Category Archives: humor

A Review of ‘DON’T LOOK UP’

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A Review of ‘DON’T LOOK UP’

‘DON’T LOOK UP’ is a 2021 deadpan movie satire on human stupidity in ignoring Climate Change by the popular obsession with social media and “fake news,” and by the extreme narcissism of government leaders and their billionaire patrons. This movie is in the same spirit as Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ was about human stupidity regarding nuclear war.

However, since the full arc of the Climate Change story is several decades long, for dramatic punch DON’T LOOK UP has compressed that timeline down to six months — from first detection to final impact — by being an allegorical satire where the real problem of Climate Change has been substituted for in the movie’s story by a planet-killing comet larger than the Chicxulub bolide of 66Mya heading straight toward Earth.

Mass media, Trump-style American government, Gates-Zuckerberg tech fantasy grandiosity and Bezos-Musk-Branson billionaire space privatization fantasy (the last two types of fantasts being wrapped up in one character), are all deliciously eviscerated in this movie.

The serious message at the heart of this movie is quite simple: pay attention to reality. That was also the same message in ‘On The Beach’ (1959) and ‘Dr. Strangelove…’ (1964). The cast is made up of A-list players, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence playing the scientists who discover “the problem” and try to alert the public, and the government to take action. But, the tech billionaire and the bought politicians see a potential profit-making opportunity instead. The character of Milo Minderbinder embodied the same idea of greed blinding the perception of reality in the struggle for and precariousness of survival, in the novel ‘Catch-22’ (1962) and its great film version (1970). The satire in DON’T LOOK UP is exquisite right up past the credits (hint, hint). Enjoy it.

There are so many inside and throwaway jokes in DON’T LOOK UP (many about Trump and trumpians) that I even thought of seeing it again for a 3rd time, in stop motion, to be able to catch them all and write them all down (at least the one’s I can recognize) for cataloguing in a subsequent encyclopedic “like and subscribe” article of my own, as a do-it-yourself-without-tuition-payments master’s thesis in film studies. But I decided to leave that huge task to the future alien archeologists who will land on Earth to sift through the ruins of our so-called civilization, and decipher our remaining media recordings like today’s Mayanologists have deciphered the glyphs inscribed at Tikal, Uxmal, Chichen Itza and many other Central American archeological sites.

So then, here is just one example. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character — the astronomy professor whose student played by Jennifer Lawrence has discovered the comet — is called “Randall Mindy”. In 2004 during the G. W. Bush Administration there was a big scandal because while Bush and his people (Republicans) and their allied media were all saying that Global Warming Climate Change did not exist, the Pentagon had commissioned a secret study of its worst possibilities — which potential consequences turned out to be something approaching the story used in the 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow”: the Gulf Stream Atlantic Current could shut down because of the Greenland icecap melting and flooding into the North Atlantic, diluting the salinity of the cold North Atlantic waters thus preventing the conveyance of Caribbean heat to Western Europe, which in turn could result in an Ice Age type of rebound globally (I’ve described the physics of all this elsewhere: trust me, I’m a scientist).

The Pentagon had commissioned this report in 2004 because they wanted to plan ahead “for the worst”, which is always what they use to get them the most money from Congress (also, there is another sly joke in the movie about a money shystering Pentagon general). Word of that secret Pentagon report leaked out quickly in 2004 and there was a public furor, so the Pentagon declassified it and made it public (you can find it online somewhere). That report was call the “Schwartz-Randall Report”, after the surnames of the author-researchers contracted to produce it. RANDALL = warning the world despite official efforts of being muffled.

Maybe “Randall” is just a coincidence, but I’m inclined to think that the writers of the movie’s story and screenplay, David Sirota and Adam McKay, are much more crafty than just simply haphazardly lucky.

For me another chuckle is the whole idea of framing the social phenomenon of Climate Change denial as if we are all like the dinosaurs 66Mya not looking up at their extinction triggering comet/meteor streaking in, to plunge into the Yucatan then and into the Pacific in the movie.

I wrote that exact idea (climate change = our extinction meteor, ignored) explicitly in an article in 2012, and implicitly in 2013 (they were published at Swans.com). So I figure Sirota, McKay and Leonardo all owe me BIG — but I won’t get paid because that’s not how success works among humankind. And — I admit — it’s even possible that somebody else might have had the same idea before me. But remember, when you do know of a prior statement of “your” idea, that never giving credit for it and successfully disguised plagiarism of it are the essence of career advancement in “the intelligentsia” of our advanced society. (I may be using a little bit of irony here.)

So for sure I love the movie, everyone in it did an absolutely superb job, and I can see every actor got a kick playing their characters, and played them to the hilt. I particularly like the Jennifer Lawrence character, not because of the young cutie pie factor the movie marketeers undoubtedly wanted her to bring into the picture, but because she spits flaming bullets at all the usual culprits, shredding those assholes, and she does right by her portrayal of Millennials, who are always being dumped on with betrayals by media depictions of them, and by the “old fuck” financial string-pullers vampiring off them.

My wife says I am like the “Randall Mindy” astronomy science guy (I do have an expired science Ph.D., from Princeton no less, and a Millennial kid), but I’m not such a nebbish, I don’t need mood pills, and there’s no way some Cate Blanchett type (the old people’s cutie pie for this movie) is going to gush on me, as shown humorously in the movie with Leonardo and Cate (I most definitely am not gush-worthy).

So all in all, a great great movie (because I agree with it), worthy of a Stanley Kubrick had he’d been alive to make it (call this one Dr. Strangelove II), a credit to all the multimillionaires and Oscarites who acted out the parts with verve in front of the cameras, and will get to crow about it in their charity foundation websites or hit songs, later — not a tax writeoff I can get, but oh well — and there is even a self-parody joke about this movie within this movie! DON’T LOOK UP is especially a credit to the story and screen writers, however-much they stole ideas from others or thought them up all on their very own (as if we all really lived in an intellectual vacuum).

So, great film, and great that we’ve at least gotten this far in really doing something “actual” on climate change. The sky’s the limit and we’ve now finally almost gotten to liftoff. The alien archeologists will really love this show.

