I finished the first season today. And what’s really happened? Yes, they’re stranded on an island. Yes, we know tidbits about their backgrounds and lives. Yes, we know that the island is mysterious and that they’re not alone. But we knew that in the pilot. And we just don’t know much more now.

The strength of Lost’s storytelling is that it takes a very simple concept – “Castaway as a series”, in the words of the ABC exec who conceived of it – and draws it out in a tremendously compelling way. But the flip side of that is the substance of the most common critique of the show: that despite the edge-of-your-seat adventure, one simply isn’t given answers. Closure. One is being strung along like Charlie Pace with his unshakable heroin addiction. And there are bumps along the way. Star Trek “man in the red shirt” type characters like Arzt where the audience cheers their death (and with it the end of their annoying antics) rather than mourning their loss. Characters who are more melodramatic than believable like the overly-hysterical Claire. People who lack a raison d’etre or a character that one can identify with, like Shannon. But those are quibbles. Overall, the series is undoubtedly quite accomplished in terms of its casting, cinematography, and music – and the Emmy awards in those categories are well deserved.

So, I like it. It’s well made. And if the show pushes me to consider the mysteries which abound in the undiscovered great outdoors, then the show has done its job. Admirably.

• I like the scene where Bill Maher is interviewing Propaghandi and offers him a binary choice: either you think it’s acceptable to threaten violence because of things that people have said, or it isn’t. Vacillation and equivocation is needless for something so basic.
• The issue as he presents it is should we have an open mind to people and philosophies that aim to dull our critical faculties and convince us not to ask questions? This is then connected with violent actions.
• There are part of the movie that I like (the above mentioned theme and scene, for instance) and there are parts that I don’t (too America-centric), much like with religious texts. I’m able to be selective with both.

Mad Men riffs off of compelling 1960s themes. The vices: smoking, drink(ing and driving), homophobia, sexism. The history: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Nixon v. Kennedy election, period product placements like Clearasil and Coke. The morality: gendered expectations about contributions to family and work life, the effect of the wars when they affected a broader swathe of society, the role of honesty and desire in a culture of repressive sexual mores. The camerawork, sets, costumes, and acting are captivating and seamless. The $2.5 million they’re spending on each episode is evident.

Thematically, the show is at times quite forthright, downright unsubtle. The historical inaccessibility and taboo of abortion. The sexist way that wives are used as pawns to get to their husbands. The powerlessness of women in the face of rape by their partners. Sometimes the show is more subtle. The way that it gradually dribbles out the details of Don’s past life. The way that sex and work serve as distractions from mundane and unhappy lives. An incessant yearning for the new that never produces happiness.

The issue is that this series is familiar not just because it’s a period and place that we all recognize from our social science classes, it’s familiar because these are overworked themes which rehash the debates of a generation past and don’t engage with the central problems of our time. When television is set in another time and place, that can provide the cover to make wry and provocative comments about contemporary society (viz. Star Trek) or it can just be a form of escapism which dodges, not confronts, contemporary social issues. It’s a well made series, no doubt. If only it were relevant. Or perhaps it’s just that the series is a product of an incredibly insular country: one which has never escaped from lionizing Camelot or from rehashing that era’s moral and social debates.

A friend gave me this book after he’d finished the LSAT. He warned me that the software was archaic Windows 3.1-era software. I didn’t have a problem with that, though.

I didn’t know, however, that it was archaic Windows 3.1-era software that didn’t work! Some of the practice tests are only available on the CD and they’re unusable. The CD has bugs including:
- Practice tests repeat entire sections, so that you get a whole tranche of 26 questions that you’ve already answered during that test!
- Practice tests incorrectly miss sections, so that you do a practice test, but it doesn’t include any reading comprehension questions, say.

As well, the book is horribly edited so that the answers to the practice questions in it are often just plain wrong! It is horribly frustrating to think that you got a questions wrong when, on closer examination, it’s actually the book’s answer key that was incorrect! This book is simply not worth the hassle! One can look at the book’s reviews from amazon.com to see a number of the specific pages within the book that are just plain wrong.

