I Watched It So You Don't Have to: Jupiter Ascending

When you find yourself thinking that a dastardly one-dimension, 7-foot tall lizard who wears a trench coat is the best thing about a movie, you start thinking you’ve just seen one of the worst movies ever made.

If you were to take your time trying to explain everything wrong with the Wachowski Brother’s 2015 movie Jupiter Ascending, you would likely miss out on some of life’s equally torturous experiences, such as having your perfectly healthy teeth yanked out with rusty pliers. Jupiter Ascending’s basic plot revolves around a destitute young woman who doesn’t know she is royalty (thanks to the configuration of her DNA) and her scheming space-family who all want her inheritance, the Earth, for themselves. With a huge budget, the movie attempts everything including the kitchen sink; nothing is spared in an effort to cram everything into a movie: In short, if you were to take Cinderella and Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix, Guardian of the Galaxy, Gravity – basically every other sci-fi movie ever – and put it in a blender, Jupiter Ascending would come out. Unsuprisingly, everything gets lost in the mix. The casting is questionable, the acting is terrible, the plot barely coherent, the visuals (generally agreed by critics to be stunning are in fact) too far over the top and OH my GOD THE sound EDITING! Fire that guy!!

I’ll begin with the plot holes simply because I have to start somewhere and they are something that for me is incredibly distracting. Most notably, Channing Tatum’s character’s past reveals that he was alleviated of his (literal) wings for attacking a member of the royal family, but we never find out why he did it. If you’re Kunis’ Jupiter, who is royalty, you might want to know what exactly happened instead of falling for this alien who is essentially a wolf-like space stripper with Spock ears. In another instance, Mila Kunis’ character is attacked in her apartment by silly little aliens looking to kill her, yet they don’t actually do it and instead opt to ‘wipe’ her memory. Wtf? Worse, the same aliens erase her memory of them being in her apartment but are so incompetent that they leave her with a picture of them on her smart phone. Then there’s half of Chicago getting blown up when the villains are chasing down Channing and Kunis, but this is explained away as Channing says the aliens will ‘wipe’ everyone’s memory and although some people will remember what happened, no one will believe those people. Meanwhile, everyone else in the city has no memory as to why half the city is blown up! And if you add in the assumption that some people would have videoed the battle and the aliens don’t have the sense to erase data on smart phone, well, you see why this is a plot hole. (I would also like to add that the 8-minute long battle over the skies of Chicago feels much like watching your friend play a first-person shooter game while you eagerly wait your turn. Of course, you never get to play.)

As far as casting is concerned, the movie might as well have been cast by a deaf and blind mute. Mila Kunis plays Jupiter (“Just call me Jupe,” she says to her subjects upon discovering she’s royalty. REALLY?), a down on her luck 20-something who wishes she was royalty and then discovers she’s royalty. Naturally, upon discovering she owns the entire friggin’ Earth, doesn’t want the responsibility and really just wants to go back to her family of poor Russian immigrant stereo-types. Unfortunately, Kunis cannot act worth a lick, making the far-fetched Cinderella plot device all the worse. Meanwhile, Channing Tatum reluctantly plays Caine, a half-wolf ex-space marine bad-ass hoping to redeem himself and get his feathery Victoria’s Secret angel wings back despite wearing a pair of gravity-defying roller skates that would seem to be more handy. There is no denying Channing was simply picking up a paycheck with this movie as he waited for the Magic Mike sequel to go into production. Then there’s Sean Bean cast as Caine’s mumbling father figure while Eddie Redmayne plays the evil Balem Abrasax, a character even more mumbly than Sean Bean who occasionally musters enough strength to scream, “Kill her!” The rest of the cast is ancillary, whose careers are probably over after appearing in this movie.

Then there’s the visuals. Are they good? Frankly, they’re too good in that there is often so much going on on the screen at times that you can possibly process it all. The visuals then were perhaps a means of distracting viewers from the movie’s attempt to critique capitalism but for which it offers no solution. Cue the scene of Kunis navigating the space-DMV in order to claim her inheritance with help of a roboticly gay assistant. Groan.

