The Flawed Approach to Man From UNCLE (2015) or Will They Ever Learn?

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About half way through the Warner Bros film “Man from UNCLE”, Illya Kuryakin tries to make the case for a Russian architect having designed and built the Spanish Steps in Rome. It seemed out of place somehow in the movie I was watching, but when the movie was over I realized where this anomaly had come from.

It would seem that the one character trait unique to any of the characters in this film that actually had its origins in the original TV series was this particular running gag. Whenever some invention, or creative work, was part of the story, Illya would always explain how it had actually been composed, or invented, in Russia. This running gag, used once, the names of some of the characters and the title of the movie itself were the only references to the original show to be found in the movie.

You might think that if you were going to bother to do a reboot of a 1960s TV series, that you would want to carefully review and select elements from the original and use them in a reboot, doing a best of, as it were, and make a contemporary entertainment product that properly also captured and moved forward what it was that made the original show notable.

Furthermore, you might choose to do this and do it well not for the sake of creative integrity but for hard core business reasons. The success of your roughly 100M $US investment depends on creating a powerful version of this property, to both get the original viewers, the teenage viewers, and as many of the inbetween that you can. There are models for this sort of thing, where it has been done successfully, and where it has not. And what we learn is that where it has not been done well, the movie has flopped. But when it has been done well, the marketing has been straightforward and the movie has been successful.

The lesson is, do it well or not at all.

The good news is that a certain amount of this can be checked before production begins. You can make use of a time honored but now sadly neglected feature of the traditional cinema which is called “the script”. Yes, you can write a script and have it reviewed by people who know the original, as well as by people who know modern action movies.

Having done this, it is also useful to cast actors who bring the script to life, and for that matter, a director who has a feel for the property. This is your job, I emphasize, your means of making a livelihood, and it is always good to remind the studio executive of their supposed expertise.

So what do we get instead? What we get is a script that ignores UNCLE, has the conceit of being a backstory to the TV show which if that is the plan, they badly fucked it up. It uses none of the anticipation and recognition, setup and payoff, available to them. The actors cast are boring, unlikeable, uninteresting. It is in places beautiful, yes it looks like a yacht advertisement from 1960s Italy, but who the fuck cares? Thats nice and all, and it would be a wonderful touch if they had a script and some actors with passion, but without them it is just a bunch of pretty pictures.

But if every silver lining has a cloud, the reverse is also true, and there is some silver lining here. Because the lead actors are so fucking boring, the women of this piece completely capture the movie. We have exactly two of them, one is a 20 year old who is completely hilarious in a scene where she tries to get Illya drunk, to dance, and to sleep with her. The other is 40 something Italian billionaire and femme fatale who jumps Napoleon Solo and then drugs and tortures him.

Yes, the parody of effete Italian manhood is entertaining, but whats the point?

Almost none of the elements that were notable about UNCLE were in this movie. No NYC tailor shop with a secret door, no THRUSH bad guys, nothing.

Its not enough to say that you are going to reboot a property, you have to actually do it well or you should save your money and make another Die Hard movie or something. As it is, it is all a giant waste of effort, of money and of an opportunity.

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1. You may wonder, as I have wondered, what the word THRUSH stands for. If UNCLE stands for United Network Command Law Enforcement, then surely THRUSH stands for something as well. At a Westercon years ago I came across a “bible” for the original UNCLE. A bible is the guide issued to all the writers of a TV series to give them enough background to write, or propose, a story for the series. In it we learn that THRUSH stands for Technical Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjection of Humanity. Well it sounds a little forced to me, but its ok.

Entertaining Report on Cybercrime in Brasil

Have you noticed how boring and unreadable most official reports on cyber crime seem to be? They come in various styles of boring from a Russian style that is at least readable to the US Govt style which is in extreme bureaucratic gibberish. Or you have the weird semi-anarchic cyber community with their quasi-rebellious bullshit and psycho-pathological narcissism.

