Norbert Haupt | Books, Movies, Art, Paintings and General Musings

Time 2020-06-20 10:07:20

Web Name: Norbert Haupt | Books, Movies, Art, Paintings and General Musings

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Norbert HauptBooks, Movies, Art, Paintings and General Musings I like a good hard science fiction story from time to time, so I picked up Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey. It s the first book of the Expanse series, a whopping eight book series that plays about two hundred years in the future. Humanity has made the leap into space and has colonized the solar system. There are people living in the asteroid belt, called the belters, there are people living on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and even farther out in the solar system. The story is a space opera with many characters, interesting situations and description of what life would be like for humans living their entire lives on an asteroid, for instance, where the gravity is perhaps one percent that of earth.So the story had promise and I was looking forward to it and possibly the entire series. But as it often goes with space-opera type science fiction, it starts becoming a story of human politics, corruption and foibles, which could play anywhere in any small town. You don t need to put me on Ceres for that.I make a serious effort to finish all the books I start reading, but that only goes so far. By the time I got to the 26% point I was so hopelessly bored, I just didn t want to read any further. If an author does not get me interested in his characters a quarter of the way through a book, I can t help it. I give up. I won t be reading any of the other books of this author.As customary in my blog, I do not rate books that I don t finish reading (most of the time). If you are interested in some of the others, you can search for Books (not finished reading) by selecting that category and you can see them all.Share this:ShareClick to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Like this:Like Loading... Posted in Books (not finished reading), Science Fiction | 3 Comments In America, we currently have the worst race relations and resulting riots, protests and civil unrest since 1968. Who would have thought that over a 50-year span of history, we would not have made more progress toward race equality in this country. The shackles of slavery, hardened over 400 years of brutal history, have not been undone, and a significant percentage of our population is still oppressed.This is the backdrop to which we chose to watch the 2019 film Harriet, which dramatizes and illustrates the life of Harriet Tubman. The story starts in 1844 in Maryland. A 26-year-old slave woman named Araminta Ross, for short Minty, was married to John Tubman, a free black man. When they approach Minty s master, a plantation owner, showing the paperwork that documents that she should be free, he simply tears up the paper and proclaims that she will be his property, her children will be his property, and that was the end of it. That moment shows the utter brutality of slavery.Minty runs away and makes her way to Philadelphia all by herself, taking advantage of the underground railroad, a system by which runaway slaves were helped in their journey north and to freedom. As was customary for freed slaves, they changed their names, and Minty picks the first name Harriet after her mother and Tubman after her husband. Rather than settling down in a life of work as a free black woman, she takes on the cause and becomes a crusader for other slaves. The eventually becomes one of the most successful conductors of the underground railroad, achieving fame and, among the slaveowners, infamy as Moses, a mysterious rebel who steals their slaves and guides them to freedom. As history tells us, she becomes one of the most famous freedom fighters of her time and a powerful female figure in our country s history.Harriet tells this story and illustrates the anguish and institutional injustice blacks have suffered throughout our history. Watching Harriet, I understood the incredible brutality of the system, our now proverbial knee on the neck of the people we subjugated for so long.I have written a lot about slavery in this blog, and I will take the opportunity here to list some of those posts, as the are so appropriate at this time in our history. Please read them.Visualizing  the Atlantic Slave Trade  Some illustrations of what it was like to be on a slave ship.Ben Carson s Appalling Statements about Slaves Our Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a black man, and a renowned brain surgeon, makes the dumbest comments ever. It s not brain surgery, man!Book Review: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl A great documentary story of what it s like to be a slave.Movie Review: 12 Years a Slave A good movie illustrating the horrific injustice suffered by slaves.With Liberty and Justice for All Eight of our presidents were slave owners. Here is the list.Be Careful What You Post Disgusting comments on social media by trolls, stating that slavery isn t all that bad, and calling those of us that think it is liberals. U.S. Population in 1776 and 1790 Statistics on the United States population in those years and the percentage of blacks.Share this:ShareClick to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Like