The Pentagon and China's Propaganda Wars (Expanded Edition)

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 14 seconds

The Pentagon and China are waging a propaganda war against their own people, and the greedy globalists of corporate Hollywood are happy to help

Hollywood won’t choose between the totalitarian Sauron of China and the authoritarian Darth Vader of the U.S. military, but instead will support both evils, and the people of the world and the art of cinema will suffer greatly because of it.

There is currently a propaganda war being waged by China and the U.S. military where both want to control Hollywood, and therefore the minds of their citizenry, for their own nefarious means.

Not surprisingly, like whores at a battlefield brothel, the morally ambiguous harlots of Hollywood are trying to profit by servicing both combatants.

PEN America, a group championing free expression, recently released an exhaustive report detailing how China has taken control over Hollywood.

The report states, “The Chinese government, under Xi Jinping especially, has heavily emphasized its desire to ensure that Hollywood filmmakers—to use their preferred phrase—“tell China’s story well.”

China strictly controls films released in their market, which is soon to become the largest box office in the world, and Hollywood wants in on that lucrative action, so they appease their Chinese overlords by obeying censorial demands, like whitewashing a Tibetan character from Marvel’s Dr. Strange, and strenuously self-censoring, like cancelling a planned sequel to World War Z.

The whitewashing of a Tibetan character from Dr. Strange is particularly interesting as that became the outrage of the moment back in 2016 when the movie was released. Many activists and journalists howled at the inherent racism of casting a white woman (Tilda Swinton) in a role that was an Asian man in the source material. Interestingly enough, Disney (who owns Marvel) stayed entirely silent throughout the controversy. The PEN America report shows that the reason for the whitewashing was that China wouldn’t allow a Tibetan portrayed on screen, so Disney dutifully complied in an attempt to get the film in the Chinese market. Disney also kept its mouth shut as to why it engaged in whitewashing in order to cover up its appeasement to Chinese demands.

Disney genuflecting to China should come as no surprise. In 1998, Disney’s then CEO, Michael Eisner, met with Premier Zhu Rongji to talk about Disney’s desired expansion into China and the 1997 Martin Scorsese biography of the Dalai Lama it produced, Kundun, which infuriated the Chinese government.

The loathsome Eisner said of Kundun, “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it,” Eisner then groveled further, “Here I want to apologize, and in the future we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.”

In the two decades since then, Chinese power has only grown and Hollywood has only become more and more weak kneed and reflexively compliant.

This Orwellian sentiment of controlled storytelling to fit a government-approved narrative is not limited to the communists of China though. The U.S. military has long had a very fruitful arrangement with Hollywood where they exchange free military equipment, expertise, personnel and locations in exchange for ultimate control over scripts.

Capt. Russell Coons, Director of Navy Office of Information West, sounded like Xi Jinping when he described Pentagon expectations while cooperating with a movie, “We’re not going to support a program that…presents us in a compromising way.”

PEN America notes this Pentagon propaganda program, “…the United States government has benefitted from, encouraged, and at times even directed Hollywood filmmaking as an exercise in soft power.”

But then disingenuously dismisses it, “But this governmental influence does not bring to bear a heavy-handed system of institutionalized censorship, as Beijing’s does.”

That is an absurd contention as the Pentagon picks movies based on a studio’s willingness to conform to its rigidly pro-military narrative standard, which is, in function if not form, just like China picking which Hollywood movies it allows to run in its country based on their adherence to a pro-China criteria.

Regardless, the reality is if Hollywood can financially benefit by acquiescing to the Pentagon and/or China’s demands, it certainly will.

In response to China’s Hollywood propaganda, Sen. Ted Cruz proposed the egregiously titled Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity and Protecting Talkies Act, or SCRIPT Act.

Cruz’s bill aims to kneecap Hollywood studios by withholding access to U.S. government support – the Pentagon propaganda program, if they alter their movies to appease Chinese censors.

Of course, SCRIPT will never go anywhere as the Motion Picture Association of America will aggressively lobby to get the whole thing scuttled to keep both Chinese and Pentagon money flowing to La La Land.

On the bright side, the SCRIPT Act has at least frightened the propagandists in the Pentagon and Hollywood enough that they are now openly touting their shadowy alliance.

For example, The Military Times recently ran a jaw dropping op-ed by Jim Lechner shamelessly espousing Hollywood’s Pentagon propaganda.

Lechner admits, “…limits on the cooperation with skilled storytellers at the American movie companies would significantly degrade the ability of the U.S. government to tell its own story…”

Lechner then boasts, “…over the decades, Hollywood has provided one of the most powerfully positive images of our military. No Pentagon-based press relations operation could come close to what Hollywood has achieved through its films.”

Over the last three decades, the Pentagon-Hollywood alliance has drastically altered American’s perception of the military and successfully neutered filmmakers as artists and truth-tellers.

For example, in the 70’s and 80’s Francis Ford-Coppola, Stanley Kubrick and Oliver Stone, made great anti-war films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, that explored the dark side of American militarism and empire.

That type of artistic and intellectually challenging anti-war movie went on the endangered species list in 1986 when the Pentagon collaborated on the making of the blockbuster Top Gun, and has since become extinct, which is why we haven’t had any great movies detailing the heinous fiascoes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Oliver Stone spoke about how he had wanted for decades to make a movie about the My Lai Massacre but was unable to get a studio on board for funding. Stone did not explicitly state this, but the implication was clear, the Pentagon’s propaganda program not only assists pro-military movies, but intimidates studios into avoiding films that are anti-war or highlight military misdeeds.

Ironically, Top Gun has become not only a symbol of the Pentagon’s propaganda prowess, but of China’s as well. In the poster for the sequel due out this year, Tom Cruise’s Maverick is still wearing his signature leather jacket, but in order to appease Chinese censors, gone from its back are the prominent Japanese and Taiwanese flags from the original.

The modern golden era of Hollywood films exploring the darker side of China peaked in 1997 with Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner. China’s swift and severe reaction to those films and the studios and production companies that made them, was extremely effective as it has resulted in studios strangling any truthful artistic exploration of Chinese themes and stories in order to avoid alienating the Chinese Communist Party and potentially missing out on the ever expanding Chinese box office.

As a cinephile and a truth-seeker, I want to see films made by true artists that chronicle the dramatically potent moral and ethical atrocities of both America and China. The plethora of post 9-11 American evils (surveillance, torture, Iraq, Afghanistan) and the brutal Chinese atrocities against the Uighers, Tibetans and members of the Falun Gong, are fertile cinematic ground. But sadly…thanks to Hollywood’s insidious, incessant and insatiable greed, none of those important stories will ever be told on the big screen.

The reality is that the propaganda war is already over and the authoritarian and totalitarian corporatists, globalists and militarists of Hollywood, Washington and Beijing, have handily won…and we the people, and the art of cinema, have lost. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

A Not-So-Very "Expert" Opinion on our Future with the Coronavirus

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

Even though I am currently a student at the Hollywood Upstairs Medical College School of Epidemiology, I have, despite the status and privilege conferred upon me by my incomplete (and entirely inadequate) education, refused to indulge the urge to make pronouncements regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

That ends today.

In the last few months I have noticed a major shift in the public’s psychology and attitude regarding coronavirus. This shift began in May, about two months into the lockdown, when I perceived that people were pretty much done with all this bullshit.

At first the shift was subtle and took the form of whispered doubts and frustrations, but then as time progressed this sentiment became much more pronounced and went from talk to action.

For instance, there are a plethora of people I know who were all in on being lockdown good citizens in April, who then questioned the validity of it all in May, and by June were throwing caution to the wind and going out to restaurants and traveling for vacation.

These folks, who all happen to be liberals of varying stripes, still “believed” in coronavirus and would say that it was happening and was serious, but that “belief” was almost entirely more politically driven rather than driven by sober, rational thought, and was most definitely betrayed by their actions.

I totally empathize with these folks as the desolation of our current cultural Manichean paradigm of good v evil forces us into binary labels and thus encourages and enables cognitive dissonance to thrive in the absence of nuance. For instance, the media has repeated over and over again that only “bad people” don’t believe in coronaviruas or the lockdown, so right thinking “good people” couldn’t say that too even if they had doubts about the efficacy of the lock down or the dangers of the disease. This results in many “good people” (liberals) acting, mask wearing aside, almost identically oblivious to the danger of coronavirus as the “bad people” (Trumpers), but just labeling their actions and intentions differently.

The thing that stood out to me about this shift of thinking and behavior among these “good people” was that it was almost entirely a function of emotional and mental fatigue as opposed to the animating principle of the “bad people”, defiance. The “good people” who dutifully obeyed the lock down in April grew fed up, sick and tired and wanted coronavirus to be over in May, and by the time June rolled around they simply acted as if coronavirus was over, even though it wasn’t. Yes, these “good people” were certainly conscious and conscientious enough, to wear masks out in public…but also unconscious enough to consistently go out in public when it wasn’t even remotely necessary.

I understand the feeling, as the mental and emotional pressure of living in lockdown is something that most people, regardless of the supposed comfort of their gilded cage, simply cannot handle.

Luckily for me, despite my decidedly ungilded cage, I am a monk at heart and in practice, so isolation is less of a burden. That said, even I have felt the sting of lockdown and the pang of yearning for normal to return. I can only imagine the intensity of that feeling for normal people who want to get out and interact and socialize and “live”…of course the irony of that is that getting out and “living” in the age of Covid 19 can lead to dying.

This blatantly obvious spike in cognitive dissonance regarding the coronavirus by the general public over the last two months was mirrored by health officials. The greatest example of this was the collection of “health officials” that signed an open letter stating that coronavirus is a deadly serious pandemic but that people should ignore lockdown protocols and get out and protest against racism, but that going out or protesting for any other reason was a function of white supremacy.

This is, of course, absurdly insane, as the virus does not recognize the righteousness of whatever cause someone is protesting for or against…it just wants to propagate itself.

The fact that these "health officials” would so quickly and willingly sell their professional integrity for politically correct social status is a stunning thing, and glaring evidence of a powerful cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias at work.

The New York Times did an article on these “health officials” a month after their letter was released and it is simply remarkable to behold, not just for the “health officials” abject denial of reality and lack of any self-reflection, but also for the Times utter dishonesty and blatant bias.

The result of these “health officials” selling their integrity will only result in the public not believing what health officials tell them…not a good thing during a pandemic. This distrust is only accentuated by the fact that both Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx lied to Americans at the beginning of the pandemic when they told them that they didn’t need facemasks. This lie was told in order to avoid a run on facemasks…which is not a reason that will bolster confidence in the pronouncements of Dr. Fauci and Birx. At this point, why would anyone believe anything any health professional ever said?

The media is equally to blame in all of this as they have long hyped the dangers of coronavirus but totally ignored the health danger of mass protests in the wake of the George Floyd killing because that didn’t fit their narrative. Just another of many reasons to distrust the long ago discredited news media.

This recent spate of decadent madness among the establishment and the hoi pollloi, where social justice trumps science and where emotionalism trumps logic and reason, is a symptom of an empire in very steep decline….and it is only going to get much, much worse at an accelerated pace.

Which brings us to where we are today.

In the coming days, weeks and months and years coronavirus cases are going to spike…then fall off…then spike again. Deaths are going to spike…then fall off…then spike again.

People are going to lose their minds because the normal they so crave is not coming back anytime soon, if ever.

And as people lose their minds, their will be more and more civil unrest…which in turn will lead to more and more spreading of the disease. Eventually there will be a very strident, dare I say, tyrannical lockdown to try and stop the spread…but that is a bit farther in the future.

As for the here and now…this is what I think is on our doorstep.

It bums me out to say this but…sports is not coming back. The NBA, NHL and MLB are trying to re-start and start their seasons but this won’t last very long. The coronavirus situation will become too untenable and all three leagues will have to shut down their seasons for good.

The NFL and college football will suffer the same exact fate. They may try and start things up in the fall but that attempt will pretty quickly fail.

You may think that sports don’t matter…but I beg to differ. I think the lack of sports was a major contributing factor in the intensity of the civil unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. Sports are a psychologically and culturally necessary vehicle for catharsis. Sport is contained and controlled tribal violence…and without it and its cathartic effects on the population, that violent instinct gets released through uncontained and uncontrolled violence…hence the rioting and looting and large spikes in crime in the last few months.

Of course, if the sports leagues would listen to my expert advice and simply fill every arena and stadium with fans holding Black Lives Matter signs, which according to “health officials” and the mainstream media apparently confer immunity to coronavirus onto the sign holder and anyone in their vicinity, then sports could flourish once again and I could get my well-deserved Nobel Prize in Medicinery.

Another big problem in the coming weeks and months is that, as much as parents want it to happen, schools are not going to open in the fall, or if they do open, they wont stay open for long. Kids may not get very sick with coronavirus, but they spread it, and parents and teachers can and will get sick as a result.

Kids not going to school is a major issue as this puts an enormous amount of stress on parents, who are already stressed out. The pressures of trying to either work, or being unemployed, while not just raising but teaching a child full time, is a really bad combination that will only further increase the emotional and mental pressure cooker.

As stated, that pressure will not be released through watching sports…it also won’t be released through going to the movies, or concerts or to bars or out to restaurants. None of those businesses will re-open, and if they do it won’t be for long.

The economic situation will also continue to spiral out of control too as businesses will be unable to open. The cascading effects of this will be a tidal wave of bankruptcies and commercial and residential real estate evictions followed by foreclosures. It will be like 2008…only much worse because it will be happening across the country and with no end in sight.

Here in Los Angeles…things will be really bad, as film and tv production will not be coming back any time soon. This means that large swaths of the city will be unemployed for great periods of time, leading to evictions and foreclosures and a general economic and personal depression.

The lack of new movies and tv shows will also contribute to the general anger and fury growing in America, as a population used to being distracted by sports and entertainment, will have little or none of either.

This means that the election in November, whether it happens or not, is going to be extremely volatile…and no matter who wins…there will be either spasms or volcanic eruptions of violence as a result. I actually think there will be less violence if Biden wins, but there won’t be no violence, as Trump supporters, denied their choice for president and their football, will be extremely on edge.

On the other hand if Trump wins (by vote count or by other means)…God help us all. This country…or at least large swaths of it…will explode and will make the George Floyd protests, riots and looting look like a church picnic. There will be massive amounts of civil unrest in the wake of a Trump victory…probably followed by strong arm totalitarian tactics to quell it.

Maybe I am wrong. Hopefully I am wrong. But I can’t help but notice a less than subtle shift taking place now where the wishful thinking of those who were “done” with coronavirus back in May and June is running head first into the brick wall that is the coronavirus reality…and that is causing a tremendous amount agitation and anxiety that is building up to dangerous levels.

Look, I get it, people are tired, emotionally spent…but the virus doesn’t care about your feelings. It doesn’t care about anything but spreading, and all we need to care about is surviving.

Sadly, we as a people have no leadership…anywhere. Not in our federal, state or local government. And when we need each other the most, when we need community…we have none. We are all on our own and that isolation will break a lot of people and will cause others to try and break what is left of our civilization.

The bottom line is this…that the normal so many are yearning for is not coming back anytime soon….and we all need to get used to the new normal of no normal at all.

©2020

The New Movie Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of our Current Press

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

In 1933, British journalist Gareth Jones risked life and limb in service to the truth, while in comparison, the journalists of today only care about access to power and towing the elite’s ideological line.

Mr. Jones, a new film by esteemed director Agnieszka Holland, tells the true story of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who travels to the Soviet Union in 1933 and uncovers the Holomodor, Stalin’s genocidal famine of Ukrainians.

Sadly, Mr. Jones, which boasts a fantastic cast of James Norton, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard, is a terrific story wrapped in a bad, dramatically unfocused and meandering film.

But thankfully, despite its cinematic unworthiness, the movie still contains important insights very relevant to our current time.

What makes Mr. Jones noteworthy is that the film’s noble protagonist is, unlike our current corrupt press corps, a dogged journalist more loyal to truth than to ideology, and more interested in maintaining his integrity than gaining access to power and wealth.

The film opens with Jones fresh off his 1933 interview with Hitler that leaves him convinced that war is ultimately inevitable. This belief gets him ridiculed for being naïve and hysterical by the stodgy and comfortable old guard of the British press.

Jones then sets his sights on the Soviet Union and tries to figure out how Stalin has been able to pull off his economic boom while the rest of the world is mired in depression, so he goes to Moscow in search of answers.

Upon arrival he finds not the worker’s paradise that fellow journalists, like the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning reporter in Moscow, Walter Duranty, have been deceptively portraying to the world, but instead discovers firsthand the repressive and totalitarian nature of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Jones then follows a lead and risks his life by sneaking off a train and going to Ukraine, where he is thrust into the horrors of the Holomodor, which are brutally and effectively depicted in the film.

When Jones exposes this calamity to the western world, political expediency causes it to be met with either skepticism or indifference. Unlike other journalists of his, or our, age, Jones refuses to tell people in power what they want to hear, instead telling them the truth, and is essentially blackballed and exiled because of it.

No doubt the same would happen today to any reporter brave enough to go against the officially approved narrative.

Our current press corps is inhabited by truth-disdaining, sycophantic stenographers more akin to the villainous Walter Duranty, a propagandist for the cause who sold his journalistic soul in exchange for a decadent and depraved lifestyle, than the truth-seeking Gareth Jones.

It is ironic that journalists of yesteryear, like Duranty, were complicit in positive falsehoods about Stalin’s Soviet Union, while journalists of today are complicit in negative falsehoods about Russia.

The cavalcade of journalistic failures and fiascos directly or tangentially related to Russia in recent years include, but are not limited to, the distortion of truth about the Maidan uprising, the supposed Syrian chemical weapons attacks, the ridiculous Cuba microwave weapons story, and of course, Russiagate, the biggest journalistic fraud perpetrated upon the American public since the Iraq War. And just this week we have added to this cornucopia of corporate media crap the ‘Russians pay bounty to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan’ nonsense. All of these stories are vapid, thin, propagandistic gruel, devoid of any depth, insight or actual reporting.