“Ambitious failure is at least worth talking about,” says critic Martin Roberts. He is right; Jupiter Ascending qualifies as a movie so bad that it is good, insofar as one can enjoy the movie on a comical level, mocking the movie’s poor execution despite the honorable intentions of the movie’s producers. You clearly get the sense that the Wachowski Brother’s thought they had a good story on their hands but once the movie went into production, it seems as though they saw how bad it was going to turn out but had already crossed the point-of-no-return and therefore had to finish production. This ‘fact’ is no more evident than in the dialogue, which seems at times written by complete strangers who didn’t bother to communicate with each other about what the characters in the movie were saying to each other, much less how they were saying it.

All of this is a shame as the underlying premise, the very reason Earth is at risk, is actually somewhat interesting: The planet is just one among thousands in which its inhabitants are ‘harvested’ to produce a life-extending drug for the alien royalty. It’s a good enough premise to construct a story around, so perhaps the remake in five or so years will be better. But that movie would have to be because when your expectations are low, you have nowhere to go but up. And that is how anyone with the guts to sit through this movie should approach this cinematic Titanic.

Manson Family Values

“If any man come to me, and hate not his father and his mother, and wife

and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be

my disciple.” Jesus; in Luke 14:26

I don’t know about you but when I think of the typical American family,

I think of picket fences, summer picnics with 2.5 kids, and cuddly puppy dogs worthy of their own Hallmark cards; the perfect lily white Stepford wives community where we all shower love and support upon one another with nary a cloud in the sky.

And back to reality. These days there isn’t much respect to be had for the family. Spousal and child physical and mental abuse, single parent households, teen pregnancy that lets the fathers off the hook, drug use, too many video games, smart phone use and TV, not enough education, and so on and so forth. For Americans, the phrase “dysfunctional family” has become the default definition of a family. We now live in a day and age when a family that isn’t dysfunctional is considered to be outside the norm.

While religious conservatives would love for you to believe that liberal, homosexual communists are to blame; the disintegration of the family unit actually lies more with, shocker, religious conservatives themselves. As with most anyone worth their salt, conservatives are just as irresponsible at parenting and are among those to blame for the breakdown of the traditional family. After all, weren’t conservatives the stewards of the family unit before it all came crashing down? Somebody somewhere dropped the ball.

In an attempt to disguise and shift the blame, religious conservative in America pretend to get riled up and make a big deal out of the decline of the American family. It’s just that, by golly, the so-called “family values” they support are almost nowhere to be found in the book (the Bible) they claim extols such virtues. [At least Muslims are generally consistent with aligning their values with the Koran in their attempts to subjugate others.] Are religious conservatives for or against the following family values? I’ll report. You decide.

Incest. Any religious conservative will say they condemn such a thing, but the Bible practically condones it! Naturally you don’t believe me, but don’t take my word for. Take God’s word for it. In the Bible, when Lot and his daughters are hanging out in a cave, Lot’s daughters get him drunk and have sex with him and get themselves preggers (Genesis 19:30-38). What, no outcry from the good Lord above? That’s weird. And what about Moses? Moses was the product of an incestuous marriage yet was one God’s favorite characters. I mean, really favorite characters. To be fair, though, the Bible does condemn incestuous marriage in Leviticus. It’s just that God certainly makes exceptions, such as in the case of Abraham and his sister. Ah, what a capricious god.

Sexual abuse. Likewise with incest, it’s hard to find in the Bible where God is against such a thing. Didn’t the previously mentioned Lot offer up his daughters as a sacrifice to an unruly mob (Genesis 19:8)? Rape doesn’t seem to be much of a concern to God. Why, in the Book of Deuteronomy the penalty for raping a virgin is the sum of fifty shekels and having to wed said virgin. Gosh, that’ll make her feel better. Taking female virgins as spoils of war is also okay-ed in the Bible; in Numbers, Judges, and Deuteronomy.

Child abuse. The Book of Proverbs offers up some good advice for dealing with unruly kids. Proverbs 13:24 tells us not to spare the rod. As in, “It was Daddy, in the bedroom, with the lead pipe.” Proverbs 22:15 states beating your child will make them less foolish and perhaps even wise, as stated in Proverbs 29:15. Proverbs 23:13-14 tells us to beat our children hard and often, ya’ know, to deliver their souls from Hell. But wait, there’s more! Exodus 21:7-8 gives instructions on how to sell your daughter. Exodus 21:15-17 and Leviticus 20:9 instruct us to execute a child who hits or curses their parent. And don’t even get me started on that whole circumcision thing! But hey, what are children but glorified piñatas anyway?

