the run around. A recorded message directed me to a web site, and the web site directed me to another phone number. The guy at that number said that my computer is "infected" and tried to sell me a protection service for $299 a year. I hope that's all he did because I let him in for a remote session. I figured that would be all right because I initiated the call. Now I wonder if I was really talking to a guy at Google or some scammer that slipped in between me and Google.

If I still can't get on tomorrow, I'll start looking for a new email provider. I don't know what effect that will have on the Institute. Meanwhile, my esteemed colleagues will have to carry on without me.

Sounds to me like he got scammed.  I don't know when we will hear from him again.  I suggested that he email me his posts and I'll put them up.


I put social realism in the title of my last post, well mainly to get attention, but really socialist realism is really just their version of the patriotic feed we got fed regularly in the fifties.  Family values.  Your country is never wrong.  Obey authority.  It was bogus man, and worse, it was boring.

And this pc stuff, same fucking thing.

A couple weeks ago I saw Hidden Figures about three black women that the whole space program would have failed without their help. It had feel good and preachy written all over it, but the critics had loved it.  The three black women never did anything wrong.  The white people never did anything right unless it was after they got their comeuppance from the black women.  Well the white women sometimes did something right, because they were women, but not very often, because they were white. 

I'm a good liberal, I believe in black rights and women's rights and if they had a LBGTQ person in the movie that too, oh and a Puerto Rican lesbian in a wheelchair, that also.

But Gentlemen, that is not entertainment.



Good

Day.