America: Imagine the World Without Her - A Movie Review

Overall, a good movie. A major plus of this movie is the perspective of D'Souza, who immigrated to the US from India. As such, like Tocqueville, D'Souza presents an "outside" viewpoint.

The movie does have its faults. It spends too much time reviewing the progressive left's distortion and vilification of US history before finally getting around to refuting those erroneous contentions. One could say that that is a positive for the sake of analysis. Nevertheless, one is left waiting for the "punch line". D'Souza, took an inordinate amount of time before finally geting around to mentioning that other cultures have been just as villainous as the US in various regards. Read the Wikipedia review.

One of D'Souza shortcomings, as an apologist for the US, in this film was ignoring Reagan's transgressions. D'Souza took great interest in hyping Reagan's famous quote: "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." as a supposed positive message. The problem of course, those were just empty words uttered for the sake of the sound byte. Reagan was unsuccessful in reducing the scope of government.

Rotten Tomatoes had an interesting breakdown concerning the responses to the movie. Eight percent of the critics gave the move a positive review. Which means 92% lambasted the film. Of the audience reviews, the positive percentage was 87%. It appears that the critics were not sympathetic to the conservative message. (I will agree that there were some non-political structural problems with the film.) Those who were motivated to the see the movie were probably conservative so the movie naturally appealed to them. In conclusion, the movie should be seen by all since it analyzes the US within the context of world history.

Finally - Science Fiction Magazine Database Ported to Linux

Finally, I have the Science Fiction magazine database working under Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 and LibreOffice  4.3.3.2). Now I no longer need MS Access for maintaining the database. Completing it has proven to have been more complicated and taken a lot longer than expected. Steep learning curve. Prior posts on this topic.

I do not anticipate embellishing the current rendition, even though it is quite rudimentary.  The next phase will be learning PHP, HTML, and CSS so that the magazine database can be accessed through a web browser. Another multi-year extravaganza?

This project is pretty much a learning experience effort. Much of the data can be readily found on "The Internet Speculative Fiction Database". I would not have been able put this project together without the assistance provide by the "Access2Base" website and the volunteers at the "Apache Open Office Forum". Thank-you.

The Main Form

"Show Author Stories" button pressed.

When the "Show Author Stories" button is pressed, all stories associated with that author are displayed, even if in magazines other than Analog.

"Find an Author" button pressed.

When the button "Find an Author" is pressed, you can initiate a search to display all stories associated with authors possessing the search string.

"Find a Story" button pressed.

When the button "Find a Story" is pressed, all stories containing the search string will be displayed.

"Add an Author" button pressed.

Occasionally, stories have more than one author. The form above allows traditional authors to be assigned to a story.