DON’T LOOK UP (trailers)
https://www.netflix.com/title/81252357

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Movie Reviews by MG,Jr. (14 November 2020 – 8 April 2021)

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CODED BIAS

“Coded Bias” is an exceptional film about how Artificial Intelligence (a.k.a. A.I.), or “algorithms,” has become powerful technology used without accountability, and despite its high level of harmful failure, all for extending the Big Brother type authoritarian control of the public by the state (which is being done overtly in China, and covertly in the U.S., England, and who knows?); and also about the unaccountable manipulation of the public for the financial gains of the small group of very rich people (overwhelmingly white males) who own and control that technology. The title “Coded Bias” comes from the fact that the racial biases (against darker-skinned and ethnic minority people, and ‘different’ sexual-identification people, and physically challenged people) and class biases (against poor people, the more poor the more discriminated against) of those controlling self-aggrandizing white men, and the Big Brother authoritarians, are literally coded into the mathematics that constitutes the mechanisms of the algorithms used to surveil you, to alert police if you are a criminal (very, very many false positives with this), to determine what job opportunities you will be allowed, what prices you will pay for online goods, what financial services you will be granted, and in many ways what punitive actions will be taken against you — and for none of that will you be given any warning nor told how such determinations were made. Complete violation of your 14th Amendment rights (to due process, and which can be logically explained and independently verified; i.e., not a Black Box with a red eye called HAL9000). This important film is available on Netflix now (see website), and also has its own website (see comment). An especially uplifting part of this film is seeing the amazingly talented technically trained and technically savvy women — which include incredible Black Women — who are on the forefront of the citizens’s effort to correct, regulate and ban, as needed, this technology. This is a film about POWER and its use of AI technology to remove freedom from the mass of the public, and to implement its biases through the Internet (for example as regards economic disparities based on race, and the swinging of elections to undermine democracy). I urge you to watch this film (I was pointed to it by a woman, Gretchen, who knows how to pick them).
Coded Bias
https://www.netflix.com/title/81328723

Coded Bias
https://www.codedbias.com/

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SATAN & ADAM

“Satan and Adam” is a lovely documentary about “an aging blues guitarist and a grad student form an unlikely duo while busking on the street corners of 1980s Harlem.” Their music is REAL, authentic; and their story: together, apart, together, old age, is both a reflection of the racial attitudes and politics of the U.S. over the last 35 years, and also a reflection of their own distinctive and idiosyncratic personalities. It is also a very touching story of the power of music to heal individual human spirits, and collective human communities. And also, these guys kick ass when they play!
https://www.netflix.com/title/81077539

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

https://www.modernbluesharmonica.com/satan_and_adam.html

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LORENA

“Lorena” is a short 2019 documentary film about a 25 year old Tarahumara woman (Lorena Ramírez, Native American, living in the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico,) who runs and wins ultra-marathons wearing sandals and her native dress (skirt!). Her whole family lives a pastoral life deep in hilly country, and they are all runners. Lorena Ramírez has won some of the hardest races in Mexico, like the Guachochi Ultramarathon in 2017, where she ran 100 kilometers wearing her sandals and traditional dress. Because of her prowess as a long distance runner she has been invited to other countries to compete. In 2018, Lorena traveled to Spain to run the Tenerife Bluetrail and came in third place after running 102 kilometers, also running with her sandals, with which she has run more than 500 kilometers in total, including Mexico City’s Marathon in the same year. Unlike her brothers, Lorena doesn’t speak Spanish because she didn’t have the opportunity to attend school and learn the language. She speaks Tarahumara in a soft voice, with words that sound so sweet and musical that you just want to listen to her telling her story. [Some of these lines came from the culturacolectiva website.]
https://www.netflix.com/title/80244683

https://culturacolectiva.com/movies/lorena-ramirez-light-footed-woman-runner-netflix-documentary

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BIRDERS

“Birders” is a short 2019 documentary about the crucial natural habitat for migratory birds, spanning both sides of the Rio Grande and along the Gulf Coast on either side of its confluence with the sea. This area has the highest concentration of birds in the U.S. because it lies along the flyways for many species of birds that migrate between North and South America. So, it attracts bird watchers, both professional (who do banding) and amateur, from all over the world. And this natural environment is threatened, and in parts has already been destroyed, by the clearing of land to build Trump’s Wall. There are Americans and Mexicans, each working on their side of the border to monitor, protect and preserve this natural habitat, and to count birds to help quantify the waxing or waning of the health of their many species; and they also teach and enthuse people (children and adults) about the loveliness of avian life and the value of seriously appreciating and effectively preserving Nature.
https://www.netflix.com/title/80244682

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MAGICAL ANDES

“Magical Andes” is a beautiful series; it is about the love of mountains, the pristine expansive wild, and lives closely entwined with that environment far from human congestion. Season 1 has six ~24 minute episodes and spans the entire 8,500km length of that mountain chain from south to north; Season 2 has four ~24 minute episodes and touches on different points of the same regions, from north to south. Brief and elegant narration is in English, interspersed with many reflections, in Spanish, by Andean residents from Patagonia to Venezuela; in Season 2 the English subtitles to the Spanish speakers is dropped. Photography is breathtaking throughout, clearly camera-carrying drones were used to great advantage. The music accompaniment is very tasteful, and guitar music for the most part. Throughout the series one can catch a few glimpses of people whose way of living reflects what I imagine a post de-growth lifestyle might be like for more of “us.” If you love Nature, and have a poetic sensibility, you would enjoy this series.
https://www.netflix.com/title/81154549

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CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (2019) [1:42] is an excellent, very informative, and provocative (TRUTHFUL!) documentary. I recommend it as the single best “economics class” (under 2 hours) you can take today. The presentation is clear and easy to understand, without being “dumbed down.” It explains exactly why your economic situation today is the way it is, whatever your economic class and generation happens to be. The system is rigged (duh) and this documentary show how, why and for whom; and it clearly shows what needs to change if we (all of us) are to avoid a cataclysmic social breakdown, another WWI/WWII type catastrophe on a worldwide scale. I especially recommend it to my kids and their generation: to help them know why we need a revolution, and where and how that revolution should be aimed.
https://www.netflix.com/title/81239470

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DAVID FOSTER, OFF THE RECORD; CLIVE DAVIS, THE SOUNDTRACK OF OUR LIVES; QUINCY.

These 3 documentaries are about famous music producers and industry/finding-talent executives. These 3 guys are famous, and have splashy documentaries made about them because they promoted many singers from obscurity to superstardom, and made them rich, while making their music corporations very, very much richer. So, naturally, the biz and Hollywood are very awed by and interested in them.

They each have certain personality and character traits that I do not care for, but of course people are all different, and it is always a bit hazardous to judge (and yet of course I do).

What I think is most valuable in these documentaries is that there is a great deal of discussion of and presentation on the nitty-gritty work in the studio: music and song composing, arranging, recording, working (and/or fighting) with the singers and instrumentalists. I found those parts quite interesting.

These 3 guys are “legendary” because they were behind many of the mega-hits from 1968 to today, and in a wide variety of popular music genres.

The documentary I think stars-in-their-eyes people are most likely to find interesting is about David Foster, an incredibly talented and capable musician who is regarded as the “best” music producer alive (along with Quincy Jones).

David Foster, Off The Record
https://www.netflix.com/title/81214083

The second and third, and closely related documentaries are about Clive Davis and Quincy Jones, respectively, legendary music moguls who discovered and promoted many pop-music superstars.

Clive Davis, The Soundtrack of Our Lives
https://www.netflix.com/title/80190588

Quincy
https://www.netflix.com/title/80102952

Quincy Jones was a formidable jazz musician in the 1950s, then did jazzy film scores for 1960s movies, and went on to become a “legendary” music producer.

While these three producers/executives were focused on making mega-hits for corporate mega-bucks, what these documentaries can show that also applies to independent music production (recorded music) in less-mainstream more artistic and smaller-audience fields of music is the technicalities of working out the final recorded tracks, which combine the talents of a variety of people.

