Something Nicer Than The Previous Post…

On a lighter note than the last post, this is a photo off the balcony of where my wife is staying in Nassau. She is actually there for work!

It’s raining in Chicago right now. Whine…

Federal Government Takes First Steps To Nationalize Other Companies

This is absolutely frightening. This article in the Washington Post says the Treasury Secretary is seeking broader powers to be nationalize other financial companies such as hedge funds, investment companies and insurance companies. Currently the Treasury Department only has the authority to nationalize banks. 

Friends, this is an absolutely unprecedented act. As if the current destruction of the strongest economy in the world isn’t enough, the same people will now be able to destroy it faster and make it almost impossible to rebuild. I just don’t know how this can be prevented short of actual physical uprising. I’ve been looking for someone who has the ideas on how to fix this before the curtain falls…but I haven’t seen any way out, since we has a country are getting what we asked for by electing these people.

It’s All About God’s Love – Battlestar Galactica Finale

WARNING: Post contains spoilers for those who have not seen the finale! Read at your own risk!

Who would have though Ron Moore was a religious guy? Even in a non-denominational, non-single religion way?

The finale brought us quality CGI battle scenes, lots of ammo spent, a couple of standoffs, murder and suicide, some tearful moments (for me, not just the characters), and, for the show, a pretty happy ending. It also left some questions about The Bigger Things: Head Six and Head Baltar are angels? Sort of, anyway. And what was Starbuck?

Moore sheds a little light on it in the interview you can read here. The last hour felt odd to me, because once again the planet had a definite visual feel to it. Old Caprica was pretty much shot normally, with no color alterations. New Caprica was shot to look very washed-out all the time. Real Earth (Earth #1?) was blue-gray; a visual cinder. New Earth’s colors were oversaturated, and I swear some of the clouds were CGI to make it look even more pristine than normal. Maybe that was all done to convince us that British Columbia looks like prehistoric Tanzania. I think it was definite decision to make it feel brighter, happier, and filled with promise.

Thanks, Ron, for not ending the series any darker. We needed to “play them out with music at the end,” as Heinlein would say. The fact that they would all soon be scratching out a menial existence was enough.

I want to make sure we remember J. Michael Strazynski and Babylon 5 at this moment. Without B5 and its groundbreaking use of story arc we could never have had BSG. (By the way, the original B5 Lurker’s Guide is still up, thank the Great Maker.) I know, other shows have done story arcs, but four years?  Lost, maybe. It’s still a tough sell to a network, I’m sure. But B5 was where TV science fiction grew up, and storytelling because more than the monster-of-the-week.

Ron Moore tried to make BSG relevant to the questions of our day, as did Gene Roddenberry in his original vision of Star Trek. In large part, he succeeded. He knew that the majority of his audience was going to be held by the character development. He apparently had no concerns that the audience would be unable to suspend their disbelief about the underpinnings of the show, such as  what makes a Cylon a Cylon. As far as we could see, they were human. One, because of God’s Love, was even able to have a child with a human. Where’s the machinery?  Moore always tried to avoid the nerdiness factor that could have doomed the show…but I guess I’m that nerd, because I’d like a little more reason to believe Cylons were at least partly non-human. Maybe “The Plan,” the prequel movie Edward James Olmos directed and which will air next fall, will tell us. But I doubt it. I would expect it was written more to bridge to the prequel series, “Caprica.” Maybe we will learn more there.

And what ever happened to the Centurions? Are they still out there? Did they build a machine civilization? Are they V’ger? Are they the Borg? I hope not. I expect something better of our favorite toasters!

EDIT, supplemental:

Here is a link to Maureen Ryan’s interview with Ron Moore and her thoughts on the finale from the Chicago Tribune: link

She caused me to remember a couple of other points:

First, JMS was (and is, I supposed) an avowed atheist. In fact, he used to work for Madelyne Murray O’Hair’s atheist magazine. His picture of the universe included “Old Ones,” beings who apparently moved to the End of the Universe after they tired of reality and playing the game. He also made the mysterious alien Kosh as the kind of being humans had interpreted as angels, and the Shadows as demons, or at least as the creatures who kindled such mythology. He resurrected his main character without telling much about how. He was willing to say there were things We Could Not Yet Understand, but he didn’t make them completely unknowable…just that we weren’t there yet. It was a sort of an explanation of the bases of man’s religions that traded some scientific Mysteries for spiritual ones. Was that really a trade? JMS left that open-ended. There were many religious references and discussions within the show. To JMS’ credit, he always treated them with great respect. I always thought of him as more of an agnostic…the show seemed on one level to be JMS trying to work out what was to him a reasonable belief system.

Ron Moore, as you can see from the two interviews referenced above, was not that subtle. Some Things We Cannot Know, and may never know…at least on this side of reality. (Anders to the departing Kara Thrace: “See you on the other side.”) I never made a connection of a sort of Holy Trinity about the show, but in a way it was very true. Kara was very much a Holy Spirit at the end. I think Moore’s characters are in some way more aware of their importance to the human race, because there is so little of it left, and very unaware of their lasting influence. They are just trying to survive and do the right thing, with little time for reflecting on the big picture…unless they end the reflection pretty much roaring drunk.