One glimpse at the ever-growing list of recurring journalistic farces involving Russia and it becomes glaringly obvious that Operation Mockingbird, the Cold War CIA program that planted stories and journalists in newsrooms across the media, is alive and well in practice, if not in name.

It is readily apparent that just as Walter Duranty was getting his marching orders from Moscow, reporters of today get their marching orders from Langely.

Of course, the truth-averse, ideologically driven journalism of the corporate media isn’t restricted to just Russia stories, as evidenced by the slavish and slanted coverage of Black Lives Matter and other woke endeavors.

The thing that I find most grating about the reliably deceptive establishment media is their incessant complaining about Trump’s alleged war on the press.

These same news outlets were conspicuously silent when Obama prosecuted whistleblowers nine times, which is three times more than all of his predecessors combined.

There was also nary a word of dissension from the intrepid souls in the media when Obama’s Department of Justice and FBI spied on reporters and tried to coerce them to expose their sources.

The most glaring example of the ideological cancer in journalism is the cheering by the establishment media of the prosecution and persecution of Julian Assange, who has done more to inform the public of the truth than any corporate-controlled reporter at any news outlet in the world, and may very well die in prison for it. 

The current crop of subservient sycophants play-acting as journalists in the corporate media are an utter disgrace to their profession, and they dishonor the staggering sacrifice that people like Gareth Jones made in service to truth.

Mr. Jones is not a great movie, but it does chronicle the great struggles of a noble man. If only we had many, many more like him today, maybe truth would be revered and the powerful held accountable. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Covid-19 is Deadly, but It Will Never Kill the Relentless Stupidity of Wokeness

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 16 seconds

As the ‘woke’ reaction to coronavirus has shown, even a pandemic won’t slow down the incessant political correctness of woke culture.

The coronavirus pandemic is a very scary and unsettling time for all of us. Everyone one I know is worried about their health, their finances or both.

Every cough or sniffle feels like a potential calamity and every missed paycheck and new bill coming due like the onset of economic ruin.

No one knows if or when life will get back to normal and we can resume working without fear of infection and with it the possibility of death. All of this uncertainty is extremely unnerving.

But thankfully there is something that can anchor us to our carefree, pre-coronavirus past…something persistent and reliable that, like herpes, will stick with us through thick and thin. I am, of course, referring to the idiotically self-defeating, painfully myopic and infuriatingly insipid, politically correct philosophy known as wokeness.

Like the ever-resilient cockroach surviving and thriving in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, that strain of vacuous thought known as wokeness is proving itself to be immune to the Covid-19 contagion.

In those halcyon days before the disease ravaged the U.S., the ‘woke’ narrative was that coronavirus was a human problem, not a Wuhan problem.

Social justice warriors resolutely decreed that coronavirus was not to be attached to ethnic identity and declared that blaming the disease on China or Chinese culture - with its penchant for wet markets and eating bats, was racist, and somehow a slur against Asian-Americans. Of course, only the most in-bred troglodytes believe that Asian-Americans go to wet markets and eat bats and would blame Asian people for the Chinese government’s abysmal failure.

Diminutive, two-bit hack comedian Bill Maher ran afoul of the woke brigade last weekend when he went against this specific politically correct talking point in a much-publicized, and shockingly accurate, rant on his HBO show, where he lambasted those who would deny empirical facts blaming China because it might trigger idiot racists to be racist. This quickly resulted in a cavalcade of woke panties once again getting all in a bunch.

It seems though that woke dogma is shifting now that the deadly coronavirus has spread like wildfire throughout the U.S., either that or these pandering nitwits are just brazenly and shamelessly hypocritical.

For example, the newest decree handed down by the politically correct twitterverse and vapid dopes in the mainstream media is that coronavirus is racist because it “disproportionately” effects black people.

Apparently coronavirus isn’t about identity…unless it is.

The aptly named Charles Blow of the New York Times has become the standard-bearer for this new race-infused woke storyline. Blow, like all social justice hammers that see the whole world as a white racist nail, acrobatically twists logic, the English language and statistics to fit this theory of Covid-19 as the ”Brother Killer”.

In Blow’s latest column, creatively titled “The Brother Killer”, he states that black men are particularly at-risk of coronavirus because they make up larger percentages of the vulnerable prison, homeless and poor population than their percentage of the overall U.S. population.

Blow writes “For these (black) men, the devastating effects of this virus may be as much about pre-existing social conditions as pre-existing medical ones.”

If Blow, and the rest of his woke minions, wanted to be accurate and weren’t blinded by race and flaccid identity politics, that sentence should read, “for poor people of all colors, the devastating effects of the virus are about pre-existing economic conditions.”

The calamity of the coronavirus isn’t about black men in prison, in poverty or living on the streets….it is about PEOPLE stuck in those conditions being susceptible to the disease.

The coronavirus does not care about race, ethnicity, gender, nationality or sexual orientation…just like the ‘woke’, it only cares about propagating itself.

Blow ends his piece with his usual straw man racial calisthenics when he writes, “History has shown that we are callously comfortable averting our gaze away from (black) men like these. We construct racialized rationales that allow us not to care, to say that they courted their fate, that pathology is at play, that one reaps what one sows.”

In what social justice warrior fever dream did Charles Blow conjure up people not caring about coronavirus and shaming its victims? The entire country has shut down in a quixotic attempt to contain the pandemic and minimize its spread, and no one but the most barbaric sociopaths feel anything but pity and sympathy for the poor souls who’ve lost their lives to the disease.

Are the adherents of wokeness, like Charles Blow, correct that alarming numbers of black people are dying from coronavirus? Yes. But it is also true, and equally unjust, that white, Latino, Asian and Native American people are dying in alarmingly large numbers. In other words…a lot of HUMAN BEINGS are dying of coronavirus…regardless of their racial or ethnic background. The Covid-19 pandemic is not a racial tragedy, but rather a human tragedy.

The cold, hard reality is that coronavirus has killed over 30,000 Americans of all races and ethnicities, and more than 130,000 people from nations across the globe. The disease could very well kill me, or you in the coming days, weeks, months and years. But rest assured, no matter how bad it gets or how long Covid-19 rages, it will never, ever kill wokeness – the indestructible cockroach of belief systems.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

UFC 249 is Cancelled. Can We Now Direct Our Bloodlust at the Elites Who Deserve It?

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

With no more live sports to use as an outlet for our anger and frustrations, maybe now we can focus our fury towards the big fight that really matters…the one against the ruling elite.

Last Thursday night Mickey Mouse and the suits at Disney put the ever ornery and defiant president of the UFC, Dana White, into a rear-naked power play/money choke hold and forced him to tap out and shut down UFC 249 due to Covid-19. Thus ended our last and best hope of live sports in the age of coronavirus…at least for now, and probably well into the near future.

I totally understand why Disney forced UFC 249 to shut down, and why every other sport is closed for business too, it is the logical and safe thing to do during a pandemic. I’m just trying to come to grips with how mentally devastating it is not to have any live sports to watch.

First the virus took away the NBA and NHL, then college basketball’s March Madness, followed quickly by baseball’s opening day and I wouldn’t be surprised if even the juggernaut of football ends up on the chopping block too.

Things are so bad they’ve even closed the bars here in Los Angeles so I can’t watch the drunks flex their beer muscles and square off in comically ineffective combat on the sidewalk at closing time. Hell, I can’t even go to the gym and watch myself fight to a respectable draw with my old nemesis - the heavy bag, because of coronavirus.

Sports are cathartic, and combat sports in particular give us a psychological release from the more primal impulses we all carry in our psyche. Watching two combatants enter the ring/octagon and put it all on the line helps us to live vicariously and not channel our own animal instincts by pummeling our idiot neighbor who plays his music too loud…even though that idiot neighbor most definitely deserves a serious pummeling.

UFC 249 was to be headlined by an intriguing bout between current Lightweight Champion, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and former interim champion Tony Ferguson. Coronavirus circumstances and confusion led to the undefeated Khabib bailing out of UFC 249 and being replaced by Justin Gaethje even before Dana White officially put the kibosh on the event. The Khabib-Ferguson pairing has seemingly forever been a star-crossed match-up as UFC 249 is the fifth fight between the two to be cancelled over the last four years.

As much as I wanted to see Khabib back in action, I have to be honest, I am so desperate to watch any fight or sporting event I’d settle for a septuagenarian slap and tickle duel between Donald Trump and Joe Biden at this point…just as long as they keep their shirts on.

In order to satiate my thirst for sport I’ve re-watched a cornucopia of old UFC battles featuring George St. Pierre, Anderson Silva, Chuck Liddell and even Khabib’s bitter rival Conor McGregor. I’ve also indulged in the entire canons of boxing greats like Ali, Arguello, Ray Leonard, Hearns, Hagler, Tyson, Holyfield, Pernell Whitaker and the villainous Floyd Mayweather. I even re-watched the first Gennady Golovkin – Canelo Alverez fight and tried to comprehend how anyone could score it 118-110 for Canelo…I still haven’t figured it out.

The depressing truth is the only new fight left for me to watch nowadays is the fight against coronavirus…and that is not in any way, shape or form an entertaining fight.

Sadly, we are losing this one-sided bout against Covid-19, as everyday more and more people are dying brutal deaths at its cold hands.

In addition, small businesses and the working class are being economically destroyed by this insidious disease, all while the fat cats and oligarchs are once again using a crisis to socialize their losses and privatize their gains through copious corruption-fueled, tax-payer funded bailouts.

While I lament the loss of sports, I am also well aware that it is a frivolous distraction meant to anesthetize the populace so they placidly accept without complaint the malignant ruling corporatocracy that continuously oppresses and depresses them.

Sports have long been a way to reduce, or at least distract us from, the stress and tensions of everyday life, which are only heightened during our communal coronavirus lockdown.  Maybe, just maybe…the absence of sport as a release valve for our anger and anxieties will bring about a breaking of the stranglehold of the status quo. With the masses here in America no longer able to cathartically release their pent up rage by watching two gladiators square off in a brawl, maybe they will cultivate that fury and direct it with laser focus at the ruling class that exploits and brutalizes them.

Americans versus Washington and Wall Street! The people versus the politicians and the corporations! That would be a fight I’d truly love to witness…and engage in.  

Who am I kidding? I know that once sports comes back from its coronavirus exile it will numb us all back into complacency almost as quickly as Khabib will put Ferguson to sleep once they finally meet in the octogon.

Until then, I’ll have to quench my bloodlust by dreaming about beating the daylights out of my idiot neighbor who plays his music too loud. Like those bastards in Washington and on Wall Street, he really does deserve a beat down.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Coronavirus Thoughts and Musings

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 27 seconds

With the coronavirus currently kicking us all in the ass and with Dear Leader announcing that the “self-distancing” protocols will stay in effect for at least another month, now seems as good a time as any to throw out some thoughts regarding this entire viral nightmare that has become our reality.

One of the benefits of being stuck in self-imposed isolation is that it gives one time to reflect and ponder on things. What follows are some of my reflections and ponderings.

PSYCHOLOGY OF A PLAGUE

The psychology of coronavirus is pretty fascinating to observe, in others and in myself.

In the weeks leading up to March 12th, when all hell broke loose in America when the NBA and NHL postponed their seasons over Covid-19 marking a new stage in the seriousness of the pandemic, I spoke to a bunch of people living across the U.S. to ask them what they thought about the coronavirus story.

At that time, every single person I spoke with told me that the coronavirus story was overblown or media hype. Not a single one of them took it even remotely seriously or adapted their lifestyle or began preparing for a prolonged pandemic.

I bought into the coronavirus story pretty early and was genuinely concerned about it, enough so that I stocked up on food and supplies back in February. When I spoke with people about coronavirus, I did not try to convince anyone else to change their opinion, but instead only listened to their perspective. I was keenly aware that to challenge people on their coronavirus beliefs of the moment could be interpreted as “judging” them, which was not my intention. I was only aware that human psychology being what it is, if I pressed people on their beliefs that would only engender defensiveness and further strengthen the belief I was questioning.

What I discovered through these conversations was that the consensus of doubt appeared to be a manifestation of both denial and cognitive dissonance.

What further bolstered this finding was that when I stopped to examine my own journey regarding coronavirus, I quickly discovered that I too went through some stages of palpable denial fueled by cognitive dissonance.

Proof of my cognitive dissonance shows itself in the fact that my concern regarding Covid-19 was so striking that I actually prepared my home for quarantine back in February and at the same time even began lobbying my wife (unsuccessfully) to pull our young son from pre-school, but despite all of that I still engaged in foolish and dangerous behavior anyway.

For example, in the first week of March, even though I was deathly frightened to do so, I still went to two concerts. On March 4th I took crowded public transportation to the Staples Center and saw Kiss, and then four days later went to the Saban Theater to see Buddy Guy. I was hyper-aware of the risk, and was vigilant in avoiding touching things and my face and every fifteen minutes or so doused my hands in Purell, but still, going to those concerts was incredibly reckless.

My thinking when deciding whether to go to these concerts or not was this…”well, I already paid for the ticket so I don’t want that money to go to waste.” This thinking, which my good Irish friend Liam called “Potato Famine Mentality”, is utterly insane. In my mind I was risking my life to go to these concerts, but still went out of not wanting to “waste money”. This is denial in action and shows the power of my own cognitive dissonance.

On March 9th, the day after I attended the Buddy Guy show, consensus was finally reached in the Politburo of my household and so we pulled my son from school, and my wife stopped going to work. This was one full week before all of LA and LA schools were shut down and three days before the NBA and NHL shut down. So basically my family has officially had a one week head start on wrapping our head around the very difficult-to-grasp concept of quarantining. From this vantage point it has been enlightening to see other people go through the same mental gymnastics we did, just a week or two after us.

For instance, days after I pulled my son from school both LA and New York City began debating whether they should shut down schools. The arguments they used were, like my Potato Famine Mentality, utterly insane, such as “kids don’t die from the disease” or “parents can’t stop working to stay at home with kids” or “kids get their meals from school”. These statements may be true but they are entirely irrelevant when dealing with a deadly pandemic. LA and NYC schools were victims of their own cognitive dissonance and stuck in denial because to acknowledge reality was too heavy a burden to bear. The officials in LA and NYC were simply incapable of wrapping their heads around the gravity of the situation because it was in their own personal best interests to not do so. Thankfully, they eventually came to their senses and a week after I made the same decision, they closed schools.

President Trump, the federal government and some state governments, have gone through that same roller coaster ride of denial, until reality crashed upon their heads and it could no longer be denied. Trump, ever the American id, sometimes goes through masturbatorial episodes of cognitive dissonance and denial even in the course of a press conference or in the answer to a single question.

The biggest lesson I learned from my struggle with cognitive dissonance and denial was that people really are entirely resistant to the concept of their own vulnerability and massive upheaval and change.

For example, baby boomers seem to be in deep denial about the dangers of coronavirus, and have been very slow to grasp the dire nature of the situation. Added on top of that is their denial of the reality that they are, in fact, elderly. It seems the vast majority of that generation are oblivious to the danger of Covid-19 and to the fact that they are not invincible, and have acted recklessly and selfishly in an act of adolescent defiance. You’d expect the delusion of invincibility from teenagers whose brains haven’t even fully developed yet, but not from 70 year olds with a lifetime of experience.

The baby boomer’s delusions of invincibility as well as their coronavirus denial fit nicely into American’s overall persistent inability to grasp that things can and will change, and will do so in a hurry. The one basic rule of life is this…things will not always be the way they are now. The aggressively delusional nature of our entire culture is stunning to behold when you step back and take a good look at it….and right now we all have time to step back and take a look at it.

Speaking of the delusional nature of our culture…

THE POLITICS OF A PANDEMIC

The coronavirus is a black swan event that is obliterating expectations across our culture and throwing everything, be it the economy, politics, entertainment, sport, you name it…into chaos.

As I argued in my last piece, crisis is always an opportunity for change, but the things that need to change in America won’t, and the things we shouldn’t change will…but for the worse.

Which brings us to the presidential election. My first thought regarding the election is I wonder if it will even happen.

There have been some epidemiologists saying that they believe that Covid-19 is a seasonal disease. This is good news and bad news…the good news is that it means that the disease will recede in the summer which will give people a much needed break from isolation.

The bad news is that being seasonal means it will return in the fall…right around election time. So if it returns in early November, that means that polling places could be a prime place for transmission and the pandemic could intensify over the winter beyond the nightmare through which we are already living.

If coronavirus returns earlier than that…say in early October, that could be even more troubling, as there is a distinct possibility that the election could be “postponed”. I know that sounds alarmist…but does anyone think that Trump would hesitate for one second to postpone/cancel the election if it were to his benefit? Does anyone think the Republicans in the Senate and the House, or conservatives on the Supreme Court would challenge him on that? No way.

It would also be difficult for Democrats to make a compelling case against this action since they will no doubt spend the campaign slamming Trump for having not done enough to prevent the coronavirus crisis in the first place or to fight it when it arrived. Trump would of course frame the “postponed” election as a preventative measure and would then turn the issue onto Democrats who are being reckless with America’s health.

Of course, this is all just speculation, and I hope the virus is soon eradicated and life returns to some semblance of “normalcy”. But normalcy seems much farther away than tyranny at the moment.

As far as the candidates go, due to coronavirus, they are not as set in stone as we might think they are. Both Trump and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, are in their 70’s and not exactly the picture of health. It is certainly not out of the realm of possibility that Trump or Biden or both, could get sick and ultimately die from the disease….or something else.

Trump dying from Covid-19 (or another health issue), would, depending on the timing, presumably put Pence on the ballot. It would also kick off a furious civil war within the Republican party that would obliterate any chance for their victory in November. Trump and his personal ambition are the foundation of the Republican party right now, and without his cult of personality, the party will crumble.

Even Pence being the VP choice is tenuous at the moment. Even though he is one of the most aggressive sycophants of the Trump era who has brought shameless ass-kissing to new lows, I could totally see Trump just kicking him to the curb for Nikki Haley or someone else.

