brainrow

A. O. Scott’s review of Revenge of the Sith in the New York Times is fun to read:

This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That’s right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it’s better than “Star Wars.”

“Revenge of the Sith,” which had its premiere here yesterday at the Cannes International Film Festival, ranks with “The Empire Strikes Back” (directed by Irvin Kershner in 1980) as the richest and most challenging movie in the cycle. It comes closer than any of the other episodes to realizing Mr. Lucas’s frequently reiterated dream of bringing the combination of vigorous spectacle and mythic resonance he found in the films of Akira Kurosawa into American commercial cinema.

…

“This is how liberty dies – to thunderous applause,” Padmé observes as senators, their fears and dreams of glory deftly manipulated by Palpatine, vote to give him sweeping new powers. “Revenge of the Sith” is about how a republic dismantles its own democratic principles, about how politics becomes militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise of power. Mr. Lucas is clearly jabbing his light saber in the direction of some real-world political leaders. At one point, Darth Vader, already deep in the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.” Obi-Wan’s response is likely to surface as a bumper sticker during the next election campaign: “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.” You may applaud this editorializing, or you may find it overwrought, but give Mr. Lucas his due. For decades he has been blamed (unjustly) for helping to lead American movies away from their early-70’s engagement with political matters, and he deserves credit for trying to bring them back.

The Hubble Space Telescope marks fifteen years of service.

Can a thing that has been used to do evil be turned to do good? The filibuster isn’t the problem. Like a hammer or a knife, it’s just a tool. What is the tool being used for? Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

The president claims he should have the judges he wants because he won the last election. He has a mandate, he alleges, but if so, it is an insubstantial one — a bit more than 2 percent of the popular vote. When you compare that with recent second-term victories — FDR, who won by 24.3 percentage points; Ike, by 15.4; LBJ, by 22.6; Nixon, by 23.2; Reagan, by 18.2; Clinton, by 8.5 — it becomes clear that Bush’s mandate is, like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a figment of his imagination. His mandate, such as it is, should be to realize he ain’t got one.

I concede that I was not always so kindly disposed toward the filibuster. There was a time when it was used to thwart civil rights legislation and other legislative acts of basic decency. Now, though, it is being brandished to block a handful of prospective judges from narrowing those hard-earned rights.

Amy Sullivan in the Los Angeles Times:

Maybe my Bible was just a different translation from the one used by Pastor Chan Chandler. Chandler was the minister of East Waynesville Baptist Church in North Carolina who told members of his flock that if they voted for John Kerry, they needed to repent their sin or resign from the church.

Calling himself “merely the spokesperson” for “the most high,” Chandler charged that Kerry was an unbeliever…

The New Republican Standard Version of the Bible has been gaining popularity among evangelicals and Catholics. Just a few weeks ago, conservative political and religious leaders lined up on their so-called “Justice Sunday” to charge that those who oppose the ideologically extreme judicial nominees whom they support cannot be true people of faith.

Some members of the American Catholic clergy told Catholic voters last year that a vote for the pro-choice Democratic nominee would be punishable by exclusion from the sacrament of Holy Communion.

This is a shift — however slight — in conservative rhetoric and tactics.

The charge used to be that Democrats were godless, a party of secularists run amok. That changed somewhere around the time when Barack Obama boomed, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states!”; progressive minister Jim Wallis became one of the best-selling authors in the country; and Americans began to reconnect with their history, including centuries of religiously motivated political causes such as abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement.

So having failed to prove that Democrats are all secularists, conservatives now assert that liberals are not religious enough…

This is a debate that conservatives are going to lose. Because you don’t have to be liberal or conservative to be offended by the idea that a political or religious leader can decide whether your faith is good enough.

Somehow, it’s always about who will be the judge.

It’s been a while since George Lucas has had much worth saying, I think. But I’ve read about a scene in the new Star Wars movie: the Galactic Senate cheers when the Emperor declares the end of the Galactic Republic, “for a safe and secure society.”

Senator Amidala says, “This is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.”

Rats. I wasn’t going to see the movie. Now I’ve gotta.

This is a fairly old story, from earlier this month: Ken Tomlinson, Republican Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, reportedly told PBS officials to make sure their programming reflected the Republican mandate.

He hasn’t denied that he said it, but says he was kidding! Sheesh, can’t you take a joke?

