We still haven’t finished not doing anything

I get a bit annoyed with Netflix because it doesn’t seem to have a way to search for good movies. A search on that site will show movies of the proper category (and likely similar to what I’ve seen before). So I thought to search the whole web for recommendations for LGBTQ movies on Netflix. I found several lists. And from those lists (plus a bit of searching for ratings and trailers) I’ve replenished my list of films to watch. The one I saw on Sunday is Timeout or maybe Time Out (its IMDB page has both). It was described as a Bollywood movie with a gay character. Since I hadn’t sat down to watch a Bollywood movie before (I have been to Indian restaurants with Bollywood movies played on the TVs on the walls with the sound off), I thought to give this one a try. Bollywood is known for its dance numbers. This movie has little dancing, but it does have several songs. So I don’t know if this is true Bollywood style. The story focuses on Guarav, who is 14, and his older brother Mihir, who I guess is a senior. Mihir is on the basketball team (Guarav is on the junior team). Guarav and friends form a band and they’re quite good – good enough to play at school events. In addition to basketball and the band a lot of the story is about teenagers trying to negotiate dating. Then Guarav catches Mihir in bed with another boy. And Guarav has a hard time figuring out what that means for him. Is he also gay? How does that affect his relationship to his brother? A nice bit of this movie is it asks the question how does one explain why one is attracted to another. I enjoyed this one. The language of the movie is listed as Hindi though it seemed half the words were English. Sometimes both languages were used in the same sentence. Fortunately, both languages are given English subtitles. After a bit of thinking about this film I saw that if one changed the language and the skin color it could take place in any suburban American high school. I finished the book The Bowl of Heaven and Shipstar by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven. The story was first published as two novels back in 2012 and 2014. My paperback contains both as one thousand page book. It took me almost four weeks to read it. This book is part of the genre of science fiction where humans encounter some jaw-droppingly huge artifact, obviously constructed, and need to investigate it. Niven had done this before in his Ringworld stories. I had also read John Varley’s Titan trilogy. In this case the artifact is a bowl about the width somewhere between the orbits of Mercury and Venus. The whole thing spins so the sides of the bowl offer gravity for a habitable space a few million times larger than the surface of the earth. The bottom of the bowl is covered with mirrors that focus the star’s light back on a small area of the star creating a jet of plasma. That plasma moves the star forward and the gravity of bowl keeps it following. If the jet (which passes through a hole in the center of the bowl) stopped propelling the star the bowl will fall into it. Humans passing in a colony ship need to investigate, partly because they need provisions, and partly to answer the question the authors set up: Who built it and why? The story is also a way for authors to show the wide variety of life they could dream up. That they did, though after a while each new wonder got a bit tiring. I wanted the story to get on to the point the authors were making, to resolve the conflicts. I think the whole thing would have been a lot better by cutting out about a third of it. The last few pages of the book are a preview of the sequel – what happens when the human ship gets to their original destination. It’s another 400 pages and online reviews are only moderate. I won’t bother. As for that page count... This book, when looking at the front cover, is narrower than other books on my shelf. That makes for a wider spine. If the cover was as wide as other books I figure it would be only 850 pages. Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday, shows the peaks in new cases per day as 1098, 950, 588, and 743. I hope it implies cases have leveled off (rather than the start of an increase). It is good it stays below peaks of 1000 cases a day. The deaths per day look like they aren’t updated as quickly as the cases per day. The last two weeks show deaths in the single digits, and the five weeks before then in the 17-27 range. Just in a couple days there were two mass shootings in California. And already in the 25 days so far in January there have been 30 mass shootings. Your favorite news source will have details at least on the two in California. Instead, I’ll comment on the huge number of political cartoons that have been created in the last few days (or created years before and reposted with no loss of relevancy). Here are some of them: Dan Nott posted a version of the Second Amendment with a lot of crossing out and rewriting:

An unregulated mass of armed citizens being necessary to the perpetuation of the firearms industry the right of the people to buy and conceal the latest in man-slaughtering technology shall not be infringed.

Danied Garcia posted one showing a man firing a gun but the band of bullets feeding it is actually a band of people. https://twitter.com/cartoonmovement/status/1617850712641179651 Jesse Duquette tweeted an image of a balance scale in which guns are heavier than everything else. Along with it is the comment:

The only thing more reliable than the next mass shooting is our gross unwillingness to do anything about it. This country is a blood-drunk snake eating itself and I don’t believe we’ll ever lose our taste for blood.

Mike Smith of the Las Vegas Sun tweeted a cartoon of a couple talking outside the Capitol.

He: When it comes to gun violence we need to consider mental health. She: Yes... The mental health of anyone opposed to gun laws.

Marc Murphy of the Louisville Courier-Journal shows the standard religious praying hands with some red stains and the person praying says, “I pray I get reelected.” Steve Sack posted one of a lawmaker trying to dismiss reporters by saying:

Too Soon! We still haven’t finished not doing anything after the last massacre!

RJ Matson posted a calendar of shootings in January in the USA. It’s accurate through Sunday, January 22 (which means it’s already out of date and doesn’t have the second California shooting). It has a splotch of red with a state abbreviation for each shooting. Sunday the 1st has six splotches, Sunday the 15th has four with up to three splotches on most other days. And this one from November 30th last year is still appropriate. I knew I could use it eventually. It shows an empty semi truck with the words:

Mass shootings in the US are happening so often, Republicans are having supply chain issues with thoughts & prayers.