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FIVE CAME BACK

FIVE CAME BACK (2017) is very interesting as American film history, BUT the real value here is the reminder by series’ end that previous generations — some of whose survivors still live among us — included many many people who sacrificed a great deal in order to allow our society to continue, and which despite its many dire failings still provided very good lives to most who are reading this. It is important to keep gratitude for those who preceded us and strived and suffered to do their best to pass on chances for decent lives for the young of their time, and those yet unborn. And the only useful way to express that gratitude is to emulate the best efforts of our parents’ and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations, for the benefit of our children, which is to say all of today’s children, and those yet unborn. And we cannot expect they will notice, or realize, or acknowledge or honor us. We can’t have such selfish expectations: why should today’s kids be any different from us when it comes to being grateful for the good things they get? They have to learn just as the more thoughtful of us have had to learn: in part by becoming more aware of the realities of the past, and in part by the struggles and frustrations of our own experiences. It all comes out of self-respect. Let me reassure you, I am not preaching here. I am reflecting for myself about my own always-expanding awareness and understanding of “life,” and how I should conduct myself if I can summon enough courage to do so. I think gratitude and self-respect should be the sources of individual human actions, that those actions should be decent and for authentic good, and that any nation improves as more of its people take on that sense of personal responsibility, because it preserves and strengthens the commonwealth: the interconnectedness of us.
https://www.netflix.com/title/80049928

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GREATEST EVENTS OF WWII IN COLOR; THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD

I just finished seeing the Netflix documentary series, “Greatest Events of WWII In Color” (2019), and can recommend it. What the film restoration and colorization does is to bring the frightening intensity and reality of the events much closer to the viewer. This is the kind of startling effect, from old grainy originally black and white war documentary films, pioneered by Peter Jackson with his visual restoration, sound reconstruction, and colorization of World War I films, for the riveting compilation released in 2018 as “They Shall Not Grow Old.”

The 10th and final episode of the WWII series is on the atomic bombings in 1945 and the closing out of the war against Japan. All this excruciating history continues to have many essential lessons too few of which have been heeded even in the present day. The total sweep of that history, really from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to early August of 1945, is a massively horrible build-up of savagery, and vastly widespread dehumanization of national populations, because of their prosecution of and/or victimization by the industrialized crescendo of the 20th century’s chained sequence of world wars.

That savagery was at its peak, and the ability to see “the enemy” as human beings was at its dehumanized nadir, in 1945 especially in the Pacific War. That poisoned psychology combined with extreme and widespread war weariness, and the press of many antagonistic forces and ambitions embroiled in the overall war effort inexorably led to the atomic bombings despite them being logically unnecessary, a position openly, persistently and yet unsuccessfully championed by Admiral Leahy.

Looking back one can see how the consensus-mind of the American leadership and the public was so hardened by their years of war, and so frightened of that war continuing with even greater ferocity with an invasion of Japan, and so desirous for it all to ‘end now, with victory,’ that it was overwhelmingly in favor of the atomic bombings regardless of any logical considerations contradicting that emotion and in favor of better alternatives. Tragic.

That was then; but now eight decades later the great majority of the American people and other fairly secure people in the industrialized world do not have that soul-sucking war-dread as a constant daily experience, as did the traumatized participants in WWII, and so we all should have the ability to rationally analyze the utility of nuclear weapons today both for our own nation’s use, as well as by others. Logically, they are obsolete and counterproductive.

I see the “great lesson” available to us from Episode 10 of the WWII documentary series mentioned here, as being that we non-traumatized by direct war experience populations CAN and SHOULD apply a psychologically mature and humanized logic to the construction of “national defense” methodology that removes the barbaric and ultimately self-destructive cruelty of nuclear weapons from our military and political thinking, and from our national infrastructure.

By its final episode, the vividness of the colorized documentary of WWII gives one an emotional tug that can act as a visceral push behind such logical efforts to really “ban the bomb.”

We CAN learn from history, IF WE WANT TO.

Greatest Events of WWII In Color (2019, trailer)
https://www.netflix.com/title/80989924

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018, trailer)
https://youtu.be/IrabKK9Bhds

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ASPHALT BURNING

If you are a motorhead, see this movie!! It’s Norwegian, and ends up at Nürburgring. It’s a total motorhead’s dream. We saw it on Netflix (dubbed). It seems there were two earlier ones (movies) in a series in Norway. You’ll love it!! (Global Warming can wait).
https://youtu.be/ViUFEs5cyhY

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HE EVEN HAS YOUR EYES

This is a fabulous movie, both thought provoking and funny. A wonderful take-down of racism in all its colors. This lovely French movie, centered by African-Franco actors, and without any guns, explosions, special effects, CGI or gratuitous violence, manages to say more about racism as habit and fear (two forms of “tradition”) being a great hinderance to having a modern society everyone can enjoy, based on simple human love and honest human connection. This movie is a “comedy” in the sense that it is never a lugubrious heavy drama, neither gratingly hysterical nor deadeningly slow; it is like a fine Burgundy wine: light bodied with a depth of flavor. See it.
https://youtu.be/7mNuKbk01ZA

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ROSE ISLAND

The only foreign military invasion mounted by the post WWII Republic of Italy was against “Rose Island” in 1968. Rose Island was a metal-platform island micro-nation constructed by Giorgio Rosa, an engineer, 500 meters outside Italian territorial waters off the coast of Rimini (6km). The Italian government became incensed by this act of pure independence outside its control, and decided to destroy the island. This prompted Giorgio Rosa to take his case to the United Nations and the Council of Europe, which latter agency was designed to hear disputes between nations, and so decided to hear the case since Rosa was a head of state! During the summer months, Rose Island was essentially a boating party location and discotheque in the Adriatic, but Rosa and his friends created a government, post office, issued passports and received hundreds of application for citizenship. Italian marine forces invaded, forcibly removed the people from Rosa Island and blew it up. Subsequently the European nations changed their laws to extend their territorial waters (and claims of judicial control) out to 12km. The movie is a breezy comedy that relates the whole story. What is clear is that power, especially the imbalance of power, is what actually governs government behavior, not the rule of or the respect for law.
https://www.netflix.com/title/81116948

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ADULT WEDNESDAY

“Adult Wednesday” is a series of short very humorous videos made by Melissa Hunter, based on the idea of Wednesday Addams, of the famous Addams Family cartoons, now on her own. Her various interactions with “normal” society are hilarious. Sadly, the series was ended because the copyright owners of “The Addams Family” objected. The web-link will take you to a starting point for the sequence of the Adult Wednesday videos (if still up). All are good. The one of catcalls to girls is delicious (girl wins).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXmpC0wpuso&list=PL0XAjui-xK6XE4PRT64WAthU6j1NmrOqU&index=14