But now at last we have a report that brings some of the excitement and romance of cyber crime in a readable style that is not laden with pseudo-philosophy. It seems to be one of several reports on regional cyber crime by a company called www.trendmicro.com.

In this particular report we have a discussion of cybercrime in Brasil which I encourage you to read on your own at this location.

But here are a few tidbits I picked up that I thought were interesting.

1. Cyber criminals in Brasil make very little use of the "dark web", such as Tor for example,  but operate in the open on the "surface web".  This is expected to change in the future as the criminals get more sophisticated and in response to greater law enforcement.

2. Cyber criminals come in two varieties: Developers and Operators. Developers develop the tools and sell or lease them to Operators.  Operators use these tools to attack their targets.

3. There are numerous tutorials and online classes for those who wish to become a cyber criminal in Brasil.  These classes sound very reasonable and one could imagine that they might be helpful even for those who are learning to thwart cyber crime.

4. There also seems to be a robust and healthy infrastructure for the provision of apparatus to help in crime. These include such things as "credit card" skimmers for companies which extracts the information on the card when processing an apparently legitimate credit card transaction.

5. Although there are numerous classes of targets in Brasil, this report does give the impression that the banking industry of Brasil has become very vulnerable.  

6. Many of the Developers are or were computer science students.  Some of them are literally Computer Science students and take time off to study for exams and so forth.  We know this because they post letters of apologies in the forums apologizing to their clients for being unavailable for a certain period. 

7. Both Developers and Operators hold Brasilian law enforcement in contempt.  Apparently the penalties for cyber crime are considered to be very weak and the law enforcement particularly inept.  Presumably this will change in the near future as both are corrected as crime increases.

8. The disastrous Brasilian economy is the prime motivator here.  There is extraordinary poverty and an economy that has stagnated with no obvious way to improve one's standing.  In this, Brasil seems to be very similar to the USA of the last decade.  Thus, the real problem here is not crime but poverty and, apparently, corruption.   Again, very similar to the USA.

9. Finally the report gives the impression that part of the cause of the substantial increase in crime is the result of the failure of the mythology that the rich are people who have earned and deserve to keep their wealth. The impression seems to be that the rich are merely more successful criminals, corrupt politicians or the children or relatives of the former. Again there is a striking similarity to beliefs in the USA.

I would recommend anyone who is unemployed and interested in a new career to read this report.

The following image is not from the report on Brasil, but is an illustration I found on the web of how a credit card skimmer scammer works:

Facebook Reblocking Counterstrategy An Excellent Sign

If we really want to simulate society on Facebook, we have to see instances of slander, libel, attacks, counterattacks, innuendo, pettiness and a few hundred other dysfunctional or otherwise negative behavior patterns between the biped mammals.  Good behavior alone would prove nothing.

The other day I came across a weird artifact in FB behavior. I blocked someone, then realized I had to comment to one of their offensive comments, unblocked them, commented and tried to block them again. But FB blocked me from blocking them again for 48 hours!

What was going on?

The counter blocking blocking was nothing less than a countermeasure implemented by FB to defeat a strategy for using blocking as a stealth attack mechanism. Isnt that exciting! Let me explain.

What people were doing is to unblock an enemy, attack their main timeline with some offensive obscenity, then reblock to avoid retribution. Its similar to lowering your shields, firing photon torpedoes, then quickly raising your shields again to avoid being fired upon.

Clever!

Fire all photon torpedoes at Facebook User!

So FB implemented the countermeasure that says that if you unblock someone you can not reblock them for two days, leaving you open to be attacked in return.

I declare FB a success. If it can generate this kind of behavior, then we truly have a human social network. These kinds of strategies and counterstrategies, an arms race if you will, is a good sign of a healthy ecosystem.

For Helen Donahue, "The Force Awakens" is All About Who She Wants to Fuck

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You may notice that the formatting of this post changes in mid stream on occasion.  This is a feature with Blogspot, and it is very hard to get rid of.  Sorry.

