The Velvet StraitJacket

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For $549 a plate,you’d think they could get the old girl some index cards.. I mean sure, she or any GOP member for that matter can’t ever use a teleprompter again after all of their mocking of  Obama’s admitted overuse of them, but are they  really back to 7th grade cheating?

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ok, here’s the thing… you can’t come out on stage and  one of the 1st things you do is mock the President’s  use of teleprompters  when you’ve got freaking crib-notes written on your hand. A cheat sheet not just for your own speech, but also for your one-on-one Q & A session. Not if your honest anyway.

We’re past hypocrisy when you do this kind of thing and well into ridiculous and petty!  Not that I mind ridiculous or petty,  it’s the mocking of your betters that bothers me. While I’m at it, what kind of ‘grass-root’ movement charges so much to get into their convention that only the elite of the cream of the crop can get into the convention. $549 a plate? In this economy? If it’s truly as Sarah put it, and not about the money, then why is she making $100,000 off the speech that would cost her ‘real American’ family of four $1400 to get in? That’s just to get in the door, that doesn’t include the flight to get there, or the gas to drive or food and lodging.

Do you think  she understands the irony of this ‘let them eat cake’ atmosphere she’s promoting while calling for another revolution?

Yeah,me either.

As for this idea that these people are the model of conservative? Is it that the Tea-party movement doesn’t care about the truth or that they don’t understand it? While Governor, Palin not only took that money for her bridge to nowhere but she forced oil companies to pay each resident of the state a stipend each year. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with this policy, but since my counter-part calls me a socialist, I would be in agreement with a socialist policy like taking money from private companies and spreading it to the populist. But can you really be a conservative when you take such huge amounts of money from the government  and from the private sector and spread it around to people who didn’t earn it?

If you’re Sarah Palin or a Tea-party member, the answer is yes.  It’s those other socialists and pork-spenders that they don’t like.. the ones with (D) after their name, the ones who elected a black man, the one who is a black man. Oh yeah, that’s something else we learned this weekend, finally the Tea-party movement declared their belief..

[Tom Tancredo]...former Colorado congressman told the first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville this weekend, where he lathered up the crowd with a speech that offered this reason for Obama’s election: “We do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”

Obama was elected, Tancredo said, because of “people who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English.”

That’s right, we don’t have literacy tests anymore..you know the tests that kept blacks from voting. But hey, this is a good thing, there is no reason to hide behind a hood anymore Tancredo has de-robed the party and frankly I’m happy for them. think about it, it must be difficult to hide behind your hate that way for fear that if you let it out, people will know you really are racist. From the sounds of the cheers and applause, those waiting for Sarah Palin and listening to Tancredo are also glad to finally drop their mask!

I guess it’s just part and parcel of what we have to look forward to, an entire section of the country who believe Palin is more equipped to run this country over the likes of not just President Obama, but Hilary Clinton and *gasp* John McCain.  I guess as long as she has her cheat-sheet written on the palm of her hand, we’ll be safe when Putin ‘rears his head’.

What do you think the Tea-party group will do when they realize that  she is not like them and she is taking money out of their childrens mouths to not be like them?  It is about the money and fame for her, if it wasn’t she would have donated the money she ‘laundered’ through her PAC back to the Tea-Party cause.  How much more proof do you need in order to believe  she’s as phony as a $3 bill and as sincere as a prostitute. People, she used the money donated to her PAC to buy her own books. On the face of it that’s not to horrible, but when you look at how she received royalties for all those bought and paid for books.. you wonder which mob-boss taught her how to launder money so well. This isn’t the liberal media coming after her for taking donations to the RNC and using it to buy clothes for her and her family, this is a pretty shitty deal she’s pulling on her donors. It’s no wonder some Tea-party member were worried about ‘profiteering’ and the ’scammy’ feeling they were getting from this convention Sarah was headlining. These people are out of work and hurting, her answer is to use their much needed money to buy her book and since she can’t just out right keep their donations,  this is the 2nd best thing.

I feel bad for the real  tea-party member who was sucked into this abyss. I do believe there are people out there who really do want less government spending and intrusion. I believe that for the 1st time in their lives, after mocking the ‘left’ for all of the grass-root protesting, they finally got up their own moxie and listened to the hoopla Foxnews was spewing to  them and backed the party that they thought was the real deal. These people are about to be disillusion more than they ever were before and for them I am sorry. I only hope they wise up to the scammy-ness of where their party is going. I know these people don’t like the ‘Harvard educated’ elite, and the idea of a Nobel being awarded to a President is akin to treason,  but is this really the person you want at the next G8  summit?

HuffingtonPost asks 2 great questions on this cheating issue..

This would mean:

A) That she knew the questions beforehand and the whole thing was a farce. (Likely.)

and

B) That she still couldn’t answer the previously agreed-upon questions without a little extra help.

