"The Better Angels of Our Nature"

(Why Violence Has Declined)
2011
-by steven pinker
A towering work. Pinker describes us as a species more moral than at any time in recorded history, due to civilizing trends that over recent centuries (and especially recent decades) have made us far less violent...a claim that flies in the face of headlines and common cynicism, but steven offers enough statistical evidence to silence a herd of cats in heat. That doesn't mean he's always right, but he maintains appropriate scientific humility. He analyzes the history of war, interpersonal violence, slavery, superstitious/ideological violence, and genocide, all of which are trending down (or disappearing entirely), and trounces the notion that the 20th century was the most warlike. He deconstructs how the rights revolutions have decreased government violence against its own citizens, with individual rights slowly superseding the good of the state. In almost excruciating detail, he explores the psychology and physiology of violence. He hangs all this pacifying on the rise of hobbesian leviathan states which replaced feudal systems. He describes civilizing as a downward process by which the poor mimic the genteel rich (i know that might not sit well with some, but pinker makes it plausible). He cites literacy as a linchpin of ever-expanding empathy, commerce as an antidote to tribal violence, and global feminism as a further pacifying factor. Pinker avoids political correctness, and even exposes its flaws. He doesn't shy from unsettling points, like the effect that our post-Three Mile Island nuclear abandonment has had on the fossil fuel apocalypse. He points out that the traffic fatalities of people who refused to fly in 2002 contributed six times the number of 9/11 deaths. He explains America's hyper-violence by showing that we're several countries, not one - the east and midwest have comparable violence rates to any advanced democracy, but the south and west have rates that reflect their origins as a culture of honor. It's tempting to compare this book to michael shermer's "The Moral Arc", which attributes all this to the ever-expanding ripples of the age of enlightenment and reason...an explanation which my humynism finds more appealing, but these two books might be complementary, not competitive (indeed, pinker is complimentary of shermer). Making sense of history's trends is one of the more challenging tasks any thinker can undertake. Wrong or right, pinker does humynity proud.

Riptide 7

Two new songs, "Monkey Butt Dance" and "Teach Me"...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP-RFjhwcTU

"Babylon 5"