Gosh, I suppose I should lighten up. So here’s a cartoon from Mark Fiore, introducing the new PBS.

I bought my first computer 22 years ago today, on May 11, 1983. Changed my life.

It was an Apple IIe, a minor 1983 update to the classic Apple II that had been introduced in 1977. The pace of technological change has accelerated since then.

The central processing unit (CPU) in my Apple IIe was a 6502 chip running at 1 MHz, just like the original Apple II. When I tried my hand at typing in programs in the built-in BASIC language, I was astonished at the speed of the machine. Error messages might flash by too quickly for me to see. My daisy-wheel printer could hammer out about 12 characters per second — very impressive compared to my own halting manual typing.

The computer I’m using right now has two CPUs, each running at 2GHz — 2,000 times the clock speed of my first computer. The CPUs are of a different design: they can deal with data in bigger chunks than the 6502; they use a RISC instruction set that operates significantly differently from the 6502. My new computer might be many thousands of times faster than my Apple IIe, or it might be only about 1,000 times faster. I’m sometimes frustrated that some operations seem to take too long. My expectations have changed during the past 22 years, but I’m also doing things with this computer that I never would have imagined doing with the Apple IIe.

My Apple IIe came fully loaded with 64K of RAM memory, the maximum amount of memory that could be directly accessed by the 6502 CPU. The Apple Writer word processor fit into a lean 16K, leaving ample memory for documents of about twenty pages. Longer documents could be saved in a series of files. Having plenty of RAM, I got spoiled. I’ve stuffed my current machine with 2.5 gigabytes of RAM — more than 40,000 times as much memory as my Apple IIe. When that’s not enough, the operating system on my current machine can use virtual memory to make it seem as if I’ve got even more memory.

My Apple IIe had two floppy disk drives, each capable of holding 144K of programs and data. A few programs were too complicated to fit in the machine’s 64K of RAM, so it was often a good idea to leave the program disk in one drive so segments of the program could be loaded as they were needed. The other drive could be used to hold any files I might create while running the program.

My current computer has two hard drives, totaling over 400Gb. That’s a little less than 1.5 million times as much storage as I got with my first computer. I have most of my CD collection instantly available on my computer. I can edit video clips and burn DVDs. Every now and then I look into adding more disk space.

I can’t prove this, but I feel fairly confident that when I bought my Apple IIe, I owned more computer power than existed in the entire world at the end of World War II — more than was used by the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, more than was used by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park to crack the German Enigma codes, more than was possessed by all the governments on both sides of the war.

It’s nice to have the latest and greatest hardware and software, but a fast computer is no substitute for a good brain.

More news from the Republican jihad:

For many residents of this hamlet nestled in the Smoky Mountains, nothing is as important as church. That’s why nine longtime members of East Waynesville Baptist Church are so devastated after being kicked out of the congregation for, they say, supporting Democrat John Kerry’s presidential bid.

The minister delivered his fatwa in a sermon last October:

But the question then comes in, in the Baptist Church, how do I vote? Let me just say this right now: If you vote for John Kerry this year, you need to repent or resign.

Oh, yes. He’s going far in today’s GOP.

Frank Rich on the sycophantic White House press corps:

It was only too fitting that Mrs. Bush’s performance occurred on the eve of the second anniversary of the most elaborate production of them all: the “Top Gun” landing by the president on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The Washington reviews of her husband at the time were reminiscent of hers last weekend. “This president has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command,” David Broder raved on “Meet the Press.” Robert Novak chimed in: “He looks good in a jumpsuit.” It would be quite a while before these guys stopped cheering the Jerry Bruckheimer theatrics and started noticing the essential fiction of the scene: the mission in Iraq hadn’t been accomplished, and major combat operations were far from over.

“We create our own reality” is how a Bush official put it to Ron Suskind in an article in The Times Magazine during the presidential campaign. That they can get away with it shows the keenness of their cultural antennas. Infotainment has reached a new level of ubiquity in an era in which “reality” television and reality have become so blurred that it’s hard to know if ABC News’s special investigating “American Idol” last week was real journalism about a fake show or fake journalism about a real show or whether anyone knows the difference — or cares.

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of V-E Day, celebrating allied Victory in Europe at the end of World War II.

That’s one reason I’m free to get worked up today about the Kansas Board of Education offering “a new definition of science that does not rely only on natural causes.”

There will be no Victory in America Day, because the battle for liberty does not end.