Even though Trump has been excruciatingly awful in his handling of the coronavirus crisis and in leading the country through it, his poll numbers are skyrocketing (for him at least) so he may not have to cancel the election to win it. Trump is greatly aided by the fact that the Democrats seem to be rolling the dice with Joe Biden, who looks as though he reeks of formaldehyde. it is hysterical to me that Democrats chose to make their decision in the primary on “electability”, and landed on Biden, who is an absolute disaster of a candidate. He is obviously suffering from dementia, and appears to be having a stroke almost every time he is on camera.

In the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis Biden was totally MIA. In recent days he has come out of hiding and everyone now wishes he was back to being MIA.

Biden persistently appears like a doddering old man who has just awoken from a very long and disorienting nap. Even with the absurdly soft treatment he gets from the media, the incoherent Biden still looks so physically and mentally frail that it is painful to watch.

Beyond Biden’s age and health limitations, he is also just a dreadful politician, and always has been. He is exactly what we don’t need or want at this moment. He is a corrupt establishmentarian who believes in absolutely nothing except his own advancement. A brief glimpse at his long track record reveals a target rich environment where selling out isn’t just a recurring theme, but the only theme.

It is very apparent to me that Trump is not up to running the country, but it is also very apparent that Biden is not up to running for president. I think even the dipshits at the DNC can see that he is not up to a grueling campaign. I believe there is a decent chance that at, or before, the convention, Biden steps down, or is pushed…in fact I’d put the odds of Biden being the nominee in November at less than 50%.

There is a lot of speculation afoot that the current “savior of the moment”, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, or as I call him, Rudy Giuliani with a Prostate, may be foisted upon the nation at the convention. I have an intense dislike for Andrew Cuomo, who is an absolute piece of shit and one of the biggest assholes we have in public life - quite an accomplishment.

Governor Cuomo is out there now bitching and moaning about a lack of hospital beds and supplies in New York needed to fight the plague of coronavirus, but it is his policies, including gutting medicaid - which he is still doing even during a pandemic - that have closed hospitals and removed 20,000 hospital beds from the state. Once again a politician makes it rain outside then complains about the weather.

Andrew’s brother Chris, who just tested positive for Covid-19, is a CNN host and may very well be the dumbest human being to ever walk the face of the earth. I sincerely hope that Chris recovers in full, if only because I hope to meet him one day, call him “Fredo” and then beat the few brain cells he actually has out of his stupid, dopey head.

It has been well established that Chris Cuomo is Fredo Corleone…but make no mistake, that does not make Andrew Cuomo - Michael Corleone…or even Sonny or Tom. No, Andrew Cuomo is Phillip Tattaglia…and just like Tattaglia, Andrew Cuomo is a skeezy pimp.

Besides Cuomo as a Biden replacement, there have also been rumblings that Hillary Clinton would, like a nasty strain of chlamydia, resurface once again. This is unlikely, but considering it is such a catastrophically bad idea, the DNC might just do it.

Regardless of who the candidates are, there is one thing we can count on…the American people are going to get fucked over six ways to Sunday by whichever douchebag wins.

PLAYING PANDEMIC DURING A PANDEMIC

Ten years ago this April 14th, my good friend Ben Morris died from cancer. Ben’s death was a staggering blow to all of us who loved him.

Ben battled the disease for over two years before it took his life. In those years, where he was more or less stuck in his brother Jem’s apartment in Los Angeles or at his parents house in Seattle, Ben became interested in, and sort of obsessed with, high end board games.

Ben, Jem and I would play these pricey board games for hours and hours on end. Games like Catan, Puerto Rico, Die Macher, Princes of Florence and many others were on the menu for our marathon sessions.

Board games were perfect for us because playing them was a social act, we could converse and joke and actually look at one another as we played, unlike with say video games, where there is very little human connection.

Ben and I got so into board games we actually designed our own, which I have to admit was a pretty cool game. Sadly, a mutual friend (former friend actually) stole the idea after Ben died and is now trying to sell it as his own. Rest assured, if I ever see this cunt again I am going to kick him in the mouth so hard his teeth will fly out his asshole, and then I’ll decapitate him with a wooden spoon and throw his empty fucking head into a septic tank.

Sorry…I got distracted by rage…what was I talking about? Oh right…board games.

Anyway, one game that Ben really got into when he was sick was Pandemic. Pandemic is a board game where you work as a team to try and stop a series of disease outbreaks across the globe. It is a pretty cool game.

Ben went through a period during his illness when he was obsessed with Pandemic…so much so that he would play solitaire games of it for hours on end. The psychology of someone battling cancer being obsessed with a game where you are trying to stamp out disease popping up across the globe is fascinating. It seemed obvious to me that Ben was using Pandemic as an avatar for his own battle to stamp out the disease in his body.

Which brings me to today and the coronavirus pandemic.

When Ben died Jem gave me a lot of the board games we all used to play. Not being much of a social entity, I have not played the games a great deal over the last decade. But when the coronavirus pandemic hit I immediately thought of Pandemic and went to try and find it. I couldn’t though. The game is somehow missing from my collection. So I searched online and found a video version of it instead that only cost $4.99…which is a huge bargain since high end board games can run $50 or more. So I bought Pandemic online and began to play it on my own.

I can now fully understand how the fear of dying from a disease can fuel an obsession with Pandemic. There is an urgency and profound meaning to every game I play. When I lose and the pandemic runs out of control over the earth, my heart sinks as I ponder the chance of that happening in the real world. My mortality doesn’t just feel inevitable, but impending.

When I actually win the game, which is maybe 1/3 of the time, I find myself being much, much more optimistic about the coronavirus pandemic and how bad it will get and how soon it will end. After wins I find myself gravitating to more positive news regarding our own pandemic…away from death counts and toward cures, vaccines and optimistic timelines and such.

I think my current fascination with the game Pandemic is just another extension of the denial I mentioned earlier. In the coronavirus pandemic we all feel hopeless and helpless and there is nothing we can do…but when I play Pandemic it feels like I am doing something. The thing I am doing is, every time I win at least, purging my anxiety, and when I lose it is an exercise in embracing humility in the face of a gargantuan existential problem.

Beyond that, I have no further insights on coronavirus at the moment, so I will conclude my rambling by telling you to stay safe, stay healthy and stay alive.

©2020

Lost Opportunities and Dastardly Deeds in the Age of Coronavirus

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 27 seconds

On March 17th, I published an op-ed titled “Coronavirus Will Eventually Get Better, But America Never Will”, that made the argument that while everything should change because of coronavirus, but nothing would change because of corruption. This week the Republicans and Democrats did me the great favor of once again proving me correct when they passed a gargantuan $2 trillion “stimulus” bill that is really just a massive bail out and corporate coup, all while fucking over the middle, working and lower class people of this country.

The coronavirus is the iceberg that has hit the U.S.S. Good Ship Lollipop as it wandered lost in the fog of its own decadence. The delusional, the duped and the damned are left in shock, stunned that such a calamity could actually befall The Greatest Nation on Earth® they thought was invincible.

What the ruling elite are doing with this bailout bill is once again stealing from the poor in order to try to reinflate a bubble, in this case the post-2008 bubble, which is actually a bubble on top of a bubble on top of a bubble going all the way back to Reagan. What ends up happening when you reinflate bubbles is that they become more and more unstable and more and more untenable, and when they burst it takes more and more effort to reinflate them until there is nothing left in the lungs to exhale. Eventually U.S. economic policy will be reduced to bailouts that are the equivalent of a corpse giving CPR to another corpse.

For example, when the tech bubble of the late 90’s burst it was propped back up with the housing bubble. The housing bubble burst in 07/08 and that was propped up with the stock buy back bubble of 2009-2020, which has now burst upon the rocks of reality revealed by the coronavirus. The stock buyback bubble is what they are trying to reinflate with the yet another bazillion dollar corporate handout.

The bottom line is this, our economy is as fundamentally unstable as a one-legged stool and as crooked as a dog’s hind leg and has been for decades. The Reagan/Clinton casino banking model has always been just another Titanic, and this trillion dollar bailout package is nothing more than the hoarding of deck chairs by the rich as they throw the poor into the icy Atlantic of inescapable poverty to try and keep their financial monstrosity afloat for just a few glorious seconds longer.

As long time readers know, it wasn’t just last week that I was a bringer of bad news. In 2015 in a review of the Ridley Scott film The Martian, I wrote about how our economy was fatally flawed and that a tsunami was coming. I did the same thing in my 2016 review of The Big Short, where I wrote, “The house of cards is coming down whether we are ready for it or not…it isn't a matter of if…it is a matter of when. You can either prepare for the coming tsunami* or not, that is up to you…but what you cannot do this time around...is say that no one told you it was coming.”

CRISIS AS OPPORTUNITY

I have always maintained that crisis is an opportunity…for good or for ill. The coronavirus pandemic presents a unique set of problems, and the correct answers to those problems could possibly transform our country and society in extremely positive ways. The problem though is that our political class is so riddled with the cancer of corruption that any chance of good coming from this is basically nil, and the odds of bad things coming from it are so high they are off the charts.

With that in mind I decided to put together a little list of things that should or could have happened in response to coronavirus to save this country and its people…but never will. I’ve also compiled some terrible things that most likely will happen that are even worse than the $2 trillion bailout we just had rammed into our collective anus.

No doubt these lists will infuriate most everyone for one reason or another, but as you can imagine I am pretty used to that.

HEALTH CARE AND HEALTH INSURANCE

Coronavirus has shown that our deplorable health care and health insurance system is not just a health crisis, it is a national security crisis, and yet we have two political parties dedicated to preserving the corporate status quo that fails Americans and leaves the nation vulnerable.

Health care must be made not only a human right, but a national security priority.

Pandemic preparation must be as great a priority as our military preparation, as coronavirus has proven that we are much more vulnerable to invasion by illness than by enemy.

The for-profit health insurance industry must be eradicated from the face of the earth. In order to do this health care must be classified a national security priority so that funds from the bloated Pentagon budget can be diverted for a massive rebuilding of our medical infrastructure. This infrastructure includes building more hospitals, building a medical manufacturing base and training more nurses and doctors, as well as implementing a Medicare-for-all, single payer insurance system.

The implementation of single payer healthcare will also have the benefit of releasing working Americans from the indentured servitude that is employer based health insurance and the corporate slavery that is the abomination called Obamacare.

In terms of economics, having a robust national health care system and Medicare-for-all/single payer health insurance will create a safety net that will put American business and enterprise on equal footing with their competition across the globe. It will also free people from staying in jobs that mistreat them, thus giving more power to workers, and will invigorate the entrepreneurial spirit, freeing people to start their own businesses knowing that they wont have to carry the burden of their employees health care or worry about not having health care themselves if their business fails.

Another instrument that would spur economic growth and entrepreneurialism would be a Universal Basic Income. As Andrew Yang showed in his Quixotic presidential campaign, it is a manageable program that could be funded simply by fairly taxing a behemoth like Amazon. It would also be good to see a stake through the heart of the trickle down thinking that has brought the U.S. to this point in its demise. Some “trickle-up” economics would be a wise change of pace.

ECONOMICS, TRADE AND IMMIGRATION

Another national security crisis is the globalism and free trade that has decimated the working and middle class in America so that corporations and the investor class can increase their wealth and power.

Free trade is a national security crisis because our supply line runs through China and other nations, which leaves America, its citizens and military, weakened and defenseless since we rely on the Chinese for many of our medications and medical supplies. This is the equivalent of relying on Japanese manufacturers to build the engines of our fighter planes during World War II.

It is simply untenable for any nation to rely upon others for vital goods, be it weapons, food, energy or medical equipment. For the U.S. to be so intertwined with China and other countries is good for investors, but bad for America.

I don’t think we should go to war with China or be belligerent towards them, but I do think we need to unwind our economic relationship with them so that it benefits American workers and companies, and solidifies our national security.

China always behaves in its best national security interest, so why don’t we?

Immigration is another national security issue highlighted by coronavirus. If we were an actual country in control of its borders, and had even the the most basic competent leadership, we should have shut the borders down the second the disease began to pop up around the globe. But ever the buffoon, the orange shitbag Trump was afraid of acting decisively and spooking the markets that got spooked anyway, and he, as always, failed magnificently.

The reality is that illegal immigration leaves us exposed and it leaves the working class in America unprotected. I don’t blame illegal immigrants for trying to come here from the third world shitholes they’re trying to escape. Much of the reason why those third world shitholes are third world shitholes is because of malignant and malevolent American empire, colonialism and meddling.

That said, when the third world migrates to the first world, the first world deteriorates into the third world. Drive around the streets of Los Angeles and you’ll notice something pretty quickly, this is unquestionably a third world city. 60,000 people live on the streets in the shadow of multi-million dollar homes, where they all shit and piss and where many steal and shoot drugs…and the LAPD are basically mandated to not do a single thing about it.

The cheap and easily exploited labor of illegal immigrants creates third world conditions by depressing the wages of working and lower class Americans and enriching the corporate and investor class, thus expanding our extreme wealth disparity. To deny this is to be willfully ignorant and blinded by sentimentality.

What needs to happen is that our border must be closed and illegal immigration stopped entirely, and legal immigration must be put on hiatus for the next 5 years. If we don’t get our immigration situation under control we are doomed. The best way to do this is to punish companies that use illegal/undocumented immigrants…and don’t punish them with fines, punish their managerial class with actual jail time. The market for illegal labor will then quickly dry up, and American workers (of all ethnicities and races) will have more leverage to demand higher wages and better working conditions.

Temporarily stopping legal immigration and eliminating the often-exploited H1B visas for “skilled workers”, would force American companies to solely hire American workers, thus elevating the standard of living in…AMERICA.

Now, the counter-argument is that this will lead to corporations moving overseas for cheaper labor. Good for them. But the way to stop that is to put exorbitant tariffs on all products made outside of the U.S. All of them. If a product isn’t made by American workers, it should cost an arm and a leg to sell it in America…and missing out on the American market would be a death knell for most any company.

Manufacturing simply must be returned to America in full in order to maintain our nation. If a product isn’t made here…BY UNION EMPLOYEES… then it must not be allowed to be profitably be sold here. Protectionism must be our top priority, regardless of what it does to the smoke and mirrors bullshit of the stock market or the investor class.

If we don’t rebuild our country from the working class on up…our boom/bust economy will continue to collapse and reinflate and collapse again until we have wheelbarrows full of worthless paper we used to call money.

In addition to all of that, while we are building a plethora of new hospitals across the country we should also be building government run housing in order for the homeless to have shelter and be accessible to receive much needed health, mental health, addiction and employment services.

Now…will any of these things listed above, that seem not-so-pie-in-the-sky when compared to the magical trillions of dollars the government just conjured up to hand out to corporations, actually happen?

No.

Coronavirus has shown us that the ruling corporate class in America would rather we all die than implement a single payer, non-profit health care system. They would rather have cheap labor from illegal immigrants than a secure border. They would rather have their profits from globalist free trade than protect Americans from the vulnerability of a supply chain that runs through China and other nations. They would rather bail out the wealthy corporate and investor class than hard working Americans who have been struggling just to survive for decades.

That is the ugly, awful, cold, hard reality.

Speaking of terrible things…

CIVIL LIBERTIES

The coronavirus pandemic is much, much, much worse in scope and scale than the catastrophe of 9-11, and as i explain above our response must be much, much, much more aggressive if we ever hope to save this country.

Of course, after 9-11, Bush and company went to work to turn the crisis into an opportunity, so they quickly moved to strangle civil liberties with the Patriot Act, rev up the military industrial complex for some heavy doses of corruption, and invaded Iraq…not to mention put into place a torture regime. All not good.

As evidenced by the bipartisan coronavirus stimulus bill, the same corrupt and tyrannical forces will exploit this coronavirus crisis for their own nefarious ends. The money train has already left the Washington station with its final destination the pockets of millionaires and billionaires as well as those who hold the levers of power.

The next step is the rise of the implementation of the police state and the reduction of civil liberties. What is so ingenious about the civil liberties angle is that people are imprisoning themselves under house arrest and shaming anyone who disobeys. This is an Orwellian stroke of genius for the police and surveillance state.

Another benefit of more than half the U.S. population in confinement is that there is no opportunity for any type of meaningful protest like an Occupy Wall Street or anti-Iraq war marches or even the right-wing Tea Party protests.

I am not saying that people should violate the stay at home orders, or that this is not a legitimate health crisis, but I am saying it is extraordinarily convenient for the ruling powers that the social dynamic now in place is that to leave your home is an immoral act that could kill you or others.

In keeping with this theme of tyranny, the Department of Justice has asked Congress for the power to eliminate Habeas Corpus during emergencies…with coronavirus already officially being designated as a national emergency.

The government will always try to expand its powers when the population is scared and right now the population is scared both for their health as well as for their financial well-being. People are ripe to be manipulated and propagandized to accept just about anything in order to “feel” safe.

In addition,the technology companies in Silicon valley are teaming up with governments across the globe to figure out a way to track every person to see where their have been, who they have talked to and what they have done in order to “track the virus”. Ummm…yeah…that sounds totally benign.

Some states are now even saying they will stop cars and knock on doors to identify people, and decide who may or may not have been to states with high infection rates. States are also closing their borders to travelers from certain areas. Freedom of movement in these allegedly United States of America is no more.

Another wonderfully Orwellian maneuver is that many local governments, like mine here in L.A., are forcing the closing of gun shops. Yes, the last thing we need when our government, led by a voracious authoritarian tyrant, is declaring a state of emergency and moving to impose draconian restrictions on the entire population, is an armed populace.

So as a result of coronavirus we have the federal and state governments eliminating our First, Second, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment protections. What could possibly go wrong?

As Orwell told us, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever”. Well America, the future is now….better get used to the taste of boot leather.

©2020

Coronavirus Will Eventually Get Better But America Never Will

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 27 Seconds

Regular Americans can no longer numb themselves with sports and gluttony, freeing them to clearly see the malignantly craven ruling class that exploits and despises them.

Anyone who has eyes to see can clearly make out that America is an addled empire in steep decline that is firmly entrenched in its bread and circuses stage.

