Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Not getting into it

OK, I've watched five episodes now and it's not really holding my interest.  Part of it is the story structure, but a good deal of it is the casting.

The basic frame is that there's a young hacker woman named Skye who is brought in to work with Agent Coulson's group.  Chloe Bennet as Skye is a typical Joss Whedon heroine: independent, self-directed, confident.  And she's good at her rule, even though her resemblance to another Whedon stalwart, Eliza Dushku, is noteworthy.  She's got the Buffy/River role.

And of course Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson is very good.  He's continuing the role he started in the Iron Man films, even though he supposedly died in The Avengers film.  (The in-show explanation is that the death was faked by Nick Fury to motivate the Avengers, but there are hints that there's a lot more to that story.)  Gregg is a very strong ensemble actor and does well here.  I don't know if he could carry a show himself.  But he doesn't have to.

Ming-Na Wen is strong as the supporting super-warrior Melinda May, like Zoe in Serentiy.  Hasn't had quite enough to work with, since Skye is the main character.  But I like when she's on screen.

But it goes down from there.

The lead male character is Grant Ward, played by Brett Dalton.  He's dreadful.  He's one of these generic Hollywood pretty boys who doesn't bring enough grit to an action role.  Very much in the Ryan Gosling pattern.  He's no Mal.  He's boring.  He can't get off screen fast enough.  That's a huge problem, since essentially he's the lead of the series.  Why is Hollywood so intent on giving lead parts based on looks?  Models cannot carry TV shows.  They've never been able to do that.

Aside from that are Dr. Fitz and Dr. Simmons, collectively referred to as "FitzSimmons".  Clever enough.  The actors are Iain De Caestecker as Leo Fitz and Elizabeth Henstridge as Jemma Simmons.

I don't think anybody in science is named "Jemma".  I digress.

These two might develop into stronger characters, but so far they are mostly comic relief, with an occasional dash of technical wizardry.

Hopefully things pick up.  If not, this series is not going to survive very long.  Production costs are too high for the show to get away with being boring.  My suggestion?  Get rid of Grant Ward.  And one annoying thing that has been going on is that the show cannot resolve the question of whether Skye is 100% with S.H.I.E.L.D. or whether she's still working with the anarchist group Rising Tide.

Hoping that this becomes more compelling.  At least it looks better than Under the Dome.

11/8 update
Update: OK, the 6th episode was much better than the most recent few episodes.  Less Skye, more FitzSimmons, all the characters were humanized a bit.

Joss just bought a little more time with this one.

The Progressive Wish List

As Greg Sargent points out, there is a fundamental lack of symmetry in what the two parties in DC are saying needs to be done in order to end the government shutdown.  The Republicans have passed a list of demands of concessions they want from the Democrats before they are willing tot let the government continue to exist on regular terms.  The Democrats have not presented a similar list of demands.  They have simply put forward the proposition that the Republicans must stop acting like children and/or terrorists.

It's time for Progressives to fight back with a list of our own.  More after the jump.

Universities are cash cows

Some quick facts:

In 1981, room and board at Harvard Universirty for an undergrad cost $9170.
(source: http://vpf-web.harvard.edu/budget/factbook/00-01/page23.html)
In 2012, room and board at Harvard Univeresity for an undergrad cost $54,496. (source: http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/harvard-college-tuition-financial-aid-increase-2012)

Using inflation calculator at www.usinflationcalculator.com, the total amount of inflation from 1981 to 2012 was 152.6%.  That means (using their calculator), something that cost $9170 in 1981 should have cost $23,161 in 2012.  It's true that not all costs rise at the same rate, but it's not like the base costs of a university are all that different from what the costs are in general for a university.  It's not a highly specialized market like gold or microchips

One more comparison:

In 1981, the endowment of Harvard University was $1.622 billion.
(source: http://www.provost.harvard.edu/institutional_research/harvard_fact_book_2012_endowment.pdf)
In 2012, the endowment of Harvard University, after a bad year, shrank to $30.7 million.
(source: http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/09/harvard-endowment-declines-to-30-7-billion)

Again, using the calculator, a fixed investment growing at the rate of inflation in 1981, starting at $1.622 billion should be at about $4.1 billion.  Now of course we expect investments to outpace inflation.  And that explains part of how the endowment grew faster than inflation.  But also, we need to account for the continued new donations to the endowment.

