Covid-19 and self-isolation after travel abroad

Good advice for  anyone anywhere returning home from  abroad. Keep yourself as safe as possible. We're all in this together.

Tororoto Star business writer catches up to reality

David Olive writing in the Toronto Star points out that oil is a dying business, an that it's past time for Alberta to diversify its economy.

I made the same points as Olive three years ago: https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2016/12/pipelines-and-alberta-economy.html

Social distancing and covid-19 (link)

Well-done aimation showing why social distancing matters:
https://youtu.be/dSQztKXR6k0

Five by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick. The Variable Man (1957) What’s there to say? Dick had probably the wildest and most accurate imagination of the golden age SF writers. He wanted to know the social and psychological effects of technology, and there are still too few writers (and others) who take that question seriously. Each tale in this anthology deals with issues that still trouble us. His technical imagination was limited, but his social and psychological imagination was not.
     The Variable Man: social control by algorithm, warfare between empires, the urge towards dictatorship, rivalries between government agencies.
     Second Variety: total war, autonomous weapons, artificial intelligence.
     The Minority Report: preventing crime by identifying criminal before they do the deed.
     Autofac: automated and autonomous production.
     A World of Talents: social competition and class struggle, symbolised by conflict between humans with psi talents and humans without.
     Dick’s vision is often bleak, but even in the bleakest stories the spark of resistance to tyranny glows, however dimly. ****

ETs want Earth!

    Groff Conklin. Invaders of Earth (1952) A nicely done collection of invader stories, with enough twists to satisfy even the reader of current speculative fiction. About the only thing none of the  authors attempt is a truly alien alien. Not surprising, since every example is pulp or popular magazine fiction, whose authors couldn’t afford to speculate too far outside of their putative readers’ boxes.
     I won’t summarise any of the stories. The Wikipedia article lists all 22 stories published in the original hard-cover edition. This Tempo Books edition, contains only 17. All first rate examples of their genre. A keeper, despite its age. Or maybe because of it. ***

Alan Bullock: Hitler

     Alan Bullock. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962) A re-read. See my first review  About the only things to add are, first, that Hitler suffered from Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
     In his Epilogue, Bullock points out that Hitler was a European, and that the malaise that he embodied was not unique to Germany. He writes Hitler’s idiom was German, but the thoughts and emotions to which he gave expression have a more universal currency. Quite so, and the rise of the far right, of ethnic nationalisms, of the paranoia triggered by the globalisation of our world, show that these thoughts and emotions are never far below the surface.
     Bullock ends his Epilogue with  [Hitler] was in revolt against ‘the System’ not just in Germany but in Europe, against the liberal-bourgeois order, symbolised for him in the Vienna which had once rejected him. To destroy this was his mission, the mission in which he never ceased to believe, and in this, the most deeply felt of his purposes, he did not fail. Europe may rise again, but the old Europe between the 1789, the year of the French Revolution, an 1939, the year of Hitler’s War, has gone forever – and the last figure in its history is Adolf Hitler, the architect of its ruin. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice – If you seek a monument, look around.
     The European Union is an attempt to refashion that liberal bourgeois polity. Brexit is an attempt to repudiate it. It’s ironic that the liberal democracy that refused to surrender to Hitler in 1942 is now the carrier of the same infection, and the one that came to England’s aid is sick with it.
     800 and some pages, and oddly enough a page-turner. Recommended. ***

Two Movies

I like movies, and sometimes watch one twice or even three times. Here's two we watched in March of this year.

    High Noon (1952) [D: Fred Zinneman. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly] This is one of the classics that holds up. If anything, it gets better every time I see it. Simple story of a sheriff who decides on his wedding day that he has to finish a job he started when he arrested a killer, who has been released, and is coming back for revenge. The one man who is willing to help pulls out when he finds out he’s the only one. The townsfolk back off from risking their lives, unwilling to accept that the killer and his cronies will destroy the town if they win. Cooper wins of course, and rides off with his bride, no doubt happy to leave the town to stew in its cowardice.
   The movie’s a fable, but it’s an unobtrusive one. The pace, the beautifully composed shots, the wonderful tonality of the black and white film, the use of natural sound, the haunting theme music, the conceit of making the movie exactly as long as the sheriff’s job, the desolation surrounding the town, the well-realised characters, all these combine to tell an astonishingly believable story. I’ve seen this movie at least three times that I can recall; I do not tire of it. ****

The movie is adapted from a short story The Tin Star. See my disussion of it at https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2014/08/john-cunningham-tin-star-colliers.html

   The American President (1995) [D: Rob Reiner. Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Michael J. Fox, Martin Sheen.] A love fantasy set in the White House, where widowed president Andrew Shepherd woos lobbyist Sidney Ellen Wade, while dealing with a reelection campaign. The plot is convoluted enough that a short summary is impossible, but the main line is clear enough: Boy meets girl, boy and girl have an affair, boy almost loses girl, boy and girl wed and live happily ever after. Well acted, competently paced and photographed, with just enough cliches bent off-kilter to provide freshness: we enjoyed this movie. Romantic love always gets me. I want to believe that everybody can be happy. The political games are well handled, too, and while they avoid getting too deep into the dirt and stay well away from the dark side, they feel true enough to make us believe the threats to Andrew and Sidney’s happiness, and how they resolve the ethical questions surrounding their relationship. **-½