I don’t know, but I don’t like either answer. One proves she’s a hack and not only does she and the promoters of the convention know it but they’re doing everything in their power to make you sure never find out, and the other proves she’s an idiot. Regardless of the spin, neither prove she’s capable of commenting on politics, much less running a country.

At the end of the day the ‘true believers’ will not believe even what their eyes show them and their ears tell them. Ironically it was not us Obama-phytes who drank the koolaid, it is the Palin/Tea Party supporters.  Obama-phytes didn’t believe he was a bastard son who was really born in Africa, because we didn’t we were called pod-people, I should know, I called them that.  But anyone who says Sarah Palin is a real Conservative, is really smart, is really capable of running this country over the likes of even John McCain..stay away from them because that is your pod-person. That is the Jim Jones follower and like those poor souls, these are just as dangerous. They will do everything in their power to elect this woman to the Presidency of the United States even if it’s forcing her poison down throats of every “real” American and real conservative in this country. I don’t believe all members of the Tea-party movement are as race-hating as those who Sarah Palin read her hand to, but if the ones who aren’t don’t stand up and renounce her and this kind of call for the good old days of Jim Crow, they might as well be.

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Huh, would you look at that..

Washington (CNN) — Senior Obama administration officials revealed late Tuesday they’ve secretly gained the cooperation of family members of Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab to help get the Christmas Day airline bomb suspect talking.
The cooperation effort has led to actionable intelligence that could help prevent terror attempts on U.S. soil, the senior officials said.

No torture, no waterboard,no stress positions,no violation of human rights or our own laws… and he’s actually talking and without a military tribunal to boot!

The senior administration officials said that since AbdulMutallab began talking to investigation again last week, he has been cooperating on a daily basis. The officials added the information gained from the interrogations has been disseminated throughout the intelligence community.

One of the senior Obama officials, who bluntly said the Republican attacks have “frustrated the hell out of me,” asserted that gaining the trust of the family was the best way to handle the case and helped the administration gain valuable intelligence from the suspect, who is believed to have ties to an al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen.

“It could be used to disrupt other attacks,” one of the senior Obama officials said of the intelligence gleaned from AbdulMutallab in the interrogations, who added the president has been getting regular updates on what the suspect has been revealing.

The Republican response so far is to complain that President Obama has wasted these 6 weeks, but let’s have some truth for once shall we…

U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.

The operations, approved by President Obama and begun six weeks ago, involve several dozen troops from the U.S. military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), whose main mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. The American advisers do not take part in raids in Yemen, but help plan missions, develop tactics and provide weapons and munitions. Highly sensitive intelligence is being shared with the Yemeni forces, including electronic and video surveillance, as well as three-dimensional terrain maps and detailed analysis of the al-Qaeda network.

I know some were worried about AbdulMutallab being mirandized and like John McCain, were trying to attack for Eric Holder for his decision and I guess prosecute him for treason(ok, not the treason part-or are they) but it looks like they can put those feary-tales to bed.

“It is also my understanding that Mr. Abdulmutallab has provided valuable information. Is that correct?” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein asked.

“Yes,” Mueller replied.

Mueller then confirmed that the interrogation has continued despite the fact that the suspect had been advised of his right to have a lawyer and remain silent.

Now this is something I also found to be of interest

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, politicians and the courts have wrangled with the thorny question of how to treat suspected terrorists. The Supreme Court has not weighed in on whether the government has the right to hold a civilian as a military prisoner, and both times it appeared the court would get the chance to decide, President George W. Bush opted instead to bring the cases in civilian criminal courts

George Bush was hard on terror; he, Dick Cheney and those like them are the only ones who can keep us safe. President Obama, following their plan makes us look weak to our enemies though and thus makes us more vulnerable to attacks. How does that work?

The fact is we have a 100% success rate in trying terrorists in civilian court and as far as I know the only ones walking around and back to their old tricks, are walking around because Dick Cheney released them! We’ve killed or captured more terrorist leaders under Obama’s 1st year than we did in the last year of Bush. We’ve had more ‘drone-launched missile strikes’ in President Obama’s 1st year than in Bush’s last 3 years. We are spending more money to “expand secretive Special Operations units, deploy more unmanned aerial drones” , but somehow it’s not good enough because President OBama doesn’t torture, because he doesn’t throw everyone into a military tribunal, because he  treats people as the laws this country was founded on tell him to treat people, so  he is still weak on terrorism. If anything, the increased drones attacks,increased terrorist casualties, successful interrogation of a  terrorist should prove that not only is he not weak on terrorism, but that he’s doing something pretty right.

