Film review: The Penguin Lessons (2024)

I just watched this charming film starring Steve Coogan and Jonathan Pryce. I don’t know what made me pick it from the seemingly infinite options that the streaming service Netflix provides, since I did not know anything about it. It was just on a whim, probably inspired by the fact that Coogan acts in interesting films, but I am glad I did so. Coogan plays Tom Michell, a teacher of English who takes up a position at an exclusive private school in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the 1970s. This school, whose headmaster is played by Pryce, is modeled after elite private prep schools in England and its students come from the wealthy ruling class. In the film, Michell is an itinerant teacher who is a loner and not politically active, seeking only to keep his head down and not get involved.

The film is based on a memoir by Michell and is built around the central true event, in which he rescues a penguin he found on a beach that was littered with dead penguins because they were covered in oil from a spill. But there was one that was still alive and Michell cleaned it up. But then the penguin (named Juan Salvador by Michell) refused all Michell’s efforts to guide it back into the wild, clearly seeing him as its life-long friend. So he smuggles the penguin back into his rooms at the school whose policies prohibit pets and tries to keep its presence secret while he tries to get the zoo to take it. His housekeeper and her granddaughter, who is her assistant, discover the presence of Juan Salvador and befriend the penguin and help him with its care.
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DOGE savings exposed as a fraud

Elon Musk boasted about how much money would be saved by DOGE’s actions but a new analysis finds that it achieved just a tiny fraction of the claimed savings.

Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.

Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.
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POLITICO’s findings come on top of months of scrutiny of DOGE’s accounting, but the magnitude of DOGE’s inflated savings claims has not been clear until now.

Even so, President Donald Trump claimed hundreds of billions of dollars had already been used to reduce the federal deficit. The former head of DOGE, Elon Musk, initially promised the organization would reduce the deficit by $2 trillion. Many in Trump’s Cabinet have also celebrated DOGE’s efforts, including his secretaries of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture.

DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.

Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.

“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.”

Lies, smoke, and mirrors. That is what the Trump gang is all about. When the next numbers for the deficit come out without any significant change, expect Trump to fire those who put out the report and put in some stooges who will give him the numbers that he wants, like he is trying to do with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But you can deny reality only for so long. It keeps requiring more and bigger lies to continue. What we are witnessing is a natural experiment to see how long a government built on lies and deception can function.

ICE thugs allowed to freely prey on people

Reports of abuses by the government’s thugs in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) keep growing. This is hardly surprising since there seems to be a quota, estimated at around 3,000 per day, that they are expected to reach. Combine that with lax recruiting standards that have likely resulted in white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and assorted fascists being employed, coupled with allowing them to be masked and given protection from any repercussions, is it any surprise that the worst impulses of people who are already prone to racist violence have been unleashed? They are now free to violently take into custody anyone whom they just think is an undocumented immigrant, whether they are or not or if they have any basis for that suspicion other than skin color.

The estimable news organization ProPublica has compiled a video dossier of ICE thugs in action, engaging in other violent actions in their drive to round up people. It is horrifying to see case after case of them breaking vehicle windows to grab people and assaulting them even when there are crying pregnant women inside.
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The desire of the wealthy to live forever

The August 11, 2025 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article by Tad Friend titled How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It on the huge amounts of money swirling around the efforts by some to lengthen their lives and even to reverse the aging process. This is a small community of billionaires who are willing to invest huge amounts of money on research into the aging process so that they might become immortal or at least increase their lifespans considerably. Naturally, this has spawned an industry of researchers who cater to this need because of the money available.

And these rich people, labeled biohackers, are willing to go to great lengths to increase their own lives. The article profiles one Peter Diamandis who can be considered an evangelist for this cause. His shtick is to get rich people to give huge amounts of money to create competitions that offer massive prizes under the umbrella category of XPRIZE for breakthroughs in longevity research and methods.

His promise is essentially a world in which you can blithely marry someone forty years younger than you, continue to have children even as your grandchildren are having children of their own, and keep your gaze trained on the farthest horizons—in which you can stick around to witness, and even determine, where humanity goes next.
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We all need car cameras to protect us from police brutality


Given that we now live in what is effectively a racist police state in which people of color can be targeted for arrest, beatings, and deportation by agents of the government, some masked, without even the semblance of due process, this recent experience of a young Black student serves as a telling symbol of how low we have sunk.

A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles.

William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on his cellphone camera, which was mounted above his dashboard. It offered a unique view, providing the only clear footage of the violence by officers, including punches to his head that can’t clearly be seen in officer body camera footage released by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
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McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on due to bad weather, his lawyers said. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver’s seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states.

McNeil happened to have his phone camera running in his car which is why this video is available showing how the police lied. You can see the video in the above link.

Note also that the pretext for the stop was that “his headlights should have been on due to bad weather.” As pretexts go, this was about as flimsy as it gets since people routinely ignore that policy. I have seen people not turning on their lights while driving in a blinding snowstorm. Do you imagine that any person who is white would be stopped for such a reason?