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THE SPACE BETWEEN US

I saw “The Space Between Us” (2016) on Netflix. It is a bloated techno-gargantuan cross between a faint echo of “Brave New World” and the trim 1980 movie “Starman” (which was good). The premise is that a kid born as a surprise on a Mars colony is too weak to live in Earth’s gravity, and so must remain “classified.” He is brought back to Earth as a 16 year old in hopes he can be strengthened to survive there; he escapes confinement to look for his mystery father; has a roadtrip romance with a quirky wise-ass runaway foster-kid girl, and everyone has a happy ending to this story. It could have been more tightly constructed for a good 90 minute movie, but it rolls out amiably enough over 2 hours with nice visuals and up-to-the-minute spacey sets and effects to distract you from the numerous logical fallacies and improbabilities linking the elements of the story (easily done if you don’t take a critical attitude). I enjoyed it as simple harmless entertainment; it is not art, it is not deep: it’s meant for a mass audience. Asa Butterfield plays the Mars Boy with the same cute naïveté other-worldliness he displayed in the movie “The House Of The Future” (with Ellen Burstyn, peripherally about Buckminster Fuller’s legacy). Gary Oldham plays the big honcho Space Business (for the Mars Colony) “visionary.” The mama surrogate is played by a Ms. Guglio, who also had a big role in a recent movie where Patrick Stewart (“Jean-Luc Picard”) plays an old ballet master and choreographer (which movie is a 3 person play of sex talk). This movie is a way to spend some COVID lockdown time, after you’ve washed the dinner dishes and you’re tired of reading an actual book for the day.
https://youtu.be/x73-573aWfs

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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

“The Other Side Of The Wind” is Orson Welles’s last movie and is a satire on movies, movie-making and celebrity culture. It is also a visually stunning 1970s cinematic parody of 1970s art movie pretensions; a comedy about the vacuity of the whole movie and celebrity business, and literally a confection about nothingness. Wind is the flow of air through a volume, it is not an isolated bounded solid object. It has no side since it is the swirl, rippling and eddying of the ocean of atmosphere we live within, and thus can have no ‘other side.’ To those not scientifically minded wind is the sensation of anything between the blushing to the gales of nothingness. To seek deep insights from Welles’s movie is to look for an answer blowing in the wind. Welles gets some delicious payback on movie critics through this film (and it was all actually photographed on film between 1970 and 1976), as well as skewering Antonioni type films like “Zabriskie Point.” Welles does one better on Antonioni’s finger to the American movie moguls by putting his “Zabriskie Point” parody, “The Other Side Of The Wind,” as a film within a film, being an incomplete movie run out of budget and the last hope for a comeback by a Hemingway type directorial titan of Old Hollywood at the end of his rope and trying to connect with youth and the New Hollywood. The actual cinematic technique used is a kaleidoscope of modernity employing black and white, color, quick cuts, enigmatic scenes, mockumentary structure, and zig-zagging progression. Welles had a lot of help from a lot of friends to shoot this movie and then to finally have it assembled as he would have wanted. Welles died in 1985, and the movie finally appeared in 2018. I was fascinated by it, and then tickled to realize that Welles had done a magic trick on me to make me think seriously about nothingness: the cultural vacuity of the flickering lights so many are so obsessed about.
https://youtu.be/nMWHBUTHmf0

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A LIFE AHEAD

“A Life Ahead,” an excellent brand new (2020) film with the legendary Sophia Loren (86!!); very modern, very heartstring-pulling, amazing performance by the young actor playing Momo (all the performers were good) – this is his story. The setting is the seamier side of 2020 Italy (but there are still beautiful souls living there).
https://youtu.be/a0ejncDxgCc

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IO

“IO” is an imaginative realistic speculative fiction about a post end-of-the-world time of environmental poisoning, and its last two survivors. By “realistic” I mean that it is not one of the bombastic live-action special effects fantasy plus horror cartoons that is the popular standard today for science fiction movies. The story is reminiscent of the seminal 1949 novel “Earth Abides.” So, most movie fan comments about IO are quite negative, indicative of an intelligent screenplay thoughtfully filmed. The movie is a largely French production, filmed near Nice, Bulgaria and California. The visuals, acting and pacing are all good as befitting the somber and very lonely situation being portrayed. The types of scientific, literary and artistic references made in the dialogs make for a too cerebral movie for many simple-minded movie fans, but lend this film much of its merit. This film seeks to make you think, not shock and excite you with gimmicks like frenetic pacing and jump cuts. In a rather elliptical way, the ending reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
https://youtu.be/y3GLhAumiec

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DOWN TO EARTH

“Down To Earth” is a recent (2020) TV series showing varieties of healthy sustainable ways to live, from selected countries in Central and South America, and Western Europe. It’s has a breezy tone but does show quite a variety of interesting an important aspects of “food” and “living” and the damaging effects of human wastefulness and lack of connection to Nature, and thus “climate change.” The episode on Puerto Rico is especially recommended because it shows how people dealt with the catastrophe of back-to-back hurricanes Irma and Maria, and continue to deal with the catastrophe-by-Trump-malice-and US-government-neglect, of loss of homes, electricity and environments. Showcased are examples of how individuals came together to respond to problems left unattended by the failures of government. The “star” of the series is its executive producer Zac Efron, no David Attenborough, but still deserves credit for producing a series with much good in it for the cause of advancing public awareness in favor of revamping American (industrialized, consumer-oriented) society for ecologically enlightened sustainability, and healthier eating habits. It is mainly aimed at typical, and by world standards well off, American viewers – it is no rabble rousing radical revolutionary documentary, but it does make many good points despite the many visits to Michelin multi-star restaurants.
https://www.netflix.com/title/80230601

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Turbo Encabulator Direct Air Capture of CO2

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So far, I have resisted invoking the Turbo Encabulator when writing about Climate Change, because I wanted to simplify the argument being advanced in favor of decarbonizing civilization. But, perhaps that was a mistake, and I should have had more faith in the public being able to appreciate a technically focused presentation.

I realize now that it is essential for the public to know that Direct Air Capture of Carbon Dioxide by Turbo Encabulator Extractive Gaseous Reemulsificative Processing by Catalytic Diplexification is THE ONLY method of decycling the accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxides, as well as the engorged oceanic plastic waste and bioaccumulative microparticulate inclusions of the biodiverse infundibuluum.

I will begin drafting a brief forty-one page extract for anticipatory publication in the immediate distant future. Be on the lookout for that.

For the basics on Turbo Encabulator technology, see the following instructional videos:

Technical Jargon Overload
https://youtu.be/aW2LvQUcwqc

“Turbo Encabulator” the Original (well, almost)
https://youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag

The History of the Turbo Encabulator
https://youtu.be/kkH20fNavoI

Chrysler Turbo Encabulator
https://youtu.be/MXW0bx_Ooq4

Introducing the innovative new Micro Encabulator™
https://youtu.be/u4ILnWpi8XY

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Steeling Ourselves to Reopen

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Steeling Ourselves to Reopen