Polygamy. Sure we outlaw it these days but that’s hardly because God condemns it. In Genesis, Lamech is the first in a loooong line of really horny dudes to have more than one wife.

The first thing a religious conservative will say in response to this is, “Well, that’s the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Jesus preaches love.” Oh, really? When Jesus preached love, he sure did it in contradiction to respecting your family. On one hand you’ve got Jesus telling people that loving your neighbor is second only to loving God. On the other hand Jesus says in Luke 18:29-30 that if a man leaves his family for God, he’ll be greatly rewarded in Heaven. He affirms more family values when in Acts 16:30-31 he says that if you believe in him your whole family will be saved but in Mark 10:29-30 reiterates what he said in the previously mentioned Luke 18:29-30, giving men great rewards for abandoning their families. Am I really expected to take tips on living harmoniously with my family from a guy who is never once shown to speak kindly to his mother, Mary, and never once speaking at all to his (step) father, Joseph? Am I really expected to follow the example of a man who in Luke 8:10-12 intentionally speaks in parables to keep some people from being saved? Am I really expected to live in the manner of a man who would curse a fig tree for not bearing fruit at his whim? Jesus wasn’t a family man. He was bonkers.

If religious conservatives are to have an argument when they claim they want to protect the traditional American family for religious reasons, they should consider being consistent*. Don’t point out how honky-dory the Bible is when you don’t even adhere to its most basic teachings. If today’s Republican presidential candidates want power, why not just come out and say they want the right to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, the right to sell their daughters, the right to beat their sons within an inch of their lives if they so much as peep when they’re not supposed to? Ah, of course if they did all that, maybe there wouldn’t be so many people in church anymore, at least not of their own free will (putting aside that free will, cough cough, is supposed to be really important to God). Which reminds me, do they ever ask a child if they want the tip of its dick looped off?

“And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant.” Genesis 17:14

Way to shun a family member over a piece of skin, God. You are one sick dude.

[* To Jeb Bush’s credit, he has suggested that working-class Americans – the Americans tasked with preserving the family – work longer hours in order to shore up the economy. The consequence, of course, would be that parents would spend even less time with their children than they already do. This would be another form of abuse perfectly in synch with Biblical teachings. Interestingly, one of his competitors for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump, has nothing but bad things to say about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, a group of people to whom family is far more important than their fairer skinned American counter-parts. And this…is nothing short of Manson Family Values.]

When A Paradox Is Not A Paradox

“This blog is false.” ~ Theory Parker

In my free time, which is almost never these days, I like to think about paradoxes and the flaws that lead to their apparent existence. Paradoxes – statements that seems contradictory but may be or seem true – come in several types; they may be paradoxes of logic, of self-reference, of statistics, of probability, of vagueness, of mathematics, of geometry and even of physics. For the sake of brevity, I am going to focus on three paradoxes today that relate more to philosophy and demonstrate why they are in fact not paradoxes. I will start with one of the most famous of all, one of Zeno of Ela’s paradoxes, Achilles and the tortoise.

Achilles and the Tortoise

This “paradox of motion” basically states that in his race with a tortoise, the much faster Achilles must travel at least half the distance covered by his slower opponent an infinite number of times in order to even get close to the tortoise. Since the tortoise always moves ahead some distance, Achilles has to travel to the tortoise’s starting point of that distance before reaching the tortoise. So, as long as the tortoise is moving, Achilles can never catch up and pass the tortoise. Or, as Aristotle himself relates it in his work Physics, “In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.”