The main characters JMS established in B5 were aware of their importance – world leader, emissary, religious icon, leader of all sapient creatures (!). They often acted accordingly. And yet the show was about the characters, just as BSG was. G’Kar was my favorite on B5, and I just realized there are parallels with my favorite BSG character…Starbuck. Hmm. Maybe these two series aren’t as different as I first thought…

Fred Thompson’s Radio Show!

Senator Fred Thompson, also known as a TV and movie actor and, for a brief time, candidate for US President, now has a radio show on the Westwood One radio network. His wife Jeri joins him on the show, which airs from 12 noon to 2 pm daily. The availability of radio stations during that time slot makes it a tough road for Fred; it’s right on top of the time when Rush Limbaugh airs his first two hours every day. Since I can’t listen to either one live at school, I tend to listen to Fred’s show as a podcast later in the day.

Fred is great, with a commonsense approach and a lack of hyperbole. Jeri provides the edge that Fred lacks on the air – she’s tough and not afraid to speak her mind. Sometimes she’s a bit hard to take but no more so than Rush, and Rush gets to do it for three hours a day.

Fred also has a couple of guests per day. So far they such folks as currently serving Republican senators and representatives and folks like Gary Sinise and Victor Davis Hanson. They spend 10-15 minutes with Fred and are generally pretty interesting.

The show has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than Rush, but is also less of an education about conservative principles. Right now I’m enjoying it quite a bit. You can find the podcasts on iTunes or access them from Fred’s site. I hope he gets enough of a run to build an audience.

Here It Comes…Duck and Cover!

The Federal Reserve is buying Treasuries and committing to double the purchase of mortgage debt. The jump in inflation can’t be far behind. From the WSJ. An explanation of why this is bad.

Buy gold and wheelbarrows, my friends.

Catching Up On Stuff

Things I’ve not mentioned lately that I should have:

Happy 25th birthday, Apple Macintosh! (back in January) Doesn’t it feel good to get out of that bag?

RIP Ron Silver. A former Democrat who finally understood after 9/11, he will be missed as an actor and a conservative. “I made so much money on your campaigns, I might just do this one for free.” – Bruno Giannelli, The West Wing

I recently got an Amazon Kindle 2, a gift from my wife. It’s a well-thought-out design and the 3G connection to Amazon.com is very fast. I wish there was a way to backlight the screen but the “digital ink” technology doesn’t work that way. It’s very readable, light and seems to be pretty sturdy. I’m taking it on a trip next week and will report how it works out.

iPhone 3G and Apple Bluetooth Headset Tip

I finally dragged out my Apple Bluetooth Headset, the one my son got for me. It was a power-eater with the original iPhone and so I never used it much – about the time I needed to, it was out of juice. I thought maybe it would be different wi the new phone.

First, I couldn’t find the travel cable that charges the headset and the phone. I knew it wouldn’t work with the new phone anyway, but that’s how you are supposed to pair them – plug them both into the cable and the USB end into power, and they should automatically pair. Since that didn’t work I had to do some research.

Here’s the deal: Set the phone to bluetooth mode. (Settings> General> Bluetooth.) Then switch it to Airplane Mode, then back off of Airplane Mode. (I don’t know why.) Then hold the button on the headset down for 8 seconds, until you hear the “power-on” ascending notes and five quick beeps. That puts the headset into discoverable mode for five minutes. It should show up on the phone, and the green light should be blinking on the headset. After the phone finds it you’re good to go.

Why that is the procedure, I don’t know. I put this together from an Apple Tech Note and the Apple forum…two separate answers, taken together, worked.

Good luck out there!

“Atlas Shrugged” History

Looking up something else I ran into a page that describes how Rand’s novel developed. You can find it here. Nothing else for today – got other stuff to do!

“Atlas Shrugged” Quote #5

The whole radio speech of John Galt is worth re-reading. It runs 60 pages in the Plume edition. It, like the whole book, could have used more editing. (Although I seriously doubt that any editor could have forced Rand make changes she didn’t want to make!) Still it is a masterpiece of philosophical argument. Here’s one piece of it:

“The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are producted by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who’re able to think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won’t produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner’s terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man’s property is the policy of ciminals, no matter what their numbers.  Criminals are savages who play it short-range and starve when their prey runs out – just as you’re starving today, you who believed that crime could be ‘practical’ if your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery was illegal.

“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion agains disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of portector to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.”

from Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

Tea Party Protest

My wife copied me an email going around telling people to send a tea bag to the White House before April 15, with the idea that it will send the administration a message that people do not like the way their taxes are being spent. Nice idea, but the last I knew all the mail for the White House, the Congress, and many other government agencies is still being diverted to an “undisclosed” post office location so it can be scanned for things like anthrax. I got that information from the instructions the Copyright Office gives out for submitting documents for copyright. They say the time it takes for processing is increased because of the safety scanning of mail.

So I doubt the tea bags will get through. I think it’s a great idea, but I don’t think Obama will ever even see them. It’s a pity, though…

By the way, there is a New American Tea Party, which is a different group, not the sponsor of this sort of protest. I do recommend them to you for your consideration.