So how’s that space program coming along?

I found it on Jerry Pournelle’s site. I don’t know where he got it. Can’t read the type on the bottom. If anyone knows who created it, I would love to know…

How to improve our standings in the world’s education rankings

I recently saw a reference to yet another article decrying the state of US public education. Here, in a nutshell, is what I think:

Like with the recent presidential election, be careful what you wish for.

Huh? I’ll explain.

See, we say we want one thing, but we reward another. I taught high school for 34 years, in rural, blue-collar and then in “high achieving” suburban environments. I saw a wide range of student achievement and parental and societal expectations. What bugged the living hell out of me wasn’t the belief that if the kid didn’t get into exactly the right college, he would be a failure at life, although that pissed me off a lot. It was that there was so much focus on the environment of the school and the social life offerings there.

It was as if the kids and parents were picking a place to go for their summer vacation, not to get an education. The appearance of the campus, the athletic teams, the other social programs for the students, all the stuff completely unrelated to the actual business of learning dominated their thinking.

But I shouldn’t have been surprised. We have been looking at education that way all the way through, K through 12 and beyond, for decades.

Schools can’t be demanding, unless it’s an Advanced Placement course. Then you can do darned near anything to a kid and the parents won’t complain, because it’s cool because it’s a college course. We had one at our school that was targeted at sophomores. Sophomores? Really? Since when are they able to handle college material? If they are, why stay in high school? Skip the crap and go get the degree.

But the degrees are watered down in a lot of fields, too, and grade inflation has made “academic rigor” practically meaningless. I laugh when I hear somebody from a regular college complain about the “for-profit colleges” that are out there. To me, they should all be for a profit and not receive any state tax money. You want a college education, you pay for it. You need loans, you get them yourself.

“But college is too expensive.” Sure it is…cut the nonsense out of it, just pare it down to the education, and you can probably reduce costs (and staff) by half. It’s completely gotten out of hand.

But that wasn’t the point of this piece. It’s why we can’t compete in the rankings with other countries.

Here’s how to fix it, if the rankings are the priority:

Shoot the horses that can’t jump. Start in, say, 6th grade, separating kids by examination into college bound and non-college bound programs. Non-college bound will prepare the “workers” our Socialist President thinks we need more of. (How Lenin of him to call us “workers.” Sheesh.) Another set of exams at 8th or 9th grade. Kids who test high in science and math don’t get to be dockworkers or taxi drivers, or investment bankers or hotel operators…they are funneled into engineering and pure sciences, or into medical profession preparation.

You see, in many countries those are the kids who are tested for the rankings – not the entire general population. Every time we include everyone in that kind of testing we shoot ourselves in the foot.

Make businesses run the colleges. For example, if you test well in 12th grade, you can go to the college run by GE, or by Apple, or by BP…their own R&D folks would teach, and you would learn what they want you to learn to actually be of use to them. Afterwards, you work for them for a number of years to pay back your education. No summer vacations starting in mid-May, no winter or spring break…you learn straight through, 8 hours a day. You could do the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in two years, tops, without “Gender studies” and garbage like that loaded in the curriculum. No football games, no fraternities.

This would also give those companies a stake in how the lower grades are handled…I can’t see how that could be worse than the way we in public education are led by the nose by the colleges today.

Sound silly? Japan has been doing this for more than 20 years, that I know of. I know because I was present for a panel discussion with Japanese educators where they laid the system out for us.

Trim the fun stuff out. No more athletic teams. No extracurricular activities. No fine arts. None of those are used in those rankings, so why bother? Do you think the Estonians who rank higher than our kids are all great violinists or soccer players? If they are, it is because their parents decided to have them do that after school on their own, not depend on the school to pay for it and teach it. There are some outstanding concert bands in Japan, for instance – but not school-sponsored, and they for sure don’t rehearse during the school day.

And yes, I know that since I am a former fine arts teacher I sound hypocritical. Remember, I am telling you how to raise our rankings, not to provide the proverbial “well-rounded education.” Obviously that has not been a priority or I would not have had a job for 34 years.

