UFO Week - The Program; A Documentary Review

UFO WEEK - THE PROGRAM

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An informative and worthy effort from James Fox, one of the very best ufo documentarians in the business.

Day five of UFO Week is here and today we review the highly anticipated new James Fox documentary, The Program, which was released on December 16th and is available on video on demand.

James Fox is unquestionably one of the very best ufo documentarians working today. He has made five UFO related documentaries in the last twenty-seven years, with The Program being his sixth.

Not all of Fox’s UFO documentaries have worked, but the ones that have, like Out of the Blue (2003), I Know What I Saw (2009) and The Phenomenon (2020), are among the very best ever made.

Fox’s most recent film, Moment of Contact, was a major disappointment as it never fully came together as a noteworthy cinematic venture, and so I was very apprehensive about his newest film.

I am glad to say that The Program, while not nearly as good as the masterpiece that is Out of the Blue, is certainly a top-notch document and important piece of the UFO puzzle for any interested in a serious examination of the topic.

The film, which runs a brisk one hour and forty-two-minutes, opens with a discussion of the “Wilson Memo”, a 2002 memo allegedly sent between Admiral Wilson and astrophysicist Eric Davis regarding the secret UFO programs run by various black budget government agencies in conjunction with aerospace and military contracting companies.

The story goes from there and includes discussions with such serious luminaries as Dr. Gary Nolan of Stanford University and Hal Puthoff, as well as lesser-known insiders like former intelligence agency analyst Lenval Logan, DOD research scientist Sarah Gamm, and former Asst Deputy Secretary of Defense Christopher Mellon.

Logan and Gamm in particular make for compelling subjects as they seem like smart people trying to tell the truth while trying to avoid saying anything that would violate any oaths or NDA’s they have signed.

Mellon has become a mainstay in UFO discussions and documentaries and he gives a good interview as he comes across as serious as can be without being a fanatic. That said, I’m a bit wary of the guy with his intelligence background and his insanely rich family background (he comes from the Mellon banking dynasty).

One of Fox’s real strong points as a filmmaker is his ability to properly pace a documentary. His good films flow with an effortlessness that is compelling, and The Program is no exception.

While Fox does appear in many of his films, he is most successful when he is not the protagonist, but just an observer/interviewer.

To his great credit, Fox is masterful with his direct yet easy-going interview style, and he gets the most out of his subjects as is possible.

Another subject examined in the film is the case of Gary McKinnon, a British hacker who broke into U.S. government computer systems searching for secret UFO stuff…and found it. And for his trouble he was arrested and faced extradition and life in prison in the U.S.

What McKinnon discovered hidden away in the government vaults, besides a crystal-clear photo of a UFO, was a list of “non-terrestrial officers” which included names. Quite the unnerving find.

The film then stays in the UK and transitions to a case in Calvine, Scotland where in August of 1990, two Scotsmen photographed a UFO. The British government confiscated their pictures…but one savvy officer held one for himself and kept for thirty years, finally releasing it in recent years.

The photo is extraordinarily good, the story of the two men who took it as told by one of their co-workers, is not. The co-worker sounds like a drunk making up a story as he goes along…and it would’ve been better leaving him on the cutting room floor entirely.

Another issue with the film is the story of Jason Sands, a former-USAF airmen who worked at infamous Area 51. Sands, who was vetted and recently gave private testimony to congress, has footage of a UFO at a firing range, and tells a strange story of an interaction with an alien.

Sands’ story of his alien interaction is definitely outlandish, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Unfortunately, after having watched the film, I’ve since seen Sands interviewed elsewhere where he tells even more outrageous tales about having to execute an alien at the behest of his superiors in order to guarantee his silence about the program in which he worked. This story is just a bridge too far and makes Sands sound like a committed fabulist or a fabulist who should be committed. I wonder if he told that same tale to Fox and Fox wisely kept it out of his film or if it is a new revelation? Either way, I think in terms of credibility it probably would’ve been better for Fox to keep Sands out of his documentary entirely.

The final portion of the The Program deals with the deep state obstruction of disclosure and features the always reliable Rep. Tim Burchett and Mellon describing the undemocratic government within a government that keeps all the secrets. (As an aside about Burchett, I was recently watching an episode of Finding Bigfoot with my son, an Animal Planet reality tv series from the 2010s – and in one episode the crew goes to Knox County, Tennessee to search for bigfoot and the mayor of Knox County – good old Tim Burchett, is there to help out and discuss his interest in the subject. I wholly endorse him being named director of the Federal Department of the Weird, Wild and Wonderful.)

There’s also a very damning display from the repugnant Bill Nelson, a former Senator from Florida and now head of NASA, who puts on a bullshit display that is so transparently dishonest and full of bureaucratic bluster that it is painful to watch. That Fox himself questions Nelson in an open forum, and then does a split-screen between Nelson blatantly lying about whistleblower David Grusch, and Grusch speaking to congress, is a master stroke.

The reality is that deep state despots like Bill Nelson, Admiral Wilson and their ilk are the tyrants of our age. These unelected bullying bureaucrats run the security and surveillance state that is antithetical to democracy and a republic and keeps us in the dark and in our cage.

The Program is about the UFO programs that men like Nelson and Wilson control, and the knowledge they refuse to share because that knowledge is power and they will never give up their unearned power.

The Program is a solid, well-made documentary that is well-worth watching. Unfortunately, it is only available to purchase and not rent, and the purchase price is $17...pretty steep.

The film will no doubt be available to rent at a much cheaper price in the coming weeks, and as good as I think it is, I think it’s worth waiting to rent it a cheaper price than buy at a steep one.

The bottom line is this, The Program is a very good companion piece to Fox’s earlier films, Out of the Blue, I Know What I Saw and The Phenomenon. As a collection, these films make a great starting point for newbies to the subject, and an excellent library of information for more experienced ufologists.

©2024

UFO Week - Battle for Disclosure : A Documentary Review

UFO WEEK - BATTLE FOR DISCLOSURE

My Rating: 1/2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Another in a long line of self-serving, money-grab documentaries from the narcissistic to the point of being messianic, Dr. Steven Greer.

Day four of UFO Week is here and today’s topic is the newest documentary from legendary ufologist Steven Greer, Battle for Disclosure.

The film, which runs one hour and forty-one minutes and is directed by Brent and Blake Cousins, was released on December 10th and is available to rent on video on demand. I rented it the day it came out and paid $1.99, but I have since went back to check the price and has been listed at $9.99 one day and $3.99 another.

The hard truth is the film isn’t worth $1.99, nevermind $9.99 or $3.99.

Steven Greer has produced a bevy of documentaries in recent years. The Lost Century: And How to Reclaim It (2023), Contact: The CE-5 Experience (2023), UFO: Endgame to Disclosure (2023), The Cosmic Hoax: An Expose (2021), Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (2020), Unacknowledged (2017) and Siruis (2013) are among the titles.

These films all share one very prominent feature…namely Steven Greer talking mostly about Steven Greer and how much Steven Greer knows.

If you don’t know who Steven Greer is…here is a primer. Steven Greer, or more accurately Dr. Steven Greer, is a physician turned ufologist who claims to have been an advisor of sorts to numerous presidents and governments officials over the years on the subject of ufos. How he became so close to the halls of power has never adequately been explained, but Greer does have pictures of himself with various big wigs, so there’s that.

Greer claims he saw a ufo as a kid and again as a teen and that he has some deep connection with them. Apparently, it is a very strong connection because he actually claims to be able to summon them.

And thus, we get to the crux of Dr. Greer. Dr. Greer has the distinct whiff of the grift to him, and that stench is quite odious. Greer obviously has a messiah complex as indicated by the fact that he, and he alone, has been bequeathed special powers and the he, and he alone, is the holder of special, secret knowledge. In this way Greer’s school of ufology feels more like a cult than a scientific exploration.

Greer’s ufo thesis is that aliens are a benevolent bunch who want to give humanity free energy technology that will release us from the bondage of our evil overlords and unleash a utopia here on earth. To be clear…I WANT Greer’s thesis to be correct. But Greer is such a shady character and seeming charlatan that I can’t help but dismiss his ideas even when some of them are somewhat believable.

For example, in Battle for Disclosure, Greer talks about how a lot of ufo sightings are actually human made crafts that were reverse engineered from alien craft byu a dep state cabal. Greer’s argument is that these human-made ufos are “illegal”…and he can “prove it in a court of law”, because the government didn’t disclose the technology…or something like that.

Greer’s legal grandstanding feels like just another example of his messiah complex…like who gives a shit if Steven Greer can “prove in a court of law” that the dark deep state is up to ufo shenanigans…because you aren’t going to get it into a court of law…that’s how the game works.

Throughout the film Greer, with a peculiar, ever-present and diabolically persistent, booger-free nose hair saluting out of his left nostril, declares that HE could prove his case in court…but then never actually meticulously makes his case for the cameras.

Battle for Disclosure is structured in such a way that it is obviously made for people who have been closely following Greer’s films and philosophy over the years. It hits the ground running from the get go and doesn’t give much context, expecting viewers to know the backstory already.

In another peculiar move, Greer goes out of his way in the first third of the film to berate, diminish and ultimately dismiss journalist Ross Coulthart, and whistleblowers David Grusch and Lue Elizondo as deceptive scions of the deep state. He doesn’t specifically lay out his case against them but just attacks them.

Now, many of my friends in the ufo community (I have a lot of them), think very highly of people like Grusch and Elizondo and Christopher Mellon. They are all in on these guys and hang on their every word. I, on the other hand, am not and do not. I look at these characters with the most jaundiced of eyes. I don’t trust them because to trust members, or former members, of the intelligence community, is a fool’s errand. These people are professional liars and they are very good at manipulation. To be clear, I don’t dismiss everything they say out of hand, I am just skeptical of what they say and more importantly, why they may be saying it.

The problem, of course, is that Greer attacking Elizondo and Grusch and their ilk without making a viable and clear case against them, doesn’t do much to damage their credibility nor does it elevate his…it just makes him seem petty and jealous of all the mainstream attention those guys get.

In the last third of the film the narrative shifts to a collection of men recounting their experiences with ufos of one type or another. These men, all military men at the time of their encounters, tell compelling but often-times preposterous tales – all of which Greer substantiates through his alleged unnamed insider sources in the deep state.

The first story is from former US Marine Michael Herrera, who claims to have stumbled upon a human trafficking operation in Indonesia run by black ops guys that used ufo/alien tech. He said his superiors were pissed at him and his team about their discovery and told him to keep his mouth shut.

Another story was told by DC Long, who while working on a military base saw technology that could use some strange sound wave technology of some sort to lift massive blocks of granite. When Long refused to sign an NDA regarding what he saw, the government destroyed his father’s construction business and confiscated all his equipment. Long’s father never spoke to him again until he was on his deathbed.

The third story is from Steven Digna Jr., who saw a ufo while doing live fire drills on a military base. Digna is in such a diminished physical and mental state at the time of shooting his interview, that it is preceded by a disclaimer of sorts telling the viewer that these guys have been through the ringer and it’s taken a deadly toll on their lives.

Digna’s story is, frankly, the most believable, but he is in such a fragile physical and emotional state it is difficult to watch him or to know if he is telling the truth.

The final story comes from Eric Hecker, who worked for the Navy and Raytheon and went to Antarctica to work security there. Hecker claims he saw a directed energy weapons system there that is capable of creating earthquakes. He claims it is the largest telescope that is also a phased array transmitter – a sort of air traffic control for UFOs – and is capable of faster than light communications. Hecker claims this weapons/communications system is above and beyond nations…it’s a transnational program that answers to no government.

The stories told by these men are pretty fascinating. I found Hecker’s the most chilling, Digna’s the most believable, Long’s the saddest, and Herrera’s the most bizarre and incomprehensible. Your mileage may vary.

As for the Battle for Disclosure as a whole, I found it to be a poorly constructed, muddled and jumbled mess of a cinematic venture. It is less a document designed to inform or convince than it is a money grab from those already converted to the Church of Greer.  

Battle for Disclosure, or any of Greer’s films for that matter, are not really useful for the majority of ufologists, nor are they a good place to start for newbies, as they are too fantastical and Greer is too aggressively grating and dubious a spokesman to be convincing.

The bottom line is, while I am immensely skeptical to the point of devout disbelief, I do hope that Steven Greer is right and that E.T. is coming to save our home and free us from the villains who currently rule our world, but that doesn’t make his documentaries good or worth watching or very informative. They are, for the most part, pretty much a waste of time….and if you’re a dope like me…a waste of money too.  

©2024

UFO Week - Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown (MGM+) - A Documentary Review

BEYOND: UFOS AND THE UNKNOWN

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW. One of the very best UFO documentaries I’ve seen. Highly informative and insightful. Well worth watching whether you’re a seasoned ufologist or a newbie to the topic.

It is day three of UFO Week here at the home office and things got off to a decidedly bumpy start with two less than stellar documentaries in day one and two.

Thankfully, day three is a gem.

The documentary today is Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown, a four-part documentary miniseries from JJ Abrams’ production company Bad Robot that released it’s first episode on October 27th and its last episode on November 8th.

Bad Robot released their first UFO documentary back in 2021, simply titled UFO, and I found it to be professionally made but underwhelming in a style over substance kind of way.

Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is not underwhelming in the slightest. Simply said, it is exquisitely made, abundantly researched, and one of the very best documentaries on the subject I have ever seen.

The documentary series, which runs roughly four hours long in total, hits upon a myriad of angles related to the UFO topic. It examines it scientifically, historically, politically and spiritually.

If you’re looking for a murderer’s row of UFO experts Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is the documentary miniseries for you.

The stellar first episode opens up with a bang with Dr. Gary Nolan, an esteemed medical professor at the prestigious Stanford University, speaking about his scientific and medical work with various intelligence agencies on deathly serious UFO-related topics.

It then dives into the bevy of sightings and experiences of Navy pilots who witnessed and recorded their interaction with various entities in the last twenty years…resulting in the Gimble and Go-Fast videos made famous in the New York Times article of 2017 that brought the UFO topic into the mainstream.

This episode features prominent Naval personnel like former pilot Ryan Graves, Rear Admiral Tim Galudet, as well as Leslie Kean, the journalist who wrote the NY Times piece in 2017, and Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense – and now prominent UFO disclosure advocate.

Also examined are the maze of various UFO programs in the Pentagon over the years and the mind-numbing acronyms that go along with them. As well as the very complex political situation around the subject, which is explained by Senator Kristen Gillibrand, who describes the military’s handling of the UFO situation, “duplicitous and inappropriate.” Wow.

Episode two delves into the history of ufology and features a who’s who of UFO heavy-hitters, like the godfather of ufology, Jacque Vallee, and the guy who knows where all the bodies are buried, PhD Hal Puthoff.

Also explored are the early days of ufology, including Donald Keyhoe’s important work and the curious case of J. Allen Hynek.

One of the most important things discussed in this episode is how it is the Navy pilots who are reporting UFO encounters, with nary a peep from the Air Force. The reasons why this might be are fascinating, not the least of which is that the intelligence agencies take a large chunk of the Air Force budget for black projects, so they are deeply intertwined with the Air Force…and not the Navy.

The other big topic in episode two is Whitley Strieber and alien abduction. Strieber, who was a novelist who was allegedly abducted in the 1980s in upstate New York and wrote a best-selling book about it titled “Communion”, was a catalyst for hundreds of thousands of regular people across the country to come forward with their abduction stories in letters to him after he published his book.

Strieber’s story is an intriguing and compelling one, and he is a terrific spokesperson - articulate, humble and serious.

This leads into episode three and four which feature Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of philosophy and religion at Rice University, who has begun to gather UFO source material from Strieber and Vallee among others in one place so that scientists and academics can do serious study of the subject without ridicule. He has also has begun conferences on esoteric subjects that brings together experts and experiencers to discuss once taboo subjects academically and scientifically.

Episodes three and four delve deeply into the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of UFOs and what they may be beyond physical objects, and what they may mean to science, philosophy and humanity going forward.

Episodes three and four are so rich with deeply serious and thoughtful discussions on elevated esoteric matters that they are worth watching over and over again…as is the rest of the series.

For seasoned followers of the UFO topic, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is a gloriously rich documentary that not only informs but seriously challenges.

For newcomers to the subject, this documentary is a great starting place if for no other reason than to give a brief glimpse at the scope and scale of the subject matter, and to do so with a seriousness that it deserves.

The biggest problem with Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is that it is very difficult to find. The documentary is currently only available on the streaming service MGM+. Not only do I know no one who is a subscriber to MGM+, I myself had never heard of it until I went looking for Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown. That’s not a good thing because unless if you’re a UFO nerd like me, you wouldn’t know this documentary series exists, and therefore won’t ever stumble upon it unless you explicitly are looking for it.

Hopefully it will eventually become available to rent through Amazon or Apple in the future, but for now the best thing to do to see it is to sign up for MGM+…which will give you a free week before it’s month to month subscription at $6.99 kicks in. Watch Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown during your free week…in fact I’d recommend you watch it twice, like I did…and then cancel your subscription before you actually have to pay.

The bottom line is this…whether you’re a ufologist or a newbie, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is a must-watch documentary miniseries if you want to have a deeper understanding of the UFO phenomenon and topic. I highly recommend you put in the effort to find and to watch it because considering what is going on in our world at the moment, arming yourself with as much knowledge as you can is a very good idea.

©2024

UFO Week - Manhattan Alien Abduction (Netflix): A Documentary Review

UFO WEEK: MANHATTAN ALIEN ABDUCTION

Earlier this year I was alerted to the fact that starting on October 30th and running up to December 16th, there were going to be five UFO-related documentaries being released on various streaming platforms.

As someone who has been interested in the topic and followed it for the majority of my adult life, I was glad that there would be a bevy of new UFO documentaries to digest. I was so happy, in fact, that I decided that once the final documentary, James Fox’s The Program, was released on December 16th, I would have a celebratory “week” on the website and review all the UFO documentaries over the course of five days – one review a day.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to UFO week…namely UFOs!! In the past two weeks there has been a cavalcade of coverage of the UFO topic because apparently New Jersey is being swarmed by drones of “unknown origin” that nobody seems to be able to do anything about. (As an aside…its odd that they are called “drones” when in fact they are the etxtbook definition of UAP’s - unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UFOs - unidentified flying objects…makes you think)

The New Jersey reports have been followed by reports, and video, from other areas of the country and the globe. Truth be told, a week before the New Jersey sightings, my son and I witnessed a very bizarre anomalous object flying at night over our farm in rural Pennsylvania. It looked somewhat like a plane, but it wasn’t a plane, and it made no noise and had odd lights on it that are not like the lights on a regular plane. We spotted something similar, but not identical, just last week as well, again at night.

We get lots of military craft flying over our farm so I just chalked it up to some military craft I couldn’t identify….and maybe it is…and maybe that’s what everyone is seeing over New Jersey. Who knows? There have been other reports in the local media of UAP/drones in the area over the weekend.

The theories about the sightings in New Jersey are all over the map. There are people claiming they are “Special Ops” drones used to sniff out a nuclear threat posed by a “loose nuke” or a “dirty bomb”. The theory goes from there and speculates the nuke is from Iran or China or Russia.