It is a sign of our strange civilization that it has no greater cultural event, no more momentous historical moment, than the release of a Star Wars movie. A million refugees in Europe, the insanity of the ongoing presidential campaign or the very strange weather which may indicate our doom through global climate change, all of these must yield to Star Wars.

But if Star Wars is our preferred form of denial it may also be a form of cultural Rorschach test which reveals our innermost desires and fears. But do we really want to know what is in the mind of the great unwashed? If they are shallow or deranged, how can we preserve our illusion that these other biped mammals are in fact conscious and intelligent actors on the stage that requires their enlightened self-interest?

So many religious faiths, like belief in the free-market system, require it. And so if western society and civilization requires rational actors, it is our responsibility to look with interest and concern to see what our little psychological experiment reveals. So much is riding on it.

Consider the case of a prominent Social Editor for Vice.com (www.vice.com) a leading web site of all that is trendy in our ever-changing society. Our social editor, by the name of Helen Donahue, has written a review of “Force Awakens” from the point of view of someone who is 25 years old, a leading member of her society, and who has never seen a Star Wars film before.

Lets have Ms. Donahue introduce herself in her own words while you can read the entire review

here where you must scroll to the end of the page.  The end of the page, the bottom of the barrel, as it were.

She introduces herself by saying

So first we learn that she is shallow as a piece of paper as she dismisses the entire pre-color cinema as beneath her contempt and unworthy of her time. Next she tells us that she was not interested in seeing the earlier movies because Mark Hamill is a blonde and she was not interested in blondes. We might call this self-deprecation or Ms. Donahue may be signaling here who she really is and that would be unfortunate.

Next we have a little overt ageism as she comments on Han Solo's introduction and his moment when reunited with Leia.

"Next old-ass Harrison Ford walks in as Han Solo and, while he's a total dick, the crowd goes apeshit over his dad jokes."  

and

"Leia shows up with something called the Resistance -- people and creatures opposing the First Order -- and she and Han exchange a lot of banter and old-person sexual tension. They apparently have a child together, but he's gone rogue. I realize their son is the dude the film had panned onto in the first few scenes.  He looks like Darth Vader, with the same weird asthma inducing helmet, except he's wearing Hood by Air."

But her favorite topic is sex, in particular sex between people who hate each other. So now she goes into introducing us to Rey, Ren and Finn and who should fuck who and who she would fuck.

"About an hour in we meet some dude (spoiler) with an overwhelming Scottish accent. While its pretty hot, I'm left wondering how a Scotsman got to whatever galaxy they're on.  I guess the Force really is awakening."

and

"When he kidnaps Rey I initially couldn't tell if they were going to get it on or not, but her ability to harness his power when he attempts mind control should have been a clear and instant turn-on. This says a lot about my relationships, as I clearly envision unbridled hatred sparking an immediate sexual connection between two people easier than love between Rey and the dude who's working his ass off to save her." 

and

"The movie ends with Rey fighting Driver (instead of fucking him .... booooring), and running up a hill, where she finds a disgruntled old man in a hooded burlap sack that is, of course, a super run-down Mark Hamill. I cant say I expected much else after 30 years, but he looks kind of like Yoda." 

A more narcissistic, arrogant, vulgar, shallow and sex-obsessed creature would be hard to imagine. She could easily be a character from one of the works of acclaimed fiction that people like so much these days.

But we must be positive about something and so here is one positive point. Given what we have to work with here, and if the old adage that those who talk about sex do not do it is false in this case, then we can only hope that Ms. Donahue is sharing with the world the best of what she has to offer, at least with men who abuse her or whom she hates.  At least for a while.

Perhaps this review does elicit Ms. Donahue's better nature but if so that would be bad for the “intelligent actor”model of rational decision making that is so prominent in justifications of our unfair and deeply fucked up society.