If you know of a country that matches the extent of arts and athletic and extracurricular activities we offer in most of our schools, let me know; I don’t know of one – including those who rank ahead of us.

While we’re at it, we can cut about half the social studies classes – have you looked at what kids are offered today? But American History and American Government, especially learning about that pesky Constitution, are not required. But we don’t cut the Home Ec and Industrial Tech – those are needed for the kids going into the service and technical industries. We need more auto shop, not less.

Full-time school. Sorry, fellow teachers, but the cushy part of the gig is the days off. We aren’t bankers and really it doesn’t make sense to barely see kids 180 days a year. Kids no longer work on the family farm, and that’s what determined the school schedule a hundred years ago that we still use today. Give ’em July off, even, but not Columbus Day, or Presidents’ Day, or whatever, and for God’s sake cut out all the shortened days for conferences and teacher work days and meetings. Just teach the kids. We have been reducing the actual number of hours kids learn for decades. It’s a crime, and I never saw that most of those days were worth the time spent. Most of us thought most of the stuff we did was a waste of time and effort. Often the activities were planned to make it look like the administration had us focused on something new and cutting-edge; then we went back into the classroom, closed the door, and taught like we always had because the old way still worked.

Make teachers accountable. Not in terms of social interaction, but in knowledge of subject matter. I don’t want my granddaughters to get an education from people who teach math but got no higher than a B in algebra – and that is far too possible today. One of the reasons for the turnover in education is because smart people get out to do something real with their lives instead of putting up with the administrative BS, the snotty kids and their arrogant parents. That leaves us with, sorry to say, not the top of the heap. I’m not saying we need PhDs in physics to teach our classes – often those folks have no clue how to teach. But we do need people who know how to teach and what they are teaching.

Look, to a great degree, the effectiveness of a school has to do largely with the raw material. I taught in a district that selected for intelligence just like a Catholic high school that required entrance testing, except ours was based on housing costs. You couldn’t live in the district if you couldn’t afford a house there, and really stupid people rarely could. Or really unmotivated people. Move kids from low-achieving areas to that school and sorry, you wouldn’t get the same results. We were good but not that good. We had smart kids to work with, motivated kids with motivated parents and a history of valuing a good education. So we got results and were ranked high in the state tests. But that’s a topic for another piece another day.

That should be enough to move us up, say, 10 places. But we won’t do it, because we can all complain about the rankings, but we still want our daughters to be cheerleaders, or in drama, or our sons to play football or (heaven forbid) join the Chess Club. And then, when they graduate, we want them to “enjoy their college experience.” When or if we ever get more serious about kids getting an education than about the football team’s record, we’ll see some changes.

Oh, and one more…

Make the schools ethnically and culturally homogenous. According to an article in the UK Guardian, the top 10 countries in reading are:

South Korea
Finland
Canada
New Zealand
Japan
Australia
The Netherlands
Belgium
Norway
Estonia

Math and Science rankings were similar. Show me how any of those countries are as ethnically and/or culturally diverse as the USA. The dirty little secret is that we are trying to be everything for everybody, and to do anything else is racist by the standards of the US. I’m not saying any ethnic or cultural group is less able than another, just that cultures dictate learning styles, as well as a host of other things that help or hinder receptivity to educational processes, and we can’t do everything at once for everybody. I think some of the inner-city charter schools are doing well because they understand this and focus on particular neighborhoods and populations. They have high standards but they don’t have to take their eyes off the educational ball. We are constantly being told we have to do this and that because of culture and diversity. Either we all learn the same way and buckle down or we don’t. If we can’t get to kids one way, we don’t have time to find six others. We really don’t. But other schools can.

When I retired, the smallest department by enrollment was “Educational Services,” or what used to be called “Special Education.” It also had the largest number of faculty. Huh? But that, too, is another piece for another day.