Others speculate that it is actually a false flag and that nefarious elements of the U.S. government are planning to detonate a nuke and blame it on…Iran, China and/or Russia in order to get the neo-con world war of their dreams.

Then there are those who think the “drones” are from Iran/China/Russia and are part of some recon mission that is a prelude to a Pearl Harbor type event.

Then there are others who think that the events of the last two weeks are the beginnings of “disclosure”, where the government admits there are aliens and they’re here, or the aliens step out of the shadows and tell everyone themselves that they’re here.

There are others who think that this is just a false flag using Project Bluebeam to make it appear there are alien craft in our skies in order to scare people and drum up a draconian response that demands we give up more rights to the powers that be in order to stay “safe”.

And finally, there are those who claim that this is all a hoax or a mass hallucination, and that some teenagers are flying normal drones over New Jersey as a gag and the media and the populace are going full War of the Worlds on it because they’re in the throes of hysteria.

As for who to believe…one thing is for certain, whatever government spokespeople say - don’t believe it as it is either going to be a manufactured lie or completely and utterly incorrect. That you can take to the bank.

What do I think is happening? Honestly, I don’t know. My sense is that the false flag discussion, be it about nukes or Project Bluebeam, are probably on the correct track…but who the hell knows?

On that note…let me officially welcome you to UFO Week!! Let’s start things off with a review of the Netflix documentary mini-series Manhattan Alien Abduction.

MANHATTAN ALIEN ABDUCTION

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This could have, and should have, been a thorough debunking of an abduction claim, but it is a rather empty and shallow miniseries that diminishes everyone involved.

Manhattan Alien Abduction, which premiered on Netflix on October 30th, tells the story of Linda Napolitano – who claims to have been abducted from her New York City apartment on November 30th, 1989, and her nemesis, Carol Rainey, who thinks the story is an elaborate hoax.

Napolitano’s story is, not unexpectedly, an odd one. She claims that on November 30th, 1989, in the middle of the night, that aliens abducted her out of her 12th floor Manhattan apartment “on a blue beam of light, lifting her onto a reddish-orange spacecraft that quickly sped off toward the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Linda’s story could easily be dismissed as the ravings of a mad woman except for the fact that there were 23 people who claimed to witness it, among them a “world leader”, namely United Nations Secretary General Perez de Cuellar.

What really propelled Linda’s story into the spotlight was that she brought her tale to ufologist Budd Hopkins, who was one of the leaders in the study of alien abduction in UFO culture, and was a conduit for Linda to the wider UFO community.

Hopkins, who died in 2011, was very well known in the UFO world for having been among the first, along with Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack, to use hypnosis to help people recall their abduction experiences. Hopkins hypnotized writer Whitley Strieber and assisted him in recalling his famous abduction experience which is recounted in the blockbuster book Communion (1987).

Hopkins brought Linda into his world of self-help alien abduction survivor meetings in his New York City apartment, and dove deep into her story, including with hypnosis.

Carol Rainey was Budd Hopkins’ wife at the time of Linda’s alleged abduction, and had a front row seat to Linda’s relationship with Budd and with her time in the spotlight recounting her tale to anyone who’d listen in the media.

Manhattan Alien Abduction is essentially a cat fight between Linda and Carol stretched over three episodes.

Carol is there to debunk Linda’s story, and Linda is there to convince you of it.

In my less than humble opinion, neither woman succeeds, despite the mini-series obviously being made for Carol’s benefit and from her perspective rather than from Linda’s or from a genuine journalistic instinct.

Linda’s story is, frankly…preposterous, and it only gets more and more outlandish with every passing fact and incident that comes to light.

For example, Linda claims that two bodyguards for UN Secretary general Cuellar, named Richard and Dan, come to her apartment in the days after her abduction and, in a somewhat menacing fashion, question her about the incident, and in doing so admit they, along with Cuellar, saw the whole thing while driving by that night.

That element of the story is fine and is very helpful in making Linda seem somewhat believable…but the Richard and Dan story just goes off the rails from there.

Linda claims Richard and Dan later abducted her…while she was walking down the street audio recording herself for her own safety, and abscond her to some location to threaten and question her again.

This second Richard and Dan story is, frankly, embarrassing. It sounds so fake and so stupid is boggles the mind that anyone would tell it, never mind believe it. But Linda told it, and Budd Hopkins believed it.

Linda seemed to have Hopkins wrapped around her finger by playing the ‘fragile bird who needs protecting’ game, and Hopkins fell for it. This seemed to infuriate Carol back in the 1980’s and 90’s…and still today.  

Back at the time, Carol, a self-proclaimed documentarian and journalist, then goes about getting Linda on camera as much as she can and investigating her story in order to debunk it. Carol, and the makers of this docu-series, think she has succeeded…I don’t.

To be clear, I don’t believe Linda’s preposterous and ever more outlandish story. It is so outrageous and ridiculous as to be absurd. But that also makes it very easy to debunk…and Carol and the makers of this documentary, fail to do even the most rudimentary journalistic work to expose Linda as a fraud…but they work very hard to make it seem like they’ve done the work.

For example, Linda and Budd have 23 witnesses who claim to have seen her being abducted into the New York night sky. That’s a lot of witnesses. A scene plays out in the documentary where Carol, while videotaping in the early 90’s, has Budd call one of the witnesses in order to question them, but Budd isn’t able to get in touch with them and leaves a message. This is his second attempt to do so. No other attempts are made…and Carol, and the producers, claims this proves all the witnesses are fake or frauds. Huh?

The claim is also made by Carol that she called one witness and that it “sounded like Linda”. Again, this is the extent of the journalism on display in this series. Out of 23 witnesses, one didn’t call back and the other sounds kind of like Linda, and so that makes all 23 fake or fraudulent? That is just as ridiculous a claim as Linda’s original claims.

Then there’s the story of Richard and Dan, the UN security guards for the Secretary General. Back in 1990 Carol films Linda as they go through file footage of various UN events and Linda actually identifies one of the guys in the video as being Dan. She literally ID’s the guy.

Now, does that mean it is the guy? Does that mean that the guy she ID’s came to her house and did all the things she claims? No. What it does mean is that it should be easy to investigate who that person is…and maybe…just maybe…find him and talk to him. If you work as a security guy at the UN, there’s a paper trail, pay stubs, taxes, insurance, and all the rest. There’s a paper trail and probably a picture ID on file. Do Carol and the producers of this series investigate and find that material? No, they don’t. Why not? I have no idea. Maybe they’re lazy.

Carol and the producers do have handwriting analysis done on a type-written letter signed by Secretary Cuellar in which he claims to have seen all that happened to Linda that night in 1989. The hand writing analysis is on Cuellar’s signature and the expert declares that no one writes their name exactly the same way twice and this signature is too perfect to be real.

Now, the signature and the type-written letter may very well be fake, but public officials use signature stamps to sign their name all the time…is it out of the possibility that this happened here? No. Did Carol or the producers acknowledge this? Also no.

If Linda is as big a bullshitter as she appears to be in this documentary, you’ve got to find more substantial evidence and prove she is a bullshitter…it can’t be that hard.

What about the other 22 witnesses? Did they try and track them down? Who are they and where are they?

Where’s the investigation into Richard and Dan and the UN and all that? This is simple stuff. It may not be easy to do and may take effort, but if Linda is so full of shit then it should be easy to prove and yet they never prove it.

With the slightest bit of awareness on the game being played on you by understanding what is missing from this series, Manhattan Alien Abduction looks in hindsight to be a cheap and tawdry venture.

As bizarre and unbelievable as Linda’s claims are the investigation into them is shallow and amateurish. Do the work. Track down the witnesses. Find a connection. Don’t just speculate and assume and conjecture and imply…investigate and prove…or in this case, disprove.

Here’s another oddity about this mini-series, namely that Carol Rainey has her own major biases from a tormented childhood in a religious cult, and from her personal relationship with Budd Hopkins, that skew her own objectivity and judgement.

Hopkins and Rainey divorced in 2006, and when he died in 2011 he was in a relationship with Leslie Kean. You know who Leslie Kean is? She’s the journalist who went on to break the big UFO story published in the New York Times in 2017 that brought ufology into the mainstream.

The question I have after learning of Hopkins relationship with Kean, and Carol Rainey’s background and her obvious jealousy of Linda Napolitano, is this…is this docuseries just Carol Rainey in a jealous fit trying to destroy the legacy of Budd Hopkins, Linda Napolitano’s reputation and undermine Leslie Kean’s life’s work?

As much as I think Linda Napolitano is a fabulist, I think Carol Rainey is one too…and a much more nefarious one. Rainey is the woman scorned, and while she may be right about everything, her personal vindictiveness and venom are not journalistically acquired evidence…they are just grievances in the form of accusations.

Ultimately, Manhattan Alien Abduction disappoints despite a very compelling thesis, and is scuttled by a thoroughly amateurish and weak journalistic effort that fails to adequately disprove something that should be so easily debunked.

©2024

The Disaster That is Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…” – my motto for the last 8 years, borrowed from Rudyard Kipling.

This past weekend the esteemed New York Times Magazine ran a piece titled “Is the Awkward ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood Behind Us?” written by Kabir Chibber.

The article caught my eye because as long-time readers can attest, I have been writing critically, and seemingly endlessly, about Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ for the better part of eight years now. If Cassandra and Nostradamus had a child prodigy whose sole gift was the ability to clearly diagnose the excesses of Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ as it was happening but to be ruthlessly ignored/punished for their correct prophecies…that child would be me.

I would link to the articles to prove my bona fides as a critic of the ‘Diversity Era’ but there are so many of them it would be ridiculous to even try. If you type “woke” into the search bar of this website your computer, and your brain, may explode at the avalanche of articles that confront you.

I don’t know, and don’t really care, who this Kabir Chibber is…but to quote John McClain from Die Hard…”welcome to the party, pal”…even if it is 8 years too late.

Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ essentially started in 2015 with the mathematically ignorant protest movement named Oscars Too White. In the wake of that nonsense came the calamity that was Trump’s election victory over Hillary Clinton, followed by the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter and the rest.

Hollywood, and some audience members, went into a tailspin of emotionalism and lost their minds in a hysterical fever of self-righteousness in the wake of these events. This hysteria forced them to embarrass themselves by seeing racism and sexism everywhere, and by steadfastly ignoring quality in favor of diversity when it came to cinema, and by also being deathly allergic to reality.

Examples abound of how asinine and insane the ‘Diversity Era’ has been…here are a few tips of the very crazy iceberg.

The ‘Diversity Era’ made the middling Marvel movie Black Panther into a Best Picture Academy Award nominee, and had middle-aged white women giving black power salutes in theatres like they were Huey Newton.

It turned mind-numbing mediocrities like Jordan Peele and Greta Gerwig into award-contending auteurs and made the mundanities that were Peele’s Get Out and Gerwig’s Lady Bird into Best Picture nominees. Hell, people were furious when Gerwig wasn’t nominated for Best Director last year for the insultingly awful Barbie. Oh yeah…and it made Barbie into a box office blockbuster too.

Ava DuVernay, one of the truly atrocious filmmakers of her time, becoming a Hollywood power player due to DEI is one of the signs of how widespread and potent the ‘Diversity Era’ disease really was.

Disney lost its fucking mind in the ‘Diversity Era’ and essentially sabotaged its two largest cash cow franchises, Marvel and Star Wars, on the altar of wokeness by going Girl Power crazy and replacing all their white male leads with women, women of color or people of color. Ironically, no white guys were allowed in the ‘Diversity Era’.

Marvel went from being the biggest box office behemoth of all-time to being a franchise in free fall, all because executives in the C suite wanted to signal their virtue by getting rid of their white male leads.

The post-Endgame Marvel lineup looks like it was assembled by an HR department at a Seven Sisters liberal arts school. Thor was replaced by Lady Thor, Black Panther was replaced by Lady Black Panther, Iron Man was replaced by black Lady Iron Man (Iron Heart), Captain America was replaced with black Captain America and Shang-Chi – a second rate character if there ever was one, got his own movie, as did the female fronted and directed Eternals – one of the worst films of the last decade. All of these movies were absolutely abysmal by the way.

Star Wars was turned into a girls and gays franchise over these last 8 years with the Rey storyline and the incessantly PC narratives and casting of their television series like Ahsoka and The Acolyte. Again, white guys need not apply…in either the creative process or the viewership.

Film critics across the mainstream media sacrificed their credibility and integrity on the altar of the ‘Diversity Era’ too as they bent over backwards to pretend to like sub-par movies just because they were ‘diverse’, and/or had a female or person of color director and/or star, and they continuously handled all ‘diverse’ projects with the most patronizing of kid gloves.

The list of Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards in the recent past highlights how deep the ‘Diversity Era’ hysteria went. It all started with Moonlight, a story about a gay black boy - directed by the entirely forgettable Barry Jenkins (a black man) who hasn’t done a damn noteworthy thing since, winning Best Picture in 2016 over La La Land as a reaction to Trump’s election.

In the following years we’ve had Nomadland – a story starring the insufferable Frances McDormand about the wandering underclass in America that somehow manages to celebrate the corporate behemoth Amazon, winning Best Picture and Best Director because it was directed by an Asian woman, Chloe Zhao.

Then we had the embarrassingly bad CODA win because it was directed by a woman, Sian Hader, and was about deaf people. This was followed by the egregiously overhyped Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won because it was about an Asian family and was co-directed by an Asian man. Quality, talent, craftsmanship and skill be damned…diversity for the win!!

As for the details of Chibber’s article, what infuriated me about it was that it acts like the insanity and inanity of the ‘Diversity Era’ only now has become obvious, and that it was impossible to recognize while it was ongoing.

Chibber opens his piece writing, “Hollywood has its eras, often apparent only in retrospect. Think back several years: Do you remember packed theaters giving Black-power salutes at screenings of “Black Panther”? Do you remember when an all-female version of “Ghostbusters” was treated as a pioneering development? Do you remember when the writer of a “Star Wars” film described the Empire as a “white supremacist (human) organization”

My question is…why on earth would anyone listen to a writer like Chibber who was completely blind to what was occurring for the last 8 years WHILE IT WAS ACTUALLY OCCURING. Contrary to what Chibber thinks, eras are not only apparent in retrospect. I am not a genius by any stretch, but apparently, I am extraordinarily good at my job…you know how I know that…BECAUSE I WAS AWARE OF THE ERA AS IT WAS HAPPENING! Unlike Mr. Chibber.

Chibber goes on to describe the Hollywood formula during the ‘Diversity Era’ as being “the same old thing, but with a bold and visionary new twist: fewer white guys.”

I wrote that exact thing over and over while it was actually happening over the past 8 years and I lost jobs, clients and friends because of it. Telling the truth in hindsight takes no courage. Doing it while the battle rages, takes not only a keen eye and perception but gigantic balls of steel. Mine are apparently the size of fucking Jupiter while Mr. Chibber is a eunuch.

Chibber then writes of the ‘Diversity Era’ and its excesses that “The moment is easier to see now that it has ebbed.”

Bullshit. The moment was glaringly obvious when it was happening but as Mr. Chibber and his ilk in the establishment media proved over and over again that it is difficult to see things clearly when your livelihood depends on you not seeing it. To quote Orwell, “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a struggle”. Well, Chibber and his pampered set are incapable of struggle, while I was born to thrive in it.

The funniest thing Chibber writes is an admission of something I have been writing about so often even I am tired of hearing myself. Chibber writes in regards to the end of the ‘Diversity Era’, “At least we no longer have to pretend to like something because it has the right politics, or because the people most vocally against it are Nazis.”

So just as I wrote for these long 8 years, critics, pundits and creators were pretending to like things simply because they had the “proper” politics and because they hated the people who disliked those projects. You think I’d be more comfortable being right considering it happens so often.

The movie studios, particularly Disney, literally turned that formula of having the “right” politics and the “right” enemies of those politics into their business model.

Amazon has done the same thing, just look at the catastrophe that is the Rings of Power series with its diverse, and dreadful, cast, and how Amazon uses the Disney model of making all criticism of their projects into claims of racism and sexism.

I have to admit, I have found Hollywood’s insatiable appetite for wokeness, political correctness and diversity uber alles over these last 8 years to be extremely depressing.

Cinema and television have never been at such a low point creatively in my lifetime, and it is all because of the woke, PC, diversity and inclusion agenda which rules our current era and cares not a bit about quality, but only about signaling virtue and having the proper politics.

I hope cinema as an artform can make a comeback in the coming years and decades, but I’m not optimistic. The signs all point to movies going the way of music…in other words, losing ever more artistry, creativity and cultural power through corporate and creative malfeasance.

As for Mr. Chibber and his article…it is the height of irony that a “person of color” like Mr. Chibber, who got the ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood completely and utterly wrong while it was occurring, is now hired to write an article about it for the lofty New York Times, while I, a brutish white man who was 1000% correct in every way about Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ from the jump, can’t even get a respectful comment in the comment section on an op-ed published by the fierce gatekeepers at the Old Grey Lady.

It seems Mr. Chibber’s insights on the excesses of the ‘Diversity Era’ forgot to mention the fact that he’s one of the big beneficiaries of it, as he’s proven through his ignorance of, and blindness to, the ‘Diversity Era’ that he is just another mid-wit DEI hire who in a saner, less hysterical time, never would’ve been chosen to write for the New York Times because he brings zero insight to the topic and is intellectually incapable of producing even one original thought.

Don’t kid yourself, Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ isn’t over by a long shot. And even if the hysteria is ebbing a bit, that doesn’t mean the damage done to the art of cinema, and the business of entertainment over the last decade isn’t indelible and won’t have long term consequences. It will…and not for the better, no matter what Mr. Chibber and his kind may claim to think.

©2024

Dispatches from the Shitshow: There and Back Again

ELECTION 2024 - POST-MORTEM #1

I’m picking up Bad Vibrations

In case you haven’t heard, former president, nepo-baby real estate mogul, and reality tv star, Donald J. Trump, has won the 2024 presidential election in resounding fashion.

I believed, due to my extensive expert analysis of “vibes”, that Trump would not win…or more accurately…would not be allowed to become president again. I was definitely wrong about the election results – as I thought the establishment would steal it fair and square, but I might still be right about whether Trump actually gets inaugurated.

A lot can happen between now and January 20th, and most of it can be very, very bad.

I had a conversation the other day with a good friend of mine, Red Dragon, who is a therapist. He and I avoid talking about politics for the most part but he called me to ask my Jungian thesis on Trump. I told it to him, which is essentially that Trump is the archetype of Loki, the Norse trickster god, personified.

Red Dragon, who is devoutly anti-Trump, then explained to me that he has a “feeling” and a “sense” that Trump’s astonishing story has one more gigantic twist in it and that twist involves some calamity befalling him. He wasn’t sure what it was…maybe a heart attack or stroke or worse.

What intrigued me about Red Dragon’s “feeling” and “sense” is that I have had the same feeling for some time now, and have even written about it. And to be clear, Red Dragon does not read my writing at all, so it’s not like he’s seen my pieces on the subject.

So my sense of the “vibes” around the election were wrong, but my “sense” of a calamity awaiting Trump persists – and is shared by other distant, yet kindred, spirits.