It is thanks to the existence of this video that the police lies and brutality have been exposed.

Ordering delivery of small items

When surfing the web, one invariably comes across instances where there is a heated discussion over what one might consider a trivial issue. This then leads to thumb-sucking articles (such as this blog post) about What It All Means and What It Says About Our Society. One has to be a little wary of this tendency because it is always possible to find some extreme behavior on the internet and then treat it as if it were more common than it actually is and then draw Deep Conclusions.

I find such brouhahas faintly amusing and even a welcome distraction from the depressing major news that seems to now be part of our daily lives. One such case was the one I linked to recently about a DoorDash driver who was angry at the size of the tip given for delivery of one cup of coffee. Apart from the issue of the tip, I was bemused by someone actually ordering delivery of a single cup of coffee. Whether you like your coffee hot or ice-cold, surely by the time it reaches you, its temperature would have changed somewhat from its initial value to make it less pleasurable?
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South Park trolls Kristi Noem and ICE

In a recent episode, the animated comedy show South Park severely trolled puppy murderer Kristi Noem, the head of the department of homeland security.

Two weeks ago, South Park kicked off its 27th season with one of its angriest, most politically daring episodes. The animated sitcom, long a magnet for controversy, incurred the wrath of the current US administration for its brutal and graphic send-up of Donald Trump as a petty, micro-penised dictator, as well as parent company Paramount’s cowardly capitulations to him.
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All of this is to say that the new episode, titled Got a Nut, is coming in hot. And for the most part, it lives up to the hype.

The episode follows two different stories: in one, the show’s resident bigot, Eric Cartman, is outraged to learn that fellow fourth grader Clyde has risen to prominence as a white nationalist podcaster who makes offensive claims about women, Jewish people, Black people and other minority groups to goad them into debating him in exploitative viral videos (“WOKE STUDENT TOTALLY PWNED”). Of course, Cartman isn’t angry on behalf of any of those groups; he’s mad that Clyde is ripping off his gimmick and reaping all the rewards. He decides to muscle in on the act, styling his hair after Kirk’s signature coif (“the stupidest haircut I’ve ever seen,” says one character), trolling college girls on social media and proclaiming himself a “master-debater”.
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Cooking next month’s jobs numbers is not going to be easy

Following the dismal jobs numbers that were released last Friday, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer, accusing her (without any evidence of course) of cooking the books to get low growth numbers in order to make him look bad.

These jobs numbers are used by the Federal Reserve as one measure in its efforts to control inflation, and are also used by the broader business and investment communities to gauge the state of the economy and make appropriate decisions. Hence it is important that they see these numbers as credible as otherwise they are useless. Up until now, the BLS has been seen as credible. Following McEntarfer’s firing, the BLS is temporarily being run by Bill Wiatrowski, the deputy commissioner, who is a career professional with the agency, until Trump appoints a new commissioner. But Trump’s action has resulted in the credibility of the BLS being seriously undermined, irrespective of whatever the new permanent head does or however sterling their reputation, because that person will have the taint of being seen as being ordered by Trump to get good numbers in the future. The only way that person will be able to gain some credibility is if the August jobs numbers (that will be released on Friday, September 5) are really terrible. If they are middling or good, people will strongly suspect that the numbers have been fudged, unless it can be shown to the contrary.

But manipulating the numbers of such a massive operation without it being obvious that you are doing so is not at all easy and Trump is stupid if he thinks that whatever lackey he appoints to that position can simply replace one set of numbers in the final report and replace them with new ones. It is going to be a very tricky process.
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Is there a middle ground between atheism and theism?

To me the answer is ‘no’ but the title of this post was suggested by this essay by Philip Goff, a professor of philosophy, who clearly wants to find one. The subheading says, “Neither atheism nor theism adequately explains reality. That is why we must consider the middle ground between the two.”

Goff says that he was brought up as a Catholic but started identifying himself as an atheist at the age of 14 and was comfortable with it for about two decades. Then about five years ago, he had to teach a course on the philosophy of religion that required him to present the arguments for and against God. In doing so he says that he found the arguments for God “incredibly compelling too! In particular, the argument from the fine-tuning of physics for life couldn’t be responded to as easily as I had previously thought.”

A few weeks into this existential morass I was peacefully watching some ducks quack in a nearby nature reserve, when I suddenly realised there was a startingly simple and obvious solution to my dilemma. The two arguments I was finding compelling – the fine-tuning argument for ‘God’, and the argument from evil and suffering against ‘God’ – were not actually opposed to each other. The argument from evil and suffering targets a very specific kind of God, namely the Omni-God: all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good creator of the universe. Meanwhile, the fine-tuning argument supports something much more generic, some kind of cosmic purpose or goal-directedness towards life that might not be attached to a supernatural designer. So if you go for cosmic purpose but not one rooted in the desires of an Omni-God, then you can have your cake and eat it by accepting both arguments.

And thus my worldview was radically changed.
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