This little piece ought to piss some folks off. But I’m telling you, if the goal is to be better at math than the kids in Finland, we have to become them. We can’t do it the way we have our schools structured now.

Well, what do you think?

Travel by asteroid

David Hardy painting of an asteroid-based spaceship

For a long time scientists and science fiction writers have postulated using an asteroid as either an orbital base or a non-FTL starship. Books like Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow use spacefaring asteroid ships because it appears to be a monumental problem to lift enough material out of Earth’s gravity well to build a starship from scratch. John Ringo’s Troy Rising series uses an asteroid, melted and inflated, as a fortress to defend Earth from aliens entering through a hyperspace gate.

SPOILER AHEAD! In fact, Ringo goes farther and, using an Orion-style nuclear bomb drive, turns his fortress into a mobile battle platform, taking it through the gate and to the battle.

I just finished Dr. Travis Taylor’s new book, A New American Space Plan, and I was struck by something that I never really considered much before. Maybe we can get to Mars using current, or near-future technology. NASA is now setting its sights on a mission to a Near-Earth Asteroid. (Or it was last I looked. NASA plans change every day.) Beyond that – let’s say we want to go to Jupiter – it’s going to be orders of magnitude more difficult. When the AE-35 antenna pointing unit failed in “2001” – OK, Hal did it, but still – they happened to have the parts or whatever to fix it. They didn’t have to, but were prepared to.

So let’s say we’ve got a Discovery-class ship, three crew in suspended animation, two minding the store on the Long Trip Out. Something breaks, or the classic Dramatic Meteor Impact happens and breaks something – something that is not available on the ship. We’re basically screwed. Don’t tell me 3D printing technology will save us. It won’t build a microchip for a really, really, long time. And a whole antenna, say 20 feet in diameter? Probably not. We don’t have Ringo’s fabbers, and if we have to wait for those, we won’t go to Jupiter for a long while.

We could do it by what Robert Zubrin, author of the “Mars Direct” concepts, derisively called the “Battlestar Galactica” approach: a gigantic fleet of ships, traveling together for mutual aid and protection. But if lifting one ship’s parts out of the gravity well is hard, lifting 20 is a lot harder.

So let’s see…maybe we can grab a Near-Earth Asteroid, bolt a bunch of stuff on it, drill it out or blow it out with nukes, and build a habitat inside. Maybe not for hundreds of people – let’s say, 50 or so. That’s a lot of lifting but not as much as the other alternatives. Ion drive, solar sail, Orion or Orion-derived nuclear pulse drive – any of them would probably work. It would just take a while to go someplace.

Look at it as if you are driving your motor home cross country and have to take your machine shop along because nobody stocks parts for your vehicle. The bigger the vehicle, and the more people, the more likely it is you can fabricate what you need. And most of the mass is nickel-iron asteroid, which is also providing a lot of radiation shielding. Instead of thinking of a trip to Jupiter as taking a few years, maybe you’ll take decades. Running a closed environmental system like that isn’t easy, but it’s easier than a lot of the alternatives. Eventually we’ll have some better drives, and we can get around the system faster.

Has anyone ever calculated how much toilet paper is needed for a five-year trip?

I don’t see this happening in the next 10 years, but it could be done a lot sooner than most every other idea I’ve heard for deep space interplanetary travel as long as we lack a superdrive. Those are based mostly on magic and good intentions right now.

Once we know how to do that, we can build bigger ones and send people to the stars. By then we should have a pretty good idea which ones have planets we could live on.

I wasn’t a fan of the NASA asteroid mission scenario until now. Now I hope we can get there. We won’t just be learning how the solar system is put together, but how to build a better spaceship.

A pity, though. I kind of like the Blake’s 7 Liberator as a spaceship design. Of course, it was built by aliens…

Blake’s 7 “Liberator” – lots cooler than flying a hunk of rock!

Recent observations on our second-term ObamaWorld

The “tax the rich” mania in France is now bad enough that the world’s 5th richest man, Bernard Arnault, is applying for Belgian citizenship. He is a self-made multi-billionaire, not one who inherited his money, and he’s apparently had it with the confiscatory tax laws in his native country.