I fear, and I genuinely mean that I am fearful because I do not want anything bad to happen to the guy or to the country, that he will not make it to the presidency, and if he does, he won’t be there very long (remember the very murky and mysterious assassination attempt on Reagan in March of 1981 was a little over two months after he was inaugurated).

Trump may have a “heart attack” or “stroke” that aren’t really a heart attack or a stroke. Or he may get shot. Or blown up. Or poisoned. Or have an anvil fall on his head. Or may have a lawfare bomb blow up in his lap. Whatever it is, the powers that be, most notably the intelligence community, are out to get him, and when they want to get someone, they usually, but not always, do.

After Trump’s win he put out a series of videos describing his plan for his presidency. In one of the videos, he talks at length about his plan for the intelligence community and how he is going to bring them to heel. It is shocking to watch, and is the equivalent of when JFK said he would “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces”. We all know how well that went for JFK…he got his brains blown out all over his Ivy League suit on a sunny November day in Dallas, Texas.

Trump further antagonized the intel community when he tweeted that he would NOT be inviting former CIA director, and unrepentant neo-con, Mike Pompeo, to join his administration. Pompeo was the one who convinced Trump to not release the JFK assassination files during his first term…something he has sworn to do this time around. Trump’s “no Pompeo“- announcement made me both cheer…and shudder, because Pompeo is a monster but his ouster will only further antagonize the villains in the intelligence community.

The point of all this is that Trump has a big old bullseye on his back, and the people putting it there are notorious for assassinations and coups. So the Trump drama may hold another turn to it that will be Shakespearean in its tragedy.

Again…I hope not…but it’s a distinct possibility.

It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I Feel Fine

I spoke to a high-ranking election official here in Pennsylvania on the morning after the election and they told me that Harris was poised to win Pennsylvania and therefore the White House until a single vote was cast in my small, rural, overwhelmingly conservative township for Jill Stein. According to this official, this single vote somehow miraculously, single-handedly, halted Harris’s momentum and began her precipitous electoral decline.

In case you’re wondering…it was me…I was the one who voted for Jill Stein and thereby destroyed Harris’s electoral bid and, according to establishment liberals and hysteric woke fools, the democratic experiment that is the United States of America.

Sorry about that. Just kidding…I’m not sorry at all.

While every liberal I know is freaking out, or inconsolably depressed and deep within the throes of despair, I feel fine.

The reason for that is simple, yet complicated. The simple part is this…Donald Trump is a gigantic middle finger to the establishment and the DEI, woke, pussy-hat brigade, identity politics obsessed portion of the democratic party, and I have, for many years, been loudly saying “fuck you” to this intellectually insipid and politically insidious faction.  

In this sense, Trump’s victory fills me with a shameful amount of schadenfreude – the German word for pleasure in response to another’s misfortune. Of course, my feeling of schadenfreude is only heightened by the woke cult’s extraordinarily expansive amount of self-righteousness and hubris over the last ten years.

So, in one sense I am giddy at the truly malodorous, mid-wit, machine politician mediocrity that is Kamala Harris and her supremely silly sycophants losing this election.

I fully acknowledge that this response is childish, vindictive and vulgar. I am not proud of it, but I do admit to it.

You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness…like resignation to the End…always the End

There is another part of me though that is deeply concerned about Trump’s victory, and it has nothing to do with his policies or the American polity, and everything to do with my own humanity. Namely, that there are many people that I love dearly who have personalized their politics to the point where they are in a great deal of emotional pain at the moment.

While I am a notoriously vicious son of a bitch, I am only that way to my enemies, and am deeply protective of those that I love.

In the broadest sense, my enemies are those in politics, like the entire democratic party and their shills in the legacy media, who have embraced a self-righteous racial, gender and ethnic identity politics over class politics. I despise these vapid and vainglorious villains because they are the most duplicitous, diabolical and deceptive scoundrels in American life, as they have irreparably destroyed the middle-class and decimated the working-class, and thus given us President Donald Trump…not once, but twice.

But then there are people in my life – most notably women, and everyone knows how much I obviously respect and adore women, like my wife, and my girlfriend, and my other girlfriend, and the prostitute I frequent, and the other prostitute I frequent, and this other women who may or may not be a prostitute who I’m trying to make my girlfriend but she’s kinda being a bitch about it so who knows where that will go…anyway…these women are deeply upset that Trump won, and I don’t like them being in anguish.

In all seriousness, I know a bevy of women who are either furious, or despondent, or inconsolable, or all of the above, regarding Trump’s victory. I totally get it. I do.

Therefore, I will not try and convince them to feel otherwise because how they feel is how they feel and I am not going to mansplain to them how their feelings are wrong no matter how wrong they are.

What I will do is encourage them to, in due time, put aside their feelings and try and analyze not so much their political beliefs but their political strategy and tactics and try and find how we, and they, got us where we are.

I would also try to encourage them to, going forward, not catastrophize and internalize their politics, because, as I have learned through experience – the Bush years were hell on earth for me, that is a terrible waste of time and an egregious waste of a glorious life.

I’m NOT looking at the Man in the Mirror, oh yeah, I’m NOT asking him to change his ways

In my final dispatch from before the election, I wrote that if liberals lose, they should, “look in the mirror and ask yourself some meaningful questions like…what have I done and what policies have I supported, that brought this vile man to power? If the answer you receive makes you question your entire ideology and approach to politics…then you’re on the right track.”

Thankfully, liberals are taking my sage advice and looking deeply inward in an attempt to learn from failure.

Just kidding…liberals have learned nothing and are once again doubling down on identity politics in order to explain their catastrophic defeat in this year’s election. The top three reasons I’ve heard for why Kamala lost are…you guessed it…racism, sexism and white supremacy. Yawn. I guess liberals think they didn’t screech “racist, fascist and sexist!!” quite loud enough over the decade. Maybe if they yell it louder, they’ll win next time. Addiction to wokeness is a hell of a thing.

A glance at MSNBC, CNN or ABC in the hours and days following Trump’s win and you were treated to intellectual titans like Joy Reid, Eddie Glaude, and Sunny Hostin, declaring that the only reason Trump won is because of racism and sexism….some of that racism and sexism even coming from “people of color” and women.

Glaude, a Princeton professor and one of the griftiest of race grifters, responded to an argument that people voted for Trump due to economic reasons, by saying, “I do not believe that…I CANNOT believe that…”. Exactly. Glaude, like the rest of the identity politics hucksters, CANNOT believe that because his entire career is premised on race being front and center at every moment in America….so if racism goes away...so does his income stream and prestige.

Glaude is, like his fellow race hustlers, Ibram X. Kendi, Joy Reid, Sunny Hostin, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and their ilk, an intellectual midget and political and cultural snake oil salesman and charlatan.

These mendacious morons are the same ones denying the fact that Kamala Harris was one of the most grotesquely inadequate politicians of the modern era and, in fact, have over and over, along with fellow talking heads and pundits in newspapers, declared that Kamala ran a “flawless” campaign. It’s impossible to take anyone who says that seriously. Kamala’s campaign was a lot of things, but “flawless” was not one of them. Kamala’s campaign was just like her in that it was fearful and entirely forgettable.

Thankfully I haven’t yet heard my favorite term “misogynoir” (hatred of black women), but that may be only because I’ve not watched enough cable news…as it is sure to be thrown around quite a bit in the coming days by the race hustler du jour trying to sound smart.

The reality is that Kamala Harris is not just a not-ready-for-prime-time player, she’s a never-will-be-ready-for-prime-time player. She is a generic, disingenuous, California machine politician who never had to actually convince people of anything in her entire career, just got to show up with the “D” next to her name to get elected. She never got a single vote in the democratic primary and was chosen to be vice-president, and democratic nominee, not despite being a black woman, but simply because she’s a black woman.

The KHive, a collection of rabid Kamala fans in both the media and public at large, loved Kamala but couldn’t name a single policy she believed in…because her identity as a black woman was all they needed, as supporting her was a self-righteous way to signal their virtue. This is why Kamala is the ultimate candidate for DEI-obsessed democrats.

This is also what made her such a disastrous presidential nominee, not to mention a heinous vice-president and senator. This is why she didn’t do the Joe Rogan interview…because she can’t sit for three hours and talk to anyone about anything. The reason for this is because there is no there - there. She is as vacant and vacuous as Trump is venal and vile…which is saying a lot.

But to Trump’s credit…he may be a bullshitter but at least he is dexterous enough to go on Joe Rogan and bullshit for three hours and not crumble and cackle his way into a warm puddle of his own piss.

Thankfully, Kamala Harris will, barring something extraordinary, disappear from public life forever because she will be a stark reminder of the failures of the DEI, woke, identity politics driven hysteria that put her a heart-beat away from the presidency…and put Trump in the Oval Office for a second time.

Alright…that’s enough ranting and rambling for today. Until next time America!!

©2024

Dispatches from the Shitshow: What to Expect When You're Expecting

Cleaning out my notebook of a few random thoughts before the “most important election of our lifetime”® tomorrow.

Ground and Pound

I’ve read a great deal about the Harris campaign’s money advantage and the power of their “ground game” recently…and have come to see it firsthand.

I currently reside in a ruby red republican county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I live in a very rural part of this very rural county. In addition, I live way off a main road and my home is only accessible by a half mile dirt lane…and is entirely surrounded by corn crops rendering it not only invisible from any road but also very spooky.

Well, despite my extremely remote location, I’ve had four canvassers come to my home in the last three weeks, all of them from the Harris campaign. I’ve had none from the Trump campaign come around.

One canvasser was a twenty-something woman and she was riding a bicycle and I was legitimately worried for her because the road nearest me is not bike friendly and bears have been known to roam these parts…I know because I’ve come face to face with one.

The point of all this is that the Harris campaign is definitely trying to get out the vote. From the ratio of Trump to Harris signs in this county, which overwhelmingly favors Trump by a margin of 20 to 1, it is an uphill battle to beat Trump here, but as they always tell us, “every vote counts”.

As an aside, I’m always tempted when a canvasser is here to tell them I’m not down with Kamala because genocide isn’t my thing, but I never do because I feel bad for these folks. From what I understand they are getting paid but I still have no interest in arguing with someone or making them feel bad. If they love Kamala Harris – good for them. Same with Trump fans. Me…I’ll pass on both but feel no need to burst anyone else’s bubble.

Two Voters

Here’s a minor sample of a discussion I had with two different voters.

The first voter, a centrist independent man from a swing state. He told me he is voting Trump because “Trump pisses off all the right people”.

I totally understand the sentiment.

The other voter, a woman, from a different swing state. She told me she would vote for Kamala if it meant “that would be the end of it”, meaning all of the victimhood stuff and identity politics being front and center in American culture. She acknowledged that her hope that voting for a black woman would stifle the woke impulses so prevalent in our current culture, is foolish, as she cited that same hope after she voted twice for Obama, and in her words, “things got much worse” in regards to that subject.

Ultimately, this female voter, who felt exhausted and dejected, told me she will either refrain from voting or vote third party.

Once again, I totally understand her situation and the sentiments she expressed.

Media Malpractice

Even to someone like me, who has spent a lifetime monitoring and commenting on the media’s mendacity and propensity for misinformation and disinformation, the last weeks of this campaign have been jaw-dropping.

For example, the media’s complete disregard for facts about Trump’s statement where he eviscerated Liz Cheney for being a war mongering chicken hawk, was disgusting.

Trump made the same point most liberals made back during the Bush administration (I know because I was one of them), namely that the neo-cons wanted everyone else to go fight in their wars but they themselves, and their offspring, would never go to war.

Liz Cheney is a perfect example of this as she and her truly vile father, Dick Cheney, are chicken hawk royalty.

That the media turned it into Trump calling for Liz Cheney to be put in front of a firing squad, is shameless and shameful. As for me personally, I do hope that Liz Cheney and her scumbag father Dick are put in frotn of firing squads, along with the rest of the neo-con cabal…but I’m not running for president.

I get that the establishment media hates Trump, but they’ve insured that they’re already greatly diminished credibility will only further drop.

The reality is that anyone who watches/reads the mainstream media…and believes it…is an irredeemable dupe and unconscionable dope.

On the bright side, if Trump wins then maybe we will get a return to actual journalism from actual journalists….you know the kind where journalists are adversarial to power and yearn to expose the truth.

After four years of the mainstream media playing patty cake with the Biden administration, and the previous four years of manufactured misinformation and disinformation regarding Trump, a return to reasoned and professional journalism would be a miracle…but a man can dream.

FDR, Revisited

You sir, are correct!!

After Trump’s shocking victory in 2016 (it wasn’t shocking to me – but most everyone else), liberals absolutely lost their fucking minds. People went insane…white liberal women most of all. And from their mental and emotional breakdown the egregiously inane identity politics, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), Black Lives Matter and #MeToo all flourished.

The pussy hat brigade drove liberalism into a ditch that is quickly turning into a grave. These fools, who stamped their feet and went on a seek and destroy mission against anyone who dare call them out for their vapid emotionalism and their political and intellectual vacuity in the wake of their loss to Trump, have set back leftist and liberal politics forty years at least. Ultimately, they have accomplished nothing but to align democrats with the malignant forces of big business, Israel, and the intelligence community, all while obliterating any meaningful class politics in their coalition. Well done, dipshits.

The same Clinton clowns who have ruined leftism and liberalism, make up the deplorable Kamala Harris supporters known as the KHive. So, if Kamala Harris loses in this election, expect more of the same from these unhinged hysterics, who in response will only double and triple down on identity politics and taking the corporate side in the class war.

My advice to all liberals is to not believe your own bullshit about this being “the most important election of our lifetime” and about “democracy being on the ballot” and how this might be our “last election”.

Stop with the existential nonsense. This election is just like any other. If Trump wins it will suck for you, there is no doubt, but…this too shall pass.

I had the same feelings you had back when Bush “beat” Gore in 2000…and all my fears were correct as Bush was the worst president of my lifetime (including Trump), and anybody else’s lifetime. But the truth is I survived…and so did the farce/charade of a democracy that I live in.  

Liberals need to understand this…Trump is an annoyance, not an existential threat. He is hated by the establishment because he lays bare the hypocrisy, corruption and shamelessness among the ruling elite.

Liberals loathing of him is based almost entirely on style over substance. Trump’s style will no doubt grate, but his substance will be only slightly different from the business-as-usual American politics. Israel and big business will rule.

There’ll be lots of bluster and bullshit…but little else that matters will change in any meaningful way.

Just know this…the truth is that it is liberal’s reaction to Trump that makes him so dangerous. Aligning with the malignant and mendacious intelligence community, big business, Ukraine and Israel, in reaction to Trump is how you not only lose elections, but more importantly, your soul.

Liberals need to understand that the only thing they need to fear, is fear itself. Trump feeds off of fear and loathing, and if you do neither, he withers and dies.

As the saying goes, when you find yourself going through hell…keep going. Well, liberals, four more years of Trump will be hell but you gotta keep going…and maybe, just maybe, look in the mirror and ask yourself some meaningful questions like…what have I done and what policies have I supported, that brought this vile man to power? If the answer you receive makes you question your entire ideology and approach to politics…then you’re on the right track.

My advice…return to class politics and completely disregard identity politics and the cult of woke. I doubt you will (or even are capable of doing so)…but that’s what you should do.

All that said…the only thing worse for liberalism and leftism than Trump winning, is Trump losing, because then liberals will think that mid-wit mediocrities like Kamala Harris, who are slaves to corporations, the intel community and Israel, are the path to power.

They may be the path to electoral victory on occasion, but they aren’t the path to progress, and they sure as hell aren’t the path to lower class and working-class prosperity, and morality and ethics in American governance.

MAGA Mania

I’ve seen a lot of media pontification about how if Trump loses there will be violence from his supporters. Consider me unconvinced.

The MAGA maniacs are not going to start a civil war in defeat. They will bitch and moan and rant and rave, but do it all from their couches. There won’t be riots or violence or marches or meltdowns because MAGA at heart is, for the most part, fat and old…just like its leader.

There will just be impotent anger that never spreads further than their own living room because MAGA is a movement for the isolated, and with Trump no longer politically relevant, it will dissipate and disappear.

Now, if Trump wins…liberals may very well march and riot, and in response to that MAGA in its various forms will come out and there may very well be violence and in the most extreme case, civil unrest/skirmishes in a civil war.

But that will only happen because Trump is still relevant and that’s what gives his movement life. Trump out of power and out of options, saps MAGA of its mojo.

Middle-Fingers

Speaking of MAGA, I was considering the whole MAGA movement the other day and came to the conclusion once again that Trump is little more than a gigantic middle-finger to the establishment and a boorish response to the feminization of America and American culture.

At this point Trump is a caricature and a parody of himself. He is all bluster and bullshit, but his real value is in telling the establishment, which has actively destroyed the foundational working-class of this country and actively despises the majority of Americans it has displaced and dispossessed, to go fuck themselves.

That establishment includes Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama. These guys, along with Biden, are the ones who sold out the manufacturing base of America, and gutted the working and middle class of America.

They bailed out Wall Street and sold-out Main Street. They’ve flooded poor inner-city communities will drugs, and sold Americans, most notably black men, as slaves to the prison industrial complex.

These presidents, of both parties, hate you. They not only want to see you fail they want to see you suffer. They thrive off of your misery.

To MAGA, Trump is the white knight come to slay the establishment dragon and right all the wrongs from decades past, up to the present day.

What MAGA fails to understand is that Trump is just more of the same. He talks a big game but plays a small one. He gives a middle finger to the establishment but then does almost exactly what they want him to do.

Trump is a showman, a shaman and a charlatan. He’s an archetype come to life. A clown in all its manifestations…happy, sad, angry. He’ll put on a show and you’ll either love him or hate him, but you’ll find it impossible to ignore him.

Harris, on the other hand, is not a showman or a shaman, she’s just a charlatan. She will try to pass through her presidency like a ghost through a fog – unseen and unheard. She is a bad actress miscast on a dismal daytime drama. She likes that she was cast in the role but will be entirely forgettable in it. She enjoys the perks and prestige of being on the show but doesn’t want the pressure of any big scenes.

This election at its core is a question of who will haunt our collective consciousness for the next four years…and obviously, no matter who wins, we will all lose.

Right again!

On that bright note…that’s all I got for now folks. I’m sure I’ll have a few thoughts on the election once we know who won, but until then, stay safe and stay cool.

©2024

Dispatches from the Shitshow: Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine

The phrase “weird scenes inside the gold mine” is a cryptic lyric from The Doors epic song The End off of their iconic eponymous first album. This seemed like an apropos title for an article about the merciful end of the insane and inane 2024 election, which is now, thank the good Lord, in its final week.

The weird scenes of late have included the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden which the mainstream media and democrats universally claimed was a “Nazi rally” because Nazi’s rallied there in 1939…or something like that. Which has me wondering if the New York Knicks are Nazis too since they attempt to rally there forty-one times a season. I KNOW, without a shadow of a doubt, that the New York Rangers are Nazis…but they’re good kind!!

As for Trump being a modern-day Hitler…let’s get real. Democrats tout the fact that Dick Cheney is endorsing Kamala Harris and they have the nerve to call Trump Hitler? Cheney is the most malignant and malicious force in American politics in at least the last quarter century…this prick was behind the War on Terror, the surveillance state and the torture program and is responsible for the murder of millions…so spare the Trump – Hitler comparisons as Trump has done nothing even remotely close to the evil that Cheney has done.