Aaaaaaaarrrrgghhhhh!

It’s ambitious in scope and tackles an interesting subjectmatter.

But it also doesn’t strive to tell more than the expected pro-American male-dominated history of the CIA. Where is the influence of feminist or post-colonial studies on this narritive? Beyond that, some of the lines are downright laughable: such as the melodramatic overacting during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

In the end, the story is compelling, but its aspirations are woefully limited.

The director who brought you Hollow Man – a movie about a man who becomes invisible and then spends two hours of screentime leering at nude women and engaging in laughable fight scenes – has taken that basic plot structure and transplanted it into a WWII period piece.

Like his other fare, this movie is well crafted – with good sets, costumes, and special effects. The actors are believable – especially because the movie is primarily in Dutch and German (with English subtitles) rather than the usual anachronistic Hollywood fare where the Third Reich communicates in fluent English (with but a minor faux-German accent to establish their identity).

This film’s nudity and gratuitous sexuality titillate but also reach absurd proportions – such as the wanton sexuality in the pouring-feces-on-nigh-naked-woman scene. Some plot devices – such as the trite ‘blueprints of the Nazi HQ’ or the cliched Hollywood battle scenes evoke James Bond more than a WWII period piece.

Ultimately, there is much to like about this movie – including the way that it indicts the Canadian military liberators of the Netherlands for allowing the Germans to continue their politically-motivated executions post-liberation. It is captivating to see a film where the Nazi is a good guy and the resistance freedom fighter is the one in the wrong.

-Halliburton did not get rich by fleecing the US government with fraudulent contracts in Iraq because a) it’s not rich (profits are low), and b) all people who know what they’re talking about agree that it’s one of the few companies that can do the job, and c) there is no evidence that Dick Cheney was instrumental in getting them the contracts, and d) the contracts were no-bid because of the need for secrecy about an impending war, and e) Halliburton’s major wrongdoing happened … in 1992!
-Racial profiling is not only politically incorrect, it’s also a really bad idea because a) terrorists will just recruit people who don’t fit the profile – like female Filipinos or the likes of John Walker Lindh, and b) the purpose of profiling would be to narrow down the list of suspects to investigate but racial profiling doesn’t do this because race is too broad of a category and is not associated enough with potential wrongdoers (i.e. most Muslims in America were born in America)
-Osama bin Laden was not trained by the CIA (he’s hated America all along) and he’s not on dialysis (that’s just a rumor – if he had been, he’d have died by now) – TAKE THAT Michael Moore!

This book grapples with shadows, but doesn’t make itself relevant.

• Bertrand Russell argues that one mistake that begins with Socrates and continues until the Renaissance is an over-emphasis on human beings and an under-emphasis on gleaning knowledge irrespective of its relation to humanity. We get scepticism, focusing on how we learn, but not the learning itself. We get Aristotle’s emphasis on telos. We get Plato’s emphasis on ethics. But we don’t have the modern emphasis on apersonal learning.
• During the decline of Pericles (of the golden age of Athens fame) trumped-up charges of corruption dogged his friends
• On pragmatics: The philosophy that triumphs is that which is most useful, not necessarily that which is certainly true. There will always be cavils that can be volleyed at any theory. The philosophy that has triumphed (liberalism, for instance) is not necessarily the most intellectually sound (it has holes like anything else) but instead the most useful, prompting people to ignore the holes. We will not find the perfect theory through unassisted reason, but only with the world in mind. For example, Parmenides argued that nothing changes. His argument is patently ridiculous because of its obvious empirical falsifiability. However, even though we can show his particular formulation of the argument to be fallacious, a defender of the position would just be able to produce more elaborate and more difficult-to-disprove formulations of the argument. People reject the argument not because it has been soundly defeated in everybody’s minds, but instead because the alternative hypothesis is more useful. The same is true with theories of time.