this:Like Loading... Posted in Movies, Slavery, Three Stars | 1 Comment Mankind s first mission to the stars has arrived at its destination. The trip took 10 years and due to the relativistic speed, dozens of years have gone by on Earth when Captain Jack Harrison and his small crew arrive.They quickly find out that they are not the first intelligent beings that inhabited the new star system. There is evidence of systematic destruction and extermination.In their quest to figure out what happened, they quickly become stranded and cut off from their ship. The science mission to explore a new star system quickly turns into a battle for sheer survival against impossible odds.Prelude to Extinction is actually a good story with a lot of potential, sprinkled with unexpected twists, some of them aided by cosmological concepts like time dilation and distortion. It s a somewhat hard science fiction story that quickly jumps over the science.For instance, all the aliens use engines that can accelerate to practically the speed of light in minutes without the crews feeling any acceleration by doing some alien tech stuff without any regard to where the energy is going to come from, and how the ships will be protected at these speeds in the relatively crowded spaces of stars systems. I know it s fiction, but the mixture of hard science fiction in the near future,  sprinkled with impossible technology of aliens millions of years ahead of us, just didn t work very well for me. I also had trouble understanding that aliens so advanced seem to have nothing better to do than to try to exterminate any other species they come across, which is central to the plot.But the worst of it is that the crew, the best and brightest Earth has to offer consistently act like boy scouts on a field trip at best. The captain constantly has trouble asserting his authority, and his crew of scientists keep making incredible blunders that just make no sense. By making all the human actors in the story morons, whose stupid actions eventually drive the plot along, the entire novel loses its sense of reality.Prelude to Extinction is obviously a setup for a sequel. But the author really should hire an editor to fix the dozens, perhaps hundreds of typos and grammatical errors in this book, before writing another one.I am passing on the next ones.Share this:ShareClick to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Like this:Like Loading... Posted in Books, One and a Half Stars, Science Fiction | Leave a Comment This picture shows an example of heavily armed but unmarked riot police in the streets of Washington, DC. Mind you, we don t know who these people are. With no names, no identification and no badges we have no idea. If we were to be assaulted by one of them, there would be no recourse whatsoever. Is this not frightening to anyone?Whether you are a 46-year-old black man, or a white female college student, or New York State Senator Myrie, or Rep. Ocasio Cortez, any of these thugs could assault you, possibly even kill you, and there d be no recourse. How is this possible? How do we tolerate this?Word is that these are mercenaries from Erik Prince, the brother of our illustrious Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, but how would we know? Also, do you all realize how expensive these forces are? Do we know how much money Trump is funneling into this buddy Prince s pocket right now under the guise of national security?The corruption is immeasurable.I can t believe I am writing this, but it seems like it s time that we exercised our beloved Second Amendment Rights.At the time when it was ratified, the Second Amendment was intended to have at least two security purposes other than a well-regulated militia:a practical purpose, to protect people from thieves, bandits, Native Americans, and slave uprisingsa political purpose, to remind the rest of the world that the United States is well-armedI haven t been assaulted by any Native Americans in a long time, and I don t know anyone who has been. We don t have slaves anymore, so uprisings are not a danger. It also goes without saying that the rest of the world has, since 1792, figured out that the United States is well-armed.However, the founders had another objective with the Second Amendment: During the early massive shift of power from the states to the federal government, the Anti-Federalists argued that the states and the people needed to be armed in case of federal usurpation of power. As a result, the American people are well-armed, as we all know, and as the NRA has been making sure we would be.The picture above makes me feel assaulted by the federal government. Perhaps I should go to my local gun store (an essential business, after all, per the NRA), buy myself a few AR-15s, a helmet, a shield, black gloves and sunglasses, and go out there and fight for my freedom.In other words, I should exercise my Second Amendment rights since the federal government is clearly now turning against its own citizens.Do you all see how Great America has become Again?Share this:ShareClick to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Like this:Like Loading... Posted in Atrocities, Racism, Wisdom | Leave a Comment Older Posts Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address

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