The problem now though is that due to COVID-19, there is a shortage of bread, as supermarket shelves are bare, and the distraction of the circus of sports has been indefinitely removed from our culture, so Americans are left with little to distract them from cold hard reality.

With no brawls or ballgames to watch, and the fear of potential hunger gnawing at their bloated bellies and brains, and with social distancing leaving them isolated with little but their thoughts as company, Americans will now find it harder and harder to ignore the truth about their country and its deplorably corrupt media, financial, government, education and health care systems, that is staring them right in the face.

As the old adage goes, crisis reveals character, and the coronavirus contagion is a crisis of epic proportions that is revealing America to be utterly devoid of any redeeming character whatsoever

If America were a sane, healthy and rational country this would be a great opportunity for change to occur…alas, it is not. America is an insane, unhealthy and irrational nation, and so any genuine change is inconceivable.

For example, this crisis has once again revealed the house of cards that is the smoke and mirrors American economy. The American economy has long been rigged through financialization, where stock buybacks and accounting shenanigans inflate the stock market but create nothing of substance for the masses except the illusion of prosperity. Here in America the economy long ago stopped working for regular folks as evidenced by the fact that despite productivity soaring, for the last forty years wages have remained stagnant while and the cost of living has escalated.

The American Way has devolved to become bizarro-world Robin Hood, where the rich steal from the poor and give it themselves. Proof of this is that this COVID-19 crisis will undoubtedly be used, just like the 2008 housing collapse was, as a way for the malignant narcissists in Washington, Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms to come together to assure that losses are socialized and their profits privatized. Casinos, cruise lines, airlines, hotels and of course, the scoundrels on Wall Street, are no doubt already lining up for their taxpayer funded handout from the incompetent boor in the White House.

Bailing out working and middle class Americans though is an absolute non-starter for the ruling elite. The upper crust will throw around vacuous catch phrases, like the deliciously ironic “moral hazard”, to make their argument, which is pretty rich considering the vermin on Wall Street and their cronies on Capitol Hill are so morally bereft it is a hazard to all of humanity.

Coronavirus is not nearly as deadly as the cancerous corruption that is endemic in our oligarchic corpotocracy. For proof of that look no further than Nancy Pelosi’s emergency “sick pay” bill, that exempts companies of over 500 employees from paying sick pay and has a boatload of special exemptions for businesses below that threshold that leaves all but 20% of workers eligible for benefits. The holes in Pelosi’s sick pay bill are bigger than the gaping void where her brain and soul should be.

The egregious economic divide in America was also highlighted by the COVID-19 debate over whether to close schools amidst the crisis. The reason this debate raged on well past the rational time to act is that our education system is not a system of learning but rather a glorified daycare and food delivery service.

Proletarian parents are unable to stay home and raise their kids anymore because it now takes two working parents - usually working multiple jobs - to make less than what one working parent did forty years ago.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 70% of all students are below the poverty line and rely on the school system for the majority of their meals. In the wealthiest country on the planet, that is absolutely disgraceful. The virus of structural economic inequality is a much more long-term and deadly problem than coronavirus, and the ruling class and their shameless lackeys in the press, have no interest in ever honestly addressing or acknowledging it.

The corporate whores in Congress and the White House (of both parties) also gleefully inform Americans that universal, single payer health care, which every other industrialized nation in the world already has, is a pipe dream and impossibility.

They tell us they could never ever pay for something so decadent and luxurious as health care, but then they magically pull $1.5 trillion out of their gold plated assholes in order to stave off a collapse of their own making. It is amazing how the Lords of Finance can make money miraculously appear in order to get things done when it is their exorbitant wealth on the line and not ordinary Americans health and well being.

Coronavirus is a crisis that is revealing the ugly truth about America and the malignant character of its ruling class. The coronavirus crisis is going to get worse before it gets better, but hopefully it will eventually get better. America, on the other hand, will only get much worse, and there is no hope that it is ever going to get any better.

A version of this article was published at RT.

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 11 - Coronavirus and Contagion

This week on Looking California and Feeling Minnesota real life meets Hollywood.  Barry and I discuss the current effects the Coronavirus is having on the studios and more importantly those working in the gigantic gig economy that is the film industry.  We also look back at the 2011 Steven Soderbergh movie Contagion.

LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA: EP. 11 - CORONAVIRUS AND CONTAGION

Thanks for listening and stay safe out there.

©2020

The Invisible Man: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This movie starts off well but spins out of control and becomes ultimately a whole lot of silliness. Even if you are a big horror fan, you can wait to see it for free on a streaming service or cable.

The Invisible Man, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, is the story of Cecilia Kass, a woman in an abusive relationship whose controlling ex-boyfriend goes to remarkable scientific lengths to torment her. The film stars Elisabeth Moss as Cecilia, with supporting turns from Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer and Michael Dorman.

The Invisible Man is H.G. Wells’ iconic story of a mad scientist who tries to play God and turns himself invisible, this film version however is set in modern times and turns the story on its head by giving the viewer not the perspective of the scientist, but that of his long suffering girlfriend trying to get away from him.

The trailer for The Invisible Man was terrific and while I am not much of a horror film aficionado, I was excited to see it. The film’s opening sequence lives up to the trailer’s promise, as it is extremely well-done and directed, and immediately captivates the audience by throwing them directly into the tension. The problem though is that the opening sequence is scuttled by its illogical conclusion, as the film quickly deviates from a real-world setting into make-believe movie-dom, thus defusing the tension and knee-capping the suspension of disbelief. Things go down hill from there.

The first half of the film is a decent thriller, and director Whannell effectively uses long, slow pan shots that hold on seeming nothingness, as well as natural sound and a paucity of music, to convey an ominous sense of tension.

In the second half of the movie though, Whannell abandons this successful restrictive directorial approach for more conventional movie making and the film and its narrative spiral out of control and stumble into a morass of melodrama.

Whannell, who also wrote the screenplay, made the fatal error of not committing entirely to his perspective choice, namely having the audience see the world through Cecilia’s eyes. By breaking perspective and periodically showing things from other viewpoints besides Cecilia’s, the connection between audience and Cecilia, and spell of the movie, are broken, and thus we are left with a rather mundane movie of little impact.

Whannell’s other error is that he expands the story beyond the bounds of its natural power. This film, about an abusive relationship, needed to stay within the intimate confines of that relationship, and eschew the wider world, which dilutes the claustrophobia and terror of the premise. Whannell’s failure to contain things neuters the drama as well as the film and its feminist message.

I genuinely like Elisabeth Moss as an actress, as she is a highly skilled and compelling screen presence, but with The Invisible Man she repeats herself and comes perilously close to caricature. Since 2017 Moss has played Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, and won an Emmy for doing so, but her Offred and her Cecilia seem to be the exact same person.

Cecilia, like Offred, is the noble female victim who finally “stands with fist” and fights back against the deplorable patriarchy that has its hands around her neck. The seams of Moss’s work are definitely showing as she spends a lot of her time on screen in both A Handmaid’s Tale and The Invisible Man, not blinking so that her eyes well up with tears, and then blinking so that the tear gracefully falls down her cheek. She also locks her jaw and steels her eyes in an act of defiance that always feels a lot more faux than formidable.

Moss certainly has greatness within her, but I wish I could see her get lost in a performance rather than being forced to see her act.

The rest of the cast are fine, if underwhelming.

Aldis Hodge is a very likable actor and does the best he can with his under written and rather illogical character James.

Stormy Reid is another likeable screen presence but she too is handed a thin character that doesn’t amount to much.

Michael Dormand and Oliver Jackson-Cohen fall pretty flat in their roles which needed to be much sharper for the premise of the film to work.

The Invisible Man is obviously a #MeToo allegory about the patriarchy and the “gaslighting” of women, and that is actually a pretty fascinating take on the story. The feminist politics of the movie and the portrayal of an abused woman’s PTSD work very well in the first half, but they do lose steam and coherence in the second half.

Another troubling thing of note in the movie is its racial politics, which can be boiled down to this… The Invisible Man movie doesn’t hate all men…just the white ones. It is made very clear throughout that The invisible Man wants all white men to vanish. Not only is every single white man in the movie is bad, but every bad person in the film is white. Every single one. The villain, his brother and even some throw away small characters are the token evil white men.

I have no issue with the villain and his brother being white…but what I find disturbing is the film’s decision to paint all of the even mildly prominent white male characters as bad.

For instance, there is a scene where Cecilia goes for a job interview and her interviewer is a nerdy white guy. The scene and the nerdy white guy character are not very important…which is why it is so striking that the choice was made to have this nerdy white guy sexually harass Cecilia. Instead of just a throw away character with meaningless dialogue, this choice of having him be a predator sends a clear and undeniable message, that all white men are intrinsically evil. The choice to have this sexually harassing nerd be white is also no accident. He could have been any race or ethnicity…but he was specifically white.

Further proof of the film’s anti-white racial politics are seen when James, who is a black cop, sits down with a white cop to speak with Cecilia. Cecilia won’t speak freely with the white cop in the room, so James asks him to leave. You may think that this scene makes sense devoid of the cop’s race as Cecilia is friends with James and wants to confide in him…this is true…but just like the sexually harassing nerdy architect, the choice here is subtle but very deliberate. They could have had the other cop be of any race or ethnicity they wanted…he could have been black, Asian, Latino…a woman…but they didn’t, they made him white and once again reinforced the message that not all men, but just the white men, cannot be trusted.

Of course Aldis Hodge’s character, James, is black and is a really good guy…a great father and friend who is patient and kind and never even considers being inappropriate with Cecilia.

The only reason I bring this up is because it struck me as being such a blatant piece of racist misandry (with racism defined as - "prejudice, discrimination or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity” and misandry defined as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men”) as to be propaganda. I would certainly mention the same thing if other races, ethnicities or genders were universally painted with such a negative brush by a film.

Regardless of this questionable ideology, I would still have been all on board with The Invisible Man if it had just been consistently good, and sadly, it isn’t.

In conclusion, The Invisible Man never lives up to the hype, to its trailer or to its source material, and thus squanders a golden cinematic opportunity. I do not recommend spending your time and money seeing this film in the theatre, but if you are interested in seeing it at all then you should check it out on Netflix, cable or a streaming service when it becomes available.

©2020

Trump, Parasite and the 2020 Election

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 57 seconds

This is an extended version of an article that was originally published on Friday, February 21, 2020, at RT.

TRUMP HATES PARASITE BECAUSE IT PREDICTS HIS ELECTION DEFEAT

Movies are a bellwether of public sentiment, and last year’s crop of class-conscious nominees, such as Best Picture winner Parasite, spell doom for Trump’s re-election.

Last night (Thursday February 20th) President Trump told a raucous rally crowd that he was not a fan of Parasite winning Best Picture at this year’s Oscars.

I think Trump despises Parasite, the South Korean film about class divisions and class struggle, because he unconsciously understands that it is a foreboding omen that foretells his electoral defeat come November.

As longtime readers know, I have developed a theory, named the Isaiah/McCaffrey Wave Theory, that is meant to track trends in the collective unconscious through various data points. These data points are then turned into waves - such as historical waves, empire waves, generational waves, time waves, and culture/art waves.

The theory is rather complex and is simply too long and complicated to coherently boil down in a blog post. So for this article I have simply focused the lens of the theory down to the culture/art waves as a way to measure unconscious trends before, or as, they turn into public sentiment.

In terms of the McCaffrey Wave Theory’s (MWT) viability, it did accurately predict the last presidential election - the first in which it was used…which most prognosticators, political scientists and other theories did not. In fact, the MWT thought that Trump’s victory was glaringly obvious…which is why I was so puzzled when everyone else was so shocked by the result.

In regards to the culture/art wave of the MWT, the primary (and most easily digestible) data points are the top ten box office films and Oscar nominated films for the year previous and the year of a presidential election. There are other secondary data points as well, but box office/Oscars are the one that we will use in this article because those films are the ones that most resonated with the general public. (And it should also be noted, film is not always the primary art/culture data point, that changes through history as different art/culture forms take precedence over others.)

Artists…even those that work in corporate Hollywood, are like antennas attuned to the collective unconscious, and their art is the act of taking the unconscious and making it conscious. In other words, artists take dreams and put them into reality. These artists are not consciously predicting the future, they are just acting on whatever resonates with their own subconscious when they are choosing what stories to tell and how to tell them.

Due to the nature of the film business, it takes years for their work to come to fruition…which is why cinema can be a leading indicator of what comes next in public sentiment as the lag time between concept and fruition gives time for those sentiments to come closer to the surface of the collective consciousness.

According to the McCaffrey Wave Theory, the titles, narratives, themes, color palettes and archetypes present in the most popular (box office/awards) movies hold clues as to what lies ahead in terms of public political preference.

The basic premise regarding these pieces of information, is to consider them like a dream and interpret them through a Jungian perspective. Dreams come from the unconscious, and movies/art are collective dreams born of the collective unconscious. Jungian dream interpretation is used because it is the best way to try and decipher the language of symbols with which the unconscious (collective or personal) communicates.

With this in mind it is also worth remembering that Oscar nominated and Box Office winning films aren’t just about the movies, but the marketing around those movies. The messages of these movies are not confined to the two hour viewing experience or to just those who see the film, because marketing will put incessant advertisements, tv and radio commercials, magazine and newspaper coverage, and billboards and posters in front of the entire populace. This will have the effect of not only being a leading indicator of public sentiment by expressing the symbols of the collective unconscious, but, as Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays teaches us, also being somewhat of a driver of that sentiment.

With all of this background in mind…let’s take a look at recent electoral history using the MWT before we dive in what lay ahead for 2020.

2016 ELECTION

The box office and Oscars accurately foreshadowed Trump’s 2016 win as in 2015 both Spotlight and The Big Short, two stories about outsiders taking on a corrupt establishment – The Catholic Church and Wall Street respectively, won Oscars, with Spotlight winning Best Picture.

Three other nominees, The Revenant, The Martian and Mad Max: Fury Road, were about men overcoming long odds and surviving in the starkest of situations. These films also had very distinct color palettes, with Mad Max and The Martian having red as their primary color, and The Revenant having blue as its primary color. These films also had similar visual schemes as they frequently used wide panoramic shots of bleak and desolate landscapes.

Even the title, Mad Max: Fury Road, was a sign of what lay ahead, Mad, Max, Fury…these words are obviously pointing to a jolting amount of anger coming to a boil in the collective unconscious. In terms of Trump, he was Mad to the Max, and his road to the White House was paved with Fury -and in the wake of his election, Democrats were the ones at Maximum Mad and filled with Fury.

Symbolically, these films tapped into the archetype of the outsider taking on the corrupt establishment (Spotlight, The Big Short), and the individual man overcoming staggering odds to survive in the bleakest of environments. Trump followed suit as he ran as an outsider taking on Washington and survived bleak odds and the grueling gauntlet of a decidedly adversarial establishment media to win.

The 2015 box office also presaged Trump’s election, as the box office champ, The Force Awakens, could’ve been titled “The Populist Force Awakens”, as it foreshadowed a forceful awakening of something. That something was the populism that propelled Trump to the Republican nomination and elevated Bernie Sanders to be a threat in the Democratic primary.

Like The Revenant, The Martian and Fury Road, The Force Awakens also used similar wide shots of bleak environments as the previously mentioned Oscar nominees, and also had a clashing red and blue color scheme…most notably in its movie poster…where red (the color of Republicans) is superior to blue (the color of Democrats). (See visual aids below)

Another top ten box office film in 2015 was Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. The title “Hunger Games” is all about warfare and a lack of resources…people being hungry and there being winners and losers. This is the same theme that Trump ran so successfully on in both the party and general elections. In addition Trump’s favorite political tactic, “mocking”, is also prominently highlighted by the title.

Two other 2015 top ten box office winners signaling Trump’s victory were Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Minions. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation could be the title of Trump’s entire campaign and presidency…as his winning was deemed “impossible”, and the nation needed to go “rogue” to elect this “rogue” candidate. “Minions” is also an apt description of Trump’s devoutly loyal followers.

The word “rogue”, defined as “a dishonest or unprincipled man”, made a very large appearance in the 2016 box office as well when Rogue One was a big box office winner. This meant that the “rogue” was not only a symbol the collective unconscious was desperate to make conscious, but also one that was advertised and marketed to the American public from the Summer of 2015 through to the end of 2016.

The top ten of 2016’s box office was chock full of primal words that indicated a less civilized, animalistic, predatory nature…such as Zootopia (a utopia of madness), Jungle Book (a handbook for life in a jungle), and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (a road map to the beast).

2016 also brought us the very clear signs of the hellaciously contentious energy in both the party primaries and in the general election. The most glaring examples were Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman which both told stories of internecine warfare with blue (Captain America) versus red (the billionaire Iron Man) as the opposing colors. (See visual aids below)

Another comic book movie, Suicide Squad was a top ten box office earner and it astutely summed up the feelings of the anti-Trump establishment Republicans and the Democrats after Trump’s victory.

But the biggest box office clue to Trump’s impending victory was the astounding success of Deadpool, the red clad, wise-ass outsider superhero, who premiered on the big screen in February of 2016. Is there any more Trumpish a superhero than the irreverent, anti-establishment Deadpool?

Hell or High Water, a 2016 Oscar nominee about two brothers who rob the corrupt banks in Texas that robbed their family, was another movie with wide shots of bleak environments (with a bleak reddish color palette), that thematically was right in Trump’s wheelhouse.

2012 ELECTION

Looking at other elections through the MWT is enlightening as well.

In 2012 Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln, films about government accomplishing great things, were nominated and monopolized attention throughout the year leading to Obama’s re-election. These films told the narrative of government as effective and good…and obviously reflected a satisfaction with the status quo…which would mean an incumbent’s re-election.

Silver Linings Playbook was another Oscar nominee that year and its title is one of optimism (silver lining) and planning (a playbook)…which sums up Obama’s re-election message.

2012 also saw Django Unchained get Oscar nominations and do very well at the box office. The film is about a black man, Django - played by Jamie Foxx, getting revenge upon racist Southerners and slave owners. Of course, this archetype of the empowered black man in a racist America, was attached to Obama during his presidency.