In addition, a man of style and panache like Hitler wouldn’t be caught dead dancing to The Village People’s YMCA. Would not happen. Wagner maybe. But not The Village People.

At this Trump/Nazi rally over the weekend, which was a who’s who of Trumpian sycophants and miscreants, famed closeted homosexual and roast comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made a joke calling Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage and you’ll never guess what happened…the media freaked out and wept and wailed over “hate speech” and “racism”. Yawn.

I admit I too was offended by Hinchcliffe’s joke not because he called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, which is inaccurate, but because he didn’t call it a floating piece of shit, which is a scientific fact.

Trump also went on the Joe Rogan Experience and talked for three hours. I haven’t listened to the show only because I’m allergic to fucking retards, and that would be a double dose which could potentially be fatal to a delicate genius like me.

In truth, I like that Joe Rogan has a podcast but I only listen to it when there’s a guest on who interests me, which isn’t all that often. That said, I’m glad the option of Rogan is available especially when the mainstream media is so obviously mendacious and manipulated. (Full disclosure – Joe Rogan once talked at length and quite glowingly on his podcast about an article I wrote – which increased the traffic to this website literally by millions.)

Trump going on Rogan is a big deal for no other reason that it proves he can do it…something of which Kamala Harris is simply incapable. The idea of Kamala sitting down and talking with Rogan, or anyone, for three hours is ridiculous. Harris is an intellectual midget devoid of even a smidgeon of charisma, and she couldn’t hide that fact during a three-hour chat with Rogan.

The reality is that Kamala Harris is such a horrendous candidate it is actually stunning to behold. She seems entirely inauthentic and out of her depth every single time she opens her mouth. It is not surprising that in the final weeks of this god forsaken campaign that Harris has gone out of her way to seem as unappealing and incompetent as ever. It almost feels like she doesn’t want to win.

And as for the MAGA morons calling Kamala Harris a socialist or communist…she’s a socialist without the socialism and a communist without the communism. She, like Biden, Obama, Bush, Reagan and the Clintons before her, and just like Trump, is a corporate whore who will voraciously fellate corporate interests and not just ignore the working class, but viciously and violently destroy it with a shameless vim and vigor.

Now don’t get me wrong, my criticism of Kamala Harris is not an endorsement of Donald Trump, or vice versa.

Trump is Trump…a narcissistic carnival barker and con man. But for all his faults, and there are a bazillion of them, the one thing you can’t say about him is that he lacks charisma and confidence – two things Kamala Harris has exactly none of.

The truth is that Kamala Harris is what’s wrong with American Politics, and Donald Trump is what’s wrong with America.

Speaking of Nazis (Ironically Enough)

A vote for Trump or Harris is a vote for continued Israeli control over the American government.

A vote for Trump or Harris is a vote for more genocide and ethnic cleansing from the apartheid state you’re not allowed to call an apartheid state – Israel.

A vote for Trump or Harris is a vote for corporate America, the oligarchs and the aristocracy.

A vote for Trump or Harris is a vote against the truth.

No thank you. I will vote for neither.

Promises, Promises

The one thing you can count on is that whatever Trump or Harris are promising on the campaign trail won’t become a reality.

Trump says he’ll release the JFK files…he won’t release the JFK files. You know how I know that? Because he didn’t do it the last time he was in office.

Trump says he’ll drain the swamp and has learned from his first administration, and yet he talks openly about putting the swamp dragon himself, Mike Pompeo, into his cabinet. Mike Pompeo, by the way, was the Director of the CIA who convinced Trump not to release the JFK files during Trump’s first term.

Kamala talks about controlling illegal immigration and blah blah blah…she’s not gonna do it. You know how I Know she’s not gonna do it…because she hasn’t done it while in office. In fact, she’s not gonna do a god damn thing in office but maintain the very worst of the status quo. She is the DEI candidate who will further infect the government and this country with the DEI nonsense that diminished everyone and everything it touches.

She will also bend over backwards to stifle free speech by banning hate speech – and making sure the sycophants and psychopaths that love her are the ones who determine what is and isn’t hate speech.

No thanks to all of it and to both of them. Neither of these shitbags will make my life any better and both of them will keep the world at its worst. He was a shitty president the last time around and she is a shitty vice president now…so the choice is between something shitty and something shitty. I’ll pass and vote third party instead.

Oh, and anyone talking about this election being about saving our democracy…just shut the fuck up. Our democracy died a long time ago, the exact moment being maybe when the intelligence community pulled off a coup and killed a sitting president by blowing his brains out all over his nice Ivy league suit in Dallas, Texas.

Speaking of Assassinations

Two days before the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania back in July, I wrote an article saying that my sense of things was that the establishment was going to do anything and everything to make sure Trump didn’t become president…up to and including having some “lone nut” taking a shot at him.

I still get the sense that Trump will not be allowed to become president. The establishment, by hook or by crook, will keep him out of power.

Here’s the weird thing…this is not based on reading of polling data or anything like that, just on my sense of the moment and of the narrative…but 2024 feels a lot like 2016 except in reverse.

Everybody was talking about Hillary winning in a landslide in the final weeks of the campaign of 2016 (except me who predicted a Trump victory)…democrats were ruthlessly arrogant and cocky and republicans oppressively depressed and horrified.

Fast forward to 2024 and everyone is talking about Trump winning and the MAGA maniacs and morons are arrogant and cocky and democrat dupes and dopes are depressed and horrified.

The polls still say it’s very close but have Kamala slightly ahead overall and in a small majority of the battleground states. The assumption is that the polls are tilted in her favor and under-estimating Trump’s support, so a close race for Harris in the polls is considered a winning race for Trump on election day. I am not so sure assumption is accurate.

Anecdotally, I can tell you here in flyover country in a deep red county in the pivotal swing state of Pennsylvania, Trump seems like a shoe-in.

BUT…the vibes feel to me like 2016 but in reverse. I think Kamala Harris…who is awful, will “win” this election. I still think the establishment, for reasons I cannot quite figure out, simply cannot tolerate Trump in power and therefore are going to pull the rug out from under him on election day or in the days and weeks following.

If the establishment/intelligence community don’t “beat” Trump or “steal” the election fair and square, then Trump is going to face all sorts of obstacles before taking the oath of office. He might have a “heart attack” or “brain aneurysm” or get a deadly case of Covid or have his plane malfunction or another “lone nut” will blow his brains out or some other calamity will befall him and that will be that. And if the establishment/intelligence community don’t remove him from the power equation in the electoral way or the covert action way, then they’ll use false flags, lawfare and the media to once again to neutralize his presidency – maybe even before it starts.

The bottom line is that I still think Trump will not be president come January 2025. Maybe I’m wrong. Who knows? But we’re about to find out.

©2024

Random Thoughts from the Shitshow - Cheney, RFK Jr., Gambling and More!

RANDOM THOUGHTS

From the ‘random thoughts’ bin in my Dispatches from the Shitshow notebook.

A few people asked me if I was going to watch the big presidential debate on Tuesday night. The answer of course is…HELL NO!

I didn’t watch the Trump-Biden debate back when Biden tripped over his own dementia addled dick and I ain’t gonna watch this idiotic horseshit either. Why would anyone in their right mind watch these two raging sub-mediocrities and dim-to-mid-wits babble their inane bullshit back and forth?

I felt the same way about the conventions. How could anyone watch that shit by choice? It’s like tuning in to television just to watch a three-hour block of infomercials. You can’t help but be dumber for having watched.

**********

If you needed another reason to not vote – both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are endorsing Kamala Harris.

Cheney and Bush are war criminals who stole the 2000 election, were either responsible due to negligence for, or complicit in, the 9-11 attacks, lied to start two illegal wars that killed millions, started a torture and massive surveillance program, ran the U.S. economy into the ground, and decimated working families while bailing out Wall Street bankers.

These two men are, frankly, evil to the point of being demonic. To be clear, they should not be in prison for their crimes, they should be at the end of a fucking rope.

That their endorsement of the Democratic nominee is not seen as a giant red flag to the vast majority of liberals in the U.S., is disconcerting, disheartening and should be disqualifying.

Liberals tell me that Trump is Hitler…but they fail to remember that Cheney and Bush actually were as Hitlerian as any president in history.

If you are one of those delusional folks who think Kamala Harris is the one to right the good ship U.S. of A…consider the utterly contemptible and loathsome swamp creatures that are backing her.

I’m not saying you should vote for Trump…I’m just saying that voting for Kamala isn’t the lesser of two evils, it is, at the barest of minimums, the equal of evils.

********

True story - I know a guy who got crabs on his birthday.

*********

I know it is en vogue to think that RFK Jr. is a clown…and I get it…he talks like Katherine Hepburn with a head cold and hiccups. But even with the liability of his addled speech, he still speaks more sense than both Trump and Harris combined.

The fact that he is out there brazenly berating and beating the righteous drum against big pharma and big agriculture, says a lot about him and his integrity, and even more about Trump and Harris’ lack thereof.

Liberals, of course, loathe RFK Jr. for speaking out against the Covid vaccine…as well as many other vaccines…but the reality is that RFK Jr. was right – about the Covid vaccine and much else, and the vast majority of liberals were dead wrong, especially regarding Covid, even though they are loathe to admit it.

I certainly don’t agree with RFK Jr. on everything…most particularly his nauseating subservience to Israel – but both Trump and Harris are equally spineless and mindless when it comes to Israel too (gee…I wonder why?).

That said, the fact that Trump is now surrounding himself with the likes of RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom have endorsed him, and saying he will put them in his administration, is a very big deal considering the villainous scum who populated the first swamp creature-infested Trump term. John Fucking Bolton was his National Security Advisor for crissakes!

When I look at Bush and Cheney endorsing Kamala, and RFK Jr. and Gabbard endorsing Trump, it seems very obvious to me that Trump wins the endorsement battle by a landslide.

Having RFK Jr. fighting big pharma and big agriculture in the public eye for the next four years would be good for the country. Of course, the question becomes could Trump tolerate someone stealing the spotlight from him for four years? My guess is no…and that the relationship would sour pretty quick.

*******

I know I am an old man yelling for the kids to get off of my lawn, but I really, really hate the proliferation of sports gambling in our culture, and think it is insidious, diabolical and dangerous.

I am not a gambler. I don’t even play fantasy sports – another endeavor that I find to be idiotic and detrimental to sport and sports fandom.

The bottom line is that I think that gambling is so toxic and such a cancer that it will eventually aggressively degrade not only individuals, families, communities and the country, but sports itself, as everything that touches gambling is tainted by it and ultimately greatly diminished.

Nowadays it’s simply impossible to watch television without seeing some stupid DraftKings or FanDuel commercial, and all of the networks covering sports have fully embraced gambling as THE focal point of their coverage of sport. ESPN has entire shows dedicated to gambling and has started their own sportsbook, and during actual games they spotlight bets to make.

Kids growing up today will have no idea about sports without gambling being such an integral part of it. Sports and gambling will be inextricably linked for this generation, and it will have dire consequences for those kids when they become adults, and for sports in the future.

The proliferation of sports betting comes nearly forty years after the Reagan administration took the guard rails off of Wall Street, and twenty-five years after Clinton essentially allowed Wall Street to become a massive casino.

We’ve all seen how well those changes to Wall Street have worked out for regular, working-class Americans…it’s been one calamity after another. We’ve had Savings and Loan scandals, Tech bubbles, accounting scandals (Enron), the housing bubble, the housing crash and on and on and on. No matter who was responsible for those crimes and calamities, it was always regular people who were left holding the bag and footing the bill.

In 2008 the entire façade of Wall Street was exposed as being fraudulent and entirely felonious. The banks, the ratings agencies, the insurance companies, the mortgage companies, the federal oversight agencies, the local, city, state and federal law enforcement and attorney’s general, all of them were exposed for the world to see…and yet…nothing changed. In fact, Wall Street only got bigger and more corrupt and now is even more untouchable, and regular people were robbed blind and left poorer and more vulnerable than ever.

The same thing will happen over time with gambling in regards to professional sports leagues, college sports, television networks, tech companies and credit card companies/banks – as they will all make gobs of money…until they don’t, and then they’ll simply use their massive money machine to pay off corrupt politicians and get bailed out with tax payers dollars. And once again it will be regular people who will be fucked over.

You can bet on it.

********

Speaking of getting fucked over….I know people are freaking out about the election. The MAGA maniacs thinks Kamala is a commie and the K-Hive Clowns think Trump is Hitler…but know this…no matter who wins the U.S. will get heinous neo-liberal domestic policies and hellacious neo-con foreign policy.

Trump or Harris…it don’t matter…we are fucked four ways to Sunday. The U.S. empire is in steep decline and will be lashing out at enemies foreign and domestic…and if you think you’re safe because you’re on the “right side of history” or are a “patriot”…guess again.

The bullseye will eventually be on all of our backs because the corrupt oligarchs and aristocrats running this country don’t just hate regular Americans, they actually want to see us suffer because they delight and live off of our misery. These ghouls will do absolutely anything to maintain their power, up to and including putting a bullet in the back of your head after having forced you to buy your own shovel and dig your own grave.

On that joyous note…I’ll sign off.

©2024

Dispatches from the Shitshow: Vices and a Stunning Lack of Virtues

DISPATCHES FROM THE SHITSHOW: VOLUME III - VICES AND A STUNNING LACK OF VIRTUES

 Oh boy…silly season is in full swing now.

So, two weeks ago there’s an assassination attempt on Trump, and then a week later Biden is kicked to the curb (as a side note – am I the only one who noticed that when Biden gave his speech about dropping out of the election, he never said WHY he was dropping out…hmmmm). And we still have more than three long months until election day.

Trump getting shot in the ear and Biden getting tossed on his rear may be the biggest events of this election, or they may be forgotten amongst the hurricane of insanity yet to ensue. Considering the assassination attempt on Trump became old news in about 48 hours, and Biden’s presidential bid was, like Biden’s mind, turned into a distant faded memory in less than a day, one can expect a perfect storm of chaos lies ahead.

Vice President Kamala Harris now takes the reins as the presumptive Democratic nominee, which should make this an even sillier silly season.

Kamala is an extraordinarily vacuous, vapid and venal woman. She is the liberal version of Sarah Palin with a generous serving of George W. Bush thrown in. She is a climber, a hack, a charisma-less dullard and dumb-ass and is not even remotely ready for prime time. She is also as unlikable as unlikable can be, mostly because she is such a transparent phony.

All that said…make no mistake…she most definitely could win.

What I assume will happen is that the media will go all out to protect her and celebrate her. We are already seeing them sticking to the “she was never the border czar” propaganda point, which is painfully absurd. No doubt her poll numbers will climb and she’ll be carried by her good press.

But if things start to go bad, if the bloom comes off the rose and she bumbles and stumbles for the next month and into September, then the deep state will need to make some moves to ensure their girl Friday gets the big gig. Which means we could see more palace intrigue…up to and including Biden resigning (or being forced to resign) as President and Kamala getting to sit in the big seat.

This would do a multitude of things for her, especially if she’s struggling on the campaign trail. First it would make her seem presidential…because she’d actually be president.

Secondly, it would get her off the campaign trail – which has never been her strong suit. She could be “so busy” as President, and take the job so seriously that she couldn’t reduce herself to campaigning, and could leave that to liberal heavyweights like the Obamas, who are very good at it.

This gets us into another uncomfortable topic, which is how can we make Kamala seem presidential when she’s not remotely presidential, and in a short period of time? Well, you have Biden resign, then a major event happens, or have a major event happen and then Biden resigns. So, what I’m talking about is a massive terror attack – in the U.S. or at the Olympics or something like that, or a major military operation (in other words a war) against the villain du jour…be it Yemen, Iran, Russia or some other mustache twisting “evil-doer” from some axis of nefariousness conjured in the back rooms of Langley and/or Tel Aviv. So buckle up…things could get even bumpier.

Speaking of which, I found Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress to be utterly repulsive. Netanyahu, who of course banged the drum for war with Iran, is a repugnant pig and grotesque excuse for a human being. That the sycophants and sociopaths in Congress all bowed down to their genocidal master lays bare the fact that our nation is bought and paid for by their zionist paymasters. How many of these groveling cowards do the Israelis have blackmail information on? My guess is the vast majority – thank you Jeffrey Epstein!!

The most disgusting display was by Pennsylvania’s own meathead Senator John Fetterman. Fetterman had a stroke during his campaign in 2022, and that was on top of being a retard to begin with, so now he’s got nothing but month-old brisket between his ears.

Fetterman’s favorite game is to dress like a homeless guy and go to work at the Senate in shorts and a hoodie in order to represent his constituents – none of whom would disrespect the Senate by dressing so disgracefully. It’s part of Fetterman’s “I’m a working man” shtick, which, if you know his life story, is complete bullshit.

Fetterman showed the world who the boss of the USA is when he showed up to Netanyahu’s speech wearing…you guessed it…a suit…because you wear a suit when the boss is in the office. Fetterman is everything that is wrong with Congress…he’s a ridiculously unserious man and his slavish adoration of the war criminal Netanyahu, and apartheid Israel only speaks to his deep moral and ethical rot.

Speaking of rot…how about that JD Vance? Vance is the Republican nominee for Vice President. Vance is the least interesting person to ever have a remotely interesting life story. He looks like a douchebag and when he speaks, he sounds like a douchebag…which may be a strong indicator that he is, in fact, a douchebag.

Vance wrote a book about his life, “Hillbilly Elegy”, which was made into a movie which was directed by Ron Howard and starred Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

Hillbilly Elegy is one of the very worst films of the 21st Century, which maybe speaks to the future if we get JD as VP. On the bright side there’s a very funny false story going around about how he fucked a couch when he was a kid…which makes me laugh whenever it’s mentioned. So there’s that.

Hillbilly Elegy is available to stream on Netflix, but unfortunately there’s no couch fucking scene in it, if there were I’d recommend it. I have recommended the film in recent days but only so people can watch it to see how atrocious it really is. As bad a candidate as JD Vance is…he’s a better candidate than Ron Howard is a filmmaker.

The reason Trump picked Vance is obvious, Vance is such a small presence, a beta male to the extreme, with all the magnetism of a tumbleweed, that Trump seems bigger and more dynamic next to him.

Vance could also be a sacrificial lamb. Vance has no constituency and no one gives a shit about him one way or the other, so if Trump is failing and flailing he could simply cut Vance loose and replace him in order to inject some action into his campaign and garner his favorite fuels – chaos and attention.

And finally, this past week the director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, testified in front of Congress regarding the assassination attempt on Trump.

Ms. Cheatle’s testimony was, to be kind, an absolute train wreck. Cheatle is one of those aggressively incompetent bureaucrats that has no idea what she is doing or even what she should be doing. A day or so after her disastrous testimony, she resigned as head of the Secret Service.

What interested me about the Cheatle hearing though was not how atrocious she was…but how unanimous the opposition to her was. Red flags go up all over the place for me when both sides of the political aisle are so in-sync on any topic, and the blistering attacks on Cheatle signified less a unity on the topic than an organized distraction from the real topic.

