Fine version of Moby Dick on Amazon video

Really very good, last night.

When did the Scandinavian genocide happen on The Expanse?

Or maybe it was a plague that wiped them all out?

Has there ever been a blonde on any episode of the show?

Have there ever been two blondes?

Really excellent video

The Abolitionists, a PBS American Experience series.

And very, very far from allowing any sort of moral equivalence to obtain between these folks and the slave owners and their broader alliance, the opponents of the abolitionists all over the country, including the mobs of the North.

Who, watching this, does not see that struggle as continuous with the struggles not only of the Civil War, but also of Reconstruction, and of the Civil Rights Era?

Or the struggle even today?

Oh, and last night there was the chilling Hitler on Trial, also on amazon video.

Also, in its way, the same struggle.

For liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

The Train

Fine movie that I have seen a few times before, excellent acting (Lancaster, Scofield), beautiful B&W photography.

Streamed last night.

The fourth season of Money Heist is excellent

Also good are the most recent Bosch and The Expanse.

You wouldn't believe how much TV I have watched and how much weight I have gained this spring.

"Mississippi Burning"

Watched it for the nth time on Amazon streaming video last night.

The same battle being fought then against white supremacist, nationalist, racist terrorists who enjoyed widespread community support and political cover is still with us, today.

Even down to the denunciations of the press for printing lies, distortions, and "fake news" about the poor maligned South, Southerners, and especially organized racist killers and their official enablers and collaborators.

All of those almost-Nazi bastards ("almost" because the Klan and its sympathizers were never officially sympathetic, much less than committed, to the fascist theory of government or the tenet of government the Germans called the Führerprinzip) were soi-disant defenders of traditional white Christian Protestant Anglo-Saxon civilization against nonwhites, papists, and Jews, especially alarmed and angered by the prospect of mongrelization and pollution of the white race through miscegenation.

The Duce notably defended the white anti-American racists at Charlottesville as "good people".

It's a tie, so I win.

Naomi, Expanse 1, 5: "Then it's two against two. We're not going anywhere."

Tie goes to me, she says, and walks away. And nobody protests.

The Expanse. The new season.

Production values don't seem as good.

And why did Naomi get so butch?

Why did all but Amos and Bobbie so change their looks?

Even Avasarala, some.

And she seems to have a different husband.

OK, same husband, different actor.

Mass politics

It could be said that an essential attribute of a successful regime in the age of mass politics is vulgarity.

But there is a considerable difference between the mere vulgarity of style and propaganda of the liberal regimes and the profound vulgarity of values of authoritarian and, even worse, fascist, racist, or Nazi regimes.

And right now many leading Western nations are sliding from the former toward the latter.

Are regimes, parties, or movements of the further left also committed to vulgar values?

Or is that another difference between them and regimes of the vicious right, from the merely authoritarian even to the totalitarian?

Questions that arise while watching on Amazon video Detective De Luca.

But there are other questions one could ask about The Expanse.

Why are the Mormons so prominent in The Expanse?

Everybody asks that.

But why do the folks on The Expanse seem like the ethnic mix found in the US or maybe also Europe?

That's a crowd that looks a lot more like America than, say, Southeast Asia or Africa.

Hell, even the UN crowds look like a bunch of Americans salted with an extra dose of east and south asians.

And yet, not one character ever displays the slightest consciousness of ethnicity or race.

Mormons apart, nobody has loyalties other than to Mars, to the UN, or to the OPA and one or another of its many factions.

Nor are identities perceived or felt otherwise.

And why do so many people admire the Martians for being an entire culture and population united in devotion to a single end, terraforming their planet?

As though somehow entire populations devoting themselves, or more likely being devoted by the powerful among them, to a single goal is just admirable in itself, quite apart from the worth of the goal.

So many people so admire totalitarianism?

And yet it seems many people, reading the books, claim the authors are peddling some sort of libertarian ideology.

Don't see it, myself.

For every means there is an end . . .

.  .  .  that would justify its use.

That seems to be the universal conviction of the principals on The Expanse.

And it is truly a sincere moral view.

A long way from the all but universal left commitment to Just War theory - because of or despite its dependence on the Doctrine of Double Effect - and the idea of war crimes.

Moral bookkeeping without God

The Expanse, season 3.

Asked if a truly good act at the end of life can make up for some or all of the evil done earlier, Ashford, a soi-disant atheist, says he likes to think so.

Make up for without make up to.

Don Quixote

Phooey. He was not a fighter for lost causes, but for imaginary ones.

James S. A. Corey didn't know that? Neither of them?

The Expanse

Amazon picked up the series dropped in 2018 by SyFy and gave us Season 3.

Season 4 will be available in December and Amazon has already committed to a Season 5.

The most remarkable space opera series since Azimov.

I'm reading the books and have just finished No 5.

So far, the only one in which nothing to do with the protomolecule or associated technology or history had a significant role.

The Tunnel, season three, Vengeance

Beautiful video, as usual.

Excellently written and acted.

Political overtones as in the first two seasons, anti-Brexit and pro-EU.

Anti-nationalist and pro-immigrant, immigration, and refugee.