Thus we must act like any economist or political scientist and reject data that does not fit our model and hope that no one notices.

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The Wikipedia page on the Rorschach Test is at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test

End of Year Synopsis at Global Wahrman

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The new year comes and the new year goes.

The thief reminds Brian to always look on the bright side of life.

Let us embrace our negativity and be positive about it so we can have the very best negative attitude of anyone.

First, on the positive side, although the Ken Perlin project is over, it was very educational and left a little money in the bank. Working with Dr. Perlin is like some sort of therapy process: the man is astoundingly productive and high energy. As a side effect of this project, I picked up a dozen or more skills that no doubt will be useful in one way or another.

Second, this blog is coming along although I would wish to have written more on certain topics that will contribute to a book or two being planned, especially the one based on the course I taught at NYU on the history of visual effects. I am not altogether sure who reads my blog, but apparently some people do and I appreciate it.

Third, my health is stable, and all I need is money and a lot more energy to engineer my way through the corrupt and insane system the medical community and our government has put in place. Can one really manage this fucked up system and do a normal job? Probably a moot point because I am unlikely to be given a normal job anytime in the next 2 or 3 hundred thousand years.

Fourth, I think I am making a tremendous amount of progress in managing my anger. I am in touch with my feelings and I am perfectly ok with my anger and really dont care when people get upset because I express my opinion. Its cool with me.

Fifth, I have a number of friends who are doing very well in life and their career, and while it is not enough to live vicariously through them, it is certainly great to see.

On the downside we have some of the following: (a) three friends passed away and two more are struggling with serious health issues, and those are just the ones I know about, (b) I am disgusted with the hypocrisy and lies in our country, our government, and our world. (c) Given my financial status, I see absolutely no way to achieve anything like my potential in this world and this affects my ability to plan and act. I was much more productive when I was disconnected from reality.

There is some progress in the world, even if it is minor. The support given to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is intriguing, even if I am cynical about what effect it has. The level of corruption of our local police and government, the way it exalts the rich and enslaves the poor, our hypocrisy and our impotence to change the system, disgusts me.

It makes one wonder if people were just lying when you were growing up and told you things, or if they were lying to themselves. Probably some of both, but mostly I think the people at the top were just lying.

None of the new technology matters if you are so poor you can not work with it. None of these new fields matter if you do not have the resources to participate.

I hope that you will have a wonderful new year and enjoy yourself in the time you have left. I hope you will keep reading my blog from time to time.

Is "The Force Awakens" A Film About White People?

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This film contains a very modest spoiler for The Force Awakens.

You could hardly not notice the John Boyega character in the first trailer of Star Wars. His Black skin was set against the white of storm trooper uniform, the sand and the sky. The implication was that this was the first time a Black man would be a leading character of the Star Wars films and not merely a token character chosen to appeal to a Black audience (i.e. the Billy Dee Williams and Samuel Jackson characters).

The character played by Mr. Boyega is certainly one of the main characters of the film, or so someone as naive about race relations such as myself might have thought.  But maybe not.

Hey I'm in a Star Wars movie!

In this editorial by Andre Seewood of the “Shadow and Act” blog of Indiewire, “Hyper-Tokenism: The “Force Awakens” While the Black Man Sleeps”, see here, he makes the argument that the Finn character is just a new style of token Black character and that in reality nothing has changed.

He makes the following points. First, that because Finn is knocked unconscious near the end of the movie, he does not actually participate in the climax of the film. Second, that Finn is a second class character in that he does not have the Force, does not speak Droid, and so forth. Third, that he fits the model of the “Hyper Token” Black person which amounts to giving the Black character much more screen time but depriving him or her of the dramatic potential of how the film is resolved: that ultimately the film is by White people about White people. And fourth, that he finds some sort of connection between this type of character and the final year of the Obama Administration.

He goes on to further describe how annoyed he is at the Black community for supporting a film like this that so crassly exploits Black people.  

