A Movie Review

Well, it's summertime, and so journalistic ethics demands from every writer a movie review.
My brother and I took the 30-mile drive to the theater up in Crested Butte from Gunnison, and found ourselves at the end of memory lane. We caught the 5 o'clock showing -- there were maybe 8 people in the theater, but I was surprised that we were not completely surrounded by other 20- to 30-year-old guys, spending a Tuesday evening reliving Saturday mornings many years ago.
Michael Bay's new unleashing of chaos on earth comes to us from Cybertron via Hollywood. Transformers is a glorious summer action movie -- it is, in a word, rad. The plot is, how shall I say it, complicated yet undistracting. Robots land on earth and start raising hell looking for a powerful cube. This cube can do some seriously bodacious cool stuff. The Decepticons want to exterminate the human race in the process of finding this cube; the Autobots want victory and the avoidance of civilian casualties, and plan to leave Earth when their mission is completed. There are some secret government agents and some military guys holed up in the Hoover Dam. None of this really matters. The dorky kid with the killer car gets the totally rad babe at the end. He is played by Shia LeBoeuf, she is played by Megan Cox. Both are acceptable.

Peter Cullen comes back as Optimus Prime, and still sounds like a noble tractor trailer should. "Freedom is the right of every sentient being" continues to be a great (and true) statement, even if it comes from a 20-year-old robot toy.

John Tuturro is over-the-top as a secret government agent, and mysterious without being sinister. This is perhaps a reversal of his role as Jesus in The Big Lebowski, where he was sinister without being mysterious. He has a great tendency to overact the part.

Of course, everyone overacts in this movie. The powerful cube overacts. All the CGI robots overact. Even the scenery overacts. But that's sort of the point. This film is not meant to be subtle. It is a combination of Saturday-morning Froot Loops nostalgia, teenage 80s-pop-culture history lesson, blockbuster action film, and product-placement clinic.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that Transformers began essentially as a 30-minute advertisement for toys. It is now a 2-hour, 30- minute advertisement for some different toys. The transition from advertisement to cult phenomenon to advertisement is brilliant.

Transformers is not a "good" movie, but it is awesome.

The Barroso video (again)

One thing that I always find interesting about the European Union is the lack of interest it gives to the concept of individual human freedom. Commission President Barroso in the previous post's video (scroll down) mentions protection from this, protection from that, the power to combat global problems (other than homicidal maniacs in London and Edinburgh influenced by a primitive savage global ideological cancer), and no dilution of national identity. However, there is precious little about what the European Union does to free Europeans. Instead, it seems to come up with ever new ways to tie them down, with those hundreds of little Tocquevillean threads.

The opt-outs for the UK....

....are "worthless," according to Margot Wallström, European Commission Vice-President.
What's most important about this article is the point that many Europeans are either unwilling or afraid to admit -- that as certain "competences" are ceded to Brussels by treaty, judges at the European Court of Justice will likely give the Union an ever-expanding mandate to legislate. (We have the same problem in the US.) Of course, we should expect nothing less from the new empire.

231 years

This week we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence; and it is still worthy of our celebration. 231 years ago, these United States shook off the yoke of a King, and in the process developed and implemented a few ideas about the purpose and limitations of the State, and citizens' roles in that state. Many of these ideas had never been tested. The American Revolution rested on the idea that government was instituted to protect rights -- rights preceded the state, and the chief function of government was to protect these rights. The right to life was chief of these, followed closely by the right to liberty and the right to pursue happiness.

This meant that government did not exist to please the sovereign, even if the people themselves were "the sovereign." Instead, government should be a protector of what man naturally possessed. The people themselves were capable of tyranny as well. Indeed, a few years later, in one European nation, "the people" demonstrated the ability to be as despotic and tyrannical as any king. The purpose of government was thus to be a protector of free men, rather than a condescending parent or a shepherd; political power existed to benefit neither the poor nor the rich; it was to protect the one against the many.



The result of the signing of this Declaration was a long series of wars pitting the freest nation in the world against the second-freest nation in the world. This has not happened since. Over the course of those battles, our enemy became our greatest ally, having exported those very ideas that the Americans implemented, redigesting them at home. The Americans could have never been so free without the British; we owe them a hint of thanks on this day, in spite of one of their kings.

We are still testing whether any nation so conceived can endure. The idea that the state exists to keep people free, free to grow, free to take risks, even free to make occasionally fail, is just as controversial now as it was over two centuries ago. What was self-evident to those men in Philadelphia -- freedom is in the pursuit of happiness; a guaranteed happiness is artificial, and certainly not freedom -- is not evident to some today. We are in fact seeing in many places the freedom to occasionally fail curtailed to the extent that it makes it difficult to truly succeed. We see other places where majority-rule is equated with freedom, even when it results in a tyranny made all the more oppressive by its very popularity.

The Declaration of Independence is a governmental document, addressed to an international audience, but it is also a document about personal independence, addressed to all humanity. True, the colonies became independent of their master, but that Philadelphia parchment also continues to remind us that every person, regardless of birth or background, brilliance or beauty, has an inhered right -- writ by powers far greater than any state -- to live their life, as long as their actions do not threaten the same liberty of others.

It is a truly revolutionary idea, even today. Happy Independence Day.

One year....

spent drinking beer in Czech Republic.
Now that's a job.

Two articles...

to illustrate a point:
First, this article (in German, sorry) discusses how McDonald's is planning to start using their used vegetable oil to make biofuel.
Next, this one is about how one company is starting to recycle plastic.... by turning it back into fossil fuels.
This is very interesting stuff, and demonstrates the ability of firms to take technology and do something with it that no government could ever do -- something innovative and practical.  Vaclav Klaus, (the current President of the Czech Republic and a pariah in Europe for his relentless insistence on making sure that individual freedom is at the heart of any EU "reform") has noted that scepticism about global warming (or its ecumenical brother "climate change") is usually linked to what people think about the role and purpose of government.  Those that are most convinced of climate change are also those most inclined to support draconian government measures for the environment.... and draconian measures for health care, draconian measures to publicly fund various social programs, restrictions on school choice, restrictions on certain political speech, restrictions on businesses, etc.
At the same time, one can see with these two articles that the market is already correcting the environment.  It is simply a matter of how one perceives the world: should a handful of people (usually in a city far away) decide how you should live your life, or should you be free to benefit from your own good ideas?