No idea why they decided to stop with the third season.

Syfy cancelled this?

Then I'm delighted Amazon snapped it up.

The Expanse

The first three seasons are at Amazon now, and they are excellent.

I hadn't realized the TV series was using a series of books, in order, with each season based on one book.

Or anyway it looks that way.

And the show is so good I had assumed it was Canadian.

It's not.

It's American.

Second thoughts

The BBC 2018 version of The A.B.C. Murders, now showing on amazon video, fundamentally misleads viewers from the very beginning as to who is doing what.

Still, it's a fine bit of work, anyway, that production.

And all the same in the first episode it's openly acknowledged that the killer is someone who knows Poirot well.

And that's a kind of correction for the misdirection.

Japp's fate, and Poirot's fall from grace with the police and the public, are the work of rising xenophobia.

Very topical.

The sense of Poirot's Catholicity is presented perhaps not altogether consistently.

In the first episode he has, and of course uses, a prie-dieu (a kneeler) in his apartment before a framed photo of the Virgin, provided with a shelf for a burning candle.

In the last it is revealed that in Belgium, before he went to England as a refugee in 1914, he was a priest and not a gendarme.

And in the first we are shown that even his name, "Hercule Poirot", is an invention of his, made up as a refugee in that year.

These are major departures from Christie.

But in the middle it is shown that while he attends masses he has not confessed since he fled Belgium in 1914 (it's 1933) and has not taken communion since then because he cannot forgive either God or the Boche, it's not clear which, for the atrocities of the invasion of his country.

To be clear, the introduction of malignant xenophobia as a serious source of evil in this production does not so much depart from Christie as make a theme already always present in her Poirot stories stronger.

She always used him to point up and tweak British insularity and anything that looked like the old "the wogs begin at Calais" attitude.

You know, mocking Colonel Blimp.

This BBC production just sharpens the tone of the rejection, and darkens the evil, of xenophobia.

But it's more than that.

The production repeatedly flashes back to tragic and violent events during the German invasion of Belgium, depicting the murder of civilians by German troops on the express orders of their officer, witnessed by the man we know as Hercule Poirot.

And the European war of 1914, like the one of 1939 in which it led to even worse and more devastating crimes, originated in malignant nationalism, especially German malignant nationalism.

Those repeated flashbacks put the xenophobia in England of 1933 in the broader context of the rampant, malignant nationalism of which it was a feature.

Well done, I say.

Update.

This is absurd.

If the eggs are soft boiled the toast cannot have jam.

It's for dunking, of course.

And I often have that very breakfast, sometimes with 8 ounces of V8, sometimes with a half strip of bacon.

Always with black coffee, though, like any good continental of Western Europe.

Or any American, North, Central, or South.

Never his disgusting tisane.

Oh, Sergeant Yelland's use of "choice Anglo-Saxon" for English profanity is a delightful and entirely correct departure from the offensive and lying label found in the stupid but common remark, then as now, "Pardon my French".

A small Belgian dandy with a waxed moustache, no beard, and pince-nez

Hercule Poirot of the series of books is a very short man.

Captain Arthur Hastings's first description of Poirot:

He was hardly more than five feet four inches but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. Even if everything on his face was covered, the tips of moustache and the pink-tipped nose would be visible. 

The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police.

Agatha Christie's initial description of Poirot in The Murder on the Orient Express:

By the step leading up into the sleeping-car stood a young French lieutenant, resplendent in uniform, conversing with a small man [Hercule Poirot] muffled up to the ears of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache.

He has all the same been played by several actors notably taller than that.

At 5'7", even David Suchet was a bit too large, though clearly the best (he and Ustinov) at catching the humorous fussiness and dandyism of the character.

Poorly cast in every conceivable way were Kenneth Branagh, Albert Finney, and Orson Welles.

The ABC Murders is one of Agatha Christie's most famous works, published in 1936 and set in 1933.

The book, like its detective, has a comic side, and most film or TV versions of it have been considerably less dark than the excellent, if not very faithful, 2018 BBC version currently shown on Amazon video starring the six footer, John Malkovich.

Particularly apropos to the age of Brexit, reemerging nationalisms, and Trump are the signs of menacing xenophobia BBC has put into this one.

Why does Amazon describe this as a "prime original"?

Why does this BBC version have the actors refer to the unknown killer as they or them in a story taking place in England in 1933, though they think of him as a single unknown person?

Neither Agatha Christie nor anyone else in 1936 - or 1933 - used singular they.

"I will find this person, Madame. I will find them," Poirot in this video says to the dead body of the first viction, Mrs. Asher in Andover.

And so on from there, again and again.

Cops and robbers

I have watched dozens of foreign procedurals on Netflix and Amazon in the past few years, Swedish, Danish, Russian, Finnish, French, Spanish, and many others, and never have the cops lied under oath or planted evidence or beat information or a confession out of anyone.

They work within the law to find and convict violators of the law.

But in American cop shows the police lie, torture, plant evidence, take bribes, commit murders, and otherwise almost always behave disgracefully and shamefully.

Why is that?

Jean Reno should have lost weight

La Rafle on Amazon video.