Alas… like the elusive Osama Bin Laden tape that surfaces only after some major event has happened, I expect a carefully worded press release from the most elusive of all creatures, Dick Cheney. Fox news and the conservative blogosphere need something to come after Mr. Obama on since he ate them for lunch at the GOP retreat last week, coupled with this new information on the lack of torturing actually working and Cheney is probably being roused from his slumber now.

I don’t expect anyone from  the right to commend the President for a job well done,that would be ridiculous and let’s face it, the halfhearted attempt would come out more condescending than anything else. The GOP for all it’s glory has painted themselves into a corner. In their quest to dismiss this President, they have painted him as a weak, incompetent, unintelligent, lying, dangerous,socialistic,Nazi-like, thief looking to steal your money to give it to the poor and your guns to give them to the Muslims.  I’m sure there is something to nit-pick about and if not, they can take a page out of a GOP strategists memo and just lie, but I thought this was a pretty good job of getting the guy to talk without having to drown him 1st.

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Could last week have gone any better?  And of course the icing on the cake was the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.  Great news for liberty and the First Amendment, but not so great news for the liberal blogosphere, as ekg’s “ corporatist dystopia” demonstrates.  After reading her blog, I felt I had just read a science fiction story of a corporate controlled future, in which nation states no longer exist and only corporate allegiance survives.  “Me?  Why I’m a citizen of Microsoft!”

But who are these gigantic corporate oligarchs bent on buying and selling Congressmen like shares of penny stocks?  In this case, the corporate behemoth was Citizens United.   “CZ” as we hip kool kids like to inappropriately nickname everything, is an non profit conservative organization set up to distribute films and documentaries to promote conservative causes.  In this case, they intended to buy time to air their film, Hillary: The Movie on DirectTV.  The Federal Elections Commission found that running the movie and commercials for the movie was considered “electioneering” and prohibited both the commercials and the movie itself from being shown.

Now, I’m not some big city lawyer, just a simple country boy blessed with the common sense that God has seen fit to bestow upon all of his non-attorney children, so really that is already more information I need to know to decide in which direction to go on this decision.

The government banned a movie.

That really should be all that needs to be said about this.

Sadly though, in times like these, when the word freedom is generally interpreted to mean getting something for free, the plain language of the First Amendment…

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

…just doesn’t seem to be a good enough argument anymore.

Have we really slipped so far off our moorings that a law that allows the government to ban books if they have a hint of political advocacy within a certain time frame to a federal election is supported by much of the country?

My first amendment rights are fully protected if I want to create “art” of a crucifix in piss, or make a sculpture of Mary out of shit.  Why then, that calls for a NEA grant!  But political speech, which was the very core of the Founders intent in crafting the 1^st amendment in the first place, should be regulated and banned?

I can’t imagine these same liberals would have felt that justice was being served if the FEC had banned Fahrenheit 911 from being shown in the 60 days leading up to the 2004 general election.  Apparently some right leaning legal group never thought of it, but up until the overturning of much of McCain–Feingold last week, that would have been perfectly legal to do.

A further irony is that McCain-Feingold explicitly exempts media corporations, such as major newspapers and broadcast companies.  These are corporations after all.  However specifically excluding them from McCain-Feingold is telling in itself.  Is it the government’s position that if they were not specifically excluded from the law, the FEC could regulate the coverage of media companies?  That’s why the canard about corporations being treated as people ring false to me.  The founders clearly didn’t intend that a newspaper owned as a joint stock company had no right to publish. That makes free expression a privilege granted by the government, not a right.  Equally ridiculous, if the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to corporations, does that mean the police require no warrant to search a company building?  Can a local government forbid a company from allowing prayer breakfasts on its premises?  Wouldn’t want a corporation treated like a person with the right to worship would we?

Although I think ekg’s vision of a return to the draft, banning of abortion, and evolution tossed out of the classroom in favor of the Old Testament is off the wall wacky, I can’t really predict what the long term results of this decision will be on the body politic. I don’t know that we will like the results.  However I know that I have to default to freedom.  This is not “hiding behind the 1st Amendment” or judicial activism, but a return to upholding the literal meaning of the 1st Amendment.

Liberals love to toss Ben Franklin’s warning of choosing security over liberty around as if they were playing catch in the backyard, but I’ve come to realize that they don’t really know what that means.  They will gladly toss freedom of speech over the side of the ship of state if they think they can accrue some short term political benefit from it. 

“Liberals” sure have changed.

I am sad that we’ve gone so far down the road away from liberty that this argument even has to be made.  Forty years ago, a liberal would have defined himself by how supportive he was of free expression.  No more.  Now he merely defines himself by what he hates.

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

Now that the Supreme Court has made ‘whoring’ legal, we can all look around at the last time our Government wasn’t bought and paid for by big business.  Sure, there have always been politicians in the pockets of these groups  but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the politician that is specifically sponsored by some interest group like a  NASCAR driver or what can now be called, the “Future of politics in this country”.