2011’s Oscar nominees had two films that pointed towards Obama’s impending victory, the first was The Descendants, a movie set in Hawaii, the state of Obama’s birth, and The Help, a film about working class black women dealing with racism in the Deep South.

2008 ELECTION

Obama’s election in 2008 is also apparent when seen through the MWT perspective.

In 2007, No Country for Old Men won Best Picture and could have been a bumper sticker for Obama’s campaign against his older opponents Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain.

Other nominees from that year were Michael Clayton, a story about a lone man taking on a corrupt corporate establishment, and Atonement. Obama ran as the archetypal fighter against corporate malfeasance…and his election would symbolize, among many voters, an atonement for the sin of slavery and Jim Crow.

2007’s box office also gave indication of a major shift occurring in the collective. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix were the top two movies that year. At World’s End symbolizes the ending of something, and the title Order of the Phoenix is a cry to rise like a Phoenix from the ashes (of the Bush administration, Wall Street collapse etc.) and restore “order”…which was the narrative and archetype Obama embraced.

Another top ten box office film was Legend, which starred Will Smith and told the story of a black man surviving a pandemic and working to find a cure. Once again, the archetype of the black savior is perfectly embodied by Obama.

In 2008, the box office was dominated by Hancock, a story of a black superhero, and The Dark Knight, both metaphors for Obama (a black man as a white knight, hence the dark knight) as the man to save America from the disastrous chaos of the Bush reign.

Other 2008 box office winners signaled pro-Obama sentiment as well, with Madagascar: Escape to Africa 2 and Narnia: Prince Caspian landing in the top ten for the year. Escape to Africa has the word “Africa” in the title, which is significant in an election where there is an African-American candidate…and “Prince Caspian” once again indicates preference for the younger - “prince”.

Although these film’s were not released until right after the election, both 2008 Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire and nominee Milk, pointed to Obama winning. Slumdog Millionaire is the story of a poor Indian boy (who is brown skinned and born into poverty), overcoming great odds and making it big, while Milk is about a first…the first openly gay politician elected to public office. Obama, of course, would become the first black man elected to be president.

2004 ELECTION

Bush’s re-election in 2004 is also found in the MWT data.

In 2003, The Return of the King, a title that is an incumbent’s wet dream, won both the box office and Best Picture Oscar. Another Oscar nominee was Master and Commander: Far Side of the World, which is a powerful title in an election involving a “commander” in chief waging two wars on the “far side of the world”.

A plethora of sequels in the top ten box office of both 2003 and 2004, such as Matrix Reloaded, X2, Bad Boys 2, Spider Man 2, Shrek 2, Meet the Parents 2 and Ocean’s 12, all foresaw Bush’s reelection as he was going for a sequel in the form of a second term.

2004’s Oscar winner, Million Dollar Baby, could have been a moniker hung on Bush, as he was labeled by his critics as an entitled, petulant, silver spooned child born into enormous wealth, power and privilege. Another nominee, Sideways, indicated not a moving forward but rather a perpendicular movement…thus re-election.

2020 ELECTION

Which finally brings us to 2020.

Purely as a political observer I have long felt Trump was going to win re-election in 2020, and 2/3rds of the American public feel the same way. The MWT has also pointed, ever so slightly, in that same direction…until very recently. It was on Oscar night, when Parasite, the ultimate outsider (a foreign film with subtitles), beat out 1917, the status quo nominee, that I noticed a pronounced shift in the waves.

Parasite’s Best Picture win is a very clear signal that the economic populism of 2020 is an even more vibrant energy in the collective unconscious than it was in 2016.

Further proof of this is that in 2019, of the nine films nominated for Best Picture, a staggering six of them deal specifically with issues of class. Parasite, Joker, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman and Little Women all tell varying tales of class warfare and struggle. This is as strong an indicator of a single sentiment as we have ever seen in the art/culture wave of the MWT in recent memory.

The box office indicates a dramatic change coming as well, with Endgame (the highest grossing film of all-time) - which signifies a definitive ending, and Rise of Skywalker - indicating something rising, dominating, as did the overtly revolutionary populist Joker.

It is also noteworthy that both Endgame and Rise of Skywalker are the end of the respective story arcs of two record-breaking, blockbuster franchises. This Star Wars narrative arc is a cultural cornerstone and is over forty years old, and Marvel’s narrative arc has monopolized the culture for well over a decade. Both of these iconic stories ending in the same year is an extraordinarily compelling piece of evidence that the end of an era is upon us.

Rise of Skywalker is not only significant for these reasons, but also because of its color scheme. In the movie’s poster, the dominant color is now blue, whereas in 2016’s The Force Awakens, red dominating blue was the color scheme.

Endgame too has a color scheme of a purple-ish blue completely dominating red in its posters which is fascinating. The off-blue-ish color is striking because it is so unusual…and portends that not only is red waning but that it is not business as usual on the blue side of the divide.

These symbols in the art/cutlure wave could not be more clearly telling us that the thing ending is Trump’s presidency, and the thing rising is Bernie Sander’s class-fueled populist revolution.

Here are some more pieces of evidence to back up that assertion. Aladdin, the tale of a blue (Democrat) genie who grants wishes, was a top ten big box office winner last year. The symbolism is obvious as, fair or not, Bernie Sanders is being labeled as someone “giving away free stuff” by his critics in the establishment.

Another sign is much more esoteric, and that is the film Jumanji:The Next Level. The film was in the top ten of the box office last year and on its surface seems quite benign, but when you dig into it, things become pretty fascinating. Let me preface this by saying once again that this is Jungian dream interpretation, and you may find this interpretation to be a bridge too far. But here it is…

When you break the word Jumanji down into what it sounds like….it becomes “jew” + “manji”. Of course, the word “Jew” in the consciousness is striking in a year with the potentially the first Jewish presidential candidate.

The other part of this equation is even more subtle, but potentially much more powerful. The word “manji” is a Japanese word for a symbol…the symbol being the left facing swastika - as opposed to the right facing swastika used by the Nazis. To interpret this data from a Jungian perspective, that would mean that “Jew” + “manji” could be interpreted as a Jew who reverses the swastika/Nazism. I am not calling Trump a Nazi, but there is a strong sentiment in the culture that does attach him to the Nazi archetype. The conclusion to draw from this is that Jumanji symbolically means the current right (Republican) facing swastika will be reversed into a left (Democratic) facing manji. It might also signify Bernie Sanders, potentially the first Jewish candidate for President, will reverse the gains of the archetypal “Nazi”, Trump. (Again…I am not calling Trump a Nazi, only that he has been branded with the Nazi/“not-see” archetype in the public consciousness)

Another vital point is that like Trump in 2016, Sanders is running as the archetypal outsider. For instance, the media keep saying that Bernie is a joke and he can’t win the nomination or the general election, but remember, the media once said the same thing about Trump, and treated him with the same contempt.

Sanders is running against the establishment of both Washington AND the Democratic party. Also like Trump, he is despised by the mainstream media, who, like establishment politicians, belittle, dismiss and denigrate him every chance they get.

On a purely political and psychological level, it is obvious that the public viscerally loathes Washington and the media more than anything, which means that just like Trump in 2016, Sanders has the right enemies…and this will be a key to his success.

In conclusion, there is certainly a chance that the data that makes up the History, Empire, Generation, Time and Art/Culture waves, will shift in the crucial coming months, and the waves will obviously reflect, and I will report, that shift. But with that said, as currently configured, the Isaiah McCaffrey Wave Theory, most notably but not exclusively the art/culture wave, clearly indicates that Bernie Sanders is going to be the next President of the United States.

©2020

VISUAL AIDS

The blue-ish purple of 2019 Endgame surrounding red.

2019’s Rise of Skywalker has blue dominated red…in contrast to the color scheme of 2016’s The Force Awakens.

Blue once again taking up a larger percentage of the frame than red in 2019’s Rise of Skywalker.

2016 - The Force Awakens has red front and center over blue.

2016 The Force Awakens with its protagonist having the appearance of holding red…the color which dominates the frame over blue.

Red v Blue in 2016’s Civil War.

Red v Blue in Batman v Superman…notice that red wins.

Deadpool…the Trumpiest of superheroes…being snakry and wearing red in 2016.

Do You Believe in Miracles? Parasites Shocking and Glorious Upset Win at the Oscars

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 37 seconds

The 92nd Oscars were a chaotic and turbulent train wreck, until Parasite shocked the world and won Best Picture.

In 1980 the overwhelming underdog U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey beat the juggernaut Soviet Union 4-3 in the semifinal game of the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. As a result of this improbable win, dubbed the Miracle on Ice, the rag tag U.S. team went on to win the gold medal.

When the final seconds of the Miracle on Ice ticked down the play-by-play announcer Al Michaels gave his now iconic call of “Do you believe in miracles?”

It is a shame Al Michaels wasn’t doing the play-by-play for the Oscars last night…as the heavy favorite and presumed winner, 1917, went down hard in defeat to the Korean film Parasite, not only in the Best Picture race but also in Best Director. Parasite became the first foreign language film to ever win Best Picture. Do you believe in miracles?

The irony of Parasite’s completely unpredictable victory is that the Oscar show itself, was a predictably scattershot mess.

The show dragged on for three hours and thirty-one interminable minutes.  Renee Zellweger’s Best Actress acceptance speech alone took up three hours and twenty minutes. Do you believe in miracles? It would be a miracle if Renee wasn’t still talking over at the Dolby theatre right now, rambling on as she named all the people that are heroes in the world…one by one.

The show opened with a very disjointed musical number by singer and actress Janelle Monae who was pretending to be Mr. Rodgers. Monae had a mild wardrobe malfunction where her blouse was accidentally unbuttoned in front of her breasts and she couldn’t get her coat off and Mr. Rodger’s sweater on. Welcome to the Oscars everybody!

After that the evening was chock full of the same stereotypical politically correct posing and pandering we’ve come to expect from Hollywood on its big night…all of which was greeted with unabashed adoration by the audience in the echo chamber that is the Dolby theatre.

A plethora of stars and award winners, including Best Supporting Actor winner Brad Pitt, trotted out a variety of political and social complaints that were all too familiar. Among the buzzwords that made appearances were ”representation”, “inclusion” and “diversity”.

Another one of the night’s big topics was women’s issues.

There were proclamations from stars Brie Larson, Gal Gadot and Sigourney Weaver that all women are superheroes, and that it is tiresome and maybe misogynistic for women to have to keep answering the question of “what is it like to be a woman in Hollywood?”

I wonder, would Larson, Gadot and Weaver also complain if no one asked them what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood? Do you believe in miracles? Well, it would be a miracle if the answer is anything other than yes.

As the evening wore on the show became more and more unintelligible. Eminem performed a song to pay homage to how songs are used in movies sometimes. Greta Thurnberg showed up in a film clip. Some guy I have never heard of who was dressed like a waiter at a moderately priced suburban restaurant did a rap that summarized the night. A group of foreign women sang some terrible song from Frozen 2 with Idina Menzel for some inexplicable reason.  It would be a miracle if any of these things made any sense.

As the night wore on and on and on…things became more and more unhinged. A highlight was Joaquin Phoenix’s entirely expected win for Best Actor, and his acceptance speech was…well…something else.

Phoenix is a weird dude, and his speech fantastically on brand. That is not to say that he didn’t make some valid and profound points.

For instance, Phoenix was the only speaker of the entire evening who had the courage to not tell the Dolby audience what it wanted to hear. In fact, Joaquin took the audience to task and talked about cancel culture and how destructive it is. Between referencing artificially inseminating a cow and stealing its calf and milk, he also said that he and the other people in that room had a tendency to think of themselves as the center of the universe. What?! Do you believe in miracles, indeed!

Then, after having won earlier for Best Original Screenplay, Bong Joon-ho won for Best Director and Al Michaels was in my head whispering about believing in miracles.

The Oscars rarely get anything right but Bong winning Best Director is a shockingly fantastic turn of events as Parasite is impeccably directed and most worthy.

And then Best Picture was up and I was ready to throw my shoe at the television when the middle-brow 1917 won, but then Parasite was announced and I was yelling like Al Michaels in my living room “Do you believe in miracles!”

And then during Parasite’s producer’s acceptance speech the Dolby Theatre house lights went down and in response the audience chanted for them to be turned back on…and they were! And I believed even more in miracles.

And then Jane Fonda did one pump fake, then another and then another…and then the greatest miracle of all occurred and she finally and officially ended the 92nd Oscars. And then I really believed in miracles!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Super Bowl Halftime Shitstravaganza

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 52 seconds

Last night Patrick Mahomes led the Kansas City Chiefs on a furious fourth quarter comeback to beat the San Francisco 49ers in an electrifying Super Bowl. Much to my surprise, after scanning the headlines regarding the game, it wasn’t Mahomes’ heroics that were garnering the most praise, but rather it was halftime performer Jennifer Lopez who was declared the real “winner” of the Super Bowl for her astonishing halftime performance.

The reality is that these contrived articles celebrating J-Lo’s astoundingly genius halftime performance were essentially written before her performance ever happened as part of the press tidal wave created by the PR machine that handles all publicity around these type of events and this level of celebrity. One need look no farther than the comments section below these gushing articles to find the unvarnished truth…J-Lo’s halftime show was not universally praised…in fact it was pretty harshly panned by an overwhelming majority of people. This opinion was in line with my own and with that of every single person I spoke with about the performance.

My thoughts on the Super Bowl halftime show with Jennifer Lopez and Shakira are thus…it was a perfect representation of the depraved inanity of modern America. The show was a mix of tawdry titillation and woke posturing combined with a complete and total lack of any and all integrity. It wasn’t so much cheap entertainment as an insipid imitation of cheap entertainment.

The two extremely thirsty, scantily clad, middle-aged stars, J-Lo and Shakira, did nothing but pose and preen like cheap tarts at a red light street for the entirety of the show because they had no other options. Since their catalogue of songs are not well-known or remembered, and their singing voices are not of high quality (or are technologically enhanced in the studio), the only way they could muster any attention was by pole dancing and gyrating like they are substitute “dancers” working the graveyard shift at a third rate strip club.

Shakira is certainly a beautiful women, and J-Lo, no slouch in the looks department either, looked like an absolute cow next to her, but the attractiveness of the participants did not distract from the vacuity of the contrived performance. No one on the stage actually sang or played an instrument, just lip-synced to a soundtrack…even the dipshit rappers were faking it. Poor Shakira was even reduced to miming the playing of a guitar at one point (even though she can actually play!). There were also a bevy of background dancers who held instruments but didn’t have the foggiest notion of how to play them only how to badly pretend to play them. It was all cringe-worthy for its blatant charlatanry and stylized mendacity.

The requisite genuflecting to woke ideology, this time in the form of a “Born in the U.S.A.” snippet to celebrate immigration, was just as much a piece of duplicitous and disingenuous corporate bullshittery as the lip-syncing and faux instrument playing. The NFL, the same league that has black balled Colin Kaepernick, and does the equivalent of J-Lo’s lip-sync when it comes to concussions and player safety, and says it doesn’t want to be political and yet acts as a flagrant propagandist for American empire and militarism, does not care about people…be they immigrants or natives…they only care about money.

The media fawning over Jennifer Lopez has been going on a lot recently and is utterly baffling. Jennifer Lopez has never been particularly good at anything she has ever done…she certainly isn’t a great actress and has never been a great singer. J-Lo has recently become a sort of Cher type of character, someone who dresses and behaves overtly sexual in a way that feels entirely and uncomfortably inappropriate, especially considering her age. That is not to say that middle-aged women can’t be sexy, they most certainly can and many I know personally (very personally - *wink-wink*) most definitely are, but J-Lo’s expression of her sexuality is self-delusional and classless to the point of discomfort, most notably because it is devoid of even the least bit of dignity.

At this point the only thing that is truly notable about J-Lo at this point in her shameless career is her unadulterated and ever expanding narcissism. For this reason, she and that repulsively fraudulent poseur fiance of hers, A-Rod, are a match made in heaven or hell, depending on your perspective.

The bottom line is that the Super Bowl halftime show, like America, has devolved to become nothing more than an absurdist parody of itself. The entire performance was nothing but empty spectacle for empty spectacle’s sake. That shit show of halftime yesterday would have been right at home at Trump’s gaudy Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, or his gauche White House in Washington D.C. The media celebration of J-Lo over her allegedly “transcendent” harlot, trollop and strumpet-esque lip-syncing performance, is just as fawning, phony and deluded as Fox News’ delirious coverage of their God-emperor Trump.

J-Lo’s insipid halftime show, and the Super Bowl itself - along with its accompanying endless array of advertisements that idiots lap up like they are dung beetles at a feces festival, are a perfect encapsulation of the bread and circuses stage of decay American empire currently finds itself in. We have a Nero on the throne, eunuchs and whores in the Senate, traitors, liars and fools in the press, and a public that is ever more insatiable for mindless distractions while their corporate overlords exploit and fleece them for everything they’ve got.

But on the bright side…at least it was a good game.

©2020

Golden Globe-Winning 'Feminist' Fleabag is Adored by Woke Critics - Does That Mean It's Actually Terrible?

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

We’ve become wary of watching something just because it’s been hyped by critics with an agenda. But does that mean we are missing out on great shows? I tried to watch Fleabag without all the baggage…

Sunday night at the Golden Globes, Fleabag, the British comedy about a serially self-destructive and sexually voracious woman, which is created by, written and starring Phoebe Waller Bridge, was a big winner as it snagged trophies for Comedy Series and Actress in a Comedy.

Fleabag’s Golden Globe success comes on the heels of its domination at the Emmys this past September, where it won awards for Best Comedy, Lead Actress, Writing and Directing.

Fleabag started as a one-woman stage show back in 2013, and after being adapted for tv and premiering on Amazon’s streaming service in 2016, it has over two seasons gradually built an audience through positive word of mouth and critical acclaim.

Fleabag had successfully eluded my attention up until 2019 when its second, and allegedly final, season arrived with much fanfare. I found myself immediately resistant to watching the show as I was very dubious of the relentless critical praise for it.

