The Binary Circumstance

In accordance to the principles of Doublethink, it does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is, that victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labor. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact. Julia? Are you awake? There is truth, and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn’t make you mad. The character Winston Smith in the film Nineteen Eighty-four based on George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-four.

Source

[My shrink] says that I’m too frightened to act and that I’m looking for some kind of magical solution which is unrealistic…

Source: Judy to Vicky concerning her stale marriage and her fear of leaving it. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a film by Woody Allen

If you would like to get your mind off of self-important politicians and the nonsense that they spout to win elections, I would highly recommend StarGaze: Hubble’s View of the Universe, a DVD that consists of awesome pictures taken by the Hubble space telescope set to music.

I found it necessary to watch it twice, because when the subtitles are displayed, I wasn’t focused on the pictures. But to really see the pictures in their full glory, it helps to turn off the subtitles. The subtitles have a lot of interesting information in them, so they are well worth reading. The are available in several languages.

The main menu didn’t come up when the DVD started playing. I didn’t realize that there’s also a voice-over narration on the DVD which allows you to see the pictures without having to read subtitles. To select the voice narration, I had to do into the audio selection menu, selecting “English narration” from the subtitle menu just gave me subtitles. I thought this was a shortcoming of the DVD.

The film is only about 50 minutes long and gazing at the universe through Hubble’s eyes really puts everything that happens on this planet into perspective.

It also makes you wonder how anybody could think that the Biblical story of creation has any truth to it. If the Hubble is collecting light from billions of years ago, how could the universe have been created just a few thousand years ago? When you see on the unfathomable vastness of the Universe, how could any human think the whole thing was built for him?

The film is available from Netflix:

NASA’s Hubble Telescope focuses its lens on amazing celestial images in this captivating documentary, which puts viewers in the astronomer’s seat. The star of the film is Hubble’s astounding footage of galaxies, supernovae, stars, planets, gaseous clouds, nebulae and other out-of-this-world sights, accompanied by a narrative detailing Hubble’s history and NASA’s mission to use the telescope for documenting cosmic events and objects.

It can also be purchased from Amazon.com.

From the Boston Globe:

Toward the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” a CIA officer played by the pitch-perfect Philip Seymour Hoffman cautions the Wilson character (played by Tom Hanks) not to be too sure they have done something glorious. To make the point, he tells the story of a Zen master who observes the people of his village celebrating a young boy’s new horse as a wonderful gift. “We’ll see,” the Zen master says. When the boy falls off the horse and breaks a leg, everyone says the horse is a curse. “We’ll see,” says the master. Then war breaks out, the boy cannot be conscripted because of his injury, and everyone now says the horse was a fortunate gift. “We’ll see,” the master says again.

I really enjoyed this movie and this review does a great job of capturing my own impressions.

The real star of the film is the script. That [Aaron] Sorkin managed to tell so serious a story in so entertaining a manner should earn him a number of awards.

The actors deliver the goods as well. Hanks’ comic timing is as brilliant as ever. Roberts is indeed, as Wilson calls her in the film, “Helen of Troy,” inspiring powerful men through her beauty and–shall we politely call it–“southern hospitality” to get with her program of freeing the Afghan people from the godless menace of the communists.

But it is Hoffman’s spot-on portrayal of the quintessential CIA operative, half crude bluster and half savvy erudition, that steals the show, and should earn him an Oscar. He storms into the film like an angry elephant, and when he’s in a scene, it’s difficult to put your attention anywhere else.

There’s a serious set of lessons to be learned behind all the hilarity, however.

The first is that, when covert actions are authorized and paid for in secret, we’re not really functioning as a Democracy. The public didn’t know what Charlie Wilson and the CIA were doing, so they had no way to vote people into or out of office to shape that policy.

And if supporting the Afghans was so clearly the right thing to do, why did it have to be done in secret? We went to war in Iraq for far less, overtly.