Now Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, is applying for Australian citizenship. He says it’s out of a love of the country, but maybe his accountants are telling him what’s coming up for him. (Ok, I can’t stand it…the Woz is going to Oz. There, I had to let that out!)

George Lucas sold LucasFilm to Disney before the end of this year for over $ 4 billion. you can’t tell me his accountants didn’t warn him what was coming up next year.

Companies all over the US are laying off people now, and some are brave enough to say publicly that they are reducing staff or cutting hours because of the impending impact of Obamacare.

There is no evidence the estimated $ 2 trillion in cash US companies are sitting on will be invested any time soon. They held onto it all through the last four years to keep it from being misspent by the Obama Administration. That will make job growth all the more difficult. This is not an environment in which companies want to take risk!

Meanwhile, we still practice the politics of distraction. It worked so well pre-election, why stop now? The General Petraeus affair is much more important than the administration’s mess of Benghazi, isn’t it? And the media cheerfully report it. We love the lurid details, but now we have had so many such affair revelations, how new and scandalous is it, really?

I think the media folks are really kind of pissed when they have to deal with Benghazi. Isn’t that old news? And it’s not like it was Watergate, or something big like that. (Even though no Americans died as a result of Watergate…)  John McCain’s response to a reporter today was pretty good, and very honest. Bless him.

I don’t really know what the fuss is all about, after all. We’ve already seen over the last four years that the Obama Administration can shred the Constitution, that Supreme Court justices can pull the most ridiculous reasoning out of thin air to justify a decision, and that lies made by government officials are routinely reported as truth. And the President’s Press Secretary just says, “Well, he didn’t know about that.”

Through all of this, Democrats were still re-elected, or were elected over Republicans in a number of Congressional races, and the President was re-elected. Apparently nothing that is done by this government that is unlawful or immoral really matters.

What are we to do, anyway? We can’t affect Washington. Voting for candidates is always about finding the lesser of the evils, right? It will never be better…might as well watch TV, lose ourselves in video games, and let the politicians take care of us. Thank God Apple has given us such wonderful toys with which to distract ourselves.

Even if we would rise up, they own the military. They will always be able to compel our obedience at the point of a gun. Tar and pitchforks lose out to tanks. I remember the so-called student uprising in China a couple of decades ago. It looked like there was hope…then there was none.

Do I think it could come to this? Perhaps. I fear not enough Americans care enough to give “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” should that be what is necessary to preserve our Republic.

Good Lord, I hope it does not come to this. But I find no alternative right now. In Europe, the downward spiral has been going on for some time. But they have had us to help bail them out. What happens when we need the bailout? Will China do it?

I think that is unlikely. I hate to sound so depressing, but I have only seen evidence since the election that our leaders  either caving in or making only a feeble attempt to slow the slide somewhat.

How do we stop this?

 

Bill Kristol caves, buys in on the Obama tax meme

Now, in full disclosure: I subscribe and read The Weekly Standard, and I like a lot of the articles I’ve read over the years. But over the last few years I’ve noticed that Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol, who edit the magazine, have become bughouse nuts.

A couple of years ago I went to a downtown Chicago hotel to hear Fred Barnes speak at an event put on by the Heritage Foundation. (A group I highly recommend, by the way.) Barnes, who I enjoyed on Fox New’s opinion panels, was rambling and, I’m sorry to say, pointless. I don’t know why. Soon after, though, I noticed he was making less sense on Fox, and last I saw he isn’t on anymore.

Bill Kristol has always seemed a little more aristocratic to me, even though he doesn’t come from those roots. His father, Irving Kristol, is considered the “Father of Neoconservatism,” which means he was an influential writer but nobody but the MSM ever came up with a definition of neoconservatism. They just called it “those nuts who think we should go to war with Iraq.”

