May 31, 2012

This is what happens when you have Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius run your counter-terrorism program.

The armed drone, it's his idea. No wonder this is working so-o-o-o well.

May 23, 2012

Why is austerity happening in Europe? Because, that's where the money is.

May 14, 2012

Fukushima meltdown ignored by GE-NBC, et al. That tells me things are beyond control, and we're

supposed to just go shopping. If it were getting better, they'd trumpet it as a lesson in how safe nuclear power is.

I don't know what the fuck to think anymore about this, and a lot of things. To tell you the truth.

May 14, 2012

Iceland setting a bad example. Who do they think they are, Chile?

May 3, 2012

Inside the Vortex, life and death for the Brutals doesn't matter.

Zardoz (1974) is sometimes dismissed as a vehicle for an aging Sean Connery to display acres of chest hair in skimpy red leather outfits amidst some standard sci-fi fixtures, including the usual total social breakdown, slavery and ultra-violence. But, it's portrayal of life for the elite One Percenters inside their crystal gated communities is extraordinary and spot-on.

The dwellers in the Vortex are totally dependent upon the forced labor of the outside "savages," and a caste of paramilitary overseers, "brutals" who enforce the delivery of food to a giant flying head, "Zardoz", which dispenses arms to the Brutals in return. Zardoz can be viewed, depending upon ones own ideology, as the Politburo or as Lockheed Martin Corporation with the Brutals playing the Red Army, the NYPD, Pizza Hut Delivery, or all tied together on horseback in dyed leather.



Lacking any real care or responsibility for themselves or the larger outside world, all the maladies of celebrity have befallen the beautiful people of the Vortex who never age, unless as punishment. They can read each others' minds, so they have no privacy, they have no incentive to do anything except plot against each other, so those who aren't involved in petty politics and psychological games, are totally apathetic. For all their learning, and the seemless, omnipotent artificial intelligence that keeps the Vortex running, they have no real interest in anything but their own status and comforts in their English Manors.



In the end, the more energetic among them simply speed their own demise by opening the Vortex to Sean Connery's muscular kinsmen, who proceed to shoot everyone inside and smash the crockery. Connery rides off to a cave with revolutionary-in-chief Charlotte Rampling and starts the whole cursed cycle of civilization all over again.