I was a little surprised by this discussion, I had not really thought about it.  I did interpret the casting of Boyega in a cynical manner, assuming that the filmmakers had cast him as a way of marketing the film.  As a person who often passes as White it is easy for me to overlook the racial implications.  

It is implicit to Seewood's argument that nothing about such a character would be accidental and that therefore it is fair to look for motive and, being a little sensitive to the larger issues, to be looking for limitations in the range of the character, as Mr. Seewood certainly is.  

I think his editorial is worth reading and thinking about.

My knee jerk opinion is that probably, and in the absence of any other evidence, that any racism is accidental.  A fair rejoinder to that argument might be that by 2015 nothing on the topic could possibly be accidental.

Two final points that are far less interesting. I did not understand his Obama argument at all. President Obama seems about as White as a Black person could be. And second, apparently the correct way to spell Black is to capitalize it.

Wikipedia and the Moral Dilemma

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I use Wikipedia every day, at least once a day and probably more often than that. In their latest fundraising, I sent them $10.00 and if you know how cheap I am these days, that is quite a statement on my part.

And yet....

Every once in a while I come across egregious and even gross inaccuracies and therein lies the moral dilemma. Wikipedia is created by thousands of dedicated individuals most of whom are volunteers and all of whom are committed fanatics who probably have nothing better to do with their lives. I tried just this year to fix one egregious character assassination on their part of a living person (Marc Canter), something they *claim* to take special care about, and it was a nightmare. Its all bullshit my friends, they couldn't care less about accuracy as long as they get their rocks off.

So when I come across mistakes, even gross mistakes, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to tilt at windmills and try to fix their misapprehensions? What good will it do? In situations like this, it is the insider who wins, the one with the most time to waste, usually the one who is most insane, and contrary to some beliefs I am not even slightly insane or at least I have no desire to waste my time trying to correct asshole beliefs.

Never try to teach a pig to sing.

If you want to read the bullshit and try to guess what the mistakes are, please see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_operation

You see, contrary to what you see in the movies, almost all black operations are legal, they are approved through a process that involves the Department of Justice, the Intelligence Committees of Congress, and of course the Executive Office of the President and various of his/her staff.   The process of approval is circumscribed in order to keep things as secret as possible, which is something that this government, as stated in the constitution and as approved by the courts, has the right to do.

You should realize that the process is not perfect, that it has changed over the decades, often in response to perceived abuses of the system by various administrations, and because the various Intelligence agencies believe that they have been used by various Administrations and then allowed to hang.   

You should also realize that almost all Intelligence activities have at their core the violation of someone's law, generally speaking, just not US law.  And yes, this is a tricky point in international relations, one that, upon examination, could make one wonder to what extent nations respect international law and to what extent they just pay lip service to it and invoke it when it is convenient to do so.

What Wikipedia should be saying here is that while black operations do not have normal Congressional oversight, they do have a process of approval that has been approved by Congress and the courts, and that these operations are therefore, in general, believed to be legal activities of the US Government, although by definition they are not ones that they would want to be publicly disclosed.

In other words, the paranoid interpretation that all secret intelligence operations by this country are illegal and not approved by the government is simply not true.

But that said, or at least that is my understanding, do I really want to try and change Wikipedia?

CIA Digs Tunnel from Richmond Virginia to Berlin

Back when we had patriotism in this country and before we collapsed into political acrimony and paranoid hatred of our own government, we all worked together to focus our paranoia outward and against the spectre of Marxism. Marxism and its cousin-in-law Communism, if left unchecked, promised to inconvenience our rich and self-entitled elite which could only lead inevitably to the empowerment of the disenfranchised whose lives were hopelessly crushed by poverty and racism.

To fight this Socialist evil all true Americans, North and South, black and white, came together and did their part to fight the Cold War and maintain our way of life.

I am proud to report that even my adopted home city, Richmond, Virginia did its part to fight the cold war.