Just for background, neoconservatives are generally considered to be those who formerly were liberals, but who rejected certain parts of the liberal agenda, but not always all of it. The term got tossed around a lot post-9/11 because publications like The Weekly Standard were strongly in favor of going into the Middle East and, to put it simply, kicking some ass.

They were not alone in this, of course. However, I would be willing to bet that a lot of the folks who became neoconservatives were against the Vietnam War, and not necessarily for the right reasons, just anti-war in general. Many neocons are of Jewish decent, and Jews have been Democratic-leaning for many years. (In fact, Irving Kristol wrote a piece entitled “The Liberal Tradition of American Jews,” in which he attempts to explain why American Jews cling so tightly to the liberal beliefs of the current version of the Democratic Party, even when it rejects support of Israel. Google it.)

Whatever the reason, some former liberals became conservative at least in terms of international affairs and national defense, but they did not necessarily reject the concept of the “limited welfare state.” Of course, such beliefs were pretty much in line with Bush 43’s “compassionate conservatism,” so it was no surprise that they supported the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Back to son Bill Kristol. His recent comments, which you can find on Breitbart.com, seem to indicate his support for increased taxes on the rich. He’s one of those fair-weather conservatives, like House Speaker John Boehner, who has decided that caving in to the so-called Obama mandate is the way to lead the opposition.

(Of course, no one is even bringing up the fact that the election might have been stolen. The people who should be investigating are celebrating Obama’s “historic” second term.)

But Kristol is so off-the-cuff, so dismissive, in his comments, as to irritate me far more. Boehner was always a weak conservative, if conservative at all. I though Kristol was smarter and made of sterner stuff. Apparently not:

“Elections have consequences… The leadership in the Republican Party and the leadership in the conservative movement has to pull back, let people float new ideas. Let’s have a serious debate. Don’t scream and yell when one person says, ‘You know what? It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires.’ It really won’t, I don’t think. I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer to freeze taxes for everyone below $250,000. Make it $500,000–make it a million. Really? The Republican Party’s going to fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires? Half of whom vote Democratic, and half of whom live in Hollywood, and are hostile to Republican principles?”  — Bill Kristol, Fox News Sunday, November 11, 2012

Except that Obama will begin with those over whatever limit he says, then lower it, then lower it again, knowing that nearly half the country doesn’t pay federal income taxes now and that the revenue generated by only taxing the “rich” (which includes small business owners, of course) is a drop in the bucket.

I agree that making Democrat millionaires pay more is a good thing. They want to, right? Anyone who wants to contribute more to the Federal coffers is invited to do so. But I don’t see Warren Buffett writing that multi-billion-dollar check any time soon, despite what he says publicly.

But all taxation is theft. Our “representatives” are no longer representing us. Using terms like “a mandate from the people” they systematically take more and more of our property to redistribute. Not all is redistributed to those in need, either, despite the protestations of these “representatives.” More and more often it is used to buy favor to help those people maintain their positions and lifestyles in Washington and elsewhere, and to entice individuals and companies to do their bidding.

So Kristol’s remark either shows a very shallow understanding of what this President has publicly said time and time again as to his beliefs about the distribution of wealth, or he has become a part of this conciliatory Washington in-crowd elitist Republicanism trend.

Now is a time for courage, for standing fast, for standing athwart history, yelling, “Stop!” It is not a time for bending to the will of this President. We will never be able to go back from the brink if we do. As it is I am afraid we may have gone too far and are destined to become a European-style socialist state. But if we are to stop it, or at least slow the decline, we must reject the conciliatory memes being tossed around in Washington. We will be hearing far more about how the Republican party needs to drop its opposition to abortion, to immigration “reform,” to the welfare state. But that just turns them into a weak version of the Democrats, and takes them away from beliefs about America that we hold dear. Maybe the Beltway Republicans will do it. Maybe even Karl Rove will do it. But those of us outside of the Beltway will not. We will not be turned away. If need be, we will reject the Republican party in favor of one that will support and champion our beliefs. And this time, a third party will have real influence and not merely serve as a spoiler.