(Yes, i endured the entire five seasons, plus five telemovies. Mostly, it became a quest to be amused by which guest actors and genre stalwarts signed on. Dwight schulz, melissa gilbert, harlan ellison, john schuck, vaughn armstrong, bernie casey, gerrit graham, june lockhart, marjorie monaghan, david mccallum, david warner, brad dourif, erick avari, majel barrett, robert englund, tony todd, michael york, michael ansara, jeffrey combs, robin curtis, judson scott, paul williams, paul winfield, bryan cranston, adrienne barbeau, eric pierpoint, theodore bikel, bruce mcgill, danica mckellar, carel struycken, ian abercrombie, richard moll, and the winners - penn and teller! Plus a surreal nod to West Wing fans, who must see the entrance that comes at the 40-45 minute mark of "River of Souls")
1994-1998
-created by j. michael straczynski
A critique of late-era STAR TREK is that it got away from the social relevance of the classic, to become average, copycat sci fi fare. If you'd like to know how unfair that is, sit through B5, which is the living, breathing actualization of that critique. Zero inventiveness. No edge. Dialogue often unrecognizable as humyn speech (partial blame goes to straczynski's non-improvisation manifesto...one aspect of actor improvisation is making speech more naturalistic, a touch that was sorely needed here). B5 shows you all these alien cultures, and instead of diving into a meaty exploration of cultural relativity and moral ambiguity, those are glossed over in the service of some "heroic humyn" tale, full of pedestrian conceits and dime-store romanticizations. Is that a bit unfair? Maybe. Who knows...had three of their leads been more compelling/natural/relateable, the whole affair might have been watchable. Even with its flaws, i confess that i started to feel sentimental when the last few episodes arrived. The actors, for the most part, gave it their best. So i dedicate the rest of this review to them - you showed up, poured out your hearts...and occasionally did quality work on better sci fi shows.
ACTOR - # of episodes
mira furlan (CYCLOPS, LOST) - 110
She played humyn/alien hybrid delenn with sensitivity and class. She should give workshops on how to do bad dialogue convincingly.
peter jurasik (TRON, HILL STREET BLUES) - 110
With perhaps the greatest acting challenge of the show, making londo sympathetic, he acquitted himself well.
andreas katsulas (THE FUGITIVE, STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION) - 110
NEXT GEN's irrepressible tomalak rendered unflinching service under eight pounds of prosthetic, and as g'kar always hit the right acting values.
richard biggs (ANY DAY NOW, STRONG MEDICINE) - 110
The affable dr. franklin came off flat...did the lines fail him (yes), or did he fail the lines (maybe)?
bill mumy (LOST IN SPACE, TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE) - 110
Ah, poor bill mumy! He never failed to make leneer believable. For a taste of what he could do with real dialogue, see DS9's "The Siege of AR-558".
stephen furst (ANIMAL HOUSE, ST. ELSEWHERE) - 110
Go stephen, go! Playing the "young" vir while over forty! He was placed in more unactable moments than anyone else, but daniel day lewis couldn't have done better. Well, maybe a little.
jerry doyle (CAPTAIN SIMIAN & SPACE MONKEYS, B5: THE GATHERING) - 110
A good actor makes bad dialogue better. Garibaldi might have made his worse.
claudia christian (A GNOME NAMED GNORM, STARHYKE) - 89
As ivanova, she became one of the few characters you kind of cared about. Her departure, sad.
bruce boxleitner (TRON, SCARECROW AND MRS. KING) - 88
And here he is, our hero sheridan! Or perhaps just a cardboard cutout, i can never tell.
jeff conaway (GREASE, TAXI) - 74
Ahh, poor jeff. Not even security chief...just assistant?! At this point in his career, didn't he rate a shot at a captain's chair? He couldn't have done worse than what they had. Am i being overly sentimental?
patricia tallman (ARMY OF DARKNESS, BABYLON 5: THIRDSPACE) - 47
As lyta, she rose (or descended) to the level of her dialogue.
jason carter (GEORGIA, BEVERLY HILLS 90210) - 45
As ranger marcus, he injected as much panache as you could ask.
andrea thompson (NYPD BLUE, 24) - 44
Before she left, telepath talia was the one character you'd started to care about. Doyle, this show ain't big enough for the both of us! Boy, did the fans get the fuzzy end of that lollipop.
michael o'hare (C.H.U.D., BABYLON 5: THE GATHERING) - 25
What seemed like a soulless studio decision to replace the first-season commander with someone "sexier", turned out to be a heartbreaking tale of mental illness.
tracy scoggins (LOIS & CLARK, HIGHLANDER) - 21
She did yeomanlike work as captain lochley, a final-season replacement for ivanova.
walter koenig (STAR TREK, STAR TREK I-VII) -13
As megalomaniacal telepath bester, he was okay. He even had a genuinely good episode in his last appearance.

Riptide 6

Two new songs, "Sunrise" and "Jefferson Blues". The second one's not a bar song, nor likely to make my concert, but gets singular love at poetry events.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I21a57vj5SY