Ms. Cheatle is a convenient, and frankly well-deserving, scapegoat, but she got off essentially scot-free (yes, she lost her job but she’ll get another one – somewhere), and won’t have her feet held to the fire any more.

Cheatle’s incompetence was so staggering, and the opposition to her so unified, that one can’t help but read between the lines and see that this whole fiasco will be quickly forgotten, and any real investigation into the assassination attempt on Trump will be scuttled…all of which is standard operating procedure for the intelligence community. There’s lots of subterfuge, lots of conspiracy theories, lots of official paper pushing and hollering, and then poof…it’s all over and no one is any wiser, and we are all left further from the truth than when we began.

Regardless of all my rambling in the previous paragraphs, the bottom line for me is still this…I simply don’t see Trump being allowed to be president come January 2025. I still don’t know who will be president, I just don’t think it will be Trump. Take that information for what it’s worth…and I’ll see you next time on Dispatches from the Shitshow!!

©2024

The Boys - Season 4: TV Review - Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This is the worst of The Boys’ seasons thus far. It is a sprawling and unfocused disappointment.

When The Boys hit tv screens in 2019 via Amazon Prime it was a glorious jolt of savage energy into the superhero genre that gave a sharp and satirical middle-finger to Marvel, the cultural behemoth of cultural behemoths at the time.

With Marvel on the mountaintop in the wake of its astonishing MCU run which culminated in 2019 with Avengers: Endgame, the superhero genre was prime for a slap in the face and The Boys delivered it exquisitely, with a solid kick in the nuts to boot.

The Boys’ evisceration of the superhero genre and corporate cultural power as well as its clear-eyed, cynical take on corrupt American politics, made it must-see tv for its first three seasons (Here is my review from season three).

But a funny thing happened while The Boys became the go-to satirical superhero tv series over the last five years, namely the superhero genre declined in popularity and relevance, and that decline was steep and rapid. Since the dizzying heights of 2019 with Avengers: Endgame and Joker, superhero films have fallen off a cliff in terms of quality and cultural relevance.

The creative energy propelling The Boys has, in conjunction with the precipitous fall of its once-lofty satirical target, lost considerable steam (and with it, relevance) in its fourth season, and the show has started to resemble the politically-correct corporate IP it so expertly lambasted in its first three seasons.

Season four once again features ‘The Boys’, a group of misfits and miscreants like Butcher, Huey, Mother’s Milk, Starlight, Frenchie and Kimiko as they try to bring down the villain Homelander and the whole corporate superhero monster Vought (a wondrous stand-in for Disney and its awful ilk)…and save the world in the process.  

Butcher is trying to save his “son” while dealing with a terminal illness. Mother’s Milk is trying to save his family. Starlight and Huey are trying to save each other and the world. And Frenchie and Kimiko are trying to save their souls.

None of this is new and frankly, none of it is very interesting anymore. Season four is less vivid and vital than the previous three seasons, and the drama, and comedy, tends to fall flat, and the characters tend to grate.

For the most part the performances all feel tired and cliched as well. Karl Urban as Butcher has been great up until now, but his work in season four seems a bit banal and predictable. The same is true of Jack Quaid and Erin Moriarty as Huey and Starlight respectively. The actors no longer seem to be embodying characters but just going through the motions.

The one exception to this is Karen Fukuhara as Kimiko. Fukuhara consistently brings a vibrancy and verve to her work as the mute superhero, and she fills her every moment on-screen with a vitality lacking in the rest of the cast.

There have been much complaints online about The Boys’ left-wing politics, but I don’t think that is the reason for season four’s failure. The reality is that The Boys has always been overtly leftist in its politics, been even in doing that it, maybe inadvertently, made fun of its own ideology.

While it’s true that the liberal politics are much more overt in season four than in previous seasons, that’s not a big deal, the real problem is that they’re so painfully vapid and trite. I mean, in season one the show savagely yet surreptitiously made the argument that 9/11 was an inside job and now in season four its reduced itself to scenes which feature torturing rich right-wing superheroes by donating their money to Black Lives Matter. That is so on-the-nose as to be embarrassing. Yikes.

The other issue is that the plot has gotten so convoluted and unwieldy as to be tiresome. The main objective of stopping Homelander and Vought has now gotten lost in a maze of odd personal tales that generate neither heat nor light.

For example, out of nowhere season four features a gay love story for the character Frenchie. That Frenchie wasn’t gay before is beside the point, but what is the point is that this storyline is superfluous at best, and egregiously tedious at worst….like when Disney added a gay character to The Eternals – they did it to check boxes, not drive drama.

Other storylines feel just as vacuous, vapid and venal. For instance, all of the stories surrounding Mother’s Milk, Starlight, Huey and even Butcher, feel redundant and devoid of the dramatic and comedic edge of earlier seasons.

I get it, things lose momentum the longer they go, but season four of the The Boys feels like a series trying to stretch things out by adding garbage filler rather than a genuine attempt to drive a story forward with energy, electricity, attitude and aplomb.

Season four ends by setting up season five, which will be the series’ finale. Unfortunately, season five is not set to arrive until 2026 and considering how much creative momentum and cultural relevance The Boys have lost between season three and four, one can only shudder to think how far season five will drop in quality and dramatic dynamism.

The bottom line is that The Boys was brilliant…until it wasn’t. And unfortunately, the bloom is off the rose and the series is now just playing out the string. Hopefully, and I really do hope this, it can right the ship and go out on top in season five with a furious finale. Considering the maddening missteps and malaise of season four, I’m not optimistic.

©2024

Dispatches from the Shitshow: The Assassination Chronicles

DISPATCHES FROM THE SHITSHOW – VOLUME TWO: ASSASSINATION CHRONICLES

So…that was weird.

A week ago, I wrote an article where I described what I thought was going to happen in this year’s election. The big point was that Trump wasn’t going to be allowed to be President…and that the intelligence community would try and assassinate him.

And then…two days later…they tried to assassinate him.

As everyone knows, “a prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” Unfortunately for me I am a prophet without honor everywhere! I’m the Rodney Dangerfield of prophets….I don’t get no honor…NOWHERE! Also unfortunately I am a prophet without profit….but that’s a story for another day.

As insane as the Trump assassination attempt was, and it was insane, I think things only get crazier from here on out.

I don’t know what exactly happened on Saturday, but what I am absolutely certain of is that whatever the “official story” is, is not to be believed even in the slightest.

It is endlessly amusing to me that the conspiracy scolds seem to have lost whatever grip they had left on our society with this batshit event. Right-wingers, even the ones who are reflexively establishment sycophants, are convinced that a deeper plot was involved than just a disgruntled, lone nut and left-wingers are convinced Trump staged the whole thing for a photo-op and sympathy. For example, I had multiple people text me within minutes of the assassination attempt to tell me they thought it was staged.

My spot on the political spectrum is impossible to discern – people on the right hate me and people on the left hate me (shrug), but I’ll say this, I don’t think this was an event staged by Trump. I think there are forces trying to destroy Trump…and they will keep trying to do it – although to be honest I’m not exactly sure why they want to destroy him. I have hunches, but I am not sure….maybe they just want to give the appearance that they’re trying to destroy him….who knows?

That said, I am most definitely open to the possibility that the powers that be are trying to destroy Trump but if they fail to do so they will still use him for all sorts of ungodly schemes and such…but that is only if they can’t pin the tail on his donkey and put him in the morgue instead of the White House.

As for the rest of the election, it is hysterical to me that Trump got shot and yet Biden is the one who looks like he’s being measured for a body bag.

Biden is a dead man walking, and I’m not just talking about in the polls.

With Schumer and Pelosi having now leaked stories about how they each spoke with the President and urged him to step aside, it would seem that Biden should not be asking for whom the bell tolls…although in his demented state he will probably keep asking even after being told it most definitely tolls for him. (And the Washington Post is now reporting that Obama told allies and associates that Biden needs to seriously consider his “viability” as his path to reelection has “greatly diminished”.)

Schumer and Pelosi leaking those stories is a Brutus level of political brutality and is a more politically bloody event than Trump getting shot in the ear. That Biden came down with Covid mere hours later may give him the impetus and cover to close up shop and hand the keys off to the rest of the party. But who knows if crotchety narcissist Joe and the rest of the Biden clan will walk away.

If Biden does step aside, then the carnage really begins.

As I said in my last article, I don’t know who will be president but I’m confident that Trump won’t be allowed to be president again.

It could be any one of the lollipop-guild of intellectual midgets which include Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro or someone else…hell…even the decaying, decrepit, demented dipshit Joe Biden might be Weekend at Bernie’s-ed into the big chair again if he doesn’t back out or drop dead.

Kamala Harris is, in the eyes of many democrats, the next in line but she is an extraordinarily unimpressive politician and person. Kamala Harris has been California’s Attorney General, a U.S. Senator and a Vice President, not despite being a black/Asian woman but because she’s a black/Asian woman. If Democrats simply declare her the nominee it will be an open declaration that identity politics is the be all and end all of their ideology and that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion their unquestioned dogma.

In recent months DEI has somewhat taken a back seat amongst the corporate set as it has become a decadent luxury they have decided they simply can’t afford, and the same may be true among the democratic party – which is, as always, hostage to its corporate donors.

I don’t know how it will play out, I just know that the “deep state” is going to do everything and anything to keep Trump out of the White House…up to and including more assassination attempts during and after the campaign and election.

There is also a very distinct possibility of terror attacks here in the U.S.(or at the Olympics), and false flag attacks overseas that will force America into a war with Russia, China, Iran, Yemen, North Korea or somebody else….whatever it takes to keep Trump out of office and the American war machine running on all cylinders.

We live in very dangerous times and that danger is only going to increase with every passing day. My advice is to believe half of what you see and nothing of what you hear, and to keep your head on a swivel, because there is much more shit about to be thrown at our fan….so hold your nose and be ready to stop, drop and roll at a moment’s notice.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Dispatches from the Shitshow - Biden, Trump and Election 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE SHITSHOW – VOLUME ONE

So, it’s that time again where everybody loses their minds over the possibility that some craven asshole they don’t want to win a sham election beats the craven asshole they do want to win a sham election.

I’ve often said that our democracy is a joke because it’s an oligarchy and aristocracy that gives us the illusion of choice as to who will be the face of our diabolical, decadent and decaying empire, but no choice in its behavior or how it is actually run.

Voting for president is simply choosing who you want to host the reality tv/game show that is American politics for the next four years. Choose wisely because you’ll have the winner on your tv screens and in the center of conversation for the next four years.

Will you choose the demented, despicable, deplorable, disgustingly corrupt Donald Trump? Or will it be the demented, despicable, deplorable, disgustingly corrupt Joe Biden? Biden is everything wrong with American politics, and Trump is everything wrong with America.

Whoever you choose you’ll get lots of corporate-friendly decision-making, heaps of Zionist-controlled foreign policy, and a consistent assault upon your rights and liberties. Yay!!

The rancid choice foisted upon us this year is indicative of how far along in the American Empire’s decline we’ve come. That out of 350 million people we are stuck with an election between these two guys…again…is so lazy that it’s just a clear sign of a late-stage empire in a near free-fall collapse.

I’ve spoken to very few people about this election mostly because there are very few people left who will actually speak to me anymore.

Having not beaten the bushes in an attempt to get the sense of voter sentiment, I am left to my own devices - God help us all, and my sense of things pieced together by my usual media watchdogging.

Here are a few of my thoughts…take them for what they’re worth.

BIDEN

There is something very amusing about the fact that the mendacious mainstream media has been in a furious tizzy about the revelation that Biden is mentally compromised, which became blindingly obvious during the recent debate.

CNN and even MSNBC have the knives out because they feel “betrayed” by the Biden White House and staff who lied about his cognitive abilities.

Look, I’m an idiot and even I knew Biden was dementia-addled all the way back in 2019 and wrote about it…quite a bit. In fact, at one point I wrote a comedic article in which I described Biden exactly as “dementia-addled”, and after much hemming and hawing and decision making pushed up the chain of command, I was informed by the head of editorial at the publication that the term “dementia-addled” could not be used because I was not a doctor and therefore could not diagnose Biden with dementia. My only argument back was that I was “not a doctor…yet!” and that eliminating the term “dementia-addled” would neuter the joke I was trying to make (which I don’t even remember now). I was politely told that the joke must be sacrificed on the altar of journalistic integrity. Shrug.

Anyway, the point being that it was very apparent to anyone with two eyes and half a brain in their head that Biden wasn’t right in his head four years ago.

And don’t get me started on this “Biden has a stutter” bullshit. Biden doesn’t have a stutter…he has never had a stutter. He’s been a politician and public figure the entirety of his adult life and he has never shown signs of a stutter. The stutter story was made up as a marketing tool to deflect from his mental decrepitude and generate sympathy.

Here's another thing. Since the debate debacle there have been endless op-eds and talking heads pontificating on Biden’s status and his future and they all start out say the same thing, “Biden is a good, decent man…”. Ok, let’s be clear…Biden isn’t a “good man and decent man”…he is an incorrigible, power-hungry scumbag. Always has been and always will be.

And he’s also a compulsive, pathological liar. He lies so much he doesn’t even know when he’s lying anymore. Our historically illiterate populace doesn’t remember, or chooses not to remember, that in 1988 he had to drop out of the presidential race because he was caught plagiarizing speeches and making up fantastical stories about himself and his accomplishments.

Of course, the biggest lie that Biden is now telling is to himself in deluding himself into thinking he can actually live, nevermind govern, for another four years.

Here’s another thing that a lot of talking heads and dipshits on social media keep spouting, that Biden is “the greatest president of my lifetime!” What the actual fuck? I mean, I suppose this could be true if you were born in the last three to maybe eight years, but good lord what sort of depraved, delusional nonsense is this?

To be fair to these people, I literally cannot choose the “best president of my lifetime” because they have all been uniquely awful. I’ve lived through Nixon, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump and Biden. That is a murderer’s row of douchebaggery, tomfoolery and incontinent incompetence that rivals any stretch of in-bred royalty in any country in the entirety of history.

Back to Biden…I have no idea if he voluntarily will step down or be forced from the ticket or the presidency or if he’ll still be breathing in November, but what I do know is that this guy is not all there. I have said this many, many times, and I’m not being facetious, but if Biden were your parent or grandparent or uncle, you’d be having very serious, in-depth discussions about finding a safe place for him to live because he obviously can’t take care of himself. You’d be conspiring on how to take his car keys away and figuring out what nursing home he can afford.

Does all this mean that Biden can’t win the election come November. No. He can still win this thing but only because people – and more importantly, people in power, hate Trump so much they’ll do anything, and I mean ANYTHING, to stop him. But more on that later.

TRUMP

I’ve never liked Donald Trump. From the first when he came to prominence in the 1980s, I thought he was a clown and phony flim-flam man who was play-acting at being somebody. This is a common malady among the silver-spoon set…but it must be said he isn’t alone among nepo-baby presidents who have suffered from this disease…see George W. Bush.

I loathe Trump as much as I loathe Biden, and for many of the same reasons. He’s a charlatan, con-man, carnival barking bullshit artist and fabulist who doesn’t have a fucking clue. Like Biden he has an inflated ego that knows no bounds and like Biden he is a corrupt and narcissistic creature who genuinely loathes the hoi polloi.

I’ve written about this before but it’s worth mentioning again that the thing that I find so darkly funny about Trump and the MAGA crowd is that they claim he is an outsider who is going to kick the deep state’s ass.

Apparently, a lot of people, both republican and democrat, don’t remember this but Trump was already president. He didn’t kick the deep state’s ass, he kissed it. And when he didn’t kiss it, they kicked his.

Trump isn’t so much an outsider to the establishment as he is an establishment figure who is hated by the establishment to such a degree they want him on the outside.

Remember Trump’s first term when he promised to “drain the swamp” and then filled his administration with the swampiest of swamp creatures? I do. Satan’s spawn John fucking Bolton was his national security advisor for chrissakes…I mean that’s as swamp creaturey as you can get.

And Trump will do the same thing if he wins this November. Hell, look at the cavalcade of cunts and clowns he’s considering for his VP pick. Nikki Haley? Marco Rubio? Jesus titty fucking Christ! These are the absolute worst of the worst swamp creatures!

Trump has also promised this time around to release all the files on the JFK assassination and UFOs that are currently classified. He promised the same thing regarding the JFK files during his first term and guess what happened? On the day before he was going to release the files the head of the CIA paid him a visit in the Oval Office and low and behold Trump reversed course and refused to release the documents. He isn’t going to release anything this time around either.

He's also reluctant to release the Epstein files…hmmm…I wonder why?

The one thing going for Trump is that, unlike Biden – who is only three years his elder, Trump actually looks vigorous. Of course, the down side of that is that his vitality only accentuates what a batshit fucking lunatic and mental and emotional midget he is.

2024 ELECTION

So, what do I think will happen in the election? I don’t know for sure…but I have a sense, and it goes against all conventional wisdom, so maybe it’s completely off, but I’ll share it anyway.

I have long railed against emotionalism in politics and political debate so it is more than ironic that I am basing my thoughts on the election on a vague “sense” rather than some data I’ve stumbled upon. But here we are.

My sense is this…that despite the plethora of polls and the overall sentiment among the intelligentsia in the country…I think Donald Trump will not be the next President of the United States. I simply cannot picture that happening.

Now the obvious counter to that would be to argue that I must be a Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer and just hate him so much I am wishing he loses. This isn’t the case. Remember, in 2016 when everyone was saying Hillary would win, I said clearly that Trump would win and why he would win.

This time around I just sense that Trump will not be allowed to be president again because he is so hated by the political, media, and most importantly, intelligence community establishment.

The ground work has been done to demonize Trump to such a tremendous degree, with the endless wailing over “democracy being at risk” and this potentially being our “last election”, that the establishment will do anything, and I mean ANYTHING, to make sure Trump is kept out of the White House.

So, what does that mean specifically…well, it means that by hook or by crook he will not be sworn in come next January. Maybe Biden drops out and is replaced and the new candidate energizes the opposition to Trump and the polls reverse and Trump is defeated. Or maybe the same is true with Biden still heading the ticket and somehow he turns things around and wins. Or maybe something else…something less conventional, happens.

The intelligence community and their allies in the rest of government and media have tried to assassinate (in one form or another) Trump since his rise by various means and don’t kid yourself, they won’t stop now.

They tried to assassinate his character and therefore derail his political ambitions from the jump, but Trump is so shameless that no matter how exposed he gets he just shrugs it off and his fans love him all the more.

They’ve tried to assassinate his political ambitions through the legal system, but once again Trump’s shamelessness has made him immune from consequences and even more popular among his minions.

And it must be said that the weaponization of the legal system for political purposes is as anti-democratic as it gets, and that the democrats weeping and wailing over the possibility of Trump weaponizing the legal system against his opponents if he wins while they do exactly that is the height of hypocrisy.

Which leaves us with two other alternatives. The first is one that will be shrugged off but is the most likely…and that is that the election will simply be rigged to keep Trump out of power. I know, I know…this is ridiculous…except that it isn’t.

Elections are relatively easy to steal, and have been stolen throughout American history….be it JFK in 1960 or George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. These things happen…and the people who are good at making them happen are the people who hate Trump the most….the intelligence community.