My only comments on the election

Will the sun now set on these United States of America?

As Dr. Pournelle reminds us, “despair is a sin.”

But I fear greatly for our families and our Republic.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry, one of the most important voices of our War for Independence, refused to attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787 out of concern the Federal Government would grow too large, saying, “I smell a rat in Philadelphia.” His speeches became major portions of the Anti-Federalist Papers.

Dad…is that you?

Johnny 5 from “Short Circuit,” 1986

Curiosity rover’s self portrait, ON MARS! – 2012

 

Are we losing touch with what America is about?

I wish we could get news people, political pundits, and the candidates themselves to stay focused on the issues. I don’t know when Obama called it a terrorist act and I don’t care. I do want to know how he would respond when – not if – Iran threatens Israel with nuclear weapons. I want to know why he won’t promote the use of US oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power. I want to know what he believes should be done about all the people on some kind of public assistance to get them off it. I want to know if he is finished with his obsession with green jobs and businesses assisted by the federal government that still fail.

I should already know all about this, especially after him serving a full term as President, but I don’t. I’m not sure he does, either. Let’s quit the talk about binders and Big Bird and bayonets and contraception and all the other little gotchas that have nothing to do with what the President is paid to do.

Our elected leaders and the national media really do think we are stupid. We are supposed to be impressed if one candidate is more “aggressive” in a debate, not what he says. A debate is not a cage match. The color of a candidate’s wife’s dress is said to be more important that the candidate’s lack of a plan for the country, I don’t know if it is planned to be diversionary or if the Obama campaign is just grasping at straws at this point.

Reagan had the advantage in 1980 in that no sane person thought Jimmy Carter would face down the Soviets if it came to that. For all the concern that Reagan was a “warmonger,” I think most people deep down knew that, if the missile threats started flying, he would be the guy we wanted to get the call. Not having a foreign enemy like the Soviet Union – but a very faceless one, instead – makes the world no less dangerous but it makes it more difficult for Romney to make a case about it.

Could we also please stop the Bain Capital attacks? Obama has no previous experience to run on, except his failures as President. So we must drag our opponent down to our level. Perhaps the sins of Bain (whatever they were) were no more Mr. Romney’s fault than, apparently, many things going on today are Mr. Obama’s. Romney has far more experience in running organizations successfully, both in public and private life than Obama. But we have to talk for days about binders and Big Bird.

(By the way, the presence of David Axelrod, Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, Eric Holder, and a host of others of their ilk show that Obama’s personnel binders must have been pretty empty.)

I am completely mystified how the poll numbers can be so high for Obama, MSM pandering or not. People can see for themselves how things are going. We in the Chicago area may consider graft and corruption a way of life, but there is no reason the rest of the country must do so. Perhaps, painful as it may be to think about, Mr. Romney may be correct – a significant percentage of the electorate is receiving some sort of public assistance and doesn’t want that threatened. They can’t see far enough to understand that, if taxes are lower, businesses are more successful, so actual tax receipts are greater. A stronger economy means the investments made by pension agencies pay off better, so those who are retired or will be retiring have less reason to be concerned about their pension system becoming insolvent, and increasing taxes to pay for them becomes unnecessary.

Remember – this country was settled by misfits: those who were religiously persecuted, or who were not going to inherit the father’s estate and had to make their own way, and pure and simple by those who didn’t want a monarch or anyone else telling them what to do, or taking the fruits of their labor. America grew quickly into a major power partly because there were many Americans dissatisfied with their lot in life who wanted to do better, and this was the place to do it. You could make money in the American colonies, and when that was threatened enough, we got together and threw off that kind of impediment to making money. There will always be abuses of power, but here we made that less likely to affect individuals by limiting the power others had over us – by putting limits on government and providing a rule of law to keep one man from ruling another.