“So, the country is steeling itself for its Great Leap Forward: coming out of our underground bunkers, our bomb shelters, our foxholes, our caves, where we have been hiding out from the tenuous invisible virus-laden fog of everyone else’s exhalations. We are being steeled to open air-tight hatches and climb out into the wreckage — unseen but wrecked — of our old world. But the air of that old world is now no longer the same; it is infected, and that infection washes in and out of human bodies that wither in many ways in the wake of the viruses’ passing, to hang in the air waiting for new hosts to house, feed and transport them on their constant wanderings to reproduce. And we, the humans weary of protecting ourselves from infection by hiding out in our private dens and burrows, are now being mesmerized by the slowly rising crescendo of suggestive siren songs, sad wails, ominous warnings, frenzied exhortations all saying the same thing: open up! leave your hiding! burst into this new air, join humanity once again, forget your fears, and gratefully, with energy, with enthusiasm: go to work! Yes, that is what is needed, work! work! work! Be happy in your work! You are wasting your lives hiding, and by doing so you are losing all that is most dear: income, employment, and all the good things you deserve, but which must be paid for! Why, that is essentially death! No!, it is time to rejoin the human race, and go out into the world without concern of our invisible invaders, and take back command of the world by stepping out into it! Yes, it takes strength to be a real man, a real woman, who can take charge of their lives and go and make something of them, by working and earning, and clearly justifying their place in our civilized world. These are the kinds of people who make up the strong healthy body of civilized humanity, the human force that pushes forward and survives, that creates the future. But not everyone has that courage, that drive, that worthiness; some are weak, outdated, unworthy; essentially deadwood, an unnecessary overhead expense on the virile core of humanity, the workers essential to the steady functioning of our way of life. So strength, now with a clearer understanding of freedom after having brushed aside the fears of this virus, is now ours, and the strong essential people understand that because they have the courage to break out back into the busy world that we must quickly revive, together shoulder to shoulder, that we can waste no sympathy on the unnecessary old, weak and cowardly. People are always dying, old, young, it doesn’t matter, so hiding away from a remote chance of death is wrong, especially as doing so has let all our work and prosperity fall into ruin. No!, we move forward, and we do so with confidence in our own strength of purpose, our own drive to gain the prosperity we deserve, our pride in supporting our families, and in helping to advance great commercial enterprises of social necessity! So, go out, fear not, some small number of you will always be surprised by an early death, but this virus will focus itself on the old and non-essential and the weak. Forget about them!, that kind of concern only holds you back from devoting yourself to what is most important and gives you your meaning in life: your work! So let the old and the weak and the undeserving sicken and die, do not worry about spreading virus germs to these non-essentials. We will be better off without them, the emotional drag on us of all their worries, and the wasted costs of their upkeep will be cast aside once the virus prunes them away from the real virile core of humanity. Then, think of the kind of world we will be building!: one of drive without restraint, of prosperity without cost, of work without stop, of people steeled to their tasks and moved past their childish sentimentality and fear, of people past caring for those who don’t deserve to live if they try to stand in our way and hold us back, especially holding us back from our freedom and obligation to work, which gives us all we were ever meant to be and to have. If you work hard, you will be treated well; if you do not work, you will be punished! So fear not! Live and let die! Join together, and work! work! work! Be happy in your work!”

And so the Maximum Leader spoke to his people to fill their spirits with his disease, and steel them to re-emerge into the pestilence of his reign, and maintain it.

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The Truthiest Reality of Global Warming

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An omniscient individual on my electronic social media splattergram expressed skepticism that the 0.04% of the atmosphere made up of CO2 could possibly have any responsibility for causing global warming, now also known as climate change. It seems clear to me now that with each passing day more people will stumble upon this startling insight, and the whole carefully constructed edifice of climate change ideological mass conditioning for social control might suddenly crack apart, and our civilization fall into ruins. So, I have decided here to break with my scientifical colleagues and to finally reveal the heretofore hidden truth of the matter, the truth behind the truth, in essence: the truthiest reality of global warming.

The true cause of global warming is: the reductio ad absurdum electro cyber auto savanting effect, or RAAECASE. This amazing and complicated effect unfolds as follows.

Popular fascination with the agnotological euphoria — also known as “brain wiping” — induced by the Internet has led to a rapid and vast expansion of viewing on the world-wide-web, and as a result of meeting this demand a rapid and vast expansion of banks and banks of electronic data machines — “computer servers” — continues to be assembled to maintain and transmit that voluminous cyber traffic. These machines are electrically gluttonous and energetically inefficient and so expel copious amounts of waste heat that is increasingly warming the atmosphere. The energy for cranking the electric generators that in turn power our modern pyramids of Internet computer banks is being supplied by fossil-fueled combustion (with a tickle or two of nuclear power), and some of that furnace heats adds to this Internet heating of the atmosphere.

As more and more people — billions and billions — fixate on their electronic telescreens, and for longer and longer periods of time, their evolutionarily atypical indolence in combination with their marked preference for junk beefish burger consumption so as not to interrupt telescreen viewing with old-fashioned knife-spoon-and-fork dining rituals has led to an explosive popular fattening known as gluteo-lipid maximization, more commonly known as maxipratty.

To feed that maxipratty-inducing Internet mass fixation there has been a massive worldwide expansion of the junk beefish burger cattle processing industry, requiring vast clear-cutting of jungles and forests to accommodate sprawling cattle feedlots from which increasing quantities of anally emitted intestinal methane bubbles (known as AEIMBs in the technical literature) are released into the atmosphere, and warming it by adding cattle gut heat (CGH) to it: billions and billions of cows producing gazillions and gazillions of CGH bubbles.

With the double metabolic explosion of a maxiprattizing world population growing by 200,000 people every day there are gazillions of new human cells added to the human biome every minute of every day, and each of those cells is a metabolic engine that needs energy to sustain itself, and thus is also a heat radiator, and all that human body heat soaks into the atmosphere to heat it up.

So, to put it bluntly, global warming is caused by fat asses getting fatter worldwide and billowing off heat because the eyeballs associated with them have glued the wiped brains they sprout from to the artificial unreality onlining across their telescreen portals to higher levels of dumbfoundlessness. The Internet is causing global warming: the reductio ad absurdum electro cyber auto savanting effect. And this is NOT man-made climate change because the Internet isn’t human! Ipso facto truthiation exacto.

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Letter to a Man Dejected by a Woman’s Leaving

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Mother and Boy-Child

We received your “fish out of water” poem today, and each read it. I know how disappointed you are, and we are each sorry for you.

I can’t offer any advice, because that’s always unwise, and because I wouldn’t have the faintest idea of what to suggest that might do any good. I think it’s all a matter of luck.

Over time I have observed that every woman is the hub of a wheel, and that wheel is a family. The family can be real in the sense of actually existing children, or perhaps other emotional dependents to whom she is “necessary” (as Ralph Waldo Emerson defined it), and at the pathetic extreme maybe just house cats or a husband-on-a-leash dog.

For most younger women their family-wheel — beyond their parents, grands and uncles and aunts — is potential. It may be the conscious thoughts and plans for the future application of their fertility, or (more likely) the unconscious behaviors that work toward the accumulation of resources and the “building of the nest,” which in our capitalist society is conceived of as “security.”

We males are merely pollinating drones to these queen bees, so they can sprout the entangling vines of their family-wheel potentialities, regardless of whether we are lovingly used over a long period, or briefly squeezed like a travel-size tube of toothpaste then immediately discarded. It’s just nature’s way. Romantic love for a man is nature’s way of short-circuiting his intellect so he will enjoy falling for the mating interaction long enough to possibly help fulfill the statistical necessities of maintaining the species by reproduction.

As I said, whether the experience of any man’s use by a woman to fulfill her biological (including psychological) imperative (whether overtly conscious, or unconsciously instinctive) is a happy or unhappy expenditure of a portion (or all!) of his life-force, is a matter of luck, pure luck.