The CIA has stolen elections across the globe time and time again, and fomented coups and assassinated people they found inconvenient to their goals. If you think they won’t do it here you’re as out of your mind as Biden and Trump.

Ever since Trump was elected in 2016 the intel community had their knives out. The Russiagate nonsense…which was absolute and utter manufactured bullshit, was a creation of the intel community and used to deeply wound Trump’s presidency.

Another example were the BLM riots…there’s a great deal of evidence that there were federal agents mixed in with the rioters who instigated the most violent and destructive behavior, like looting and burning.

The same is true of January 6th, where the FBI had agents/assets among the masses protesting at the Capitol, who then turned that protest into a riot and overran the building.

And then there’s the mysterious white power groups that march, always masked and anonymous, at various spots to generate media attention. These people seem to me be obvious federals agents/assets meant to drum up turmoil and media attention. What is strange is that even when these people are detained by police they are never unmasked, and the media never dives deep to find out who they actually are.

This is all a long way of saying that the intel community is up to their usual games and they will do anything to eliminate Trump from power – for whatever reason.

The final thing that could happen is that, and let me be one thousand percent clear on this - I’m not calling for this or wishing for it nor do I support it, Trump could be killed.

I know, I know…I’m a conspiracy nut. But this is how the world works. Trump has been made into the ultimate enemy of American democracy, a Hitler in waiting who will never leave office once he gets in despite the fact that he already left office after his first term.

The existential angst coming from all corners of the media and democratic establishment has people in a frenzy, and if you don’t think this is a dangerous thing to do, you don’t know what the intelligence community are capable of.

Some “lone nut”, thinking they’re a patriot, could do something terrible and think it is righteous because they’ve been conditioned to think of Trump as Hitler.

I know democrats who hate Trump so much they want him dead, this is clear, and when things get that hot someone could very well go full Lee Harvey and cast the one vote that matters. Of course, it won’t be a “lone nut”, it’ll be an orchestrated and manipulated event by the people most committed to stopping Trump, but the “lone nut” narrative will be easy to sell.

The other thing is that Trump, a rather unhealthy 78-year-old, could drop dead from “natural causes” that I promise you won’t be natural at all. The intel community is good at this stuff and they will have the support of the media to tell whatever story they want.

Regardless of how it happens, my sense is that Trump will not be president again. This will come as a relief to the democrats in my life who are apoplectic at the thought of four more Trump years.

That said, I don’t know who will be president. I don’t even know if Biden makes it to election day. In fact, I don’t know much, and could be totally and completely wrong about everything I’ve just written, but what I do know for sure is that no matter who gets elected in November and who gets inaugurated in January, we’ll all be entirely fucked…that you can take to the bank.

©2024

The Trump Legal Charade and Other Uncomfortable Truths

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 49 seconds

I loathe Donald Trump with the fury of a thousand suns but it seems obvious to me as someone aligned with neither political party, that the legal cases against him are third world, banana republic level political warfare manufactured to thwart his political ambitions.

This is the sort of legal maneuvering that the CIA routinely works overseas to knee cap political opposition to the corporate stooge they placed in power.

Make no mistake, Trump is a scumbag and a charlatan but the same could be said for every single president in my lifetime.

Bush and Cheney lied us into an illegal war that killed millions and ran a torture program and illegally spied on Americans. No charges. Obama willfully murdered Americans without trial. No charges. Wall Street honchos and their lackeys in government willfully defrauded the American public for billions if not trillions with the housing bubble and subsequent collapse, and not a single one of them was held “accountable” for their crimes. And yet, people celebrate when Trump gets convicted of this manufactured, pissant bullshit? Can people really be that gullible, that controllable and that stupid? I guess so.

Trump’s conviction isn’t about “holding a president accountable!”, it’s about inoculating the corrupt establishment from legal consequences by punishing a loudmouthed incompetent for deviating from the script (but not the narrative) and daring to disrespect the deep state. Charging and convicting Trump and not Bush, Obama and the bevy of bad boy Wall Streeters is the point and is meant as a way to rub any thinking person’s nose in shit.

Understand that Trump is meant to be a scapegoat (in the Girardian/classical sense - although certainly not an innocent) upon which the establishment can throw its sins and cathartically cleanse themselves in the eyes of the public through his legal crucifixion.

For example, the fact that Trump is facing prison for paying hush money to a whore while war criminals Dubya and Cheney bask in the glow of liberal love, is frankly, horrifying and extraordinarily revealing about the state of our country and the vacuous, vapid and venal nature of 21st century liberals. The fact that Trump is an icon of the right to begin with says the very same thing about modern-day Republicans.

Another note on Trump is that the big selling point for Democrats and Biden is that Trump is a threat to democracy…which is hysterical. What “democracy” exactly?

I think Trump is less a threat to our alleged “democracy” than the people in both parties who keep third parties off of ballots and allow corporations and Israel to meddle unabated in our elections and government.  

A line I often hear from Democrats is that this could be our last election because Trump won’t leave office if he wins. This is moronic. Trump is an actor…and just because he improvises his lines doesn’t mean he’ll change the storyline.

Do people not remember that Trump was president already…and many claimed he wouldn’t leave office then too…and yet…he isn’t president anymore. He left office. The retort to that fact is often “he didn’t concede”. What does that even mean, really? He left office…so who cares if he “concedes”? Do Super Bowl losers have to concede the game before the trophy is handed out? No. The game was played and the score is the score even if the loser doesn’t like it.

And speaking of the fact that Trump was already president…any dope that still thinks he is some outsider who will drain the swamp needs to be institutionalized if not lobotomized. Trump ran the first time, and is doing it again, as the ultimate outsider…and in a way he is...but not really. What he really is, is the ultimate outsider among insiders…like an uncouth dinner guest who shits on the duck l’orange.

The most repulsive thing about Trump, and there’s a lot to choose from, is that he ran as a man who’d drain the swamp but when elected stuffed his administration chock full of the most vile and corrupt, swampiest swamp creatures who have ever existed.

As for Biden…those delusional dingbats who think he’s doing a great job and that the economy is robust and that he is some kindly, dignified statesman, are even dumber than the MAGA morons.

Biden is a dementia-addled shitbag who is one of the most corrupt politicians of the last 60 years…which is quite an accomplishment considering the array of assholes who’ve held office.

The bottom line is it actually doesn’t matter in the least who wins the election because the brutish, barbaric beast will continue slouching towards Bethlehem and the decadent and morally diseased American Empire will continue its decay and decline leading to its inevitable collapse. And regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, know this, that every member of the ruling class, including the president, aren’t indifferent to your plight…no…they actually actively hate you and desperately wish you and your family great harm.

Understand that when you are voting in November you aren’t choosing a leader, you’re simply casting the lead for the clown-show that is American politics and whom you want to see on your tv every night. You can either have the corrupt, senile scumbag or the corrupt, blowhard carnival barker.

Regardless of how Trump’s legal issues play out or who gets the most votes in November, the bottom line is that no matter who wins, we all will lose.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

10th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards™®

10th ANNUAL SLIP-ME-A-MICKEY™® AWARDS

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are the final award of the interminably long awards season. The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™®, or as some lovingly call them, The Mockeys™®, are a robust tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year.

Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So, any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this year’s Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next year’s Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR

Saltburn – This is a truly atrocious, artistically repugnant film that fails on every single level. The script is horseshit, the direction dogshit and the performances bullshit. A mountain of shit that high makes for a very odious movie.

Rebel Moon – A Zack Snyder Star Wars rip-off…what could go wrong? Well…apparently everything. One of the dullest and dumbest movies in recent cinematic history. But look on the bright side…a sequel is hitting Netflix in just a matter of months. Kill. Me. Now.

Ghosted – Chris Evans has the brains of a Tsetse fly and the charisma of a pencil eraser and Ana de Armas is a beautiful woman but very limited actress who needs to fire her agent immediately. The combination of these two morons matching dim-wits and tossing out flaccid one-liners in an action-rom-com is as lifeless and inert as a crippled eunuch’s loins.

Meg 2 – It’s tough to fuck up a giant shark movie, but the Meg 2 was able to pull it off…the key to their success? Removing the giant shark from the majority of the movie. Way to go you fucking numbnuts!

And the loser is…SALTBURN! I hated this movie. It is stupid and awful and putrid and pathetic. Anyone who liked Saltburn for any reason should be beaten to death with a sock full of month-old, frozen, elephant turds.

WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR

Adam Driver – Ferrari – Adam Driver is a favorite of many big-time filmmakers and has a cult-like following among fans. But the reality is that Adam Driver is a consistently shitty actor. This doughy, dork-faced doofus talks like Kermit and has the screen-presence of a tumbleweed wrapped a sheet of Saran-Wrap. In Ferrari Driver went full Father Guido Sarducci and managed to turn Enzo Ferrari into the Chef Boyardee of auto racing. He did the same to Maurizio Gucci in The House of Gucci a few years ago. Driver doesn’t just need to stop acting in Italian roles, he needs to stop acting.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge – Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – Remember how charming and funny Phoebe Waller-Bridge was on Fleabag? I do…but barely. It is tough to remember after watching her suck all the life out of the most recent Indiana Jones movie. That Waller-Bridge has all the athletic grace of a baby giraffe with rickets doesn’t help her thrive in this action role.

Bradley Cooper – Maestro – Poor Bradley Cooper. Dude just wants an Oscar so he keeps making shitty movies about musical guys – first A Star is Born and now Maestro. This time in order to woo Oscar voters he wears “Jew-face” and turns the gay histrionics up to eleven. Yikes. Still doesn’t work. He so wants to be a great actor that he does nothing but ACT in these movies. He ACTS so much that he forgets to actually…you know…act. There’s not a single moment in Maestro where Bradley Cooper (or his co-star Carey Mulligan) seem like actual human beings…not good…not good at all.

And the loser is…ADAM DRIVER – FERRARI – Adam Driver is the 21st Century’s version of Elliot Gould…in case you’re wondering…that is not a compliment in any way, shape or form. On the bright side, in twenty years he can play one of the main character’s dads on a reboot of Friends.

WORST SCENE OF THE YEAR

Barry Keoghan fucking a grave – Saltburn – Yawn.

Barry Keoghan slurping jizz-soiled bath water – Saltburn – Cringe.

Barry Keoghan having oral sex with a menstruating woman – Saltburn – Eye-roll.

And the loser is…IT’S A TIE between all the try-hard, faux-edgy, god-awful scenes with Barry Keoghan doing vile shit in Saltburn. And the real loser in all of this is us – the poor bastards who watched this flaming fucking garbage pile.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF THE YEAR

BARBIE– Barbie was a phenomenon. Barbie was a blockbuster. Barbie was a critical darling. Barbie was also a fucking atrociously awful movie. A two-hour corporate toy commercial infused with a toxic strain of toddler level feminism that left any person with half a brain in their head wanting to light themselves on fire, and any man with two-balls in their bag wanting to cleanse their palate by killing a Sabre-Toothed Tiger and then dragging some whiny plastic shrew by her hair back to his cave.

It is a testament to how mind-numbingly stupid our culture and populace has become that the insipid and insidiously imbecilic Barbie was so unabashedly celebrated and exalted as a great movie and a work of genius.

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATIC MALPRACTICE

EMERALD FENNELL– Emerald Fennel won an Oscar for writing her first film Promising Young Woman. Upon further review that movie is garbage. Upon first view of Saltburn, it is an abysmal pile of amateur-hour excrement. Considering her track record, Fennel shouldn’t even be allowed to direct traffic, never mind a movie. She is an out and out cinematic charlatan who has only gotten a shot because of Hollywood’s post #MeToo addiction to elevating talentless female directors. She has earned this Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award the hard way…by being devoid of any and all talent.

P.O.S. ALL-STARS

JONATHAN MAJORS– I really liked Jonathan Majors when I first saw him the in the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco. But he is the type of actor that the more you see him the more you see how hollow his work truly is. A perfect example of this is his most recent performance in the Marvel series Loki.

Majors is “acting” so much in this series it made my head hurt and my colon twinge. He is just so obviously desperate to show himself acting so that everyone can say, “wow…look at that guy’s acting!”

The result of all this is that Majors is a major disappointment as an artist.

He’s also a major disappointment as a human being as he got charged with some abusive shenanigans with a former girlfriend and then other former girlfriends came forward and said he was an aggressive asshole and on and on and on.

Then there were the tapes of him comparing himself to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Good lord.

The bottom line is that Jonathan Majors’ career is, at best, comatose…at worst, dead on arrival. Marvel cut him loose and an arthouse film of his which had garnered some Oscar buzz was completely shelved and if it is ever released will be done so under cover of darkness.

On top of all that Majors gave an interview on Good Morning America that was so catastrophic as to be astonishing as he came across as a completely disingenuous and delusional sack of shit.

Good riddance Jonathan Majors…you will not be missed…but congrats on being a Piece of Shit All-Star.

LIZZO – This rotund retard was the point elephant for the media’s relentless “body positivity” movement. Everywhere you turned Lizzo was there front and center playing a flute or singing and dancing, all while wearing next to nothing with her gargantuan ass hanging out.

The reason Lizzo was shoved in our faces was because our culture and civilization is actively being subverted and our intelligence being assaulted. Up is now down, left is now right, and bad is now good.

The fact that Lizzo is so gratuitously grotesque is the point of it all. The truth is, and everyone knows this, that if you saw Lizzo in your bathroom at 3 in the morning, you’d think your house was haunted. Speaking of bathrooms, Lizzo is so fat she has to shit in the bathtub.

Now, despite the relentless comedic vitriol I am currently spewing at Lizzo, the truth is she should not be shamed for being fat, but she shouldn’t be celebrated for it either. The chances she will die young of a heart attack, diabetes, or choking on a ham sandwich, are astronomical, and we should not encourage her gluttony any more than we’d encourage someone else’s alcoholism or drug addiction.

Speaking of shaming, the reason Lizzo is one of this year’s Piece of Shit All-Stars is because she is being sued by her background dancers for…wait for it…“weight shaming” them. The dancers also alleged that Lizzo harassed them sexually, religiously, and racially. She’s also accused of disability discrimination, assault, false imprisonment, and creating a hostile work environment.

Lizzo sounds like her insides are as repulsive as her outsides…which is quite an accomplishment.

The good thing about all of these charges against Lizzo is that the media is no longer shoving her fat ass in our face and we no longer have to pretend this pig is a beauty queen. A win-win scenario for everyone.

JADA SMITH – Jada is a multi-time POS All-Star and she and her family are lifetime members of the POS Hall of Fame. So why is she on the POS All-Stars again? Well…because SHE IS A GIANT PIECE OF SHIT!

After all the hoopla and horseshit around Will Smith and the Oscars slap and all of that…Jada thought this year was a good time to put out a book and overshare with America about her entire sordid and supremely narcissistic life. I mean…who gives a fuck what she or her fruitcake husband or her truly repugnant children think or feel?

This irrelevant whore was out there shouting from the rooftops about how the love of her life was Tupac, and she basically publicly cuckolded and castrated her husband, and in doing so essentially ended his career…for that at least I’m grateful.

Jada’s addiction to the spotlight, despite her complete allergy to hard work and total lack of talent or skill, is a toxic mix, and the poor public who have her obnoxious, self-righteous posturing imposed upon us by a celebrity adoring media, are the ones who truly suffer.

The reality is that Jada is an absolutely awful person in every single way. My hope is that Will Smith grows a pair of balls and goes semi-O.J. on her by drowning her in a septic tank…at least then they’d become ever-so-slightly interesting.

P.O.S. HALL OF FAME

This year’s sole inductee is the grouping of…

BIDEN, TRUMP, AMERICA’S CORRUPT POLITICAL SYSTEM and THE AMERICAN VOTERS

I am certainly not the first person to say this but WHAT THE FUCK!?!?! There are like 350 million people in the United States and the best we can do for the job of President is these two decrepit dipshits?

Joe Biden is a geriatric, dementia-addled creepy-old man and corrupt swamp creature. It is painful watching him walk on television, never mind try and talk.

This ass-hat is such a limp-dick douchebag as to be astonishing. No one, and I mean no one, with whom I’ve spoken in the last four years has anything but contempt (and occasionally pity) for this incessant failure.

Speaking of contempt, on the other side of the aisle is Trump, who is a carnival barker, rodeo clown, reality television blow-hard and corrupt charlatan.

I don’t know anyone who is excited about this election or either of these candidates. It is a testament to how far along the fall of the American Empire truly is that the populace is simply resigned to the ruling class installing either of these shitheels in the presidential chair.

It’s important to remember that no matter who “wins” the election, nothing will truly change.

Trump is running as an outsider candidate who will drain the swamp, but the last time he was president he filled his cabinet and administration with the swampiest of swamp creatures.

Biden, of course, IS the swampiest of swamp creatures. This twat has never actually held a real job in his entire life. He’s been a politician his entire adult life, and is Trump’s equal, if not superior, when it comes to corruption.  

What you’re really voting for in this election, and all elections, is who will be cast as the lead in the role of President of the United States…a long running, very unpopular reality television show.

In the 21st century we have had a narcissist, silver-spooned, nepo-baby, mental-defective war criminal as president (George W. Bush), and then people elected a smooth-talking, narcissist, CIA created dummy-corp love-child (Obama), followed by a silver-spooned, narcissistic, reality-tv star (Trump), followed by dementia-addled, geriatric, corrupt swamp creature (Biden). This is a murderer’s row of dipshittedness…all of whom ruled with neo-liberal domestic policy and neo-con foreign policy…or as I call it – the worst of both worlds.

The fact that I found it impossible to even tolerate watching any of these fucksticks on television for more than two seconds is a pretty strong indicator that my bullshit meter is finely attuned and that my taste in humanity is much too sophisticated.

Which brings me to the American voters.

Look, I get it, people are stupid or exhausted or a combination of the two. They are also relentlessly propagandized and conditioned to be allergic to critical thinking. But the fact that we are quietly compliant while these two fucktards are hoisted upon us is a scathing indictment of the state of our union and our populace.

And don’t even get me started on the imbeciles and morons who actually buy into all this shit and are fervent supporters of either candidate. If you go to a rally for either one of these fucksticks, you should be lobotomized. Hell, if you even put a Biden or Trump sign in your front lawn, you should be institutionalized.

The bottom line is that regardless of who wins this year’s election, there is one thing we can count on and it is this…all of us will lose….THAT IS GUARANTEED!

And on that happy note…thus ends the Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards™®!! I hope everyone enjoys the after-party and that I see none of the losers who these awards next year!!

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next time…at the Slip-Me-A-Mickeys!!

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Leave the World Behind (Netflix): A Review - It's the End of the World as We Know It...and Obama Feels Fine

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This film never lives up to its potential but it does feature some impressive cinematography and a tantalizing and unnerving narrative. It isn’t a great movie but it does make for a good conversation/thought piece.

Leave the World Behind, written and directed by Sam Esmail, is a dystopian, apocalyptic, psychological thriller produced by Barrack and Michelle Obama now streaming on Netflix.

The film, which stars Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali, is based on the novel of the same name by Ruuman Alam, and it tells the story of the Sanford and Scott families as they navigate an unfolding cataclysm across the U.S. from a tony neighborhood on Long Island.