Sixty years ago, this country’s commitment to liberty was more than mere lip service. Whether we are so committed today is in our own hands.

Kim Campbell, briefly Prime minister of Canada, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher:

Paul Krugman… wrote that he read Henry Kissinger’s PhD thesis, which is about what happens in a stable system — this time Europe at the time of the French Revolution — when one of the players is a rogue and doesn’t play by the rules. And he talks about all the rationalizations that people make, why they’re doing this. You know: “Well, they have to play to their supporters, and they’ll come on board soon.” And Krugman says as he’s reading this, he thinks “My God, I’m reading about the Bush Administration.”

I think when we face radicals — people who actually don’t accept the rules, who don’t accept the historical consensus of the separation of church and state, who have no respect for the notion of what science is, all of these kinds of things — it is so mind-boggling that people are kind of paralyzed. They don’t know what to do. And so they keep thinking, “Oh, it’s just a marginal thing, they aren’t really this focused at changing things.” And yet they are.

The discussion of Henry Kissinger’s thesis is in Paul Krugman’s book The Great Unraveling. I recommend it.

Revolutionaries depend on the incredulity of the rest of us. If you believe radical right revolutionaries mean to stop somewhere short of trampling on your rights, then they’ve won, you’ve lost.

A few days ago, griping about the media obsession with “runaway bride” Jennifer Wilbanks, I wrote:

Have we forgotten how to say, “It’s none of my business?”

Since then, I’ve realized that we say it a lot. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard, “I know it’s none of my business, but…” Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of minding our own business.

This blog doesn’t get much traffic, usually. But in the last 24 hours, there have been about fifteen times as many visitors as on an average day. Almost every one of them found the site by Googling for “Jennifer Wilbanks.”

So tomorrow I’ll be posting my stunning exposé on Britney Spears’ pregnancy. It’s all the news you need to know!

That should run up the hit counts a little.

Janeane Garofalo on the PBS program NOW:

The right wing noise machine over the last forty years has spent an enormous amount of money and time convincing the people that the truth is a liberal bias.

…

The mainstream media has now given fact and spin equal weight in a “he said, she said.”

I saw Jon Stewart performing live earlier today. He’s a funny guy. The audience laughed and applauded throughout the show.

Ohio was a “swing state” in last year’s election. Jon asked whether we’d enjoyed having presidential candidates visit every few days to tell us how much they loved us. He asked whether we’d seen any of them since the election. They used us, he said, then threw us away “after they’d done their dirty, dirty business.”

It wasn’t all politics. He talked about buying a new computer that the salesman assured him was “more powerful than the computers NASA uses to launch the space shuttle.” Jon said his shuttle was just sitting in the driveway at home because his old Tandy computer wasn’t powerful enough to launch it.

Mostly, though, there was a political edge. Paraphrasing very loosely, he said this:

The divide in America today is not between religion and science. It’s not between conservative and liberal, or Republican and Democrat, or red states and blue states. The divide in America today is between moderates and extremists.

We’re all moderates here. We’re not shouting slogans. Nobody here has their mouth taped over with the word “Life.” Nobody here is carrying around a can of red paint just to throw on somebody.

You don’t see moderates standing in front of a building chanting, “Let’s be reasonable!” You know why? Because moderates have stuff to do. They’re too busy to travel around the country staging vigils for the TV cameras. That’s why the extremists seem to be winning. Moderates have stuff to do.

We’ve had a lot of presidents — some really good ones, and some really bad ones — and our government has survived through all of them. It will survive through these guys, too. They may try to bring it down, but they’ll fail, and here’s why: when things get bad enough, all those busy moderates — the ones with stuff to do — are going to say, “You know, this stuff can wait ’til tomorrow.” And they’ll rescue the country from the extremists.

But he said it better than I did.

One of the tough things about being absolutely certain you have the one literal, immutable truth must be learning something like this:

Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

That would be embarrassing, I should think, especially if you were accustomed to making fiery denunciations of your enemies based on the Book of Revelation.

Dr. Aitken said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone’s name, she said.

“It’s a number puzzle — the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero.”

Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. “It’s a very political document,” Dr. Aitken said. “It’s a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it’s written in coded language and riddles.”

Oh, so using God’s name to justify your own agenda isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s a time-honored tradition. I guess I owe an apology to all those currently taking the Lord’s name in vain.