So poetry is an excellent tonic to accompany, or wake, the experience.

Specifically about the family-wheel, I observe that any man wooing a women with children is doomed to fail unless and until those children become enthusiastic supporters of his aims. This is not usual. The children (regardless of age) always want primary access (and for some even control) of their mother (biological or not). This grows out of their dependency/survival psychology, as I’m sure you can see (the needy id).

Also, as already noted, mother’s first allegiance (except for sociopath and deep narcissist moms, like drug addicts) is always to her “children,” whether human, animal or imaginary. It is a foolish man who tries to separate a mother from her children in order to capture her love for himself. The good quality or dysfunctionality of these children is irrelevant. Little Red Mother Hen will always clutch her chicks under her wings rather then strut off with Rooster Cockburn no matter how long and loudly he crows. That Rooster Cockburn does get in every now and then is purely a matter of luck and on the run.

My own sweetie has recently been renting a lot of “modern” movies of old people finding love even as they and their best friends are dying off. It makes some sense that after one is retired (these movies are about white people with more than adequate financial means living in advanced countries — like the well-paid actors playing the parts), and the kids are grown and “gone” that senior citizens who would like some canoodling could find each other for some periods of enjoyable shared company.

But these movies would not be nearly as enjoyable if they included the many dreary realities and personal compromises that are necessary to keep two mature adults in an extended romantic haze. Older people have their ways, their quirks, their likes and dislikes pretty well cemented in, and it is not such an easy thing for any two oldsters to mesh these without serious compromise. It would seem to me that “dating” for old people would work best as a smattering of sequential quickies. For me of course this aspect of love remains theoretical, and I have no inclination whatever to engage in experimentation to verify my theoretical analysis of senior citizen romance.

I think the best we can do at any point in our lives is to work and play at those activities and tasks that give us our sense of fulfillment. I’m thinking of artistic, intellectual, manual and body-active, and social activities — not “work” or “business” activities — that just absorb you and make you feel alive. Things that are the best use of your irreplaceable time; things that may seem “boring” and “trivial” and “selfish” to others because such personal activities don’t make you an accessory to fulfilling the desires of these “friends” for receiving unearned entertainment and attention. You act out of a sense of appreciation and enjoyment in being alive — almost autistically, rather than acting so as to define yourself by the approval of others, and in the hope of happiness coming from the outside world into you: independent centeredness versus a hollowness of dependency at the mercy of a fundamentally selfish and uncaring world.

Anyway, a man of independent centeredness (emotionally, psychologically) toodling away happily in whatever his form of engaging craziness may be, could bump into another independently centered person (possibly female) who shares enough of his interests that the idea of sharing company for a while seems appealing. I think this is the best way to luck into love. It requires a light touch, as regards pressing requirements on the other person’s way of life so as to make it “better” for you. I think the required light touches are more likely to occur with partners (it’s always “temporary” but of unknown duration) who meet in this independently centered way.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t discount the possibility of deep love and strong long-term emotional (and financial) commitments between couples. It’s just that I think they are best, and most likely to succeed (be fulfilling to both), when the individuals are independently centered and aware to relate — and extend their caring — with a light touch. Even so, whether if turns out “good” or “bad” is mostly luck.

I suppose this is all just a theory of karma. If I’m just leading a fulfilling life in an honest way then I’m more likely to find myself in the company of another person (or persons) who are doing the same thing in their own way. Maybe there will be enough overlap of interests to make it attractive for both to share (some of, all of?) the doing. Even in this ideal though, you know that “the other” is always an independent life-force entity whose flight plans and orbits are never slavishly determined by the gravity of your being (or at worst your self-centeredness).

So, like you I have at times both surfed the waves of love with incredible exhilaration (1), and I have also been dashed to smithereens against the rocks of bitter dejection, by catastrophes of ruptured love (2). What I’ve learned is that it is pointless for me to even pretend I now know something about romantic love (even though I may assume this pretense to write a novel), or “relationships,” or “women,” or (gulp!) “sex.” But I do think I know a little bit about “people,” and my talk about “independent centeredness” and “light touch” reflects that (3), and goes far beyond the confines of romantic and sexualized love, which for most people is merely desire labeled as “love” (4).

Finally, time and your own good sense to keep busy doing what you love doing, what you are good at doing and gives your time alive its sparkle and zest, are the best balms to soothe the tenderness of a broken heart. Your true friends will give you the space you need to work out your new accommodation with reality at your own pace, and they will be happy to know that you’re still here in our wild and woolly life-zone, toodling away at your unique line of creative independently centered insanity.

My only advice: keep writing poems.

Over and out,
Mangogarcia.

(1) Fuck Yeah!
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/12/23/fuck-yeah/

(2) Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2016/11/30/pre-traumatic-stress-syndrome/

(3) The Touch of the Open
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/08/31/the-touch-of-the-open/

(4) Love and Desire
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/08/28/love-and-desire/

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Political Memes, Opus #2

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Why do what’s right when you can make money?
Why be courteous when you can get ahead?
Why be truthful when you can lie to get your way?
Why share when you can have it all?

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Telling the truth is not hard,
guaranteeing you’ll like it
is impossible.

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The Socialist overthrow of Capitalism
would be a greater victory
than the capture of the Roman Empire
by Christianity.

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It must be a terrible heartbreak to have lived through the 1960s, and clearly remember the Civil Rights struggles and your protests against the Vietnam War, and then have had Reaganite Republican children and Bush and Trump Republican grandchildren. What a waste of all your child-rearing sacrifices, after having dreamt of an approaching just and democratic world, to bitterly realize that your turn at genetic transmission had been hijacked by fascism. Because of Hillary Clinton’s connivance in thwarting the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016, and her being singularly responsible for bringing Donald Trump to power, there will never come a time in which I won’t detest the women (and men) who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary elections, and still insist she should have been US president. I pity Trump voters, despite them being at least disappointing and at worst horrible people, because they are infected with a self-defeating and obdurate stupidity. Hillary Clinton-loving people are supposedly more intelligent and moral, but are in fact absolute failures who are irredeemably vain and selfish, and thus unworthy of concern.

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West God In Rut
Wine God Strut
We Trusting Do
Go Turd In West
Wet Gin Or Dust
Go Trust I Wend
I Trod New Gust
Wet Gin Do Rust
West Rust In Dog
Wet God In Rust
In Dog We Trust
I Got Us Newt’rd
In God We Trust.

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It is so sad to see intelligent, fundamentally decent people
in the prime of their lives
lost in bitterness,
unreachable to friendship
by those outside their exclusive club of resentment.
It is a sadness like grief for a loss in the family
of one still living
but forever beyond contact.

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American society is ignorant, self-absorbed,
fearful and thus cruel, surrendering to enslaving greed,
and soulless by lacking a compassionate unifying vision.

Its best hope lies in the individual development
of strong moral character, and thus socialist vision,
by enough people to revolutionize the entire culture.

Manuel García, Jr. — 23 March 2018

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Zionist manifest destiny
in Palestine and beyond
is a war crime, which
Americans should not
subsidize nor sacrifice for.