The Sanford’s, a white family from Park Slope-adjacent Brooklyn, made up of the ornery Amanda (Julia Roberts), her easy-going husband Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their teenage children Archie (Charlie Evans), who is obsessed with girls, and Rose (Farrah McKenzie), who is obsessed with 90s pop culture – like Friends and The West Wing, rent a beautiful home at the beach on Long Island for a week.

In the middle of their first night, there’s a knock at the door, and two black people, G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and Ruth (Myha’la), appear. The story between the Sanfords and the Scotts go from there but I won’t get any more in-depth on it in order to avoid spoilers.

The rest of the plot revolves around mysterious events that are happening in the U.S., specifically in relation to the Sanfords and Scotts, in New York City.

Technology, such as cell phones, the internet and cable television, stop working, leaving the protagonists in an information and communication blackout, which allows chaos and paranoia to flourish.

Once again, in order to avoid spoilers, I will refrain from delving much deeper into the plot than that.

The film’s director, Sam Esmail, is best known for creating the tv series Mr. Robot, but this is just his second feature film, and despite some very bright spots, at times it shows.

To Esmail’s great credit, he creates some very vivid and stunning images in Leave the World Behind, that rattle viewers to the core. Visually the film never fails to unnerve with one apocalyptic nightmare visual after another, like luxurious paintings hanging in a dystopian art gallery.

Esmail and cinematographer Tod Campbell use an often swirling, spinning, panning, zooming and rotating camera to make the viewer just as discombobulated and disoriented as the characters portrayed on-screen. All this camera movement isn’t just directorial masturbation, but instead is very cinematically effective and done with an admirable amount of precision and creative dexterity. As the character’s go through their strange journey, Esmail’s camera leaves viewers in a world where up is down, and left is right…literally.

The same is true of the camera framing, as things are often shot from odd angles, and despite the visuals being crisp and amid razor-sharp straight lines, everything is framed off-kilter and off-center, to great affect.

Unfortunately, as much as I loved the look of the film, the story it shows and the drama it reveals are often sorely lacking.

The biggest issue with Leave the World Behind is that it is bursting with a cavalcade of dramatic potential, but is never able to fully realize it.

The greatest obstacle to the film’s dramatic success is that it gives us one-dimensional, unreal characters, places them in an extreme yet compelling and entirely believable situation, and then has them behave in the most inane, counter-intuitive and annoying ways imaginable.

I can’t give too much away in regards to specifics, but things happen, and characters behave, in ways, both big and small, that are just ridiculous beyond belief and it frankly ruins the film as the tension and drama are undermined by these egregious plot and character improbabilities and decisions.

There’s a bit at the end which is meant to be poignant, and could have been really terrific, but is ultimately neutered by a failure of Esmail to thoroughly impress upon the audience, through repetition or targeted intensity, the crucial pieces involved. (Again, I am being intentionally vague to avoid spoilers.)

As for the cast, they do the best they can with the rather shallow characters they’ve been given.

Julia Roberts’ Amanda is basically an upper-middle class, left-of-center Karen, exercising her mid-life crisis muscles by being an irritable bitch for reasons she will never even try to understand. Roberts is a steady screen presence but she has never brought much of interest to the table and Leave the World Behind is no exception.

Ethan Hawke has matured into a solid actor and his good-natured Clay is a passable and likable attempt at an everyman – if ‘everyman’ were a college professor of English and Media Studies. It’s the character of Clay that is much more troubling than the actor portraying him, as Clay is the clueless, sack-less white man incapable of not only defending himself but of mustering the courage to even attempt it.

Charlie Evans and Farrah Mackenzie play the teens Archie and Rose respectively, and there isn’t much to the characters or the actor’s performances. Neither of them jumps off the screen or generates the least bit of magnetism.

Mahershala Ali is, as always, a strong presence on-screen, but his character G.H., is an absurd stand-in for the film’s producer Barrack Obama. G.H. is impeccable. He is unfailingly good, smarter than everyone and entirely incapable of cowardice. He is principled, moral, ethical, noble, brave and above all…correct. Yawn. The truth is that there were twists and turns that could’ve occurred with G.H. to make him more interesting, but they never happen and so we are left with little more than a cardboard cutout of the man that Barrack Obama, and his slavish sycophants, thinks he is - paging Dr. Freud…narcissism alert!

Myha’la as Ruth Scott is fine, I guess, but again, she doesn’t have much with which to work. Ruth is, like G.H., better than everyone else…I suppose simply because of her immutable characteristics…namely that she is black and a woman. Like Roberts’ Amanda, Ruth is an incorrigible bitch but it’s ok because she’s just speaking her truth…or something like that.

The genuine drama between Ruth and G.H., and between the Sanfords and the Scotts, is eschewed in favor of a rather tepid, embarrassingly trite, middle-of-the-road, decidedly elitist and liberal, high school freshman level identity/race politics that feels forced and obscenely phony, which is very unfortunate.

Speaking of politics, the fact that the Obamas produced this movie, the first non-documentary film they’ve produced, is both telling and, frankly, quite unnerving.

The apocalyptic, dystopian, and totally believable plot of Leave the World Behind, and Obama’s insider status among the power elite, makes it feel like this movie isn’t a piece of fiction but rather a piece of predictive programming…or enlightened prophecy, as to what awaits us.

That may sound irrational, or like “conspiratorial thinking” – something that is lambasted in the film as being unserious despite it being proven correct in the story (and more and more often in real life), but whether conscious or unconscious, artists and art often have a way of showing us the catastrophe that is right around the corner. 9/11 is a recent example of this.

The film is marinated in an establishment politics that is entirely rigid, center-left and upper-class. This elitist, left-liberal orthodoxy is so deeply ingrained in the movie that most-mainstream, establishment indoctrinated viewers won’t even recognize, and if they did they wouldn’t see it as political.

I’ll write a much more in-depth, political, psychological analysis of the film in the coming days, but will state here only that this movie is riddled with as much insidious propaganda as anything I’ve seen in any feature film in recent times.

Whether it be subtle, or not-so-subtle, attacks on libertarians, right-wingers, white people, conspiracies, and even Elon Musk, or anything else that isn’t establishment approved, the film never fails to be in complete lockstep with mainstream orthodoxy as designed by the aristocracy and oligarchy.

In this way the film, despite its attempt to present itself as edgy and politically avant-garde/revolutionary, is, at its heart, an intellectually and dramatically flaccid but ideologically faithful homage to the status quo….just like the former President who produced it.

In conclusion, Leave the World Behind is chock full of dramatic potential but is never able to fully realize it. Despite some compelling visuals and sequences, the film’s dramatic and narrative failures ultimately leave it an unsatisfying viewing experience.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Pain Hustlers (Netflix): A Review - Phony and Forgettable

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A remarkably empty cinematic exercise that is neither insightful nor entertaining.

Pain Hustlers, starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, in the new Netflix movie that tells the tale of Eliza Drake, a stripper in Florida who becomes a highly successful pharmaceutical saleswoman of fentanyl who gets caught up in a corporate criminal conspiracy.

The film, directed by David Yates and written by Wells Tower, is based on the book of the same name by Evan Hughes and is a true story.

I had heard little about Pain Hustlers before checking it out on Netflix. All I knew was that it was in some way about the pharmaceutical industry and the opioid epidemic, and that is starred Emily Blunt. I am all too familiar with the opioid epidemic and its devastating effects, and I like Emily Blunt, so I thought I’d give the movie a shot.

I regret that decision.

Pain Hustlers is one of those movies, which are all too common in the streaming era, that is instantaneously forgettable. The images and story pass before your eyes and evaporate into the ether before you can even register their existence. This film is so forgettable it feels like I never actually watched it…even though I know I did because I wish I hadn’t.

The story at the heart of the film is interesting enough I suppose, as Eliza Drake’s rise from poverty and fall from grace have great dramatic potential, but everything about the film, its writing, its direction, the acting…is poor.

Let’s start with the casting. I think Emily Blunt is a terrific actress. I just rewatched Sicario and she is phenomenal in that great movie. She’s also outstanding in The Devil Wears Prada and A Quiet Place. But in Pain Hustlers she is painfully miscast as a white trash Florida woman who’ll do just about anything to make ends meet. Emliy Blunt is as an actress is, and can be, many things…Florida white trash isn’t one of them.

Blunt is simply too beautiful, too classy and too put together to ever be white trash. Put her in sweatpants and she doesn’t look cheap she looks like an elegant and chic woman in sweatpants. It’s not her fault…it’s just the way things are.

Due to Blunt’s natural grace and style her Eliza never seems too down and out for us to think she or her daughter are in true peril. And when Eliza climbs the ladder of the two-bit corporation that hires her to sell pain medication, it isn’t all that compelling because Blunt makes Eliza seem like she’s well above the low-rent operation anyway.

Chris Evans plays Pete Brenner, the hard-charging pharma salesman who brings Eliza into the fold. Chris Evans is a truly terrible actor and always has been…but just when you think he couldn’t get any worse as an actor, he gives us Pete in Pain Hustlers. Evans puts on an absolute clinic in awful acting in this movie.

Evans, a native of Massachusetts, is remarkable in that he often times as Pete – but not always, attempts a Boston accent, and yet still butchers it. That the accent comes in and out is forgivable only because, like a toddler trying to play drums, it’s so awful you’re glad he occasionally stops trying.

Evans is one of those atrocious actors who thinks he’s really, really good. Like you can see it in his eyes that he thinks this performance as Pete is definitely Best Supporting Actor ground he’s confidently marching across. This level of irrational confidence no doubt helps Chris get the ladies in real life, but the camera is a bullshit detector and it sees right through a dimwit charlatan like Chris Evans.

The always entertaining Catherin O’Hara plays Eliza’s white trash mom Jackie and somehow manages to not be entertaining at all. O’Hara’s Jackie is nothing but a walking caricature and never manifests as a human being, just an annoyance. If she played this character in this way in a three-minute comedy sketch you’d still think it was shallow.

Andy Garcia plays Dr. Neel, the founder of the pharma company in question, and his performance, which he seems to think is fantastic, is instead flaccid. Garcia huffs and puffs and crazies his way through the role but it all feels like a put on and not an actual performance emulating a real person.

Besides the casting and acting, the direction is as second rate as it gets. David Yates, whose claim to fame is having directed 7 of the Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts films, tries to turn Pain Hustlers into a combination of Wolf of Wall Street and Goodfellas set in the strip-mall pharma world in Florida, but wildly misses the mark.

Yates interjects black and white interview segments into the film to make it all seem “real”, but these segments are legitimately bad as everything comes across as ultra-phony. It doesn’t help that the performances in those black and white interview segments are particularly bad.

Yates also uses a voice-over (Goodfellas style) that doesn’t propel the narrative but just feels like a cheap way to cover over the glaring flaws in the cinematic storytelling. As my film school editing professor once told me, “voice-overs are bad…unless your Scorsese…and nobody is Scorsese.” David Yates is certainly not Scorsese.

The film is consistently visually stale, the performances are relentlessly uneven and remarkably dull, and the story lacks a compelling or dramatically satisfying arc. What is left is a big budget after school special film that comes and goes without the least bit of notice. That stars like Emily Blunt and Chris Evans are in this film only makes it all the more perplexing as to how this got made…and why.

Pain Hustlers is set in 2011, in the wake of the first wave of the opioid epidemic when a chill had gone through the pain management industry thanks to America’s waking up to Purdue Pharma’s rapacious greed and criminality. The drug at the center of this movie though is not oxycontin, but rather fentanyl, an opioid even more powerful, and deadly, than oxycontin.

The film tries to walk along a straight razor as it argues that fentanyl is a great drug, but that corporate greed is what causes it to become problematic due to over prescribing. It presents charming rogue pharma salespeople as the real working-class heroes who get screwed (sometimes literally) by the corporate big wigs who ruin the fentanyl utopia these hard-working, hustling salespeople created.

That is a very complicated moral and ethical argument to make, and maybe it’s a worthwhile one, but Pain Hustlers and its director Yates are too low rent artistically (and intellectually) to ever clearly make this argument, or any argument regarding the opioid crisis coherently. Which is a shame as nuance is welcome artistically even in the most seemingly Manichean of circumstances.

In recent years there have been numerous opioid epidemic projects based on non-fiction books that have made it to streaming services. In 2021 there was the miniseries Dopesick on Hulu, and in August of this year the miniseries Painkiller premiered on Netflix. While Dopesick wasn’t great, it was decent enough…but now with Pain Hustlers, Netflix has churned out two straight, similarly titled, really bad opioid themed projects based on books in the span of three months. Not good.

As much as I proselytize and evangelize regarding the horrors of the opioid crisis (which is still ravaging the country) and the villainy of the pharmaceutical industry and the corruption of our government, I simply cannot recommend Pain Hustlers as it isn’t informative, insightful or entertaining.

The truth is that Pain Hustlers is completely and entirely forgettable, so don’t waste your time watching it. I’ve not read the book Pain Hustlers by Evan Hughes, but I can only hope that it is better than the movie…so go read that. Or better yet, go read the books Dopesick by Beth Macy, Painkiller by Barry Meier, American Overdose by Chris McGreal and Dreamland by Sam Quinones. What you discover in those books about our country and the moral and ethical corruption of our vile ruling class, will change the way you look at our world and help you to understand that those who rule and own us, passionately despise us and actively want to do us great harm.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

This Week in Propaganda - 60 Minutes Edition

PROPAGANDA WATCH - 60 MINUTES

As the world has rapidly deteriorated over the last few years I have steadfastly stayed away from writing about politics and world affairs for the sole reason that it felt like a Quixotic quest to tackle such toxic topics.

Propaganda has, in this age, become so all-encompassing in our daily lives that my job of dissecting it in my writing became an entirely fruitless exercise, like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.

The reality is that no matter how many articles, news segments or political comedies I could have eviscerated for being obvious propaganda meant to mis or dis-inform the masses, nothing would change. Echo chambers and information silos are too air-tight nowadays, making critical thinking all too uncommon, and when attempted, much maligned. As a result, no one would wake up from their establishment media trance just because little old me was desperately trying to knock the scales from their eyes so that they could see the Truth.

The simple fact is that it is too late. The blood-red dye has been cast in regards to our nation and the world and the best-case scenario for me was simply to keep saying over and over again, “I told you so”, which, despite what Gore Vidal’s insistence that they’re the four most beautiful words in our common language, is incredibly depressing.

Staying away from the noxious environs of corporate news and vapid political comedians like John Oliver, Bill Maher and the excruciatingly awful Late-Night hosts, was a very pleasant experience, as forcing myself to watch all of that vacuous garbage felt exceedingly masochistic.

But now, after roughly two years respite, and as the world stumbles blindly into world war and our nation into well-earned collapse, I find myself, much to my chagrin and frustration, charging headlong into the breach once more.

My reenlistment into the unwinnable propaganda war happened quite by chance as a little over a week ago I had just watched a football game and was distracted…and then the old CBS Sunday night stalwart 60 Minutes started and I got lulled in to watching the first segment. This segment, hosted by Scott Pelley, featured the domestic intelligence chiefs of the “five eyes” countries (US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia). To say that this segment was ridiculous to the point of absurd would be a colossal understatement.

Then I watched the second segment, which was about Emad Shargi, an Iranian-American convicted of being a spy in Iran and imprisoned until he was part of a prisoner and cash swap orchestrated by the Biden administration. This second segment was a laugh out loud piece of unintentional comedy that made the first segment seem tame. I bailed on the final segment of the episode, which was about the pop singer Pink because…well…it was about the pop singer Pink for fuck’s sake.

I did not write about my 60 Minutes experience all week, adhering to my pledge to stay away from such topics…but then the following Sunday I saw one segment of the next 60 Minutes episode, which featured a segment on Georgia (the country, not the state)…and well…here we are.

The first thing to understand is that it is not by coincidence or accident that as the ruling class malignant neocons try to convince Americans to go to war across the globe, that 60 Minutes runs three inane and insane, manufactured propaganda segments in back-to-back weeks vociferously declaring that China, Iran and Russia are evil incarnate and pose existential threats to the US, democracy and the “West”.

Let’s start with the segment on Emad Shargi, the Iranian-American recently released from an Iranian prison. This segment was so obscenely slanted and perversely propagandized as to be the ultimate in anti-journalism.

The “reporter” running the segment was Margaret Brennan who has the uncanny ability to always look like she is about to cry.

Brennan walks us through the tale of Emad Shargi, an Iranian who immigrated to the US as a teen before the Iranian revolution in the late 1970s. Shargi went to school in the US and became a chemical engineer and started his own business. Good for him.

During the Obama presidency, in the wake of the “Iran deal” which Trump would later rescind, Shargi thought it would be ok to go back to Iran…so he did…even though his father warned him not to.

He is then arrested and charged with being a US spy.

This is where things get pretty interesting…or funny…depending on your perspective.

In recounting his story, Shargi, who is such an obvious phony as he is acting from start to finish everytime he’s on camera, tells of armed revolutionary guards coming to his home in Iran in the middle of the night. These police hold him and his wife at gunpoint and refuse to tell him for what crime he is being charged.

Margaret Brennan, with eyes swollen with tears, is shocked and horrified by the tyrannical brutality of these Iranian police behaving in such a manner. I had a different thought…namely that this exact thing happens dozens, if not hundreds, of times every day in another country…the United States of America, where police routinely raid people’s homes with guns drawn and whisk them off in the dead of night with no explanation of the charges. Apparently, Ms. Brennan is blissfully unaware of this reality.

Shargi then goes on to explain that he was taken to the “most feared” prison in Iran, Evin prison, and put in the “intelligence” wing ruled by the fearsome Revolutionary Guard.

Shargi recounts how he was put in a small room to be interrogated and a big man came in and yelled and threatened him and then another man came in…as Shargi called him “the good cop”, who promised to make it all stop if Shargi just confessed. Shargi refused because he said, with a wry smile, that he wasn’t a spy.

Brennan then jumped in and in typical 60 Minutes fashion fed a line to Shargi, by saying “…and then the torture began”. The funny part of it was though that Shargi responded by saying, “yes…threats of torture”. If you were paying attention, you’d notice that “threats of torture” is not exactly torture.

Shargi then went on the explain that he was “tortured” by being threatened with physical violence, waterboarding and a wide array of terrible treatment. How quaint. I know of hundreds, if not thousands, of American prisoners who would have loved to only have been threatened with physical violence and waterboarding.

As for Shargi’s interrogation…he was treated exactly like countless American prisoners interrogated in police houses across the country every night. The good cop-bad cop routine is so well known as to be Hollywood cliché at this point.

As for Shargi’s fear of the notorious Evin prison…you think low level criminals sent to Riker’s Island feel the same way Shargi did going off to Evin prison? Yeah…they do. Is Evin any worse than San Quentin? Holman? Pelican Bay? Angola? Sing Sing? Attica? Folsom? ADX Florence? I think not.

Shargi then tells an incredible part of the story that gets completely ignored by the spectacularly inept Ms. Brennan. Shargi tells of how, while out on bail, he is approached by someone who tells him he should escape from Iran while he has the chance. He is then aided in an escape attempt but is caught 30 miles from the Iranian border.

Let’s unpack this shall we? So, Iran is such a despotic, draconian tyranny that it lets out suspected spies on bail? That would seem to contradict the narrative that Shargi, Brennan and 60 Minutes is trying to push…which is why they never adequately address the issue.

