Letter to Liz Warren’s campaign:
Letter to Liz Warren’s campaign:
Liz is my Senator and I started out supporting her. Now I am leaning Bernie or frankly, any Democrat but Liz. My disenchantment started with Liz wiffle-waffling over Medicaid for All. Is she for it or against it now? Having some third system for a transition as Liz has reportedly proposed is a trillion dollar opportunity cost which can and should be avoided.
Why can Liz not say anything nice about socialism? I am a union member and DSA member, and Liz’s program is a socialist program. Why can she not acknowledge democratic socialists such as Eugene Debs, Upton Sinclair, Michael Harrington, Bayard Rustin and Victor Berger? We don’t want ‘Bernie Lite’ and we definitely do not want another entitled, neoliberal, rightist candidate like Hillary Clinton. I’m so disappointed, and looking forward to a progressive challenger from the real Democratic party of the people when Liz runs again for Senate.
I was a credentialed voting state delegate to the 2018 Democratic convention. I welcome your response.
best,
Henry Edward Hardy
Copyright © 2020 Henry Edward Hardy
Rise of Skywalker is a Film Designed by a Committee
Rise of Skywalker is a Film Designed by a Committee, and when we say that we mean not only an indictment of how the Lucasfilm and Disney execs worked over the story, but the obvious and huge retcons of the story line not only from eps 7 and 8, but also the original trilogy.
In the original trilogy, we cared about the characters. We were curious and even inspired by the force and samurai wizard mentors such as Obi-Wan and Yoda dishing out ice cream koans like [The Force is] “an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together” and “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
Episodes 7, 8 and 9 eschew the samurai warrior/wizard mentor stuff and goes for an origin story of the protagonist Rey. But after three movies, we still know almost nothing about her, and she knows almost nothing about her origins. Why is it that so many strong female characters are devalued by spending their entire story line angsting about “who am I?” I mean does John Wick or James Bond get all emo about their identity?
Special effects are wonderful, of course. The script is just miserable. Lawrence Kasdan this is not. Acting is serviceable. Adam Driver still seems weirdly miscast to me as an evil Sith wannabe overlord. He comes off more like a creepy abusive satanist boyfriend. Daisy Ridley gives a solid performance as Rey. She really gives it her all physically and emotionally. Her whole fierce elf aesthetic made me think of Elfquest.
The music was not John Williams. It was bombastic, overly dramatic and had only sound and fury, nothing really memorable or lyrical.
One of the things which made Fury Road a great movie was how the battles were set up, you could tell exactly who was where doing what. Ep 9 is the opposite, it’s a huge mess.
Trying not to be too spoilerish but there are also big issues in terms of even the internal logic of the third trilogy leading to a problematic and improbable deus ex machina.
The best I can say about ep 9 is that it re-retconned a lot of the scurrilous and disrespectful retcons in ep 8. But continuity is out the window totally. And for folks who enjoy the Old Republic and the legends continuities these three last Star Wars films gave us nothing and disrespected or devalued a lot of what we thought we knew.
Skywalker is a well-made movie in terms of production values. As a story, it is very unfullfilling as a way of ending the Skywalker series and fails in theme, plot, characterization, and continuity.
2 of 4 stars.
Copyright © 2019 Henry Edward Hardy
How Star Wars 7,8,9 would go if I was the writer and producer
I’m so disappointed with the deconstructive and destructive nature and intent of the new Star Wars movies. Leia and Han’s storybook marriage disintigrated and their son turned into an emo psycho-killer cultist. Everything Luke believed when he was a young Jedi knight was wrong, and now he is a broken old man who has severed his connection with the force and sunk his starfighter in the sea.
What a load of horse hockey.
So here’s how it would go if it were up to me.
The crawl at the beginning of ep 7:
STAR WARS
Episode 7
A New Menace
The NEW REPUBLIC has collapsed into feuding republics and principalities. The RESISTANCE was disarmed. Those who resisted are hunted as terrorists and killed or imprisoned. HAN and LEIA SOLO run a shipyard and cantina at Mos Eisley on Tatooine.
Demobilized STORM TROOPERS form the basis of a political movement called the Home Soil Movement. Imperial Remnants threaten the Republic from beyond known space. And where are the Jedi? Vanished, gone and almost forgotten.
LUKE SKYWALKER disappeared ten years ago and his whereabouts are unknown.
