Christmas film recommendation: The Ref

Every year I recommend that people forget the standard Christmas films and check out instead the 1994 film The Ref. With great performances by Denis Leary, Kevin Spacey, and particularly Judy Davis, it is a hilarious story of a burglar on the run from the law who takes a seriously dysfunctional family hostage on Christmas eve and then has to keep them from fighting with each other while trying to make his escape. I discovered that the full film is available in one stream on YouTube in good quality. [Read more…]

Drivers behaving badly

Some time ago, I linked to videos taken by cameras mounted on the dashboards of Russian cars that show crashes and the like. It seems like dash-cams are popular in Russia. I don’t know anyone in the US who has one though there are increasing demands for police cars in the US to be equipped with them so that there is a video record of what happens following a stop that can be produced as evidence, especially when allegations of police brutality and tasering are involved. [Read more…]

The coming death of the idea of free will

The idea of human beings having free will is so powerful that it would seem to be impossible to dislodge. Having free will seems to be so essential to the way that we view ourselves that denying its existence seems like denying our very humanity, transforming ourselves into mindless automatons, and thus we are loathe to relinquish it. Isaac Beshevis Singer captured this struggle well when he said, “We must believe in free will. We have no choice.” [Read more…]

The decline of the US?

Via reader Norm, I obtained a link to a long and interesting article on the state of the US by the staff of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, titled Notes on the Decline of a Great Nation.

The article takes as its starting point the chaos wreaked by Hurricane Sandy and how it revealed the lack of proper planning and foresight. Other symptoms pointed to that are most glaring is the neglect and decay of basic infrastructure and essential services because rather than pay for these collective goods, the money is being diverted into individual pockets, with most of the wealth going into just a few of them. We are essentially living off the investments made in the 1950s and 1960s.

The article says that what little reinvestment that was attempted was thwarted by Republicans and Tea Party activists seemingly determined to bring the country grinding to a halt in order to prevent Obama winning a second term, coupled with an obstinate determination to view any assertions of decline as borderline treasonous, since it goes against the solemn creed that America is the greatest nation on Earth, always has been, and always will be.

One has to be wary of sweeping generalizations about nations. The US has tremendous human and material resources that it can call upon if needed to reverse the trend. But the warning signs are clearly there that the political decision-making system in the US has become dysfunctional and that something needs to done to arrest the decline.

What happens when reality catches up with rhetoric?

In a survey taken after the election, the polling firm PPP found that 49% of Republicans thought that the group ACORN had stolen the election for Obama. This is fascinating considering that ACORN no longer exists, having been disbanded a few years ago. Given that about 32% of the population identifies as Republican, this means that about 16% of the voting public believes stuff that has absolutely no basis in reality. [Read more…]