Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 12oct15

George Rebane

The government is corrupt.  It’s always a tickle to note the protestations of liberals on these pages who howl when we conservetarians point out that our government is too big, inept beyond belief, costs too much, overreaches into our lives, and is hopelessly corrupt in literally all that it does.  The local leftwing lackeys dutifully decry our citations of such violations of public trust as the whine of an ignorant, negligible and soon-to-disappear miniscule minority.  Yet the national data keeps coming in to show how out of touch are our neighbors of the Left.  Gallup again returns to us polling results that confirm 3 out of 4 Americans believe that our government is indeed corrupt, and the national Right/Left split falls evenly at 48% favoring each.  What is it about the definition of 'small minority' that these innumerates don’t understand?

The new movie ‘Truth’ is a hopelessly blatant whitewash of the CBS/Dan Rather scandal of forged documents used to create out of whole cloth a smear of President George W. Bush.  It is truly desperation time for Democrats to put out such a movie that will highlight the perennial mischief the Left propagates through its lamestream media.  But in this case even CBS is distancing itself from this revisionist propaganda piece about Rathergate.  Here is what CBS said to Variety about the film portraying their yellow journalists –

It’s astounding how little truth there is in “Truth.” There are, in fact, too many distortions, evasions and baseless conspiracy theories to enumerate them all. The film tries to turn gross errors of journalism and judgment into acts of heroism and martyrdom. That’s a disservice not just to the public but to journalists across the world who go out every day and do everything within their power, sometimes at great risk to themselves, to get the story right.

Can the combined auras of Robert Redford as Dan Rather and Cate Blanchet as the wicked producer Mary Mapes really convince 2015 Americans that they were the moral equivalents of the heroic Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame?

‘Gravity’ – from implausible via improbable to impossible

George Rebane

Fair warning, this little critique of the hit movie ‘Gravity’ will greatly reduce your enjoyment of it, especially if you recall your high school physics.  Based on the rave reviews it has been getting (I read Joe Morgenstern in the WSJ), we and another couple went to see it last Sunday.  The saving grace of our double date was the dinner afterwards at the Northridge.

The movie deals with the aftermath of an irresponsible Russian satellite intercept test that creates a debris field of satellite and missile pieces which happen to be co-orbiting with the Hubble telescope, the International Space Station, and China’s space station.  The movie’s two astronauts (its only characters) undertax the talents of George Clooney and Sandra Bullock; but hey, they had to cast some names to carry a story line that suffers as much damage as do the shuttle, space stations, and the Hubble telescope during this explosion riddled space thriller.

‘Behold the Pale Horse’ in ‘2016’ (updated 27aug12)

George Rebane

This week with friends, Jo Ann and I attended showings of the two titled movies about the state of our country and its portents.  They are excellent albeit disturbing summaries of the notions and issues that we have been discussing on RR for the last five years.  Definitely worth seeing for those whose political outlooks range from conservative to middle roaders.  Progressives might be interested to know how well their machinations are both perceived and known.  Here’s a short summary of the films.

Hollywood Synthesized – Another Step Closer

George Rebane

In ‘Avatars – Lauren and Bogie Together Again’ I described the progress toward a new film industry wherein old actors would become immortal and continue to star in new films as long as audiences were willing to pay for them.  Accelerating technology has taken another giant step in this direction as described here in ‘Digital human actors set to break into big time’. 

Atlas Mugged (Addended)

George Rebane

Yesterday afternoon we, along with the Steeles, went to see the movie ‘Atlas Shrugged – Part 1’ that I described in ‘Shrugging Atlas is Back’.   The movie, based on Ayn Rand’s novel of the same name, lived up to its expectations.  The casting, acting, production values, and fidelity to the original were well executed.  I look forward to Parts 2 and 3 of this trilogy.

Reflecting on what I had seen in the movie, especially how it depicts what we are living through today, I was struck by the thought that the trilogy will communicate little to the meager number of progressives who will see it.  Heralding its early demise, they simply do not understand the point of the movie.  Its dystopic message for the rest of us will be seen as a necessary waypoint to their new world order.

In that order there is little need for individual risk, initiative, and enterprise.  All problems will be solved by state committees for the common good.  'Excess funds' will be siphoned out of the population through higher tax rates and redistributed.  All progressives know that higher tax rates will not harm the economy, in fact, they cite the post-war years as evidence that higher taxes will even stimulate the economy.

Unfortunately, the conditions of the fifties are misinterpreted by the left.  Then the US was the technology, agricultural, and manufacturing leader of a world mostly under-developed and devastated by war.  As long as international trade was allowed, and appropriate set-asides and subsidies were in place, the imposed tax rate did not matter much.  Money still came pouring in from all sides because we could make and sell stuff that the world could get from nowhere else – competition was non-existent, and demand was found under every overturned rock.  Not any more – Atlas mugged.