My reticence regarding Fleabag was fueled by the assumption that critics loved it not because it was good but simply because it was created by a woman. In other words, I assumed the critical adoration was because it was a “feminist” show that checked all the right cultural and political boxes.

My skepticism regarding critical opinion has been hard earned, as it seems all criticism of entertainment nowadays is rife with political agendas that far outweigh quality in a critic’s professional criteria.

A prime example of this biased critical approach is the 2017 film Lady Bird. Lady Bird, which was directed by Greta Gerwig, was met with unabashed critical swooning upon its release. Amidst all of this vocfierous praise I was excited to go see Lady Bird…and then I saw it. To call Lady Bird a raging mediocrity would be an insult to raging mediocrities.

It was readily apparent to me that Lady Bird, which boasts a 99% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, was being graded on a woke political curve simply because it had a female writer/director at the helm. By pointing this fact out I became the turd in the punchbowl at Greta Gerwig’s coronation as the new Queen of Cinema and was quickly labeled a misogynist for my treason and cast out of the Kingdom of Right Thinking People.

Contrary to woke opinion, I didn’t find Lady Bird to be overrated due to misogyny but rather because I am a devout cinephile whose assessment of a film is based first and foremost on its quality, not its diversity and inclusion. By that measurement, I found Lady Bird to be amateurish and trite, more akin to a collection of bad Saturday Night Live skits than to a serious piece of cinema.

Transparent, the 2014 Amazon comedy/drama about a father who becomes a trans-woman, is another example of critical judgment skewed for symbolic political purposes. The show, which was created by Jill Soloway and starred Jeffrey Tambor as Mort - who becomes Maura, won eight Emmys over its four seasons. Critics gushed over Transparent, as it received critical scores on Rotten Tomatoes of 98, 98 and 100 over its first three seasons.

I watched the show because I had heard that Tambor, an actor I deeply respect, did amazing work in it…and he did…but the show itself was so God-awful it made my stomach hurt. I have never seen a collection of more repulsive characters and vapid caricatures on one show in my entire life. My loathing of Transparent was met with predictable accusations of transphobia, which is ironic since the characters I found so repellent weren’t the trans-gendered ones, but the cis-gendered ones.

The critics who love Lady Bird, Transparent and even Black Panther, which is a painfully middling and unimpressive Marvel movie, do so because those movies represent a sort of utopian dream of diversity and inclusion, not because they are creative and artistic masterpieces. Having the “correct” politics now trumps great artistic achievement in the eyes of critics, which is why I am so suspicious of their opinion.

Which brings me back to Fleabag. By the time I had become aware of Fleabag I was already thoroughly jaded by my experience of Lady Bird, Transparent and Black Panther among others. Unfortunately, in response to critics pushing their political bias I had reflexively formed my own bias against the shows they endorsed. I realized that assuming Fleabag was just another vacuous “girl power” show solely based on critic’s love for it was just as vapid an approach to criticism as the woke critics I abhor. So I took the plunge and watched Fleabag.

Contrary to my contrarian instincts, Fleabag is absolutely, insanely and infectiously fantastic. The show is not some recipient of a woke-inspired critical leg up, but rather is an off beat, gutter dwelling, low-brow, sort of masterpiece of the half hour comedy genre.

The writing is gloriously crisp and comedically precise while the cast, most notably Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Olivia Colman, Bill Patterson and Andrew Scott, are spectacular.

Fleabag is a feminist show, but not in the sense of how that term is misused in our popular culture at the moment. Fleabag does not embrace victimhood or blame men, instead the lead character, brilliantly played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is a fully formed, multi-dimensional person who has agency in her life and is solely responsible for the hysterical mess she’s made of it.

If, like me, you have a plethora of pop culture scar tissue and stayed far away from Fleabag out of fear that it is just another piece of politically correct garbage, I promise you that it isn’t. The show may not be for everybody, it is pretty raunchy for instance, but it is as good a comedy as you will find anywhere on television and is deserving of its praise and worthy of your attention.

 A version fo this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

A Hidden Life is the Story of a Farmer Who Resisted Hitler - NOT a Metaphor for Anti-Trump #Resistance

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

A Hidden Life by iconic filmmaker Terence Malick celebrates an Austrian farmer’s Christian principled opposition to Hitler, and any attempts to draw a parallel between the movie and anti-Trump resistance are myopic at best.

The new film is the true story of Franz Jagerstatter, a Catholic farmer in Austria who is conscripted into the German army during World War II and must choose between his conscience and pledging allegiance to Hitler and the Third Reich.

Jagerstatter’s conscientious objections to Nazism come with dire legal consequences that put his life in peril and leave his mother, wife, and three young daughters pariahs in their small village community.

The movie, which stars a who’s who of European actors, including August Diehl, Bruno Ganz, Michael Nyqvist, Franz Rogowski and Mathias Shoenaerts, may be difficult for non-cinephiles to absorb as Malick, who has made such classics as Badlands, The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, has a storytelling style that is more meditative and impressionistic than general audiences may be conditioned to accept. That said, the film is as dramatically profound and insightful as anything I have seen all year.

Although A Hidden Life was in development before Trump ever became president, some out here in Hollywood have interpreted the film as a metaphor for the moral imperative to resist Trump. I think that interpretation is myopic at best, and believe that the movie is unintentionally a scathing indictment of the moral vacuity and hypocrisy at the heart of the anti-Trump resistance.

The main point that I took away from the film is that moral authority is essential if opposition to evil is to endure. Franz Jagerstatter had an abundance of moral authority because his loyalty was not to country, village, leader, party, policy or even church, but to Truth.

The opposition to Trump, which calls itself the #Resistance, loathes Trump because he is a boor and a bully, its opposition to him is based solely on personality and political party rather than on the moral principle to which Jagerstatter adhered. This lack of a commitment to Truth and principle is what exposes the #Resistance as being completely vapid and devoid of moral standing.

For instance, the #Resistance are rightfully furious over Trump’s immigration policies, and like to wail about “babies in cages” to prove their point, but that outrage rings entirely hollow since they never spoke up in opposition when Obama put “babies in cages” and deported so many immigrants that he was known as the “Deporter-in-Chief”.

Equally disingenuous is the #Resistance outrage over Trump’s supposed war on the free press. Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers during his two terms than every other president combined and yet none of these resistors said a word in opposition back then.

Even more damning is the #Resistance deification of morally and ethically dubious intelligence agency apparatchiks. John Brennan, Michael Hayden and James Clapper are all criminals and moral abominations for being integral parts of America’s heinous torture, rendition, surveillance and drone war programs, and yet the #Resistance now hail them as patriots and heroes.

The FBI has long infiltrated civil rights, anti-war and environmental groups in order to destroy them, but that hasn’t stopped the #Resistance from celebrating the FBI’s “professionalism” and genuflecting before loathsome establishment creatures like FBI alums Robert Mueller and James Comey, out of pure anti-Trump animus.

Political darlings of the #Resistance, such as Democrats Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, call Trump a traitor but then pass expansive military and intelligence bills that further empower the executive branch and the Washington war machine.

The #Resistance has further proven their hypocrisy by embracing the establishment talking points to a shocking degree. These allegedly liberal anti-Trumpers are shameless anti-progressive shills for empire who cheer the prosecution and persecution of truth-tellers such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and decry the failure of Trump to go to war in Syria and Iran and to be more belligerent towards Russia.

Franz Jagerstatter lived a quiet, seemingly inconsequential, “hidden life”, until he was forced by his conscience to oppose the Nazis and carry the cross of Truth from his Eden in the Austrian Alps to his Golgotha in Berlin. Pope Benedict XVI beatified Franz Jagerstater in 2007 for his unwavering commitment to Christian moral principles in the face of a formidable evil that was aided in by a complicit Catholic Church. In contrast, the fraudulent #Resistance in America only play at opposition to evil, as is proven by their craven sychophancy toward the depraved neo-liberal, imperial establishment and its military-intelligence industrial complex.

The neo-liberal, imperial establishment in America is a malignant, brutish and bloodthirsty beast that has killed and exploited millions of innocent people from Asia to the Middle East to Latin America and everywhere in between over the last 70 years and the self-righteous and self-aggrandizing anti-Trump #Resistance poseurs will never have the moral authority of a great man like Franz Jagerstatter until they recognize that simple fact. For the #Resistance to squabble over which mask the slouching imperial beast will wear, be it the folksy mask of George W. Bush, or the good ol’ boy mask of Bill Clinton, or the hope and change mask of Barrack Obama, or the brash and brazen mask of Donald Trump, is a fool’s errand and the devil’s handiwork.

A Hidden Life is a deeply moving and worthwhile cinematic venture because it shows the poignant struggles of a man who, unlike the current crop of “resistors”, was willing to sacrifice everything in the service of Truth. The #Resistance must learn the crucial lesson of Franz Jagerstatter, that loyalty to Truth must be the priority, if it ever hopes to attain any moral authority. The first, most basic and most important truth that the #Resistance needs to understand is this…that Donald Trump is not the cause of the evil of neo-liberalism and American empire…he is a consequence of it.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2019

Knives Out: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is an unoriginal, predictable and painfully dull two hour and ten minute episode of Murder, She Wrote laced with pernicious racism.

Knives Out, written and directed by Rian Johnson, is a murder mystery about the death of murder mystery writer Harlan Thrombey, and the search for his killer among his scheming family. The film stars Anna de Armas as Marta, Harlan’s nurse, with supporting turns from Christopher Plummer, Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon and Chris Evans.

Sometimes the Gods of Cinema Smile Upon You…and Sometimes They Don’t

On Monday morning I had a block of free time and, as I often do when time permits, I headed to the movie theatre to partake in the cinematic sacriment. The film options on a Monday morning were pretty slim, and the only movies that worked for my schedule were Honey Boy and Knives Out. Honey Boy is Shia LaBeouf’s pseudo-auto-biography, and while I hold no animus toward Shia, I hold no love either. In addition, I just wasn’t in the right headspace to commit to a heavy movie about the tumultuous existence of the guy from Transformers. Knives Out is not a film I had any previous interest in seeing, but I did hear it was “fun”, and so in the search for some mindless entertainment I made the leap and went to see Knives Out.

My quest for mindless entertainment was only partially fulfilled, as with Knives Out I certainly got the mindless part but didn’t get any entertainment. I found Knives Out to be anything but fun. Now, to be fair, in general I am not a fan of the murder mystery genre, it just isn’t my thing. That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a murder mystery movie on a technical level though and appreciate it for its craftsmanship and skill though. The problem with Knives Out is not its genre, but rather the fact that it is poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable. The best thing about Knives Out, and this will become more and more evident as you read this review, is that it forced me to take my knives out against it.

One of the biggest issues with Knives Out is that it thinks it is incredibly clever but in reality is incessantly imbecilic. The film is an thinly-veiled allegory for the immigration debate in America, and is little more than a piece of virulent propaganda whose politics are obstinately Manichaean and frankly, repulsive and disgusting. Tackling the immigration issue is certainly a worthy undertaking, and I would love to see a well-made film navigate the nuances and intricacies of that topic in its text or sub-text, but the politics of Knives Out are so ignorant, arrogant and infantile as to be odiously repugnant.

The most damning part of the film’s politics is that the movie drips with a visceral hatred of white people. The film’s denigration and belittling of white people is aggressively heavy-handed. The Thrombey family are presented as a collection of conniving and deplorable whites marinated in privilege, which makes sense since they are the villains, but make no mistake, the film isn’t just about hating the rich, white Thrombey family, it is about hating and belittling ALL white people regardless of class. Evidence of this is that Fran, the Thrombey’s poor white housekeeper, and white police officer Trooper Wagner, the two most prominent non-rich white people in the film, are portrayed as a money-hungry schemer and a pop culture obsessed nincompoop, respectively. The white people in this movie are all morally, ethically and intellectually revolting.

Whites in Knives Out lie, scheme, and are compulsively duplicitous, whereas Marta, the Latina immigrant with a heart of gold, is portrayed as literally being physically incapable of lying or doing anything bad. In addition, Detective Eliot, who is black and is essentially Trooper Wagner’s partner, is calm, cool and rational next to Wagner’s empty-headed buffoonery.

***I AM BREAKING MY NO SPOILER PLEDGE IN THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!***

SPOILER ALERT: The coup de grace in terms of the film’s propaganda is that in the final shot the white Thrombey’s are all gather in the driveway, and standing high above them on a balcony is Marta, the new Queen of the Thrombey estate. The white people look up at her with resentment, and also with hope, that she will be gracious and benevolent towards them now that she is in power even though they did not treat her with respect and grace when they ruled the roost. The final shot of the film is Marta looking down on the white people and drinking from a coffee cup that reads “my house, my rules”. Message sent and received.

****END OF SPOILER****

I don’t mind a film having a political perspective, in fact I prefer it, but what I do mind is a film that has such a pedestrian political outlook infused with such a blatant animus towards one group, whatever group that may be. The politics of Knives Out are so insidious, insipid and pernicious I couldn’t help but think of Leni Riefenstahl, the Third Reich’s documentarian, when I watched it, not for the quality of the film making, Riefenstahl was a genius, but for the racial viciousness that fueled it. The animus towards whites on display in this movie would be absolutely unacceptable if it were aimed at any other group, be it Jews, blacks, Latinos, Asians, gays, lesbians or the transgendered. That this movie is gaining so much traction in the culture, is adored by critics and is considered “fun”, is a very ominous sign for the what lies ahead for us all.

As for the cast of Knives Out, they are an appealing bunch who are very unappealing in the film. Daniel Craig is an actor I genuinely like and is the best James Bond of my life time, but his Benoit Blanc private detective character is painful to behold. Never has a Southern drawl been so brutally mistreated or a caricature so stretched beyond credulity.

Anna de Armas is easy on the eyes, and you could find worse things to do than look at her for two hours, but beyond that she doesn’t bring a whole lot to Marta. She is not assisted by the script in any way, which flattens her character into a one dimensional saint. In a way Marta’s sainthood diminishes her and is, ironically, racist in that it dehumanizes her. Marta is not so much a full fledged, multi-dimensional person as a glowing orb of noble intentions…maybe she’d be more interesting if they let her be an actual human being.

Chris Evans took time out of his busy booger eating schedule to bring his extra special brand of vanilla to the movie. It is astonishing, considering that he is so white he’s nearly transparent, that Evans is a black hole of anti-charisma from which no magnetism can escape. Evans out of his Captain America costume is like Donald Trump naked…painfully unappealing and hysterically underwhelming.

Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Jamie Lee Curtis and Toni Colette all appear in the film and I assume got paid handsomely, and I am happy for them, they are quality actors who deserve respect and admiration. I hope they find more substantial projects with which to make their living in the future.

Rian Johnson is best known for directing the much maligned Star Wars : The Last Jedi in 2017, and Knives Out is an equally vapid, vacuous and politically correct enterprise. Johnson’s filmography is glaring proof of his allergy to nuance and character development. It would appear that Johnson is a Hollywood white knight who overcomes his lack of talent and skill by getting hired simply for being the most self-loathing white man at the pitch meeting. Johnson is among those self-loathing white people who pose at racial sensitivity because it costs them nothing, but who are actually racist because they promote themselves over whatever cause they pretend to care about.

I did not care about a single person in this movie, and thus didn’t care about the movie at all. There is no tension, no surprises, no twists, no turns, no drama and no insight or interest generated in this film. Knives Out is not a well made murder mystery, it is a two hour and ten minute long episode of Murder, She Wrote crossed with an MSNBC inspired woke telenovella. If you love murder mysteries maybe this movie will hold your attention, in which case I recommend you wait to see it for free on cable or Netflix. As for everyone else who is either minimally interested or actively disinterested in murder mysteries, my advice is to never waste your time on this piece of abhorrently dull nothingness.

With Knives Out the gods of cinema seemingly abandoned me in my Gethsemane…but then, in a twist much more interesting and substantial than anything that happens in Knives Out, the gods smiled upon me. You see, during my screening, for no apparent reason, the house lights came up about midway through the film. The movie never stopped, it just kept rolling with the lights on. Needless to say the view of the screen was obstructed and it was all very distracting. After a minute or so a patron near the exit left the theatre and informed staff of what was going on and after about five or ten minutes the lights went out.

I realized during this incident that this was my get out of cinema jail free card. By intervening and “ruining” my screening of Knives Out (which was already ruined by the movie being awful), the cinema gods had smiled upon me after all by giving me the excuse to get a refund for my ticket. And sure enough, once the credits rolled I made a beeline for the manager and calmly explained what had happened and he gave me a free pass to see another movie. I will never get the two hours and ten minutes of my life back that Knives Out took from me, but thanks to the cinema gods, I will now get to drink the art house nectar that is Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life for free! Thank you cinema gods!

©2019

Kamala and Krusty the Clown

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 49 seconds

On Tuesday December 3, 2019, California Senator Kamala Harris ended her bid for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential election. My reaction to this news was inspired by The Simpsons episode "The Last Temptaion of Krust”, where Krusty the Clown calls a press conference to announce his retirement from show business. After Krusty’s attempt at a profound retirement statement is scuttled by an intrusive press corp, he is barraged by a series of questions, one of which is “Krusty…why now? Why not twenty years ago?” My question for Kamala Harris and her supporters would be, “Why now? Why not ten months ago?”

I wonder if like Krusty, Kamala has simply faked her own demise and will resurface, sans clown makeup, under the name of Rory B. Bellows. Could Rory B. Bellows make an appearance at the Democratic convention? Could Rory B. Bellows be a VP candidate? Who knows…who cares?

Let’s be very clear about something…Kamala Harris was a dreadful candidate from day one who was solely motivated by her personal ambition and not any guiding political principle. A shamelessly shallow, woke posing, neo-liberal dedicated to maintaining the status quo, Harris attracted vociferous support from the media and middle-aged bourgeois white women. In a brazen display of identity politics at its worst, a certain faction of woke posing bougie white women loved Harris for the sole reason that she is black and a woman and gave them a chance to clearly signal their virtue. It seems obvious that these Harris supporters are as devoid of any guiding principles, core political beliefs, morals and ethics as their black lady savior.

