Film review: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) (no spoilers)

I am not a big Star Wars fan, so take my review of the final act with a grain of salt. (I mean the final act of the original nine-episode storyline of course. This lucrative franchise will be milked with spinoffs until the next millennium.) I enjoyed the first trilogy (episodes 4, 5, 6), absolutely hated the first film of the second prequel trilogy (episode 1), so much so that I completely skipped episodes 2 and 3. The first film in the final trilogy (episode 7) got good reviews, enough that I went to see it and quite enjoyed it. I then watched episode 8 and was disappointed again and was now ambivalent of seeing the latest release but decided to do so due to a combination of staying with people who were going to see it and curiosity about how the story line would end. We ended up seeing it at 8:45 on Christmas day morning which had the benefit of the theater being largely empty even though we were watching it on an iMax screen.

(Q: Why were the nine films made out of order? A: In charge of scheduling, Yoda was.)
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Investigative journalism that gets results

For the Christmas holiday, I thought I would post a good news story.

I am a financial supporter of the investigative journalism outfit ProPublica and today comes a news item that makes me glad that I am doing so. Some months ago, they had an expose of a nonprofit hospital affiliated with the Methodist church in Memphis, Tennessee that was suing poor people for not paying their bills, even going to the extent of garnishing their wages which is devastating for people who live paycheck to paycheck. The hospital was essentially using the courts as a collection agency by threatening people with severe legal penalties. Thanks to that expose, the hospital and the church was shamed into canceling the debts and in a follow up story today, we hear about the results, starting with the case of Danielle Robinson.
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Midsomer Murders and ethnicity

As I have mentioned before, I am partial to watching British police procedural shows on TV. They tend to eschew graphic violence and chases in favor of more genteel story telling. One of the most venerable of these shows is the series Midsomer Murders that has just released its 21st season. Over time, the series has developed a slightly campy, tongue-in-cheek feel because of the sheer implausibility of so many murders taking place in quaint little villages and rustic settings in one small English county. With each season, the way that the murders occur have become steadily more outlandish so that I now often laugh out loud when people have been killed in bizarre ways and their bodies are found in the most incongruous places. (In one episode a few seasons ago, the victim was a cricketer killed by the mechanical bowling machine used for practice that had been adjusted by the killer to rapidly fire high speed balls at his head.)
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Foxconn tries to gouge Wisconsin

We know the script well by now. A big company dangles the prospect of opening up a new factory or office that promises a lot of good-paying jobs and gets the local and state governments to offer up all manner of tax incentives and other inducements to close the deal. But the inducements given to them do not seem to have been written into the contract to be contingent on them making good on the promises. Then once the deal is signed and the company gets all the benefits, the number of jobs mysteriously gets reduced, they pay less than promised, and the factory and office size becomes much smaller.
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Dubbing, subtitles, and miscommunication

I wrote recently about how disconcerting it was when watching a film when the audio and video are not synchronized, so that the spoken words do not match up with the mouth movements of the speaker.

I recently watched a film where this problem was even more pronounced. It was an Italian film but they had dubbed it into English. Dubbing is usually bad and rarely done these days. When I was young in Sri Lanka, I recall seeing a number of so-called ‘spaghetti western’ films that were made in Italy that had one American star (like Clint Eastwood in the Man With No Name trilogy) or with Steve Reeves as various mythical heroes like Hercules, with the rest of the cast being Italian. So the star would speak in English but all the others in Italian with their voices dubbed in English. They were pretty bad.
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How old will you be in heaven?

About a year ago, I wrote a post having fun with the idea of what religious people think about the age that they will look like in heaven, any answer to which creates all manner of contradictions and problems. It turned out that St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) had thought about this a lot and laid out his vision.

In this article, Margaret Morganroth Gullette looks at what the various religions that have an afterlife as part of their doctrine say about this question, and they all seem to think that you will look young, a fantasy that is nurtured by popular culture.
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Pete Buttigieg: The ‘outsider’ who is actually a neoliberal insider

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has got a lot of mileage and positive press with his claims of being a religious person and mayor of a small rust-belt Midwest town and thus an outsider to the swamp of Washington politics. But as his campaign has gained ground and peoplelook more closely at his background, that veneer has started peeling off, revealing him to be very much a part of the national security state. Max Blumenthal writes that he is very much a political insider being groomed by the neoliberal establishment and the ‘liberal interventionist’ faction of US politics.

Blumenthal looks at the parts of Buttigieg’s resume that he does not talk much about, starting with Tulsi Gabbard’s criticism of Buttigieg’s support for sending US troops to Mexico to fight the drug cartels, and his angry and defensive response.
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An own goal by Andrew Yang?

The entrepreneur whose candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president has shown surprising longevity (he was one of only seven candidates who qualified for the last debate) may have said something that might doom it.

Andrew Yang said he does not think Trump should be facing criminal charges and would consider pardoning Trump if he were in fact prosecuted.

“We do not want to be a country that gets in the pattern of jailing past leaders,” Yang said, adding that “there’s a reason why Ford pardoned Nixon.”

“I’d actually go a step further and say not just, hey, it’s up to my [Attorney General]. I would say that the country needs to start solving the problems on the ground and move forward.”

“Would you consider a pardon then?” NBC News asked.

“I would,” Yang said.

We actually should get in the pattern of jailing past leaders if they have committed crimes because that is the only way to prevent them from committing crimes in the first place. There was outrage at Ford for pardoning Nixon and strong suspicions that it doomed his re-election campaign. This idea that we should ‘move forward’ and not look back, the same excuse president Obama gave for not prosecuting the torture war crimes committed by the Bush administration and the CIA, is what enables presidents to willfully abuse their power, over and over again.

Yang saying that he would pardon Trump, someone who has abused his office and taken vilification of Democrats and indeed anyone who even mildly criticizes him to high levels, may well turn off many Democrats, similar to the adverse reaction to Tulsi Gabbard’s decision to merely vote ‘present’ on the impeachment articles. It will undoubtedly infuriate the many who think Trump is an absolute danger to democratic norms.

Trump is mad as hell about being impeached but not acquitted

As one might have expected, Donald Trump is annoyed that he may not get the quick impeachment trial and acquittal in the US senate that he seeks.

The Senate adjourned until January with the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic leader Chuck Schumer unable to agree on trial procedure. Pelosi has said she wants to know how the trial will be handled before she sends two House-passed articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate.

Trump, who was due to arrive at his private Palm Beach resort late Friday, has been looking forward to a trial in the friendlier Republican-controlled Senate and is riled up about the delay, according to Senator Lindsey Graham.

“He’s mad as hell that they would do this to him and now deny him his day in court,” Graham told Fox News Channel after meeting with Trump at the White House on Thursday night.

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