Wednesday, August 11 at 7:30 pm

Destination Moon

by George Pal

When production on this movie began in 1949, everything about the project was state of the art.  The great science fiction author Robert Heinlein co-wrote the script and served as technical advisor.  The movie’s astronomical visions were realized by Chesley Bonestell, whose artwork virtually defined the look of space travel at the dawn of the rocket era.  This movie is even noted in NASA’s official time line of space-travel history.  It remains a milestone film, not so much as classic science fiction but as an attempt to visualize the reality of space exploration.

The movie now seems quaintly nostalgic, and its depiction of humanity’s first lunar landing is inaccurate on several details. Taken in context, however, it remains impressively authentic.  The motivation for the lunar conquest remains military:  the country that controls the moon will control the Earth, and cold war paranoia fuels the mission of the rocket ship Luna, which blasts off from the Mojave desert carrying four daring astronauts.

http://www.kqek.com/dvd_reviews/d/3453_DestinationMoon1950.htm

To learn more about Film Series held

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Film evenings begin with optional potluck refreshments and social hour at  6:30 pm

followed by the film at  7:30 pm,

followed by a discussion after the film.

Wednesday,  January  20  at  7:30  pm

Episode Two: The Lonely Robot

This second episode of The Trap develops the theme that drugs such as Prozac were being used to normalize behavior and make humans more predictable, like machines.  People with standard mood fluctuations diagnosed themselves as abnormal.  They then presented themselves at psychiatrist’s offices, fulfilled the diagnostic criteria without offering personal histories, and were medicated.  The alleged result was that vast numbers of Western people have had their behavior and mentation modified by SSRI drugs without any strict medical necessity.

Adam Curtis shows Richard Dawkins propounding his ultra-strict “selfish gene” with archive clips emphasizing how the severely reductionist ideas of programmed behavior have been absorbed by mainstream culture.  This brought Curtis back to the economic models of Hayek and the game theories of the Cold War.  He explains how, with the robotic description of humankind apparently validated by geneticists, the game theory systems gained even more hold over society’s engineers.

This episode describes how the Clinton administration gave in to market theorists in the U.S. and how New Labour in the U.K. decided to measure everything it could, the better to improve it.  In industry and public services, this way of thinking led to a plethora of targets, quotas, and plans.  It was meant to set workers free to achieve these targets in any way they chose.  What these game-theory schemes did not predict was that the players, faced with impossible demands, would cheat.

Then Curtis describes how the theory of the free market was applied to education.  With league tables of school performance published, the richest parents moved to new homes to get their children into better schools.  This caused house prices in the appropriate catchment areas to rise dramatically — thus excluding poorer parents who were left with the worst-performing schools.  This is just one aspect of a more rigidly stratified society, which Curtis identifies in the way in which the incomes of the poorest (working class) Americans have actually fallen in real terms since the 1970s, while the incomes of the average (middle class) have increased slightly and those of the highest earners (upper class) have quadrupled.  Similarly, babies in poorer areas in the U.K. are twice as likely to die in their first year as children from prosperous areas.

Curtis concludes that the game theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behavior is appropriate and useful.  In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves or psychopaths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series)

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