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VW is Germany’s Ford, Audi is VW’s Lincoln.
US VW’ers pretend having MB & BMW status
they’re too poor and chintzy to pay for,
by being pushy obnoxious drivers.

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Inflation is money’s shelf-life.

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Extinction sooner is better than profits delayed.
(It’s all about the money.)

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Genocide is the original sin of the real estate industry.

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“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just;
that his justice will not sleep forever…”
– Thomas Jefferson,
(Commerce Between Master and Slave, 1782)

“Freedom is the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear.”
– George Orwell
(The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937)

“If a nation values anything more than freedom,
it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is
that if it is comfort or money that it values more,
it will lose that too.”
– William Somerset Maugham
(Strictly Personal, 1941)

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals
to speak the truth and to expose lies.”
– Noam Chomsky, (1966)
(The Responsibility of Intellectuals)

“It’s typical for educated classes to be more effectively controlled
by the indoctrination system to which they are directly exposed,
and in which they play a social role as purveyors,
hence coming to internalize it.”
– Noam Chomsky, (1985)
(Intervention in Vietnam & Central America: Parallels & Differences)

“Nothing is easier
than to convince oneself of the merits
of actions and policies that serve self-interest.”
– Noam Chomsky
(Year 501, The Conquest Continues, 1993)

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The Victim Queen controls the World by projecting an infinite spectrum of dislikes.

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“I don’t want to have to think!”
Why humanity will extinct itself as soon as possible,
and pat itself on the back for doing so.

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God is a self-righteous excuse
for inflicting unconscionable cruelty.

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Will there be Love in 200 years?

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My biggest mistake:
having unrealistic expectations
of people I don’t know.
(Mainly everybody.)

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An old type of “joke” applied by racists/bigots who happen to be People-Of-Whiteness, against Black People (also known as People-Of-Color, and/or include: African-Americans, Afro-Caribbean, Africans) compares them disparagingly to apes: monkeys, chimpanzees and gorillas. Genetically, there is only one race: the human race. And, we are all a species of primate: apes. Genetically, humans and chimpanzees are 98.8% identical. There is a greater difference between chimp and gorilla DNA (94.8% same) than there is between chimp and human DNA (98.8% same). White skin only developed in humans after 12,000 years ago (after the Ice Ages) and most likely after 6000 years ago. Very well preserved human DNA from recently uncovered human remains in Britain, from 6000 years ago, was analyzed to determine that such early Britons had black skin (very deeply dark brown, or “negro” skin color), straight black hair, and blue eyes! Racial jokes are the lame humor of ignorant people.

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U.S. Political Parties:

Libertarian:
the sociopathic anti-war pro-greed party.

Republican:
the sociopathic pro-bigotry classist party
run by careerist touts for capitalism.

Democratic:
the anti-bigotry classist party
run by careerist touts for capitalism,
and now fighting off an insurgency
by democratic socialists.

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The only 2 excuses for voting Trump:
1. You’re a bigot too,
and he lets you feel good about it.
2. Dementia.

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The Gates of Heaven are locked shut
to bar the dark children
of the despoiled colonies
from climbing into the Olympus
of their White Gods
who luxuriate in the effulgence
of their self-satisfying beneficence
that is the envy of the sacrificed
whose blood and sweat
are fermented and distilled
into the intoxicating ambrosia
swilled
at the never-ending
Harvest Feast of the Gods.

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I could whisper words of milk and honey in your ear,
and tell you sweetly what you want to hear.
I could entertain and lull you like the smoothest joint
But, really folks, what would be the point?

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The Conservative Bible, and Equality vs. Freedom

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The Conservative Bible and Creed

The Conservative Bible, rule #1:
The rich have the right to steal, the poor do not have the right to live.
The Conservative Creed, tenet #1:
I am perfect, all my problems are caused by other people.

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The Conservative Bible, rule #2:
The greater the wealth, the more it is deserved.
The deeper the poverty, the more it is deserved.

The Conservative Creed, tenet #2:
Wealth, by definition, means living on capital gains, not wages.
Wages are a necessary evil for the upkeep of the servants.

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The Conservative Bible, rule #3:
Human rights can never be interpreted to infringe on property rights.

The Conservative Creed, tenet #3:
Failure to turn a profit or increase share value are the only justifiable complaints against corporations.

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The Conservative Bible, Lesson#1, Morality & Society

Morality (Good versus Evil, Good versus Bad):
1. Anyone or anything that makes money and accumulates wealth is “good.”
2. Anyone or anything that costs money, and accumulates debt is “evil” or “bad.”
3. The magnitude of one’s goodness is given by the magnitude of one’s wealth.
4. The magnitude of one’s evil, or badness, is given by the magnitude of one’s debt.
5. A person of neutral moral value balances losses with income, and debts with assets.

The only social value is money.
The only social responsibility is to enrich oneself.
The greatest social problem is government.
The problem of government is to minimize its size and cost consistent with its function.

Government is the minimum bureaucracy necessary to maximize wealth enrichment; it:
1. Maintains military forces to protect wealth (the “good”) from foreign threats.
2. Maintains internal security forces to protect wealth (the “good”) from domestic threats.
3. Maintains military forces to enhance wealth enrichment by opening foreign markets.

Government is the source of the ultimate social evils:
1. Taxes: the imposition of losses on enrichment.
2. Regulations: the imposition of restrictions on enrichment.

The most important organizing principle in society is the corporation.
Opposition to corporate society is communism, the most dangerous idea of all time.
Socialism is the excess overhead cost of government from coddling the unproductive.

There is no such thing as “greed,” one is either:
1. productive: by being morally responsible to enrich oneself, or,
2. unproductive: by being criminally negligent to be poor.

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The Conservative Bible, tenet #4:

All of humanity fits into five categories:
1. Friends: provide dividends
2. Peers: provide investment
3. Workers: provide profits
4. Layabouts: create expenses
5. Enemies: create losses.

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Liberal Intolerance vs. Conservative Intolerance

Conservatism (n.), the irrational fear that somewhere someone you think is inferior is being treated as your equal.

Liberalism (n.), the comfortable presumption that your attitudes mark you as a superior and deserving individual.

“Conservatives” and “Liberals” are the two varieties of capitalists.

The critique by conservatives about “liberal intolerance,” a.k.a. liberal intellectual and political orthodoxy, cuts both ways; “conservative intolerance” to counterarguments is just as prevalent. Both of these simply reflect the ignorance, shallow-mindedness and fears of two large groups of people with opposing biases.

People who are good critical thinkers (not many of these) and open-minded (not many of these either) so as to continuously evolve their opinions and beliefs on the basis of new learning (from whatever source) based on facts (real ones) can enter into political discussions and arrive at useful results. Such useful results can include an agreement about the actual facts of a given issue, and then forthright statements of what each of their personal preferences and biases are, and that their only unresolved differences are about how they each choose to feel about those agreed-upon facts.

A good example for observing this is climate change (CC). The facts are indisputable, the only real differences are how “conservatives” and “socialists” feel about it (“liberals” – one of the two types of capitalists – feel pretty much the same as conservatives about CC, but they don’t really want to admit it). Socialists fear CC more than conservatives, and want to make whatever “economic sacrifices” are necessary to prevent it. Conservatives fear any obstruction to their prime concern of immediate personal enrichment more than they fear any harm from the “slow” changes to Earth’s habitability caused by CC.