But all of this gets us back to the basic point here.  The Harvard endowment is growing at a pace far outstripping the rate of inflation.  But in spite of that, the cost of tuition (and room and board) is also growing at a pace far outstripping the rate of inflation.

Something is seriously messed up here.  Universities like Harvard are simply becoming huge depositories for cash.  Its endowment has taken on a life of its own, completely untethered to covering the costs of running a university.

Best of Bond IV...Old Bond

Bond, Part IV

This post has been slow in coming, probably in part because these are the dismal years.  Let's face it: Roger Moore stayed with the role too long.  By the end of his run he was 57 and looking it.

So...the late Moore films.  A mixed bag - not uniformly bad but only one of the bunch is actually good in my opinion.  We last left the series with Moonraker, a film that has not aged well.  Then there was For Your Eyes Only, a film that has aged well.  And then we have the slow decline into Octopussy and the face plant known as A View to a Kill.

I think when I started this series I may have said that Never Say Never Again would be tucked in with the two Timothy Dalton films.  While that would partition the films more evenly, I think it's more natural to throw it in with the Old Roger films, since it was contemporaneous with Octopussy and has many of the same flaws (in addition to its own unique flaw!)

While the previous round of Roger Moore films featured super villains in hidden mega-complexes threatening to destroy the world, the later films eased up a bit on those cliches.  Still a lot of gadgets, though.  And a lot of camp.  Almost no concern for realism.

Let's recall the criteria in this series of evaluations again:

• Bond – who the actor is, how good he is, and what he brings to the role
• the Villain- Mr. Big, Scaramanga, etc.  I judge the films on how compelling the villain is.
• the Bond Women – some films have few, some have many, but I’m pretty sure all have at least one. The quality ranges from Denise Richards’s absurd nuclear physicist to, of course, Mrs. Bond herself, not to mention Pussy Galore
• the Good Guys – M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter in his many incarnations and other sidekicks
• the Henchmen on the other side like Jaws, Oddjob, and Nick-Nack.
• the gadgets – not just judging how neat the gadgets are, but whether they were unwisely allowed to take over the film (as often happened with the later Roger Moore filims)
• whatever else I happen to think of

And now we move to

For Your Eyes Only

Oppose military strikes on Syria

The reasons should be obvious

• Syria is not threatening the US
• Yes, somebody used sarin gas, but we don't know who
• But even if we knew for a fact that it was Assad, the US isn't the world's policeman
• Few things outrage me more than a government demanding a sequester in domestic spending while finding the money to drop bombs on Arabs.
• Bombing is just going to create more chaos in Syria, not less...and that will lead to
• escalation.

We tend to live in a reverie that presumes that the current way that our society is organized can persist indefinitely.  But there are many reasons why our current path cannot persist: dependence on non-replaceable fossil fuels, the effects of global warming (including the drought in Syria), and others.  Right now few things are as easy to get our government to do than to attack some small country that annoys us for some reason.  So I don't want to hear the song-and-dance about how our "credibility" is at stake.  I'm willing to stipulate that Assad is a terrible man.  But so are most of the rebels opposing him.

The way our society is running, we take a real shallow, short-attention span solutions to any problem outside our borders (and many inside).

As some point soon I'm going to revisit the legacy of the "Arab Spring."  Let's just say for now that it isn't pretty.

Aarron Sorkin rips apart Occupy Wall Street (The Newsroom Season 2: Episode #4 Clip "Shelly On OWS" (HBO))

So, Aaron Sorkin has been sucking me into The Newsroom, against some of my better judgment. There are things he does very well and things that he does in a ridiculous manner (namely, having every character be utterly glib 100% of the time). One of the things he does well is have people talk about politics.

In the clip below, Jeff Daniels (one of the best actors in Hollywood and that's been true for decades) rips an Occupy Wall Street representative to shreds. Except that she's not really a "representative" in any formal since OWS doesn't have "leaders" because they wanted "everybody to have a voice."

Not the Smartest Guy in the Room

If we are to believe Ezra Klein, Larry Summers is the front-runner in President Obama's mind to take over the job of Chairman of the Federal Reserve as Ben Bernanke's replacement.  Bernanke hasn't been an ideal Fed Chair, but he's been far better than his predecessor, the absurdly overrated Alan Greenspan, whose monumental contribution to American economics was "lower interest rates and the economy will grow."
Now Benranke is retiring and Obama has to pick a new Chair.  In this space, we express our hope that Summers is not the choice.