dear ma

Dear ma,

Oh yes, your point about some people ending up on the street no matter what, MIGHT be true...but still, that seems like saying that because some people will always engage in life-threatening activities (extreme sports, drugs), it should be legal to murder.
Poor jaym, having to defend a religion that becomes more ridiculous with each passing generation...as we keep evolving morally and scientifically, revealed religion just gets more and more preposterous. I feel for her, i truly do. A lot of this isn't her fault...science is discovering genetic predispositions to liberalism and conservatism.
I was tempted to put you on the spot, on whether you thought jesus was a communist. I think jaymie has convinced herself that jesus wasn't political (Using the narrowest definition possible - did he run for office? No? Then he wasn't political! Never mind that the non-mythological jesus was a claimant to the throne.). But if jaym can convince herself he wasn't political, she can avoid the staggering contradictions between christianity and capitalism. She's painted herself into this horrible corner. I mean, the sermon on the mount, not political?? Jesus (or his mythological version) was the original wide-eyed commie hippie.
You continue to wonder (as do we all) how much of our behavior is humyn nature. Here are two books i'm about to read, "The Blank Slate", by steven pinker, and "Evil", by roy baumeister. The upshoot seems to be that selfishness is humyn nature, but so is a sense of justice. Evil isn't "evil", it's just a social coping mechanism that can get wayyyy out of hand in inflated, impersonal societies.
Oh yes, i think many of the founding fathers were aware of (and conflicted by) the slavery issue. I think they even tried to deal with it, but gave up and passed the buck to future generations.
Sure, work ethic is important...but we've long passed the point where anyone needs to work a forty-hour week. Our technology and agriculture are so advanced, that no humyn NEEDS to work more than a fifteen-hour week. We're just stuck in this rut of unbounded greed and economic exploitation. To live as i live, seeing the halls of the uber-rich, then walking among the homeless...it's just staggering the amounts of denial and absolute lack of compassion still in us. And the saddest part is that most rich people aren't patent assholes...in fact, many of them are some of the nicest people you'll ever meet. But that only underscores the incredible amounts of rationalization going on.
love,