[Addendum]  The above does not make explicit what I want to relate as the major takeaway from the movie and the book.  In 1957 Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged as a warning to us that if we kept looking to government for solutions and allowing it to grow into a megalith surrogate for our personal responsibilities, then we would wind up with the world she depicted.  That same megalith would hang around the neck of every productive citizen in the land.

The truth of the matter is that Rand's described world is now upon us and much more.  We are past the point she depicted.  In her warning, she still allowed for a way back to sanity.  Today, the added burden of massive debt and deficits has put us beyond the pale - we are beyond the precipice like Wiley Coyote.  And like Wiley, we will not be able to walk on air back to safety.  Even Atlas cannot lift from our backs the trillions upon trillions we have senselessly allowed to accumulate there.

Ruminations - 19jan2010

George Rebane

• Avatar – the screenplay
• Haiti and foreign aid

I was reminded of my naivete by an email from a RR reader with a link to an article that discussed the message delivered by the film Avatar.  This blockbuster raises the bar for producing movies rich in very realistic computer graphics and extends all this into 3D.  I covered some of the implications of the film’s technology in ‘Avatars Lauren and Bogie, Together Again’.  But the Avatar storyline is something else.  It is typically simplistic Hollywood leftwing pabulum which I thought would come through in spades to everyone who saw it.  Wrong.  When our kids took us to see it over Christmas, we all talked about the anti-capitalist, anti-western culture, anti-religious (and a few more antis) propaganda content that seemed to hit the viewer squarely between his 3D glasses from almost every scene.

It turns out, of course, that not everyone picks this up, and to that extent the film delivers another powerful punch as it is shown worldwide.  Everyone comes to it with their own view of history, and most young people with no such view at all.  How diverse these realities of the past can be was again illuminated in the comment threads to my Jan column (here and here) in The Union.  Collectivism did not fall with the Wall in 1989, it just changed clothes, putting on a much brighter and colorful coat that makes it blend in better with its competition.

These pages have discussed the effects of foreign aid to poor countries, most recently in the context of post-disaster Haiti (‘Haiti – After the Dust and Tears’).  Bret Stephens in today’s WSJ writes ‘To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid’ and cites the 2006 report from the National Academy of Public Administration entitled ‘Why Foreign Aid to Haiti Failed’.  Foreign aid to poor countries has failed uniformly and by any measure, perpetuating misery and death.  This has been documented in Easterly’s White Man’s Burden (here), and now the cry is coming also from citizens of the recipient countries.  Perhaps most heart-rending is from Kenyan economist James Shikwati’s “For God’s sake, please just stop.”

Avatars Lauren and Bogie, Together Again

George Rebane

In the early 1980s my firm in Los Angeles had just bought and installed the most advanced computer graphics system available.  It was the second one on the west coast (the other one belonged to a big aerospace company) and we used it to create multi-media images and videos for the then new PC controlled laser discs.  Word got out (well, we helped a little) and soon we were doing post-production work for Hollywood production companies fixing stuff that went wrong in producing movies and commercials.  Working with that system, it immediately became clear to us that this was the future of movies.  But more importantly, movie stars could live forever on the screen.

I called in our intellectual property lawyers, described what we thought was possible, and asked if dead actors’ estates had ever granted rights for ‘them’ to appear in new digitized productions.  The answer was no, because such screen incarnations had never been possible or occurred to anyone.

The scheme to do it was complicated but straightforward since the actors’ faces and bodies existed on film from all angles, and we had lots of audio from them.  This would allow surrogate actors to act out the parts in a new movie, perhaps wearing special suits with lights and gridlines on them.  In post production we would then render the surrogate actors with the appropriate stars’ faces and even costumes.  The speech would be modified using the dead actors’ speech formants (analyzed speech components) to ‘superimpose and blend’ it on the surrogates’ voices.  The final product would be the real thing – Lauren and Bogie, or Lucy and Desi, or … .

All we needed then was some faster and more commodious hardware - that would eventually come along given Moore’s Law - and to write some nifty interactive computer graphics (CG) and speech processing software.  Anyway, I later checked that part out with John Hughes, founder of Rhythm and Hues which along with George Lucas were then the world’s leading CG houses.  John agreed that all of it would be possible with the new hardware and a pile of cash.  Having neither, we both went on with our lives doing other things.

Today the movie Avatar has brought together the CG technology developments of the last thirty years and demonstrated that it is indeed possible to make a new road movie starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, or anyone else you care to pick.  I haven’t yet heard of the voice overlays I described above, but I bet someone is working hard on it.

And not only will dead stars live again, but still kicking actors will be able to play themselves in a much younger year.  In short, an actor need no longer progress through the aging roles of yesteryear. Tom Cruise can play a twenty something when he’s sixty something, and Sean Connery will forever return to his 007 role.  People covering the industry have already started talking about it (here) since Avatar continues to rack up piles of cash.

An aging population would flock to movies and programs that revived memories of their younger years with new material that comes to life with the same actors that inspired their youth.  There’s gold in them thar hills!