Some of those cartoons came from about four dozen that Denise Oliver Velez posted at the top of the comments of a pundit roundup for Daily Kos. I’ve saved a few Ukraine updates. On January 15 Kos of Kos wrote about the Russian attack on apartments in Dnipro, Ukraine. As reported at the time there were 25 dead, 73 injured, 72 apartments destroyed, 230 damaged. Kos declared that in carrying out that attack Russia was really stupid. At a time when Ukraine’s allies were about to meet in Ramstein, Germany (the meeting has since happened) to discuss the next round of military aid and arguing over what to include...

A smart Russia lays low at this time, focusing on their tactical advances around Soledar, near Bakhmut. They make fake noises about “peace process” and string Germany along, pretending to be interested in finding resolution, if only the West didn’t encourage Ukraine to be so unreasonable! Instead, they engaged in a war crime so blatant, so viscerally horrifying, that a recalcitrant German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will have no choice but to agree to “free the Leopards”—the European-standard battle tanks manufactured by Germany’s arms industry.

The meeting would show that Ukraine’s capabilities will only improve and modernize.

Russia is still banking on the West losing its patience and pressuring Ukraine to freeze the current lines. Announcing everything would dash those Russian dreams, and might even spur a reassessment of their war effort.

This apartment bombing has shown the need to end this war as quickly as possible to prevent more war crimes. So deliver as much military gear as possible as quickly as possible. From a post on January 17th, Mark Sumner of Kos updated the stats for the Dnipro apartment attack: 44 dead, 79 injured, 39 rescued from the rubble. Most of the post is about Russia “liberating” the town of Soledar north of Bakhmut. There wasn’t much left of the town by the time Ukraine withdrew. One reason for defending it as much as they did was because Soledar was already destroyed, but keeping Russia bottled up here means another village may be spared destruction. As for why Soledar, which has no strategic value:

Russia didn’t manage to capture Kyiv. So it redefined victory down to taking the eastern and southern areas of Ukraine. Then it failed to hold Kharkiv, so it redefined victory to capturing all of Luhansk and holding the sea coast. Kherson is Russia forever! Then Russia lost Kherson in an absolutely humiliating defeat. Then Russia decided that taking Bakhmut, Bakhmut would be a victory! Only they couldn’t capture Bakhmut. Russia threw everything at Soledar because it needed a “win.” And any win would do. The strategic value of taking this flat space that used to hold a town is negligible, except in terms of the media reports announcing “Russia scores its first victory in months,” backed by the sound of 10,000 cheering tankies. Which does make you think. Not so much about Soledar, but about exactly why Russia felt it needed a win so badly that it was willing to reset the bar of victory so low and raise the level of acceptable loss so high. It’s fair to say that the importance of Soledar isn’t well understood, and the answers won’t be found on a map of Ukraine.

On Thursday the 19th, leading up to that Ramstein meeting, Sumner reported the long list of equipment the US and European countries pledged to send to Ukraine. Sumner wrote, speaking of Putin...

But what’s happening in Europe right now might be the capstone for his despair. In spite of a year of terrorizing and torture, in spite of enough nuclear threats to populate a thousand Tom Clancy novels, in spite of feeding untrained Russian soldiers wholesale into a meat-grinder for a “victory” over an area the size of a Walmart parking lot … Ukraine’s support in the West Just. Will. Not. Go. Away. By now, Russia expected Europe to be fretting about the cost of keeping their homes warm, the U.S. to be launching investigations into Zelenskyy’s laptop, and Ukraine’s army to be running on fumes. Instead, no matter what false claims Wagner may be making, Ukraine is having a stellar week—a week that sends a signal not just to Putin, but to China and to anyone else who thinks anything good can come from invasion.

On Friday the 20th, the start of the Ramstein meeting, Sumner discussed the central debate. Ukraine needs tanks. Up to this point Western countries didn’t want to send any modern tanks – old Soviet era tanks were just fine. Many European countries were willing to send their German made Leopard tanks. But clauses in export licenses say Germany must give permission for the buyer to give or sell the Leopards to any other country. And German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wasn’t giving that permission. There are, of course, a lot of historical reasons why Germany is reluctant to be an active supporter of any war effort. On Sunday the 22nd Kos reported that Germany would not prevent other countries, primarily Poland, from sending their Leopards to Ukraine. This was after Poland began suggesting that they and a few other countries were going to send their Leopards whether or not Germany gave their blessing. Kos also discussed the fight over the little village of Novoselivs’ke, north of Svatove. Unlike Soledar, this little village has a great deal of strategic value to both sides. On Tuesday the 24th Sumner reported that Biden was leaning towards sending the M1A2 Abrams tank to Ukraine. He had originally said no (the Abrams would be much more of a logistical mess for Ukraine than it would be a benefit). But Scholz had said he wouldn’t approve Leopards unless Biden approve Abrams. Since then both countries have confirmed both tanks would be sent (but don’t expect the Abrams to show up for a few months – the people to run and maintain it will need lots of training).