One of the triumphs of the Cold War was the CIA's Berlin Tunnel in which they dug a tunnel from the US Zone to the Soviet Zone in Berlin and were able to tap some telephone cables that carried military communications from Berlin to Moscow. The tunnel was in operation for 11 months and was a giant success in its time, but its real value came afterwards when, to everyone's surprise, the Russians made the discovery of the tunnel public in order to show the perfidy and lack of good faith of the West.

The tunnel

One of the great moments in “unexpected consequences” this revelation increased the status of the USA in the eyes of Europeans who did not believe that we had the sophistication to pull such espionage off. In fact, we really didnt, and relied to a significant degree on the British, but that is another story.

Many years afterwards, since the tunnel was hardly a secret, the CIA published a report on the tunnel, its genesis, execution and aftermath.

For a summary, see here.

For a discussion of actually building the tunnel, see here.

And what should I find but in that latter report the news that Richmond Virginia, where I grew up, had a role to play in this effort:

I can only hope that the people who dug this trial tunnel ate at Waffle House or at the Commonwealth Club, perhaps even at the Country Club of Virginia.

I have confidence that even today, Virginians would rally to their call and work to support the CIA in their efforts.

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For another discussion of the tunnel and its discovery, see 

http://www.faqs.org/espionage/Ba-Bl/Berlin-Tunnel.html

An Appreciation of Conan The Barbarian (1982)

In this post I am going to argue that a low-budget firm from the 1982 which has been dismissed as some sort of comical misfire is in fact a well-intentioned, and surprisingly well-executed film that captures the spirit of the genre it was derived from.  In other words, because the genre itself is somewhat goofy in a certain way, then it is perfectly acceptable for the film to be goofy as well, as long as it fits the material.  Its a difficult road to take and can be misunderstood by people outside the genre who don't know what they are looking at.

Living as we do in a very insincere time, with hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement the new integrity, and motion pictures being as false as they have ever been, with huge budgets for anti-masterpieces like Avengers: Age of Ultron, the ultimate empty movie, it was a shock to more-or-less accidentally see a low-budget film from 1982 that I had often heard dismissed and criticized, and discover an integrity that no one had ever mentioned to me in the context of this film.

This film, of course, is Conan the Barbarian (1982) directed by John Milius and written by Milius and Oliver Stone.

Conan studies acting with great diligence and you can see his acting improve as the movie proceeds.

Before I go any further, let us return briefly to the time in the 1970s and 1980s when there were ghettoized forms of what the publishing industry dismissed as "children's literature" before these subgenres were recognized as being vastly important sources of revenue for infinitely cynical media corporations.  And in those more innocent days, authors of these subgenres eked out a living, barely, and were unknown except to their publisher, their literary agent, and a few thousand readers and hardcore fans, many of whom would attend science fiction or fantasy conferences.   And those fans and authors, mostly ignored by the mainstream, would occasionally see a terrible movie adaptation of their beloved subgenre or occasionally, very rarely, an excellent effort that really delivered, especially when seen in light of the filmmakers limited resources.

Two examples of low-budget films that were excellent efforts even with very low budgets include Highlander (1986) and The Wicker Man (1973) both of which were well-received by the community of readers of their respective genre..  

Of course now that we live in a time when Hollywood desperately pillages these subgenres as a way of making money, having failed completely to create any creative areas of their own, we must wonder if it was not better to be left in our ghetto rather than be ruthlessly exploited by these scum both on the screen and at the circus that has become Comic Con.

One of these dismissed literary ghettos was the subgenre of “sword and sorcery” and, within that subgenre, was a series of stories by Robert E Howard first published in Weird Tales in 1932 about a barbarian named Conan who worshiped a god named Crom. Conan evolved in many ways over the decades, sometimes going by the name Conan the Barbarian, sometimes by the name Conan the Cimmerarian, and sometimes jokingly called Gonad the Barbarian. There were a billion books and comic books written about this character and somehow I managed to read none of them. But certainly they were a valid property of the sf and fantasy subgenres and a beloved child of the community.