With facts forthrightly admitted, two opposing “feelings about the facts” can intelligently engage in discussion to explore these two sets of feelings in an effort to spark deeper thought in the opposite party, which deeper thought (if honest) can induce an individual to critically examine their own sources of willful ignorance and fear.

You can’t change someone else’s mind, only they can do that for themselves. However, a refusal to acknowledge facts is a sign of a closed and socially dead mind. Closed-minded people, who lack the intellectual honesty and courage to be forthright about their actual motivating preferences, biases, fears and bigotries, become hostilely defensive when they sense their biases being challenged. That’s when you get clashes of bullying bluster and bombastic bigotry against snide, arrogant, dismissive and patronizing outrage.

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Why are Republicans so mean-spirited? What is it that’s eating at them and keeps them so angry about the pittances the poor get? They have a tremendous envy of the scant happiness the poor may enjoy, and a sad compulsion to act malevolently toward them. Why? How can they have happy lives harboring such bitterness? Why can’t they just live and let live? This is what I have never ever been able to understand. It seems like a wound that won’t heal: a horrible abscess of the soul and a poisoning of the brain. The materialism and wealth accumulation that consumes their lives seem like attempts to create a monumental artificial beauty that masks the repulsive and tragic corruption hollowing out their humanity. This is why Republican-type people seem so fake to me, soulless androids trapped by limited programming for hostility, which is advanced by deceit and masked by denial, and which is based on resentment of those deemed inferior. I think their ongoing and unacknowledged anger is an unconscious eruption of protest and rebellion against the repression of their own humanity.

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Equality vs. Freedom

Conservatism (n.), a political economy that rewards wealth and punishes poverty.

Liberalism (n.), a political economy that rewards wealth without rancor to the poor.

Socialism (n.), a political economy that equitably maximizes social benefits instead of inequitably maximizing individuals’ profits.

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Conservatives (n.), self-imagined victims of the poor who they persecute in revenge.

Liberals (n.), self-imagined humanitarians who believe they deserve advantages and appreciation.

Socialists (n.), people who want fairness to govern the politics of their society.

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Conservatives and Liberals are both capitalists, want limited government (“freedom”), and are thus anti-socialist (anti-“equality”).

Socialists are anti-capitalist, and thus favor a state-managed economy (“equality”).

Democratic Socialists are a hybrid of Liberals (capitalists) and Socialists (anti-capitalists), their political economy is state-regulated capitalism for the elimination of poverty, managed by a democratic process (“Freedom” moderated by “equality”).

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People vs. the Purpose of Government

Every American is guaranteed the right to try to become wealthy on their own. The purpose of government is to protect the wealth of those who have successfully profited from their right to seek wealth. The degree of that protection is proportional to the amount of wealth.

Government is not the problem, the people are the problem. If the government can just defund the people it will have all the money it needs (from taxing the people) to spend on the really important things: billionaire bonuses (need-baseless untaxing); controlling world fossil fuel reserves (power hoarding); wars for Zionist expansion (Modern Manifest Destiny); free Wall Street speculation insurance (single-payer Fortune-care); corporate welfare (job security for oil, pharma, war tech, etc., billionaires); intelligence, robotic and special military forces to control the world (real bomb delivery by White Pentagon House laptop); and domestic occupation forces to corral the people away from wealth-safe, toxin-free and government-only areas (IDF, Internal Defense Force). Public voting remains a problem to government security, and needs to be replaced with access-controlled private voting by purchase of candidates. “Voting is so precious it has to be rationed.”

The people do not have constitutional rights to: dignity, respectful treatment, clean water (everywhere), food (and also real, organic and non-GMO food), health, health benefits (whether publicly funded or employer-based), housing, winter heating, financial security, family planning & reproductive rights (services, equipment and accessories), truthful news media, good public education, full-time living-wage employment, vacations, determine terminal care actions for self with medical assistance (everywhere), and exclusively publicly-funded elections with open primaries and debates open to all candidates. These are all privileges, and privileges are awarded on the basis of competitive bidding by privilege buyers. A variety of private charities offer some of these privileges to the public in many regions of the country, on the basis of their own assessments of individual need and merit.

The burdensome overhead on government for populist benefits must be eliminated to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of protecting wealth and property proportionately, and of accelerating capital gains.

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Donald Trump’s Medal of Honor Citation

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Classified Citation for the Secret Medal of Honor, for Donald Trump

In the Classified History of the United States, Donald Trump will go down as one of the greatest heroes of the early twenty-first century, for almost single-handedly saving the republic from the anti-capitalist insurrection of Bernard Sanders, thus allowing our neoliberal economic order, guided by its Wall Street conservators, to continue without any foreseeable domestic threats for the remainder of the century.

Donald Trump accomplished this feat by his uncanny insights into public relations, his personal investments and losses, and his unsurpassed personal sacrifices in accepting near universal condemnation for his public policies, and opprobrium for his personal behavior. By willingly exposing himself to the public as the villainous foil to our designated successor for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, and carrying through with this boundlessly difficult and distasteful role to the bitter end, Donald succeeded in repelling a majority of the American public into the embrace of Hillary Clinton, and thus satisfactorily under our continuing control.

Donald single-handedly ruptured the Republican Party, creating the opportunity for it to repudiate its obstreperous and discredited populist “Tea Party” elements, and to realign itself once again under the full control of its long-standing and stable professionals of our bipartisan national leadership class. By creating what has been called “the most powerful negative pole of political policy and activity ever exhibited in an American presidential election,” Donald caused the fragile and insecure positivity of Hillary Clinton’s “political pole” to be exponentially enhanced in public perception. As a consequence of this felicitous enhancement, the luster of Bernard Sanders has been significantly dimmed, and the rabid enthusiasm of his anti-capitalist followers has been satisfactorily quenched into a mass disappointment that has excellent prospects of enduring as long term apathy.

Barack Obama has been the most successful tool for public guidance we have ever been fortunate to acquire, so it was natural we would once again turn to the Clinton-controlled Democratic Party for his successor. Hillary Clinton is the outstanding choice for that role, because of her lifetime of loyalty to our interests, and the singular confluence of politically useful characteristics she possesses: her female sex, which immediately guarantees her capturing half the votes in America, her absolute freedom from moral impediments, her salubrious cupidity (the bedrock of her loyalty), and her mastery of dissimulation and political manipulation. Where this “dream candidate” has weakness is in the area of easily rallying the public, and we had great apprehension earlier in her campaign with the surge of Bernard Sanders in opposition to her. It required the coordinated efforts of our operatives in the Democratic Party, the media, the corporate donor class, and the Obama Administration (including the president himself) to bring the Sanders insurgency to heel. But, essential to making the anti-Sanders counteroffensive successful were the enormous contributions of Donald Trump in the public sphere, as described earlier.

Truly it can be said that no man has knowingly shown greater loyalty to our class interests, and at greater sacrifice, than Donald Trump. For his unbounded and effective energy, sacrifices and success in our interests, we bestow on Donald Trump the Secret Medal of Honor.

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