I’m afraid we need another frontier, someplace where the dissatisfied can go to make a way for themselves. It was a huge investment for a family to buy a Conestoga wagon and head out for the West. The investment required to get off-planet is too high for homesteaders. When or if that might change it could easily be too late – we will have taxed ourselves into oblivion and no one will be able to get off-planet.

But a good start would be to make this discussion about the real issues and how we can get America back to what it is all about.

“Atlas Shrugged – Part II: The Strike”

I think in most cases, if you like Ayn Rand’s book, or even found it thought-provoking, you will like the movie. If not – especially if you respond in great horror to Rand’s ideals – you will hate it.

This cast was, by and large, at least as good as the Part I cast, except for Dagny. Samantha Mathis is no match for Taylor Schilling, sorry. Oh, and Rebecca Wisocky was a far better Lillian Rearden in Part 1.

Jason Beghe was a fine, growly Hank Rearden. I can’t think of a TV part where I’ve liked Paul McCrane, so he is a fine Wesley Mouch – even though the name seemed to fit Michael Learner better.

I think the plot modifications and updating to fit the present day worked very well. I know it must have been difficult to edit down all those great monologues, like Francisco’s at the wedding and Hank’s at the hearing. $ 40 per gallon gasoline would have seemed ridiculous a few years ago, but today it just seems prophetic. The most chilling visual to me is any of the scenes of the streets of New York. There are so very few cars on the streets that are normally jammed with traffic, yet it is midday – the first time I didn’t even notice it. When I did, it scared the bejeezus out of me.

The main threads are there – the increasing desperation of the government as the economy goes down the toilet, the opportunistic nature of Mouch and his friends (remember Rahm’s “never let a crisis go to waste”?). Of course, every decision made by the government is exactly the opposite of what should be done…in a black-and-white world like that of the film it is much easier to see the folly of the government’s directives than it is in our daily lives.

Dagny is more and more driven by trying to discover the secret of Galt’s motor and torn apart by trying to save the country singlehanded. As more and more of the men who actually keep the world going disappear she is pushed practically to her breaking point…and she escapes. Her escape is very short-lived, however, and she is compelled to come back to save the railroad once again. For those of you who have not read the book or seen the movie, yet, I won’t spoil any more of it for you.

If you have read the book, and enjoyed it, and saw how it is a cautionary tale for today, then by all means go see the film and take your friends. The really “extreme” – to use a term bandied about too much nowadays – ideas of Rand are not promoted in the film. There isn’t much in here to argue with unless you are an extremely close-minded liberal. Even conservatives of a religious bent can’t argue with the film as much as with the book. Rand promotes the idea that organized religion is almost as bad as government – she refers to religious folks as “mystics” throughout the book. None of that is present in the film. The film really promotes enlightened self-interest over “social justice,” equating required sacrifice for the good of all as a form of slavery.

The Dagny/Hank Rearden romance is downplayed somewhat in the film. It’s used as a plot point as required by the book’s plot, but it doesn’t become overwhelming. In the book the romance is based on mutual respect and an attraction forged by their shared beliefs and passions. This is not a romance that develops between “oil and water” types of people. The only thing that holds them apart is Hank’s marriage, loveless though it may be.

Of course, all of that changes in Part III…after all, at the end of Part II, Dagny looks out of the wreckage of her plane and sees…John Galt.

Is it perfect? No. Does it do a good job of presenting the main points of the book? Yes. I hope a lot of those “undecided” voters see this movie. This could easily be the America of 2016, if we choose unwisely.

“Atlas Shrugs Part II” opens Friday!

With a new cast, the second installment of the “Atlas Shrugged” trilogy, based on the Ayn Rand novel, opens in theaters this Friday. It will be interesting how the whole “Galt’s motor” thing will be handled in the near-future setting of the movie series. (The book gives no particular date, but there is a lot of speculation that was to be set in the – at the time of the book’s publication – near future of the mid-1970s.) It will probably not be in theaters for a long time, so check it out right away. It’s important to see before the election. And if you haven’t purchased the first installment, it is available here and is on the Amazon video-on-demand service as well as  on Netflix.

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