wrob

Star Trek Discovery, season 1

(As a placeholder for the series-spanning writeup, i hereby accept STD into the canon...but barely, ever so barely. Its almost unforgivable flaw is that it fetishizes violence like no TREK ever [except the non-canonical abrams]. And it doesn't move the original vision forward, only sideways like DS9 and VOY - here, we have a gay regular plus a female regular who would never be found on a catwalk, which are both great...but the other core flaw is the absence of allegorical social relevance. A couple episodes touch upon TREK themes, but that's it. As of now, no STD qualifies for this writer's franchise-wide best-of marathons.)
FOUR-STAR EPISODES: 0
AVERAGE EPISODE RATING: 2.07
-The Vulcan Hello **
A century after ENTERPRISE (and ten years before the classic), during which time there has been no klingon contact, the U.S.S. Shenzhou is lured into a standoff with a prophet of kahless trying to reunite all the houses for a war against the Federation. The humyn first officer, raised on Vulcan by sarek and convinced that war can be avoided by striking first, attempts a mutiny. There are no flashes of chemistry, only adequate acting. Nothing about the writing makes it recognizable as TREK. With tension but little else, an inauspicious debut.
-Battle at the Binary Stars **
First officer burnham is tossed into the brig...while all Stovokor breaks loose as the klingons (now with twenty-four houses present) attack the Federation fleet. Mass destruction and death ensue, followed by an audacious raid designed by burnam. They cripple the klingon flagship and kill their leader, but their own captain (michelle yeoh - SUNSHINE, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA) is killed. Burnam is sentenced to life imprisonment for mutiny.
-Context is for Kings **
Burnam's prison shuttle is intercepted by the USS Discovery, and she's conscripted by captain gabriel lorca. An experimental propulsion system could, if successful, win the klingon war. A sister ship working on the same technology suffers total disaster. Shipmates new and old treat her with mistrust, except for her nervous, insecure roommate. The captain has secrets...
-The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry **
An admiral questions whether lorca's tactics are too rash. Discovery discovers that a possibly-sentient, spore-friendly being is needed as a conduit to make the experimental drive work, and they use it to save a colony, but at risk to the creature's life. A TREK theme resurrected! Plus klingon intrigue and betrayal...then they capture lorca.
-Choose Your Pain **
Lorca is in a brutal klingon brig, with an unknown junior officer and...harry mudd (rainn wilson - THE OFFICE, SUPER)! Treachery and collaboration culminate in an escape, in which mudd is left behind. Needing the spore drive to rescue lorca, physicist lt. paul stamets hooks himself to it. He survives...but at what cost?
-Lethe ***
Discovery follows a burnham mind link to sarek, who is dying alone on a ship that's been sabotaged by vulcan extremists. Sarek tries to push michael's link away. An admiral visits, determined to discover the truth behind lorca's recklessness. She and lorca have sex...
-Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad **
I SO wanted to give this three stars, but the narrative gets wonky and unfocused at the end. The first TREK appearance of the real, non-android stella mudd should have been one of the funnier moments ever, but...otherwise, you have crewmembers partying (techno versions of Bee Gees, al green, and "Jump Around"...YES!), while harry mudd transports aboard and keeps initiating thirty-minute time loops, until he figures out how to commandeer the ship, to sell to the klingons. It's not as playful as a mudd episode ought be, and the choice to make him homicidal is probably irreconcilable with his established character, but it's brisk and fun.
-Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum **
Burnham, saru, and ash have an away mission on a planet with ethereal sound beings who might help them see through klingon cloak technology, but the beings have another agenda. Well, it ain't bad...though i guess i already said that in the rating.
-Into the Forest I Go **
Discovery must make 133 consecutive short jumps to unlock the secrets of the klingon cloak, which fries stamets' brain. Burnham and ash rescue the admiral on the klingon ship of the dead. With one final jump, they end up in an unknown universe.
-Despite Yourself ***
They're in the classic mirror universe! Discovery must transform itself to a reality where lorca is a treasonous fugitive, burnham is a captain presumed dead, and sylvia is the blood-soaked Discovery captain. Ash begins manifesting a klingon personality, and a deep scan reveals he was surgically transformed...and he kills the doctor to keep it secret. This high rating is unusual, given that there's minimal mirror interaction, but sylvia's fumbling transformation into "captain killey" is a delight.
-The Wolf Inside **
Tilly works to heal stamets' brain with spore therapy, so Discovery might return home. Burnham is aboard her own mirror universe ship, enduring the strain of passing as its brutal captain, with the renegade lorca to be given to the empress. She disobeys orders to destroy a klingon-led, inter-specieal rebel base. Mirror sarek is among them, and mind-melds with burnham. The empress is revealed as the mirror of captain georgiou, whom burnham betrayed.
-Vaulting Ambition **
Stamets meets his mirror self inside the mycelial network. Tyler's klingon ego, genetically grafted into him, emerges...a conceit that strains credibility to the breaking point.
-What's Past is Prologue **
Sentenced to death for disobeying orders, burnham reveals to the empress her true nature...and figures out that lorca has been the mirror lorca all along, manipulating Discovery to get back to his universe and overthrow georgiou. His followers amassed, battle breaks out aboard the flagship, on which the abuse of spore power will lead to the destruction of all universes (the battle scenes are too glamorous/gratuitous for TREK). Discovery undertakes a suicidal mission to save all life. In good shakespearean (or bad TREK) fashion, the baddies all die and the goodies all live, floating home on mycelial shockwaves. Burnham brings the empress, rather than leave her to die.
-The War Without, the War Within **
This one feels a bit more familiar as TREK. Discovery returns to its own universe, but nine months later. The klingon war is nearly over, and not in a good way. Joined by the admiral and sarek (james frain - TRUE BLOOD, GOTHAM), a plan is hatched to take the war to Q'onoS, using georgiou's knowledge of the klingons.
-Will You Take My Hand? **
Georgiou is given command of the mission to end the war...though she doesn't reveal her plan to destroy Q'onoS altogether. An away team must navigate an orion embassy village, while facing hard moral choices. One star lost for a too-easy ending, plus a back-patting denouement that's not quite earned. Nice things happen here, though - i started to care about these characters (after only fifteen episodes, hmm). Plus, the depiction of scantily-clad females (and males) is less gratuitous than in TREK's past. It would have been more morally responsible to do without the gratuitous violence, but progress must be acknowledged. Plus, the first veteran TREK actor appearance - clint howard (GENTLE BEN, APOLLO 13), as a seedy orion!

Riptide 5

A couple brand new songs, "Crazy Shit" and "The Dong Song"...the great surprise was that the audience loved the second one. I thought maybe it was "too far" in entertainment terms, but do you know how stunning it is to look out and see a stranger singing the last few words of a song with you, when that song has never been heard publicly?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKWB--f7gyA