So when I heard that Dino and Raffaela de Laurentis were planning a production of Conan I had no particular expectation that they had anything very authentic in mind.  And when it came out, I heard a lot of criticism from reviewers.  But that was a mistake on my part, because how could mainstream reviewers hope to understand a movie based on Robert Howard's work?

And there are many superficial corny elements in this movie.  But this is Conan, he beats people over the head with a sword and defeats exotic and beautiful witches after sleeping with them, and when appropriate he burns down temples and yet he never forgets where he came from and that he swore vengeance.

But there were clues all through this movie that something more than average was going on. Perhaps the biggest single clue was that the film was written by John Milius and Oliver Stone.  Both of these gentlemen are actually pretty good writers.  

At various times during the film I felt the pure vision of Howard's oeuvre and laughed almost in astonishment.  Yes a little goofy when you look at it as a jaded adult but it is necessary to find the child in you, the child that read Howard's work, and there it was, miraculously, somehow on the screen.

Arnold looks great as Conan

The film was shot in Spain with mostly unknown actors with the exception of James Earl Jones as the major bad guy, and Max von Sydow in a cameo as a distressed King and father.  Arnold is in his first movie here, and he starts out a little stiff but he gets better as the film goes along.  You can see him improve.   And it works.

One might even wonder if, in another life, or parallel universe, if James Earl Jones would not have received a best supporting actor nomination for his role as Doom.

Doom smiles at Conan as he is being tortured.

I felt that the film had integrity, delivered on its promises and deserves to be on the list of notable films Hollywood has made in the science fiction and fantasy genres.  Maybe not great art, but better than expected.

Good job, guys and gals.   I hope the film helped your careers back then and led to the artistic destinies you deserved and desired.

A Prayer to Climate Change

This is a not altogether successful attempt to write a prayer with a little of that great Old Testament, prophet of doom, feeling.  It is from the heart.  I am sincerely tired of waiting for Global Climate Change to arrive, and I think it is a great opportunity to wash away some of the evil in this world.   So, bear with me as I let loose with a little venom.

(Raising my hands to heaven)

1. Invocation

Come, climate change, come now.

Bring forth the rising tide of the oceans of Your vengeance. Wash away the cities filled with the deniers of Truth. Bring down upon the world Your wrath at the biped mammals filled with greed and sin and corruption.

2. Justification

They deserve to personally experience the results of their actions and their failure to act.  It is the people who are living today who deserve this punishment.

They knew what was right and wrong and they denied the evidence of their eyes out of greed. They used their power to defeat sane discussion of the issues and defeated efforts to solve the problems before it was too late.

3. Punishment

They deserve to see the oceans rise and their cities washed away.  They deserve to see the continent wide movement of refugees who flee drought and the tragic wars that result.

El Nino, my Brother, wash away the tears of the mothers of the student-teachers, all who were killed by their politicians who serve Mammon.

Fire from the heavens, burn away the corrupt flesh from the cities of Santa Ana and Los Angeles who have violated their oaths to imprison the innocent.  Destroy these corrupt politicians in whatever city or country they exist.

Release the carbon from the oceans.  Crush the glaciers into ice cubes and allow the fresh water to change the ocean currents.  Outgas the methane hydrate from Siberia and release new greenhouse gasses into the biosphere.

4. Conclusion

Now is the time.

We pray for the catastrophes to cleanse the world not 100 years from now or even 100 months from now but now.

Forgive us for our impatience but look with favor on our plea.

Every day we hope for the tsunami of shit that is your vengeance to wipe away these scum and leave the world pure as it once was.

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For those of you who are not up on your biblical curses, Mammon has a variety of meanings, but is considered to be one of the angels serving Lucifer.  

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon