We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Before the end of this century, there will be another American Civil War.
Well, I reviewed the previous effort by Daniel Craig, so here we go with the next instalment: Quantum of Solace, with Daniel Craig in his second outing as Ian Fleming’s hero. It is the 22nd film in the series, which is quite something in itself, when you think about it. I went to see the film with pretty high expectations after what I thought was a great debut by Craig in Casino Royale.
Quantum of Solace – which has absolutely nothing to do with the short story Fleming wrote in a collection – is a sequel to the first Craig film. Having been betrayed and left heartbroken by the death of Vesper Lynd, 007 goes after the organisation that is behind the death of Lynd. We are led on a series of furious chases and action scenes in Italy, the Caribbean and Latin America. The direction of the movie is handled at an incredibly high tempo, much in the manner of the Bourne films starring Matt Damon. (Poor Matt, I haven’t been able to think of him in the same way again since watching Team America: World Police).
This is a very violent film. Craig did several of the stunts himself and got quite badly hurt in some of them. If you want lots of fight scenes, with minimal dialogue and no gags, this is for you. The problem, is that I think that Craig and his directors are trying far, far too hard to react against what they rightly regarded as s the foppish versions of Bond served up by the likes of Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan. QoS is a still a good film but it could have been much better with a bit more variation of pace, and a bit more opportunity for Craig to show how 007 is developing as an agent and as a person.
Supporting actors are generally good, if not as strong as in Casino. I like the chap who plays Felix Leiter, who is not the character of the books but I reckon is going to be a regular feature of future Bond films. Judy Dench is wonderful as M; in fact she holds much of the film together. But the other women in the film are not very strong characters and not a patch on Green’s Vesper.
I will give this film seven marks out of a possible 10. I would give Casino Royale 9 stars. The Bond franchise has definitely been rebooted by Craig, but the film-makers must not turn Bond into a humourless brute. The character created all those years ago was a tough bastard all right, but he was a bit more than that.
Is all change good? No. Only good change is good.
– although probably more quote of yesterday from Alice Bachini-Smith
PLUS: I just noticed this
PLUS: I also like this (via here)
Short cryptic link-posts, of the sort which will make absolutely no sense as soon as the link stops working, seem to be accumulating here just now, so here’s another. Check this out. It’s Friday Ephemerus (?) number one at David Thompson‘s today.
Seriously, forgetting about the short cryptic thing, but assuming you now know what I am talking about, I think this might make a good visual metaphor for the television people as they chatter about the Glenrothes bye-election, just won by Labour. Suddenly, David Cameron must now be becoming afraid, very afraid. Is the utter cluelessness of the Conservatives about all the financial turmoil grabbing defeat for them from the jaws of victory? Are they starting to McCain themselves? Are they, the party that is confused and hesitant about doing the wrong thing, going to be beaten yet again by the party that is unconfused and brazen about it?
Politics trundles on and the more you pay attention to it the more depressed you are going to get, so what I like to do instead is look at gadgets. Gadgets aren’t everything. An affordable mobile phone is scant consolation if your ludicrously unaffordable house has just been repossessed. Flat screen televisions are only as good as the stuff that’s on them. Cool cars only provide escape from the cares of city life in car commercials, not in cities.
Nevertheless, gadgets are still being done well, and every now and again I like to pick out a new one and praise it on Samizdata, both for its own beautiful sake, and because doing this makes the point that life would be so much better if everything (not just gadgets) was done like that, by grasping capitalists in competition with one another instead of by tyrannically pompous bunglers who are clever only at winning elections or at sucking up to such people. The last such gadget that I got excited about here was the Asus Eee-PC, which I now happily possess, and am gradually finding more uses for. And now, I offer you the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, which is a digital camera, which looks like this:
 It doesn’t look anything very special, or very different, does it? And for many people it won’t be. For all those Real Photographers squinting into their optical viewfinders to get the perfect shot with their brick-like Canon or Nikon DSLRs, the G1 would be a severe come-down, because the G1 doesn’t have an optical viewfinder. But for that vast tribe of cheaper and more cheerful digital snappers who prefer cameras that don’t weigh so much, the fact that the G1 has no optical viewfinder is exactly the point. We Billion Monkeys, as I like to call us, look at all those Real Photographers with their clunky black contraptions and we say to ourselves, yes, I’d love my pictures to be as good as theirs are, and it would certainly be nice to be able to use lots of different lenses the way they do, but really, does a camera have to be that big to be that good?
