Tonight's film is the final entry in Daniel Craig's James Bond reboot cycle. I've long wanted to point out this contrast. GoldenEye opened with the fall of the other side's gods. Lenin's statue toppled, the hammer and sickle shattered, the whole apparatus of Soviet iconography broken and sunk. The Soviets had been the heavies from the first day of Bond, SMERSH, the Lubyanka, the machinery of fear in Moscow. Bond existed, in part, to rub their noses in the dirt and prove that the West still held. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the GoldenEye titles marked the victory. The British agent and the free world had outlasted the system that wanted him and his way of life dead. The enemy's symbols went down; Britain's stood. No Time to Die's title sequence? Britannia falls and breaks. Her shield drops. The British emblem is shown in ruin at the start, and the designer has said why: it is not Britain's finest hour. I do not see it that way. Where GoldenEye celebrated the destruction of the adversary's order, this one advertises the dissolution of our own. The villain, Lyutsifer Safin, succeeds where SMERSH failed. He finishes the British hero. The titles place the crumbling of the national symbol of Britannia as the necessary prelude. Is it revenge for that earlier GoldenEye sequence? In effect, that is what it achieves. The irony is that both title sequences were made by Daniel Kleinman. It is a mirror image: Soviet icons destroyed then, British icons destroyed now. It is foreshadowing the end. Bond does not walk away; he stands under the missile bombardment at the end. Visually, that is the revenge of the side that lost the Cold War, served up as high art and melancholy. Fleming wrote Bond to win, not to die after Britannia had been shown falling to pieces in a title sequence. He gave the public a British secret agent who did his duty, enjoyed the pleasures of life, and always came through. Ruthless, self-indulgent, a wonderful character. Not a hero in the sentimental sense, but a man who gets on with it. Loyalty to the Service, to Queen and country, are his few perceptible virtues. The novel You Only Live Twice has him look death in the face and survive. That is the point. To have him stand under a missile barrage and simply take it is antithetical to who Bond is. This is the precise opposite of what Fleming wrote. He did not open his books with the ruin of the symbols under which Bond served. He opened them with the certainty that a British secret agent, however battered or broken, would still climb Everest, still beat the world at its own games, still rub the villain's nose in the dirt. The Soviets understood what Fleming was doing. Izvestia called the books rubbish and pornography. Fleming was delighted. They feared the idea of a free man who wins. Fleming's books are not for people who need their national icons dismantled before the story starts. James Bond is not a vehicle for self-loathing like Jason Bourne. He is the reminder that the old virtues and values of the West still count. Kill him and show Britannia in pieces, and you have made a film of the opposition's book. You've made the Soviet book Avakoum Zakhov Versus 007 into film. The Daniel Craig films are competent, often stylish, and occasionally rather good. They are not Ian Fleming. They are the contemporary preference for institutional self-doubt and the dismantling of one's own icons, rendered with expensive melancholy. No Time to Die makes one wish we had a fifth Pierce Brosnan film instead. I do not hate it. The stunts and the action are all good, and Daniel Craig did do a lot of his own stunts, so kudos to him for having guts, but this film is why I do not enjoy his run the same way I enjoy the original twenty films. The original films one can watch again and again. With Craig's, one needs more time before viewing it once more. What a fall from Sir Roger Moore parachuting under a Union Jack. #JamesBond #NoTimeToDie #DanielCraig #IanFleming

Your grandparents probably have a little round scar on their upper arm from the smallpox vaccine. Nobody gets that shot anymore, because 49 years ago this week the disease caught its last person in the wild, a 23-year-old cook who hopped in a stranger's car to give directions. His name was Ali Maow Maalin, and he worked in the kitchen at a hospital in Merca, Somalia. A driver pulled up one day looking for an isolation camp, with two sick kids in the back seat. Ali got in to point the way. He'd never been properly vaccinated, even though the hospital was supposed to cover all its staff, so that short ride was enough. About ten days later he came down with a fever. Doctors told him it was malaria, then chickenpox, and by the time anyone realized what he really had, the last wild smallpox on the planet had been walking around a port town for days. The eradication team tracked down every person he'd been near and vaccinated all of them. Nobody else got sick, including every patient he'd been cooking for. Then the world held its breath for two years. WHO put up a cash reward for anyone who could find one more case, and nobody ever did. In May 1980 they made it official, and smallpox became the first human disease ever wiped off the face of the earth. And this thing was enormous. Smallpox killed around 300 million people in the 1900s alone, more than both World Wars combined. 9/11 killed 2,977. In 1967, the year the final push started, smallpox killed about 2 million, which is like losing nearly two 9/11s every day, all year long, to one virus. The whole global campaign cost about $300 million over 12 years. The US earns back everything it put in every 26 days, just in vaccines it never has to give again. Wall Street would kill for that kind of return. Good news like this is easy to miss because it shows up as funerals that slowly stop happening, spread across years, in places most of us will never visit. Nobody pins a date on that. The records can't even agree whether Ali's rash appeared on October 26 or the 27th. Ali spent the rest of his life going door to door in Somalia, vaccinating kids against polio. He died of malaria in 2013, out in the middle of a polio campaign, still trying to help the world wipe out a second one.

终于把网上很火的“ABC 三步叠衣法”看明白了 真的万物皆可折

MorpHex is a shape shifting robot created by Norwegian engineer Kåre Halvorsen that transforms from a rolling ball into a six-legged crawling machine

John Wilkes (1725-1797), was an English radical politician and wit, and co-authored “The Essay on Woman”, widely regarded as the most obscene poem ever written in the English language, it has never been published. A copy exists in the British Library, which, until 1970, one could only read with a clergyman present. Wilkes was notoriously ugly, with a broken nose and a crooked jaw. Yet, he was the most successful womaniser this country has ever produced, even stealing Casanova’s favourite mistress. When asked his secret, he replied, “Give me half an hour to talk away my face and I can seduce any woman ahead of the handsomest man in Europe.” At heart a serious man, he did many things to further our personal freedom. Wilkes established the right of the press to report Parliament, and was responsible for the abolition of General Warrants, which enabled a person to be arrested and detained without being charged. An enemy of tyranny in all its forms, he is buried in Grosvenor Chapel, South Audley Street, London. His slab reads “John Wilkes. A friend to liberty.”

On a snowy day in 1963, a company older than the Civil War told its workers it was leaving town. It started as a blacksmith shop in 1852. Its wagons rolled west with the pioneers and carried supplies for the Union Army. Later it built cars, and at one point it employed about 24,000 people in one Indiana city. For generations it was the job in town. Fathers, sons, uncles and grandfathers on the same line. On December 9, 1963, the company announced it was closing the plant. Less than three weeks before Christmas. More than 6,000 people out of work at once. Eleven days later the last car came off the line. Then came the second blow. The pension fund did not have enough money to pay what it had promised. Workers 60 and older got their full pension. About 3,600 people. Workers between 40 and 59 with at least 10 years got about 15 cents for every dollar they had been promised. About 4,000 people. Everyone else got nothing. About 2,900 workers. Men in their fifties who had given the company their whole working lives walked out with a small check and no retirement. Their story reached Washington. It took more than ten years. On Labor Day 1974, President Gerald Ford signed a law that set rules for workplace pensions and created a federal insurance fund that pays workers when a pension plan fails. The company was Studebaker, in South Bend. The law is ERISA. If you have a workplace pension or a 401(k) today, you are covered by the law those workers made necessary. Should a company ever be allowed to walk away from a pension promise? Yes or no.