Harris’s army of woke bourgeois white women routinely use terms like “racist”, “misogynist”, or my favorite, the painfully pretentious “misogynoir” (hatred of black women), as a defense mechanism against any and all questions about Harris’s worth as a candidate. In the wake of Harris’s demise they are now furiously hurling those same invectives around like syphilitic monkeys throwing poop in a frenzy at the zoo. Thankfully for them they are so full of shit that they will never run out of ammunition. What is so revealing about these tactics from pro-Harris white women is that they are routinely employed against “people of color”, like Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard…apparently when you are a bougie white woman Harris supporter, racism and misogyny are things of which only other people are guilty.

It should come as no surprise that these empty-headed Harris supporters who are now so triggered by her failure, are the same collection of mindlessly rabid Hillary hypocrites from 2016 who consistently alienated anyone and everyone with their entitled, self-serving bitching. Just like when they blamed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat on Bernie Bros and Russia, these Harris supporting woke bougie shrews will now blame everyone and everything else for their idols humiliating and catastrophic failure. Old dogs never seem to learn new tricks…like how to actually think…or take responsibility…or how not to get emotionally attached to a political candidate.

Speaking of not thinking…the New York Times published two op-eds in Thursday’s paper on the topic of Kamala Harris dropping out. One was from the reliably inane and emotionalist Charles Blow, whose column is once again a case study in buffoonery. The piece, titled “What Kamala Harris’s Campaign Teaches Us” is a masturbatorial exercise in delusional racism porn.

Blow opens the piece by describing how last January, Kamala Harris came into the presidential race with a bang and a resoundingly warm welcome. Blow recounts how Harris raised a substantial sum of money, sold a great deal of merchandise and had 20,000 people at her Oakland announcement. He then describes how polling guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight published a piece just after her announcement that touted her as the front runner. Silver also proclaimed he was “skeptical” of “Biden, Sanders and Klobucher” but “more bullish about Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke and Corey Booker”.

Of course, these Nate Silver quotes are pretty hysterical in hindsight as Kamala and Beto are out of the race and Booker might as well be, and Biden and Bernie are among the top three candidates. Silver has once again revealed himself to be a charlatan when it comes to political prophecy but this hasn’t stopped him from becoming the establishment’s favorite numbers nerd, and this partially accounts for why woke bourgeois white women swarmed to Harris…she had gotten the stamp of approval from Silver and the rest of the mainstream media.

Blow then papers over the problems with Harris as a candidate and her campaign, and boils down her failure with this wonderfully obtuse paragraph.

“It is fair to ask what role racism and sexism played in her campaign’s demise. These are two “isms” that are permanent, obvious and unavoidable in American society.”

Blow is a high priest of the Church of Identity Politics and a guru in the Cult of Victimhood, so his racism addled brain believes everything is because of racism. Proof of this is on display in his article when Blow goes through all the of the structural racism Harris failed to overcome in her bid for the nomination…from debate rules about funding to a primary schedule that opens with two “white” states Iowa and New Hampshire. See, according to Blow it wasn’t Kamala Harris’s fault that she failed, it was the racism and misogyny of white Democrats.

Of course, Blow’s thesis is obliterated by reality, as in the last three presidential elections, Democrats have nominated a black man (Obama) twice and a white woman (Hillary) once, with Obama getting the momentum to his first nomination in 2008 when those rascally racist white Iowans came out en masse for him, but Charles Blow never let’s facts get in the way of his idiocy.

Another piece of information that destroys Blow’s thesis is that Beto O’Rourke, a white man who also got Nate Silver’s stamp of approval and who also hit the ground running with a well received campaign, went out of the race with merely a whimper even before Kamala Harris after voters got to know him and realized that toothless dog won’t hunt.

My favorite part of Blow’s article is when he finally acknowledges the black elephant in the room that stomps his thesis into the dust when he mentions that it wasn’t just white voters who rejected Harris…it was black voters. Blow has a theory about black voter’s reticence with Harris too. He writes,

“But there is something else that we learn — or relearn — from Harris’s run: the enduring practicality of black voters. They, in general, reward familiarity, fealty and feasibility.”

According to Charles Blow, when black voters reject Kamala Harris it is because they are practical and pragmatic, whereas when white voters reject her it is because of racism and misogyny. Charles Blow is a social justice hammer who thinks the whole world looks like a rusty racist nail.

The second Times piece, “Why There Won’t Be A Black Woman Running for President” is from Melanye Price, a professor of political science at Prairie View A&M. Prof. Price makes similar arguments in her piece as Charles Blow. What is striking about Prof. Price’s op-ed is that , similar to Blow’s column, its internal logic is entirely at odds with itself. For instance, Price states,

“Any time a black politician has to demonstrate her blackness or prove her connections to the black community, she is already in serious trouble. But why were blacks so suspicious? None of it seemed to be enough — not her decision to attend a historically black college, join a black sorority, not even her black father. This I still don’t understand.”

What is so odd about that statement by Price is that literally in the next paragraph she answer’s her own questions. “Why were blacks so suspicious?”…as Price tells us,

“In black circles, the “she’s a cop” refrain was heard most often. Her role as California’s attorney general — its “top cop” — was a major source of criticism during her presidential run. Police officers of any gender or race are wildly unpopular among blacks.”

If Price wanted to understand black voter’s recalcitrance regarding Harris’s candidacy maybe she should have read her own article.

It is important to note that Harris’s history as a “cop” not only turned off black voters but poor ones as well, because in poor communities, regardless of race, the police are a malignant entity that menaces the population and is a major threat to their freedom and well-being, whereas for woke bougie white women, like Harris’s supporters, the police are a benevolent force who protect them from the dangerous world outside their privileged enclaves.

Earlier in her piece, Prof. Price writes incoherently about her thoughts on the word “electability” in relation to race and gender.

“Thrown about as an identity-neutral term, there is no doubt that, in 2019, electability means white male centrist. In the shadow of America’s first black president, it seems that only white men who take positions that are more conservative than the party’s base can overcome the misogyny and racism of the current president, not women or racial minorities and certainly not a black woman.

It is doubtful whether or not having the support of the African-American community would overcome this. Currently, Pete Buttigieg has tiny black support and he is still seen as a viable candidate. This is the challenge going forward for flawed candidates like Ms. Harris or for that perfect black female candidate people seek — convincing the media and the electorate to reject the tendency to revert to traditional understandings of who can be president. If flawed white male candidates are still “highly electable,” then where is the space for flawed black, white, Latina, Asian or Native ones?”

What Prof. Price is arguing in these two paragraphs is difficult to discern. I am certainly not as bright as a professor from Prairie View A&M, so it could be that Prof. Price is talking over my head…or it could be she has no idea what she what she is talking about or what she wants to say.

The sentence, “In the shadow of the first black president, it seems that only white men who take positions that are more conservative that the party’s base can overcome the misogyny and racism of the current president, not women, or racial minorities and certainly not black woman”, is so garbled and jumbled as to be near gibberish. My best attempt to decode this statement is that she is saying that ‘after Obama, Democratic voters believe that only center right candidates can defeat Trump’. If she believes that it would have been nice if she actually wrote that more concisely and clearly.

It only gets worse in the second paragraph as the claims in one sentence that she doubts that African-American support would overcome this bias (towards white, male centrists), but then points out that “Pete Buttigieg has tiny black support but is still seen as a viable candidate.“ This is such an odd argument. Pete Buttigieg IS a white, male centrist, so in keeping with Prof. Price’s thesis Democrats…including black ones who shunned Harris, would support him due to his “electibility”.

Price then claims in her next statement that the challenge going forward is for flawed minority candidates to convince the media and electorate to “reject the tendency to revert to traditional understandings of who can be president”. By using Pete Buttigieg as her nefariously centrist, white male example, Prof. Price scuttles her entire flaccid thesis, as Mayor Pete is NOT someone who would be categorized under “traditional” in terms of being president due to his youth, inexperience and most notably his being gay. If Mayor Pete became president he would be the very first openly gay person to do so…that hardly seems traditional.

In the last sentence of the paragraph in question, Price moves the goalposts considerably when she says flawed white male candidates are considered “highly electable”, when in the preceding sentences she used the lower bar of the term “viable” to describe Buttigieg. This is not a difference without a distinction, as being a “viable” candidate and being a “highly electable” candidate are very different things. “Viable” and “electable” mean the same thing, but “viable” and “highly electable” are miles apart.

Prof. Price and Charles Blow obviously both believe that Kamala Harris’s campaign was destroyed because of racism and misogyny. They can’t prove it, and that is very clear from reading their articles, but they just KNOW it must be the truth. They know that even though Harris was a dead eyed, impotent candidate, the reason she failed is because of some deep seated bias in Democratic voters. Harris’s woke bougie white women supporters fervently agree with this critique and are all too happy to shout it from the mountaintops because it proves the most important thing to them, that they aren’t racist, but everyone else is…including apparently, black voters, who en masse rejected Harris.

The bottom line regarding Kamala Harris is this…and Prof. Price, Charles Blow and the Harris fan club will never be able to see or admit this…but Kamala Harris has risen in her political career from local, state and now federal government, and all the way up to being a “viable” candidate for president when she first got into the race, not despite her gender and skin color, but because of it. Obama didn’t become president despite his blackness, but because of it. Liberal white guilt is a real thing and a potent political force in the hands of a skilled politician. To be clear, Barrack Obama was an awful president, just look at his selling out of working people with his handling of Wall St. and Obamacare…and his disgusting chicanery in Flint, but he was a miraculously gifted, once in a lifetime political talent. Obama’s talent was enhanced by his “compelling narrative”, which like “electable” is a code word, but for “race/gender/sexual orientation differences”. Americans were attracted to Obama’s “compelling narrative” and elected him twice to the highest office in the land, just like Californians were entranced with Kamala Harris’s “compelling narrative” and voted her into state office and then a senate seat. Regardless of white liberals infatuation to Harris’s “compelling narrative”, she ain’t no Obama, and never will be, and thus white liberal guilt was not enough for her to overcome the fact that she alienated black voters. Harris is a third rate political hack whose only skills are shamelessness and woke pandering…and, white liberal guilt or no, that does not play quite so well on the national big stage as it does in California.

Prof. Price finishes her piece by writing,

“But there is vetting a candidate using reasonable metrics and there is scrutiny that some reserve for certain categories of candidates. We should consider whether some of Ms. Harris’s detractors fell in the latter category.”

The word “consider” is doing a lot of work there. Prof. Price and Charles Blow don’t so much as “consider” Democratic racism and misogyny in Harris’s fall, but insinuate and assume it. This is an important lesson for anyone who is a liberal or progressive, know that no matter a candidates qualifications, talents or skills, if they are black, a woman or both, if you don’t mindlessly support them you are infected with the disease of racism and misogyny. This does nothing but alienate potential allies, and reduce the much needed critical thinking function from political debate and decision making…which is not a positive development.

One thing about Harris’s failed campaign that neither Price nor Blow “consider” is that her inability to generate support is not a function of racism and misogyny but rather of voter maturity. Could it be that after at least thirty years of progressive voters being conned by neo-liberal bullshitters like Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama who, like Kamala Harris, had no core political belief beyond gargantuan personal ambition, they have finally woken up to the scam, and Kamala Harris is just a casualty of that awakening? Maybe, just maybe, Kamala Harris’s dismal showing in the presidential campaign is a sign that the scales have fallen from liberal eyes and they now possess the ability to discern who actually cares about and will fight for working people and the poor and not simply be a corporate shill in progressive sheep’s clothing. I certainly hope the scales have fallen from liberal eyes and they can now see the light through the deceptive haze…but Joe Biden’s and Pete Buttigieg’s continued popularity does not leave me optimistic.

Prof. Price writes in her final paragraph a sentence that is just remarkable for its obviousness. She writes,

“I am still trying to make sense of her (Harris’s) candidacy and its larger implications.”

Great. How about this Prof. Price, how about you and Charles Blow go “consider” Kamala Harris’s candidacy and its larger implications, and THEN write an op-ed about it, instead of vomiting upon New York Times readers this vacuous and vapid word salad totally devoid of any insight or meaning?

Much like Kamala Harris’s campaign, both Prof. Price and Charles Blow’s op-eds are self-serving embarrassments that should be ignored and forgotten as soon as possible. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

©2019

Game of Thrones Predicted the Zealotry of Extinction Rebellion Eco-Fanatics

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

 The similarities between the eco-moralists of Extinction Rebellion and the Sparrows cult from Game of Thrones are uncanny.

I have a long held a theory that film and television can be tools of prophecy used to glimpse the future. Here are a few examples that support my unconventional thesis.

In the 1990’s, numerous films, such as Armageddon, Independence Day, Deep Impact, Godzilla and The Siege, showcased the New York City skyline being decimated by one calamity or another. In addition, on March 4, 2001, the X-Files spin-off series, The Lone Gunman, aired an episode where hijacked airliners were being flown into the World Trade Center. Then six months later 9-11 happened and the devastation to the New York City skyline by hijacked planes was all too real. 

Another example was in 2016, when the films Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman reigned supreme at the box office. These films highlighted internecine warfare between superheroes, even pitting the colors red (Iron Man/Superman) versus blue (Captain America/Batman). These movies were released in the spring of 2016 and predicted the contentiousness of the coming November election and the raging of a vicious culture war in its aftermath.

The Handmaid’s Tale was in production when Trump won the 2016 election, and when it first aired in the Spring of 2017 gave voice to liberal women’s fears of patriarchal misogyny under a Trump administration. The show was also a precursor and predictor of the #MeToo movement in the fall of 2017.

Game of Thrones in particular is a bellwether when it comes to entertainment as prophecy. The show’s first episode, “Winter is Coming”, aired in 2011 and that phrase quickly became the series tag line. Billboards warning, “Winter is Coming”, portending an invasion by undead White Walkers and their zombie minions, soon loomed ominously over cities and towns across America. In the ensuing years a metaphorical winter did indeed descend upon the U.S., as the cold wind of political correctness swept across the land while an army of mindless ‘woke’ scolds waged war on free expression and diversity of thought.

Game of Thrones ended this past May, but with every passing day its creator George R.R. Martin looks more and more like Nostradamus. For example, when I saw the recent Extinction Rebellion climate crisis protests, I immediately thought of Game of Thrones.

Why would eco-activists who snarled New York City traffic by supergluing themselves to a boat in Times Square, took a hammer to a government building in London, grounded a flight from Dublin to London, and plotted to use drones to shut down Heathrow, remind me of Game of Thrones? Well, because these fanatics are eerily reminiscent of a group of religious zealots from Game of Thrones called the Sparrows.

If you’ll remember, the Sparrows and their leader, the High Sparrow, came to prominence in King’s Landing after the death of Tywin Lannister. The cult attracted great numbers of followers to their devout way of life, including some royals like Ser Lancel Lannister, who was former incestuous lover to his cousin, Cersie Lannister.

The similarities between the Sparrows and Extinction Rebellion are numerous. For instance, both groups were born out of noble intentions, as the Sparrows set out to alleviate the suffering of the down trodden, and Extinction Rebellion were concerned about the environment.

Both groups are also religious in nature. The Sparrows ardently worship the Faith of the Seven and brutally torture sinners and violently coerce them to confess, such as Cersei who was forced to do a public naked walk of shame to atone for her sins.

The eco-moralists of Extinction Rebellion are a religious cult too, as their members blindly worship at the altar of “scientism”, claim to have a monopoly on truth, demand purity and punish heretics. Extinction Rebellion has also gotten celebrities such as Radiohead’s lead mope Thom Yorke, among many others, to do their own walk of shame and sign a confession admitting to their past climate crisis sins.

Extinction Rebellion even has its own Joan of Arc character in Greta Thurnberg. Thurnberg, a heart felt 16 year-old who suffers from mental and emotional issues, has been held up as an eco-saint and had her passion, youth and innocence exploited as both weapon and shield by cynically manipulative activists.

It should be noted that there are some differences between the Sparrows and Extinction Rebellion. For instance, the Sparrows are religious ascetics who live a life of monk-like devotion and simplicity in order to save their souls, whereas Extinction Rebellion are not ascetics themselves, but instead insist that everyone else live ascetic lives by giving up their worldly goods such as cars or traveling by plane.

{The Sparrows also work to feed the poor, while in contrast Extinction Rebellion demand that people grow their own food, which would starve the poor since they have no land upon which to grow sustenance. }

Another difference is that the leader of the Sparrows, the High Sparrow, gave up a vast fortune in order to become a member of the religious order, while the co-leader of Extinction Rebellion, Dr. Gail Bradbrook, is a professional malcontent who makes her living through various protest movements with Extinction Rebellion just being the most recent.

While the Sparrows and Extinction Rebellion do have differences, the bottom line about both groups is that their true purpose is to usurp power in order to implement their radical agenda.

On Game of Thrones the High Sparrow played a masterful game of political chess setting the Lannisters and Tyrells against one another in order to wrest control of the Iron Throne for himself. The High Sparrow exploited the political ambitions of the Tyrells and the weakness of Cersei Lannister’s impressionable young son, King Tommen, in an attempt to gain power and turn his religious beliefs into royal decree.

Extinction Rebellion’s strategy is equally Machiavellian. Their abrasive tactics of creating traffic jams and airport delays are only going to irritate and aggravate working people, thus creating enemies instead of allies. But Extinction Rebellion doesn’t care about gaining popular support. The movement believes in Gene Sharp’s theory of non-violent action that claims that protest movements only need the support of 3.5% of the population to trigger mass changes. So Extinction Rebellion is using peer pressure and social fear among the elite in the establishment media and the entertainment industry in order to acquire endorsements and donations they believe will assist the movement in reaching cultural critical mass while bypassing populist sentiments.

Extinction Rebellion are just as devious and duplicitous as the High Sparrow, as evidenced by founding member Stuart Basden revealing the movement’s real agenda is not combating climate change but destroying “white supremacy”, “patriarchy”, “Euro-centrism” and “hetero-sexism/heteronormativity”. In other words, Extinction Rebellion is nothing more than a Trojan horse to normalize and codify into law ‘woke’ hatred of straight, white males in the name of environmentalism.