Secondly, who is this mysterious person who counsels Shargi to escape and aids them in doing so? More on that in a bit.

Once Shargi is captured and returned to Evin prison, he is sent to see, as he describes him, “a hanging judge”. 60 Minutes then shows a picture of this judge and it’s like something out of comedy sketch, as it is the worst picture of this man ever taken as he looks menacing and angry…like a “hanging judge”. Nice tabloid touch there for 60 Minutes.

Here's the thing regarding this “hanging judge”. First of all, every judge is considered a “hanging judge” by the people being judged by them. Secondly…and most importantly…this “hanging judge” oddly enough doesn’t sentence Shargi to hanging…which is strange since he’s supposedly a “hanging judge” and Iran does hang people. No Shargi is sentenced to ten years in prison…which is no cake walk but it also isn’t being hanged, nor is it as bad as say twenty years in prison. Go to any prison in America and you’ll find lots of people who’d be thrilled to only get ten years from a “hanging judge”.

Shargi then tells the story of a riot that breaks out at Evin prison, during which prisoners are lighting fires and guards are shooting at them. A frightened Shargi decides to stay in his cell and risk asphyxiation rather than be shot by the brutal Revolutionary Guard.

But then a funny thing happens…the Revolutionary Guard rescue Shargi and take him out of harm’s way. Or as Brennan describes it, the Revolutionary Guard saves Shargi because he was “more valuable to them alive than dead”. What kind of twisted logic is that? People save someone’s life and their only motivation is because he must be worth more to them alive than dead? This is classic dehumanizing propaganda as plain as day, reducing Iranians to heartless, soulless devils who only ever have bad intentions and are incapable of doing something good….and if they do do something good it is for bad reasons.

But here’s the thing…what is so fascinating about the Shargi segment is that it ends with Shargi back home in the US in his very nice home doing regular things with his wife. You’ll never guess where this gorgeous home is located…the Washington D.C. area. Washington is a strange place for a chemical engineer to plant his flag and make his home. It’s also a strange place for a chemical engineer who hasn’t worked in well over five years to have such a nice home, as real estate is extremely expensive.

It's also curious that Shargi when he went to Iran was working for a “Dutch firm” as a consultant. As a chemical engineer working for a mysterious “Dutch company”, Shargi would have been compelled to make contacts with Iranian chemical engineers and scientists...all of which seems like something an intelligence agent or asset would be doing. The “Dutch company” is a standard cover for this type of intelligence operation, and Shargi’s being a “consultant” gives him one more layer of cover.  

Now back to the mysterious person who encouraged and aided Shargi in his escape attempt. It seems more likely than not that that person, who not only whispered in Shargi’s ear that he should escape but also had a support system in place designed to help him do just that, was Shargi’s intelligence handler who was trying to get his asset out of a hostile nation for fear of the whole network being exposed or captured.

In conclusion, it seems to me that Emad Shargi, despite his denials, was an American intelligence agency asset or agent, and may have been working for the US intelligence community for quite some time even before he went to Iran.

You would never even consider such a blatantly obvious idea if you listened to Margaret Brennan and her ilk at 60 Minutes, but if you read between the lines, it becomes pretty clear that Emad Shargi is not what he says he is.

Speaking of frauds, the segment on the “five eyes” intelligence chiefs in that same episode was chock full of them. As Scott Pelley, with propaganda boner fully engorged, was so proud to say in the segment, this was the first time in history that the five eyes intel chiefs had ever appeared together on television….and they did so because we are in so much great danger.

Watching FBI head Christopher Wray and his collection of vile intel whores gathered around a table was like watching a meeting of midwit bureaucrats at the Lollipop Guild.

The main takeaway from this segment was that China is really, really bad. The main reason China is bad is because they don’t play by the rules of international capitalism….the horror!

These morally and ethically obtuse idiots went on and on about how China is the biggest evil in the world because they cheat at capitalism by stealing intellectual property. They also claimed that China interferes in US elections (that familiar claim again!)…funny…they never mentioned Israel’s relentless and obvious interference in US elections though.

One of the main points was made by Wray when he said that China stealing intellectual property from US corporations isn’t “just a Wall Street problem, it’s a Main Street problem” because it costs Americans jobs. How cute…so Wall Street, corporate America and the investor class rape and pillage the working class and obliterating unions for decades by sending their jobs overseas to China on the free trade express…and now we’re supposed to give a shit that American companies are being fucked in the ass by China? Cry me a river asshole. That ship sailed back in the 80s with Reagan, 90s with Clinton, and 00s with Bush, if you cared about the American people you would’ve stopped China back then when it mattered and could be contained. You didn’t. Instead, you took the short end money and gutted the U.S. manufacturing base and working class…so fuck you if the beast you let loose on poor and working people is now devouring you.

And then there was this week’s episode of 60 Minutes, which featured the segment on Georgia and Russia. The main takeaway from this segment was…shock of shocks…Russia is bad!! It even includes an interview with an old lady to prove it!

The segment starts by pointing out that Russia is “occupying” a portion of Georgia after a flare up of hostilities in 2008, and then goes on to make a big deal of Russia’s “quiet invasion” of Georgia through immigration. I wonder if 60 Minutes has ever done an aggressive bit of journalism on how the US is occupying 25% of Syria (the land being occupied is…shock of shocks…resource rich)? I doubt it.

The main thrust of the piece after that is that Georgia, which borders Russia, is angry that so many Russians are coming to their country, many to avoid military service, and are remaking the nation.

The president of Georgia, Salome Zourabichvili, is furious about it and adamant that Georgia, for its protection, be allowed to join the EU. Ummm…Mrs. President Lady…if you’re worried about waves of unwanted immigration changing the face of your nation, you’ve got as big surprise coming to you if you join the EU…just ask Sweden.

If Georgia joins the EU they’ll get the privilege of being swamped by a tsunami of immigrants from a variety of third world shitholes in Africa and the Middle East. You think Russians are bad? Russians are driving up apartment prices and starting businesses in Georgia because they bring money and education to Georgia. Wait ‘til you get unemployable military aged men from Africa and the Middle East demanding free government services and committing crime at astronomical rates coming to your country instead.

Speaking of which, if 60 Minutes wants to do a story on how immigration, in this case illegal immigration, can destroy a culture and turn a first world nation into a third world nation, I have a scoop for them that will require absolutely no overseas travel at all. They won’t even have to travel to Texas to see it…they can just walk outside of 60 Minutes’ New York City offices.

In conclusion, 60 Minutes is, in their own self-righteous, journalistically vapid way, banging the drum for World War III by putting out these rather ridiculous and obviously manufactured segments touting Russia, China and Iran as the new “axis of evil”...and there are plenty of dupes and dopes in this country who will march right along with that tired old beat. Idiots who demand we keep throwing our hard earned money at Ukraine and Israel will demand we send our young men (but never their young men) to fight and die for those insidious countries when our money alone isn’t making enough of a difference. The same will hold true when China takes Taiwan.

As General Smedley Butler once astutely observed, “war is a racket”, and this new world war is going to be no different. 60 Minutes is just a delivery boy for the true villains of this story, the evil neocons and the venal charlatans in our government and their equally vile Zionist paymasters.

World War III isn’t coming…it’s already here and has been since at the very least the charade of the Maidan and U.S. led coup in Ukraine in 2014. If you don’t know that, then that is on you. If you want to stop it, I have bad news….you can’t…it is inevitable. Flailing empires in steep decline do not go quietly into that goodnight, and our empire will be no different, but probably considerably more violent than the ones that preceded it into the scrap heap of history.

Expect to see, in the coming days, weeks and months, some catastrophic event…a major false flag and/or green flag terror attack on US or European soil or an attack on US military installations, ships or troops, or something like that, which will completely silence any anti-war voices and rally the mindless masses to send their young men into the unwinnable meat grinders awaiting them in the Israel/Middle East, Ukraine/Eastern Europe and/or Taiwan/Asia.

In these troubled times the bullshit piles up so fast you need wings to stay above it…so do what I intend to do…keep your head up and start flapping your arms…it’s the only chance you have to try and keep a keen eye on the Truth and maintain your sanity, integrity and soul. Good luck.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Encounters (Netflix): A Documentary Mini-series Review - The Truth is Out There...But Not So Much in Here

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

 My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Newbies to the UFO story might find this a decent if uneven place to dip their toe into the topic. Viewers more informed on the UFO phenomenon won’t find much useful in this tepid and tame mini-series.

Encounters is the new four-episode docu-series on Netflix that explores four different UFO mass sightings at four different locations across the globe. The series, which premiered on the streaming service September 27th, is garnering some attention because it is produced by Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin.

As someone who has had a longtime interest in the subject of UFOs, and who has read and watched a great deal about the phenomenon, I was excited to see Encounters. With UFOs, or as they’ve now been deemed UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomenon), finally being publicly taken seriously by governments and the media after years of being scoffed at, the opportunity for quality documentaries to inform audiences and initiate further investigation is at an all-time high.

Prior to Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment producing Encounters, other high profile Hollywood producers/directors have stepped into the UFO breach in recent years in similar fashion. JJ Abrams’ 2021 docu-series titled UFO, is one example.

Encounters is very similar in some ways to Abrams’ UFO as both are four-part docu-series, both cover a lot of familiar ground that UFO afficionados will know well, and both are decent enough starting places for the uninitiated to dip their toe into the UFO subject. Unfortunately, both are also, despite their best intentions, middle-of-the-road, rather forgettable projects.

Unlike Abrams’ UFO series, Encounters for the most part stays away from the UFO hot topics that have made headlines in the last five years or so and instead focuses on four mass sightings in recent and not-so-recent history.

The first episode is about the 2008 sighting by hundreds of people in Stephensville, Texas.

This first episode is, like all the others, very well shot and professionally produced. The witnesses presented aren’t just credible but are interesting, and their stories are compelling. Even more compelling is the radar evidence discovered after a FOIA request that backs up the claims of those who saw UFOs and saw F-16s quickly chase after them.

One minor issue I had with the first episode is that it never mentions that Stephensville, Texas is very close to the home of George W. Bush, who was President of the United States at the time of the UFO incident. This seemed a curious omission in recounting the tale.

Episode two covers the 1994 encounter at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe. This incident is fascinating, but the episode is a bit bumpy. For instance, 60 students claim to have seen a UFO and an alien in broad daylight, but one student, who is now a grown man, claims he made the whole thing up and everyone else just went with it and now believe the delusion. I understand wanting to show both sides of an argument, but this lone student seems, frankly, unhinged, and his testimony about it being a hoax feels, ironically enough, absurd in the face of the counter evidence.

This episode is noteworthy solely because it introduces the remarkable Dr. John Mack, the late Harvard psychiatrist who in the 1990s began to take the alien abduction phenomenon seriously.

John Mack’s story is worthy of an extensive documentary all its own, but Encounters is only able to give a brief background on his astounding career and the impact he had on the subject. One can only hope that a more extensive documentary on Mack is produced, but for the time being this quick review in episode two will hopefully pique newbie’s interest in the man and his work.

Episode three examines the 1977 Broad Haven Triangle incident, in which a bevy of Welsh school boys and townspeople witnessed UFOs and aliens. This episode was the weakest of the bunch as it never streamlines its storytelling or clarifies the bizarre incidents in question.

The incident itself is fascinating, as all of the children who witnessed it were quickly separated by skeptical teachers and asked to draw what they saw, and drew the same thing. The counter point is that at that time the culture was awash in UFOs and so all people, not just children, had a foundational understanding of what UFOs would look like and thus rendered them in unison upon request.

Much of the other witnesses in the Broad Haven case tell interesting stories but they feel less compelling, and frankly less believable, than the three other incidents examined in this series.

The final episode looks at the plethora of UFO sightings in Fukushima, Japan after the horrific earthquake and tsunami of 2011.

This episode features the very best video evidence in the series, but also wanders down some pretty bizarre, and frankly, unhelpful paths when interviewing residents of the area.

For example, one woman, a drama teacher and pseudo-spiritualist, claims she is an alien and is inhabiting a body on earth to witness the great transformation that is happening. This woman, who is like every other new age kook I’ve ever met, and trust me when I tell you I’ve met a hefty number of them, suffers from the shadow disease of new age-ism, namely egregious narcissism. Why the producers would include such an obviously low-credibility nutjob like this woman is beyond me as it demeans the topic and diminishes the mini-series.

The spiritual element of UFOs is a big topic in this episode as the cultural differences between East and West are explored, with the East being more open to UFOs as some sort of spiritual phenomenon rather than a physical one.

The Fukushima UFO case is one of the more evidence-based ones, so it makes the producers decision to focus on more esoteric subjects rather than on the actual evidence very counter-productive and dismaying.

On the whole, Encounters is disappointing for someone like me as I know a lot about these incidents already, and the series doesn’t really bring anything new to the fore.

To someone with any background in UFOs, Encounters is decidedly tame and feels rather out of date. If the series came out a decade ago it would’ve felt much more relevant and interesting.

That said, if you spend the majority of your time in the mainstream and are a newbie to the UFO subject, then Amblin’s Encounters could be a decent enough place to dip your toe into the topic, as would be JJ Abrams’ tepid UFO series.

But if you want to take a serious look at the subject of UFOs, I would recommend starting with the work of documentarian James Fox, whose films Out of the Blue (2003), I Know What I Saw (2009) and Phenomenon (2020), are as good and as informative as it gets in the genre.

With those three films as your foundation, you’ll have a solid understanding of the history of the subject and how we got where we are today, and what might come tomorrow.

As for Encounters, despite covering some truly vital incidents, it never rises to be anything more than a brief overview of a topic worthy of so much more.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Succession (HBO): Final Season Review - All's Well That Ends Well...Enough

****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SOME SEASON 4 SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE ARTICLE!!****

Season 4 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Overall Series Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: WATCH IT. Great acting and great writing make for some great TV.

Succession is dead. Long live Succession.

The HBO prestige drama about the dysfunctional Roy family and its mega-media empire had its season four and series finale last night.

For its four seasons Succession has been a glorious dramatic feast served in an era where both film and television have consistently fed us mostly middling, mind-numbing, middlebrow mush.

Watching patriarch Logan (Brian Cox) and his ne’er-do-well offspring Kendall, Shiv and Roman run roughshod over America and its culture was insidiously entertaining but also bone chilling because of its unnerving similarity to the real-world.

The Roys are part Murdoch (Fox), part Redstone (Viacom/CBS/Paramount), part Cox (Cox Communications) and part Roberts (Comcast), and like them all, entirely awful.

Despite being a toxic brew of capitalism porn and media mogul soap opera, Succession never failed to be a joy to behold and the reason for that is two-fold.

First, the acting was superb across the board. Secondly, the dialogue brought to life by these actors was razor sharp and never failed to be anything but modern-day Shakespeare.

That all said, season four was the weakest of the Succession seasons. It wasn’t terrible at all, in fact, it featured the greatest episode not only of the series (episode 3) but of any series in recent memory. But it felt like season four was less dramatically and narratively crisp as the seasons that preceded it.

Part of the issue with season four was that it didn’t earn much of the drama it tried to use. For example, the political election storyline felt trite and shallow because the stakes of the election were not sufficiently developed, and then when they were upon us felt artificially heightened…much like our own real elections.

The same was true for the climax of the finale. Without giving too much away, there is a confrontation between the siblings at a crucial moment that rang surprisingly hollow and underwhelming because it just seemed forced and manufactured, which is not something that happened throughout the run of the series.

This crucial confrontation needed more lead time in order to be more developed and more believable. Unfortunately, the lack of believability around this confrontation undercut the dramatic momentum of the episode, season and series.

Season four was also hamstrung by killing off its most compelling character, Logan, early in the season. Logan was the center of the Succession universe and while it was amusing watching the Roy children try and fill the gaping void left in his absence, it was never quite as profound as when Logan was sitting atop the throne.

Speaking of King Lear…oops…I mean Logan, Brian Cox was absolutely phenomenal in this series. Cox’s Shakespearean speechifying was as good as it gets and has ever gotten in television. Cox’s Logan was a combustible and curmudgeonly king and we should all bow down to his combativeness.

Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy was also spectacular. Watching Roman go full Fredo…and you never go full Fredo, in the final season was extraordinary. Culkin’s ability to bring Roman’s self-loathing and searing, rapier wit to life with such skill and verve was among the show’s highlights.

Sarah Snook’s oh so human, desperate and transparently wounded Shiv was a consistent pleasure to watch as she was Lady MacBeth, Goneril and Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother) all rolled in to one.

Jeremy Strong was outstanding as Kendall, the broken boy who would be king but can’t get out of his own way. Strong’s unrelenting commitment to the vacuous and vacant Kendall was impressive.

In season four, Alexander Skarsgard was exquisite as Swedish tech guru Lukas Mattson. Skarsgard was so great in season four as the GoJo CEO he basically took over the show with his quirky, nerd guy darkness.

But of all the great actors on Succession, nobody tops Matthew Macfadyen who played Shiv’s pain sponge, sycophant husband Tom Wambsgans. Tom reeked of shameless ambition and sweaty desperation but never succumbed to self-pity, only to self-interest.

Tom’s whipping boy, cousin Greg, played by Nicholas Braun, yearned to be part of the amoral and incompetent Roy sibling “quad” and would do anything to make it happen or to make anything happen for himself. Braun was outstanding as he stole scenes and episodes with his priceless line readings and his character’s insecure maneuvering and backdoor bravado.

I suppose the reason why, despite its faults and despite having watched the finale on the new, annoyingly glitchy, streaming service Max (fuck you, Max!), I liked Succession so much was that it accurately spoke to our current time and current predicament.  

Watching a Shakespearean-esque dramatization of the ruling elite and ownership class of America, filled with an endless supply of second and third-rate fucktard, mid-wit nepo-babies devoid of balls but ravenous for power, who surround themselves with sycophantic psychopaths whose only ambition is to hold onto their own tiny, Mordor adjacent fiefdoms, was as entertaining as it was unnerving because this is exactly how empires, like America, fail and fall.

For instance, anyone who is even remotely aware can see that America’s ruling class are a decidedly spent force. For God’s sake we are on our way to having another election between fourth-rate, incompetent shitstains Joe Biden and Donald Trump. In a country of over 350 million people, it is impossible that we must choose between a compulsively lying, narcissistic, dementia-addled, pedophile politician and a bloated, incoherent, shameless, compulsively lying, nepo-brat, failure.

Of course, the truth is we only have a choice between these two asshats because we don’t actually have any choice…only the illusion of choice. Succession makes it clear that the decision between who rules and who is ruled is not a decision at all…it’s simply theatre, meant to entertain and distract while the Logan Roys and Lukas Mattsons – the ruling elites of the world, sit on high and pull all the strings.

It was great fun while it lasted, but Succession, like America’s global empire and the dollar’s dominance, is over…and frankly…it needed to be over. Succession needed to end because it ran out of runway for its drama and the American empire needed to end because it, like all empires before it, has grown much too decadent and depraved whilst wearing the crown to survive.

America will no doubt deeply miss its empirical power when it’s gone because if Succession has taught us anything it’s that while being in power is a cold, barren, miserable, sterile, lonely, painful existence, life without power is much, much worse.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023