Prologue
Luke and Leia at the cantina… smuggling/resistance business… an unexpected guest. It is Chewbacca, taking some leave before returning to Kasssyk to take up a post as a General in the militia.
Chewbacca is concerned. His scouts report that dissident Storm Troopers have found a new line of credit with the banking clan and have been seen on Kamino, home of the cloners who made the Clone troopers during the Clone Wars. Over dinner they fall to discussing old times.
After the destruction of the second Death Star and fall of Emperor Palpatine, much of the fleet was demobilized. However a sizable fleet of several hundred ships under Admiral Thrawn departed for the Unknown Regions.
What happened to Luke? After the war he was hailed as a hero but refused all honors, retiring to Tatooine, living in Obi-Wan’s old campsites and becoming much of a hermit. Then one day he was gone, just gone. And Leia could no longer sense him in the force.
PS I wrote this Dec 30, 2017, but I am posting it now in contrast to the actual progress and conclusion of the third Star Wars trilogy.
Copyright © 2019 Henry Edward Hardy
Letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren about the CASE ACT S.1273
TO: Senator Warren and staff; whom it may concern
FROM: Henry Edward Hardy
SUBJECT: CASE ACT S. 1273 concerns, proposed revisions
DATE: October 23, 2019
Dear Senator Warren.
I am a strong supporter. We in Somerville Ward 7 love you and we have your back.
I want to share with you in more detail some of the concerns about the CASE ACT S. 1273 which I shared during my call to your office today.
Copyright is enabled by the US Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.“
In other words, the social good desired is for all writings and discoveries to come into the public domain in a reasonable time.
The development of copyright law over the past century has gone instead in the direction of keeping copyright works out of the public domain for longer and longer times, and imposing more and more harsh punishments on violators, and moving into the domain of strict liability without regard for knowledge, or intent of the alleged violator.
“Copyright trolls” churn out hundreds of thousands of demand letters to try to bully individuals without the means to afford legal representation to settle on their terms. The people who will be the targets and victims of the CASE Act will be the most vulnerable and underprivileged members of society. Just missing a notice or failing to file the right papers in a timely manner could lead to a default judgment of $15,000 dollars or more.
A possible remedy for the CASE Act is to revise it such that:
* The plaintiff must show knowledge and intent by the alleged violator.
* The plaintiff must demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that a specific accused person committed specific illegal acts on a specific day and time, in a specific place, in a specific manner, causing a specific harm. Not just Internet Protocol Number or MAC address matching over a range of dates.
* Fair use must be a specifically available and overriding defense.
* The plaintiff must document actual harm in a specific dollar amount.
* The accused who are indigent, disabled, or on public assistance must receive defense counsel at federal expense.
* There should be no elements of strict liability and the burden of proof must lie entirely with the plaintiff.
* There should be substantial punishments for those who misuse the statutory procedures to churn out false or unsupported claims. In particular, the ‘unclean hands’ doctrine should apply to plaintiff trolls who have already been found in violation.
Thanks for all you do and we love you!
Best,
Henry Edward Hardy
Trump Appears to be Unfit for Office
Trump Appears to be Unfit for Office
This is not normal. It isn’t normal for the President of the United States to call himself a “very stable genius.” Repeatedly. It isn’t normal for the President to refer to his own supposed, and indeed, hypothetical, “great and unmatched wisdom.”
It isn’t normal to threaten to destroy an allied country, NATO member Turkey, if they do what the President just told the Turkish President they could do.
It isn’t normal to call respected senior members of Congress traitors, or call for impeaching them, as if that was a thing under the Constitution. It isn’t.
I disagree profoundly with Mr. Trump’s behaviors and statements. I can’t offer an opinion about Mr. Trump’s policies or beliefs, because he blows every which way with the opinion of the last person he talked to, or the last thing he saw on TV or some crazed internet trollery.
Donald Trump is manifestly unfit for office. These past few weeks he’s eclipsed Richard Nixon and even the madness of King George and is saying things every day which are not only manifestly untrue, and self-contradictory, but which one sees and wonders where does this end?
Mr. Trump should not have access to anything which could be harmful to himself or others, much less nuclear weapons and a military which spends as much as the next ten military powers combined.
It is time, long past time, to remove Mr. Trump from office by legal means, whether that be by the 25th Amendment, Impeachment & Trial, or the ballot box. The sooner, the better.
letter to the New York Times, Trump’s Ukraine Call Was ‘Crazy’ and ‘Frightening,’ Official Told Whistle-Blower
Copyright © 2019 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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