Solutions and rebuttals to this paradox have been offered by Aristotle, Archimedes, Thomas Aquinas, Bertrand Russell and philosopher Nick Huggett, with only the physicist Peter Lynds and mathematician Hermann Weyl coming close but still missing the mark. I’ve always found this puzzling as the solution to this paradox – thus not making it a paradox – is incredibly simple: The paradox is only a true paradox if we’re talking about Achilles and the tortoise as two-dimensional beings on a two-dimensional plane. But this is not the case in reality. In reality we live in three dimensions of space and one of time, to say nothing of the fact that the Earth is rotating while hurdling through space during which our solar system orbits the galactic center which is itself winding its way away from other galaxies as space is expanding. So, when Aristotle says something like, “In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started,” it cannot be true that the faster runner ever occupies the same point in space (much less time) that the slower runner has started from, no matter the given starting point for the slower runner. Another way to put it would be to say that if we point to the starting point of the slower runner and tell the faster runner to go there, the faster runner may go to the same geographical location but the geographical location has changes its position in space-time by the time the faster runner gets there. And if the faster runner is fortunate to have the Earth rotate towards them as they run, they are in fact that much quicker (though this increase in speed is not detectable by human senses).

Zeno’s paradox here, like his other paradoxes of motion, winds up failing on account that he perhaps didn’t know about the four dimensions we live in. Furthermore, Zeno appears to make the mistake that time is static; that there is no flow to time. While time may occur in discreet packets at the quantum level (i.e. Plank time), there appears to be no interruption in the flow of time at the macro-level of the physical world. If Zeno has bothered to listen to his contemporary Heraclitus who said, “Everything is in flux,” Zeno would have readily seen the flaw in his paradox and never come up with his tale of Achilles and the tortoise.

“This Sentence is False.”

“This sentence is false,” is probably the most well-known version of the Liar Paradox and is categorized as a self-referential paradox. Quite simply, the apparent paradox is this: If "This sentence is false," is true then the sentence is false, but if "This sentence is false," is false, then the sentence is true.

I deny this is a paradox on two accounts. The first is that despite appearances, the sentence actually has no subject with which to refer to. The subject in question, “This sentence…” if taken by itself as a phrase, can have no truth value in the same way a phrase like ‘this book’

does, seeing how ‘this sentence’ is an abstract concept and ‘this book’ refers to an object in reality. That is to say, abstractions cannot have truth values, or perhaps it is more precise to say they have no truth values in reality, outside of individual minds. While a unicorn may exist as an abstract within our minds, unicorns don’t actually exist in reality. As such, I am of the position that abstractions have no truth or false values. If something has no truth value universally to all people everywhere, it simply has no truth value at all; the word, phrase, or sentence in question is ultimately devoid of truth or falsity.

Furthermore, I object that abstractions can reference themselves and maintain any truth value simply because referring to itself as being true or false cannot be verified. If a unicorn says, “This unicorn is true,” we don’t know what about the unicorn the unicorn is saying is true much less know whether or not the unicorn is lying, especially when unicorns don’t even exist in reality. 

“This sentence is false,” is merely a nonsensical utterance derived from the contrivances of language.

Ship of Theseus Paradox

A little more challenging is this paradox brought to us by the Greek historian, Plutarch. He writes in his Theseus, "The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from

Crete had thirty oars … they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same." What Plutarch is asking is if parts are taken away from the ship and replaced which new parts though of the same design, is it still the same ship? Furthermore, would it still be the same ship if all the pieces were eventually replaced? Further furthermore, if all the parts were eventually replaced with new ones and the old pieces were reassembled just as they had been on the ‘old’ ship, which ship is actually Theseus’ ship?!

Aristotle thought he’d solved this paradox by invoking four criteria (he called them ‘causes’) for the ‘identity’ of the ship. They include the Formal Cause (the ship’s design), the Efficient Cause (how the ship was built), the Material Cause (what the ship is made of), and the Final Cause (the purpose for which the ship is made). Aristotle was mostly concerned with a thing’s formal cause, so as far as he considered the problem, there was no paradox because despite the replacement of parts – no matter how extensive – resulted in the same design. This also satisfied Aristotle’s second most import cause, the Final Cause, since the design still allowed for sailing. So, if we were only concerned with the idea of Theseus’ ship, the ‘form’ of Theseus’ ship, then both ships are Theseus’ ship (which puts aside the question of ownership). But since Aristotle added criteria that to him indicated that only the ship that was still worthy of sailing was Theseus’ ship. Of course, if both ships are sailable, Aristotle’s argument sinks.