What is even more alarming about Extinction Rebellion is that investment banks like HSBC, JP Morgan Chase and Citi all share their radical environmental agenda because they see the “climate crisis” as an “opportunity”. These banks also saw an “opportunity” in mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations during the housing bubble. That turned out to be a catastrophe for working class people and so will the Wall Street backed Extinction Rebellion agenda, which will be just another replay of the tried and true formula of stealing from the poor to feed the rich.

I am a committed environmentalist and am not skeptical of climate change science, but I am deeply skeptical of Extinction Rebellion, their intentions and their tactics…and you should be too.

On Game of Thrones Cersei eliminated the plague of the Sparrows in the most explosively spectacular of ways, but paid a steep price by losing her son, King Tommen. Hopefully Extinction Rebellion will go much more quietly into their good night. But if they don’t, and these eco-moralist clowns do impose their delusional environmental agenda, it will be Joker, with its depiction of an angry populist uprising that becomes cinematic prophecy.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.com.

©2019

Parasite: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fantastically original film, gloriously directed and acted, that is both dramatically potent and politically insighftul.

Language: Korean with English subtitles

Parasite, directed and co-written by Bong Joon-Ho, is the story of the Kim family, who live at the bottom rung of Korean society and try to connive their way out of poverty. The film stars Song Kang-ho as father Ki-taek, Jang Hye-jin as mother Chung-sook, Choi Woo-shik as son Ki-woo and Park So-dam as daugher Ki-jong.

Parasite is an exquisitely crafted film that, although it is in Korean with English subtitles, speaks as eloquently and insighftully about the perils of American capitalism and the growing resentment and rage born out of astronomical wealth disparity, as any film in recent memory. In this way Parasite is reminiscent of last year’s Shoplifters and this year’s big movie Joker. All three of these movies tap into the pulsating dissatisfaction of the working poor who are being left further and further behind, and growing angrier and angrier about it, with every passing day.

Whenever certain themes recur in films that capture either the critical or commercial imagination (or both), my antenna stand on end because as my studies have shown, cinema can be prophecy, and these films are red flags as to what is percolating just beneath the surface in the collective sub-conscious. One look around America, and the world, gives credance to the theory that these films, all of which give voice to the emotional pull of populist uprisings, are trying to warn us of what lies ahead.

Parasite is a brilliant examination of the frustration and fury that accompanies being at the bottom of the social rung in a corrupt and rigged capitalist system. The only way to get ahead and get out of the prison of debt, and it is a prison, is to lie, scheme and cheat. If that means throwing other poor people under the bus, then so be it.

Director Bong Joon-ho has tapped into these ideas of class struggle before, most notably in his film Snowpiercer (which starred Chris Evans aka Captain America), which was a remarkably innovative and original film. Bong’s class consciousness in both Parasite and Snowpiercer is fueled by anger and fear… namely, fear for what will result when the anger from below is righteously unleashed upon those at the top when the house of cards crumbles. Bong, either consciously or unconsciously, understands that the current world order sits atop a super volcano that is growing more and more unstable and combustible, and his film’s reflect the emotional and political fragility of our time.

In Parasite, the poor are vermin, roaches, who are either being pissed on or drowned, as poverty is a deluge that imposes upon them indignity after indignity until it suffocates them. The poor are forced to stay in their place and warned not to “cross the line” into familiarity with the rich. The prison of poverty has walls, both real and imagined, that are impenetrable…even when you repeatedly bang your head against them…like Arthur Fleck does in Joker (wink).

The rich family in Parasite, the Parks, are the picture of decadence, detached from the ability to see the poor as even human. The Parks are repulsed by the poor, who they see as more akin to animals than people, as evidenced by their disgust at the literal smell of poverty. The Park’s revulsion at the poor does not stop them from fetishizing poverty, much like Americans fetishize Native Americans but make sure they stay on the reservation (wink)…just one more way for the rich to exploit the poor for their personal gain.

Parasite’s politics and psychology are as insightful as its drama is enrapturing. The film never shies from the difficult or the desperate, nor does it wallow in it. Instead Bong Joon-ho has made a socially relevant, dramatically explosive film that is deliriously entertaining in every single way.

Bong’s direction of Paradise is fantastic, as the film’s dramatic and physical geometry is spectacular. His use of straight lines, differing levels (symbolic of class status) and long journeys upward and downward (very similar to Joker, where Arthur Fleck makes those trudging journeys up the long flight of stairs, and the victorious dance down it) is proof of a master craftsman and artist at work.

Bong’s ability to meld together comedy, suspense, elements of thriller, as well as social commentary is extraordinary. I never knew what was coming next in Paradise and was always surprised, sometimes shocked and never disappointed.

The cast of Paradise are outstanding. Song Kang-ho in particular gives a dynamic performance that is consistently rich and layered. And both Choi Woo-shik and Park So-dam do stellar work that is both magnetic and subtle. Park in particular has a charm and presence about her that is intriguing and compelling.

Parasite is one of the very best film’s of the year and most certainly will garner an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Picture, if not a win, and may even sneak in a Best Picture nod. The film is expertly made, wonderfully acted, politically prescient and dramatically potent, for these reasons, Parasite is required viewing for cinephiles and regular folk alike. My recommendation is to go as quickly as you can to the art house and see Parasite…it is that good. And after that, head to the cineplex to see Joker…again, and then when you get home watch Shoplifters (I see it is now available on the streaming service HULU)…because they are that good too. If you want to know what is coming for America and the world, and why, go watch those three movies. But make sure you go see Parasite as quickly as you can…it is truly a fantastic film and well worth you time and money.

©2019

Joker: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW.

Joker, directed by Todd Phillips and written by Phillips and Scott Silver, is the story of Arthur Fleck, a mentally-ill, down on his luck clown-for-hire and stand up comedian, who transforms into Batman’s arch-nemesis, the super-villain Joker. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Fleck, with supporting turns from Robert DeNiro, Frances Conroy and Zazie Beetz.

Early Thursday night I put my life in my hands and made the dangerous trek to the local art house to see Joker in 70mm. Thankfully, no angry white incels were laying in wait for me, so I lived to tell the tale of my Joker cinematic experience…here it is.

I went to Joker with very high hopes, but paradoxically, because I had such high hopes, I assumed I’d be disappointed by the film. My bottom line regarding Joker is this…it is a brilliant film of remarkable depth and insight, a gritty masterpiece that is a total game-changer for the comic book genre, and a staggering cinematic achievement for director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix.

Joker is the cinematic bastard son of Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece of 1970’s New Hollywood, Taxi Driver. Beyond being an homage, it is more an updated bookend to that classic, engineered for the corporatized Hollywood of the 21st century.

The film’s Taxi Driver lineage is hiding in plain sight, as it has similar music, shots, camera angles and even re-purposes the famed finger gun to the head move. Joker’s Gotham, is eerily reminiscent of Taxi Driver’s New York City of the 1970’s, which Travis Bickle aptly describes as “sick and venal”. I couldn’t help but think of my Los Angeles neighborhood when seeing Joker’s dilapidated Gotham, with its garbage piled high on every sidewalk and a layer of filth covering the city. In “sick and venal” Los Angeles, we are much too evolved to have garbage piled high on our sidewalks, no, out here in La La Land, even in million dollar neighborhoods, people are disposable and so we we have them piled high on the sidewalks instead, as homelessness is epidemic. Joker’s Gotham, Bickle’s New York and my Los Angeles also share a deep coating of grime as well as a thriving rat population that is disease-ridden and increasingly bold, both in and out of public office.

Joker’s depiction of Gotham as a Bickle-esque New York is fascinating bit of sub-text, as it is a throwback to a time before Manhattan was Disney-fied and Times Square turned from degenerate porn hub to hub of capitalism porn. Joker is also a throwback to a time before cinema was corporatized/Disney-fied, a pre-Heaven’s Gate age, when filmmakers like Scorsese could flourish and make movies like Taxi Driver, unhindered by suits blind to everything but the bottom line.

Joker ‘s genius is also because it is a “real movie”, a Taxi Driver/The King of Comedy covertly wrapped in the corporate cloak of superhero intellectual property. Unlike the sterile Marvel movie behemoths, which Scorsese himself recently described as “not cinema" and which are more akin to amusement park rides than movies, Joker is, at its heart, a down and dirty 1970’s dramatic character study, for this reason alone the film is brilliantly subversive and a stake into the heart of the Disney Goliath.

It is astonishing that Todd Phillips, whose previous films are the comedies Old School and The Hangover trilogies, was able to conceive of, and execute, Joker with such artistic precision and commitment. Phillip’s success with Joker is reminiscent of Adam McKay’s astounding direction of The Big Short (2015). Previous to The Big Short, McKay had basically been Will Ferrell’s caddie, making silly movies well, but they were still silly movies. McKay’s long term film making prowess is still in question, as is Phillip’s, but that does not diminish their mastery on The Big Short and Joker.

Phillip’s direction really is fantastic, but he is also greatly benefited by having the greatest actor working in cinema as his leading man. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Arthur Fleck/Joker is an astonishing feat. Phoenix famously (or infamously depending on your perspective) lost a great deal of weight to play the role, and his wiry, sinewy frame at times seems like a marionette possessed by a demon outcast from American bandstand or Soul Train. Fleck/Joker’s madness is seemingly chaotic, but Phoenix gives it an internal logic and order, that makes it emotionally coherent.

Phoenix is a master at connecting to a volatile emotionality within his characters, and of giving his character’s a distinct and very specific physicality. What is often overlooked with Phoenix is his level of meticulousness and superior craftsmanship in his work. Joker is no exception as his exquisite skill is on full display right alongside his compellingly volcanic unpredictability. Phoenix’s subtle use of breath, his hands, as well as his attention and focus are miraculous.

Phoenix is a revolutionary actor. He is so good, so skilled, so talented, that he is reinventing the art form. His work as Freddie Quell in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012) was a landmark in the art form, and his performance in Joker is equally earth shattering. If he does not win an Best Actor Oscar for Joker, whoever does win the award should be ashamed of themselves for stealing the statuette from its rightful recipient.

Contrary to establishment media critical opinion, Phoenix does not make Arthur a sympathetic character, but he does make him an empathetic one, and one with which we empathize. We don’t feel sorry for Arthur, we feel kinship with him as he struggles to maintain some semblance of dignity in a society allergic to compassion.

Joker was described by its detractors as being “dangerous”, and I can attest that the film is indeed dangerous, but not for the reasons laid out by its critics. Joker is dangerous because it dares to do something that corporate controlled art has long since deemed anathema…it tells the very ugly truth.

Joker has the artistic audacity to peel back the scab of modern America and reveal the maggot infested, infected wound pulsating in agony just beneath our civilized veneer. Joker’s chaotic madness is a perfect reflection of the sickness of our time. Think Joker is too “nihilistic” or “negative”? Turn on a television, read a newspaper or take a cross-country flight, and you’ll see that the nihilism and negativity of Joker are nothing compared to the madhouse in which we currently live.

Arthur Fleck is America, as the country, populated by narcissists, neanderthals and ne’er do wells, has devolved and self-destructed, rotting from the inside out after decades of decadence, delusion and depravity. America is rapidly degrading and devolving, and that devolution is mirrored by Arthur Fleck has he transforms into Joker.

Joker is unnerving to mainstream media critics because it shines the spotlight on the disaffected and dissatisfied in America, who are legion, growing in numbers and getting angrier by the hour. As I have witnessed in my own life, the rage, resentment and violent mental instability among the populace in America is like a hurricane out in the Atlantic, gaining more power and force as every day passes, and inevitably heading right toward landfall and a collision with highly populated urban centers that will inevitably result in a conflagration of epic proportions.

Joker, the consummate trickster, is devoid of politics and ideology and exists only to feed and satiate his own voracious madness. Fleck is an empty vessel and the Joker archetype co-opts and animates him. Fleck, born again as Joker, is adopted as a symbol for the struggles of the angry and the desperate, in other words, Joker is the archetype of our times, a Trumpian figure, who unintentionally inspires others, friend and foe alike, to release their inhibitions and unleash their inner demons. Joker is dangerous because he is an avatar for the rage, resentment and desperation of millions upon millions of Americans who have been forgotten and left behind and are utterly despised by the elite. Joker is both apolitical and all political. The populist Joker is both Antifa and the Alt-Right. Joker is everything and nothing to everyone and nobody all at once. The media in the movie, and in real life, make Joker into a monster, an icon and an iconic monster for the dispossessed, elevating him in the eyes of those desperately seeking a savior.

In a perverted and brilliant way, Phillips and Phoenix make Fleck into a Jesus figure, who as he transforms into Joker, becomes an unwitting Christ/anti-Christ. The line between messiah and madman is a thin one, and depends almost entirely on projection and perspective.

Arthur Fleck, like Jesus, is literally someone who is repeatedly kicked when he is down. Like Jesus, society ignores and despises him. Like Jesus he is berated, belittled and beaten…and yet all he wants to do is make people smile. Like Jesus, Fleck’s birth story is convoluted and lacks coherence.

What makes Phoenix’s portrayal so chilling is that his Fleck earnestly desires to bring joy to the world just like Jesus…and just as Jesus is actually a good magician/miracle worker, Fleck is actually a good clown, filled with energy and purpose. But Arthur soon realizes that there are two jokes at play in the universe…the one where he is the punchline, and the one in his head, of which he is self-aware enough to realize regular people “won’t get it”. Jesus makes the same sort of discovery during his temptations, he hears a “joke” in his head too, but it is the voice of God, and he comes to realize no one else will “get it” either. Fleck and Jesus are presented the same two paths, Jesus takes the one of self-sacrifice and becomes the Christ, and Fleck takes the road of human sacrifice, and becomes The Joker/Satan.

At its core Joker is a character study, and so there is not a lot of heavy lifting among the cast besides Joaquin Phoenix. That said, Frances Conroy, Robert DeNiro and Zazie Beets all do solid work with the material they have.

The film is shot with an exquisite grittiness by Lawrence Sher. Sher pays adoring homage to Taxi Driver by using certain specific camera shots and angles throughout the film. Sher also uses shadow and light really well to convey Fleck’s/Joker’s perspective and his tenuous grasp on reality. Sher, like Phillips, does not have a resume that would make you think he was capable of doing such substantial work, but in the case of these two men past was not prologue.

Joker is one of those movies that reminds you why cinema matters, as it uses the tired and worn comic book genre to draw viewers in, and then sticks the knife of brutal cultural commentary deep into their chests.

Joker has been at the center of of a cultural storm ever since it premiered to a raucous ovation at the Venice Film Festival in September. The film won the Golden Lion (Best Picture) at Venice and was quickly catapulted into the Oscar discussion, which created a fierce backlash against the film from certain American critics and woke twitter. The common refrain from those critics who saw it at Venice, and those who hadn’t, was that the film was “dangerous” because it would incite disaffected white men to become violent. In researching an article I recently wrote about the controversy, I came across a stunning number of articles with the imploring and weak-kneed headline, “Joker is Not the Movie We Need Right Now”. Of course, the converse is true because Joker is exactly the movie we need right now.

The critical opinion of Joker, especially among the critics at influential media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Time, is aggressively negative and dismissive, riddled with a belittling and condescending commentary. The criticisms leveled at the film from these effete establishment critics are obviously contrived, petty, personal, political and entirely predetermined. The amount of intentional obtuseness on display about Joker, its cinematic sophistication and its artistic merits, by these supposed important critics is stunning and revealing.

The critical malevolence toward Joker is undoubtedly fueled by a need to virtue signal and pander to woke culture, and is born out of personal contempt for the filmmaker (who dared defend himself against “woke culture”) and manufactured anger at the subject matter. The poor reviews of Joker by these American critics says considerably more about those critics, their dishonesty and lack of integrity, than it does about Joker. Make no mistake, Joker is a masterpiece in its own depraved way, and the critics who succumb to the myopic social pressure and cultural politics of the moment by reflexively trashing the movie as immoral and artistically and cinematically unworthy, will be judged extremely harshly by history.

In looking at the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Joker currently has a critical score of 69 and an audience score of 91. The disconnect between critics and audience on Joker is similar to the disconnect on display regarding Dave Chappelle’s recent Netflix stand up special Sticks and Stones. Chappelle’s show was pilloried by critics who were horrified by the comedian’s “unwoke” and decidedly politically incorrect take on the world, as the critical score is currently at 35, while the audience score is a resounding 99. It would seem that in our current age, bubble-dwelling, group-thinking critics in the mainstream media, are no longer interested in artistic merit, cinematic worthiness, skill, craftsmanship or talent, but rather in personal politics, woke ideology, political correctness and conformity, and are dishonest brokers when it comes to judging art and entertainment.

Joker is a watershed for the comic book genre. In the future film historians will look back on this time and say that there comic book films pre-Joker and comic book films post-Joker. There is no going back for the genre. That does not mean that Marvel will immediately crumble and fall into the sea, but it does mean that the genie is out of the bottle, and there is no getting it back in. Jason Concepcion and Sean Fennessy at The Ringer recently pondered if Joker is to the superhero genre what The Wild Bunch was to westerns back in 1969. They are not so sure, but I certainly think is as genre redefining or killing as The Wild Bunch. The Disney/Marvel model, post-Endgame and post-Joker, will only see diminishing cultural resonance and relevance, as well as financial returns, from this point forward. The superhero genre will not disappear overnight, but it has begun its long retreat from its apex, and God only knows what will eventually replace it.

In conclusion, Joker is a mirror, and it reflects the degeneracy, depravity and sheer madness that is engulfing America. Joker is an extremely dark film, but that is because America is an extremely dark place at the moment. Joker is unquestionably one of the very best films of the year and should be, but probably won’t be, an Oscar front-runner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Screenplay. I highly recommend you go see Joker in theatres as soon as you possibly can, as it is must-see viewing for anyone interested in cinema, art or in understanding what is rapidly coming for America.

©2019