The thing is – from where we Billion Monkeys stand, sit or crouch – DSLRs look like a relic of the analog age, like those weird early steam ships that also had sails on them. DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex, and this refers to the fact – commenters will doubtless correct me to the degree to which I am, I am sure, somewhat-to-completely wrong – that in order for the optical viewfinder to be an accurate foretaste of the picture being attempted, the light that enters a DSLR has to be divided up and sent off to two different places, one of them being the optical viewfinder and the other being the magical electronic surface that turns the light into a digital picture. This process involves … well, it involves a lot of space and a lot of complication.
So, the G1 does away with the the optical viewfinder. You can still squint through an eyepiece if you really want to, but what you see is a digital picture, not a merely optical one. More conveniently, you can see the digital picture beforehand on a small screen, which, as with the best little digital cameras, twiddles, and hence lets you take pictures that you can still see even when you are holding the camera way above your head or way down in front of your private parts. Most DSLRs still only show you the picture on their screens afterwards, but the latest ones also have these see-the-picture-beforehand screens, but this combining of optical and digital previewing all adds to the size and the expense. What the G1 does is put all its pre-viewing and post-viewing eggs in the one digital basket.
→ Continue reading: The Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 is a glimpse of a different and better world
We have sometimes been pretty harsh on John McCain at this blog. It is only right, though, to remember the very fine qualities of this man. Coffee House does so. Well said.
Some of the comments that we got yesterday after the Community Organiser from Chicago was elected were wonderful. Here is my personal favourite:
First, demonize him and ascribe his motives to evil and malfeasance, not just policy differences. We should proclaim often and loudly that he is not our president, that he stole the election and he has no mandate. We should repeat false stories about him, no matter how crazy or wrong, until they are accepted as common wisdom. We should create lies and urban legends to smear him and demean him. We should ridicule any verbal slips or gaffes, and ascribe them to his native stupidity and intellectual vapidity. We should accuse him of every sin and crime under the sun and attempt to have him impeached for policy differences, which we should call crimes. We should undermine any programs he wants to pass by misstating their goals and content. We should take quotes out of context to make him seem ridiculous and to make him seem mean-spirited. We should repeat often that he doesn’t care about people who aren’t the same race as he is, and that he is only out for his own kind. We should claim that he is going to try to force a coup and take over the country by force. We should claim he’s going to lock up any dissenters. We should loudly scream about losing our rights and interfere with his speechs and disrupt any gatherings of his party. Our politicians should cynically misstate his policies to make him look bad.
Update: one or two commenters are outraged by this and the words “native stupidity” have prompted at least one commenter to accuse me of being a racist in putting this paragraph on the blog. For goodness sake: the whole point of the comment was that it was written by a very bitter man who understandably feels that it is time that Obama should be attacked in exactly the same way as was Bush, who after all has been constantly attacked for being stupid, for his Texan drawl, whatever. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
I don’t normally respond to comments by adding to my original posts, but in this case I think it is necessary to lay down a marker to all those Obama supporters out there who might get twitchy when their hero gets any flak: criticism of Mr Obama is not some form of disguised racism. If the Democrats and their cheerleaders in the MSM spend the next four years trying to ward off all criticism of their man as racist, they will demean the genuine examples of racism that still exist. Further, they will, either unwittingly or not, harm racial harmony in the US and elsewhere. They will also deserve our contempt.
Andy Burnham MP to the Royal Television Society (in questions after the speech):
The time has come for perhaps a different approach to the internet. I want to even up that see-saw, even up the regulation [imbalance] between the old and the new.
[Reported by The Register]
Twice is coincidence…
In response to a letter from the UK Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), Nominet is announcing an independent review of its current corporate governance structure, to be benchmarked against established best practice corporate governance standards.
Three times is enemy action…
Hazel Blears MP:
There will always be a role for political commentary, providing perspective, illumination and explanation. But editors need to do more to disentangle it from news reporting, and to allow elected politicians the same kind of prominent space for comment as people who have never stood for office. […]
Unless and until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.
I take it that “adds value” means ‘supports us’; “legitimate protest” means ‘sneering at our enemies’; and a “more responsible manner” means ‘without questioning our control of the discourse’.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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