The solution that most philosophers ignore because it is just too obvious, is to say that Theseus’ ship is whichever one he owns and is at the helm of. If Theseus had paid for one single ship, there might be a question as to which ship he actually owns, but by adding that Theseus must be at the helm of the ship as well quite quickly resolves the apparent paradox. While the pieces of the ‘old’ ship may have been taken away and reassembled, it is not Theseus’ ship. It was Theseus’ ship but not anymore, just like there was a paradox but not anymore.

Have a paradox you need solved? Just send them to pi3.onefour@gmail.com and I’ll get back to just as soon as I return from time-travelling to the past to kill my grandfather.

The United States: It's Not All Bad

“Today's the fourth of July / Another June has gone by / And when they light up our town / I just think what a waste of gunpowder and sky.” Aimee Mann

I often have difficulty finding nice things to say about my native country, the good ol’ U.S. of A. Given the various collective consciousness’ of Americans and not finding myself a part of any of their groups, I find it nearly impossible to consider myself an American; if anything, I consider myself a citizen of the world. Still, it would benefit me to find something nice to say about the country I live in despite the overwhelming stupidity I am often surrounded by. With that in mind, there is definitely something nice to say about the United States of America, namely, that it is a country that against all odds eventually gets it right. Sometimes it is a country that even apologizes.

I am speaking chiefly of two recent news items. One, the recent Supreme Court ruling that gays and lesbians be legally allowed to wed across the country; a shocking and staggering decision given the judges currently sitting on the Supreme Court. (Of course, the vote wasn’t unanimous. You can always count on Justice Scalia to be a dick to every non-white, non-Republican, non-Christian citizen.) Two, little more than a week earlier, a white supremacist shoots nine dead in South Carolina, prompting a weeks-long national backlash against the South’s traditional symbol of racial hatred, the Civil War era’s Confederate flag.

Naturally, the racists went practically Darwinian on us and attempted flooding the Internet with 'clever' memes like this one:

And the meme works…for about a second until you think about it even superficially. Did the U.S. government slaughter Native Americans and screw them out of their land? Yes. Did they intern innocent Japanese citizens during WWII? I believe so. Did the Bush Administration OK torture of Iraqis? You betcha. Is police brutality a major issue these days? Yes, yes it is. So, the thinking goes, the U.S. flag and the people it represents must be as bad if not worse than the Confederate flag and the people it represents.

Whoa, little fellers! There is one major difference between the U.S. flag and the Confederate flag and the people they respectively represent: The U.S. government eventually apologizes for the mistakes it makes. Even if such apologies are lip-service, apologies are often made and some kind of relationship is established between the victimized parties and the perpetrators. Those who are beholden to the Confederate flag have never done this or even tried; they have never said, “Gee, we’re really sorry for our ancestors doing what they did to your ancestors.” Instead, they continue to fly a flag – a symbol – of their continued hatred of groups of people simply because such proponents are dimwitted and unable to understand anything in the world beyond themselves. Proponents of the Confederate flag will insist that their flag is merely a part of their roots, conveniently leaving out the part about being racists who would gladly lynch a black person if they thought they could get away with it. While I personally see no need to apologize for anything someone in my family might have done to anyone else, I can have sympathy towards someone’s pain and remove symbols that indicate and reinforce what a terrible person I am. Upon a moment’s reflection, the formerly ‘clever’ meme is nothing of the sort.

Conversely, though it may come late in certain situations, the U.S. as a whole gets around to making an apology. In a few years, when it is seen that gay marriages didn’t cause the universe to implode, the U.S. will get around to apologizing to the LGBT community. "Hey, guys, we're real sorry we treated you as if you weren't human. That was messed up of us." This is  something great about America, something most other countries cannot say.If you are wronged, the U.S. will eventually apologize, hopefully not posthumously like, say, the Vatican is famous for.  

The gods be willing, the U.S. may even one day apologize to itself for being a black hole of idiocy.

(Figure out the problem with this one yet? The U.S. has no jurisdiction over the pyramids which are in Egypt. And, as far as I know, Egypt has never apologized for the fact that the pyramids were built by slaves, probably because tourism brings in a boat load of money. Surely, the Egyptian government doesn’t go out of it’s way to explain how the Pyramids at Giza were built. Hint: They were really built by aliens! A belief only Americans hold. Sigh.)