Imagine, Big Tobacco gets tired of the FDA restrictions and bad publicity they’ve gotten.. what to do- what to do.. Now they have the answer, they hire X amount of politicians and pay for all the attacks ads and smearing propagandist movies  that they can and then run them 24/7 on every channel and in every paper they can find in the politicians area all the way up to election.. and on election day.. Viola! Instant game changer, now they have X amount of paid senators who will work to change the laws against tobacco so they can start to rehabilitation their selves with the new “Pro-Smoking” TV spots they will be allowed to run after their candidates trim a few laws in their favor.  If that doesn’t work? Hell, they’ll just buy  more candidates in the next election.

The 1st thing we’ll see to go are the Unions. That of course makes the GOP happy! In fact this decision has them squirming for joy right now, they are salivating and as we speak placing “For Sale” signs on their office doors. This is a republicans wet-dream and at 1st they will be extremely happy with their new toy. Eventually though they will come to find out what all whores find out, it’s not always easy fucking for money… sometimes you’re forced to do things with that creepy guy who smells bad and afterward you just feel dirty and used inside. But guess what? By that time it’s too late, even the GOP will be disillusioned when they realize Pandora’s box is opened and looking them in the eye, it’s just a shame they won’t be able to do anything about it.

We all know there are some people out there who can be bought for any price so what happens when that person is given unlimited funds to win an election? I’ll give you a hint: Sarah Palin Wins Presidential Election.  As Alan Grayson said it will no longer be the senator from Iowa, it will now be the Senator from Exxon-Mobile.

So what can we look forward to and why is this a bad thing? Well for starters, after the Unions go then any Wall Street reform will be out the door as well and if we thought Wall Street was getting away with murder before… you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Think about it, before… groups like AIG or Bank of America were barred from spending too much money to directly influence an election.. but now the money we gave them to get back on their feet can go towards electing a Congressman who doesn’t believe Wall Street should have to pay anything back, or start loaning any money again, or  have any restrictions,checks or balances in any way..What’s that you say? You don’t like that idea? Well sorry my friend, you are just a single voter with limited funds.. AIG and BOA are now more important voters with billions to spend electing their chosen candidate. C’mon, do you really think your $25 dollar donation can compete with their $25 million? Of course  it can’t  so that means candidates will no longer listen to their constituents, they won’t have to.. they only have to listen to and help the interests of the big corporation who funded their campaign.

How does this change things? Ohh count the ways..

EPA? HA! Corporation can now buy candidates to lessens dumping restrictions.. the money they save from the loosened restriction can go towards buying more politicians.

FDA? Hey, hormone infused animals, irradiated produce and weeding out the ‘downer cows’ from the healthy ones all effect the bottom line.. In the ‘New world’  paid-for politicians can change FDA guidelines to help these companies and their bottom line. Not that their bottom line and our health go hand in hand and in fact they are mostly on opposite sides of the room, but look.. your $25 donation just doesn’t go as far as it used to.

New and untested drugs going on the market whenever the Big Pharma wants is another gift that’s been bestowed upon us by the infinite wisdom of John Roberts, Antonin Scalia,Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Anthony Kennedy.

Global warming Out! Pollution control out! Toxic dumping Out! Bad meat recall Out! Dangerous toy recall Out! Bad tires out!  Low cost housing Out! All social programs Out! Abortion and divorce Out! Reducing age limits on cigarettes and alcohol In! Reinstating the draft In! Drilling and strip mining In! Anti-trust laws Out! Monopolies In! Separation of Church and State Out! No prayers in school Out! Evolution in class rooms Out! Creationism In! Mom and Pop small town stores Out! Wal-mart on every corner In! Untested drugs In! Lawsuits against drug companies for knowingly testing unsafe material on the population Out! Reduction or banishment of minimum wage In! Low to no taxes on the rich and business In! Taxation without representation In! The middle class Out!

The list is endless, anything..anything any big corporation or special interest wants is now up for sale. The insurance conglomerates admitted to spending millions on ads to disprove the need for health reform. $20 million from 6 of the largest health insurers  was quietly being pumped  into third-party television ads aimed at killing or significantly modifying the major health reform bills moving through Congress. Now add another $100 million to buy a few politicians and what do you think the health debate will look like then? I see it as a war, a war over which Congressman can give the most to whichever insurance company pays the best. We the people? I laugh.. We don’t exit anymore.. how can we, we are single entities with limited funds going against massive blocks whose primary goal is not the best interest of the common man, but the best interest of the share-holder, and if buying a few dozen school board superintendents,mayors,governors,Congressmen, Judges  and a President increases the bottom line..then the CEO and Board members are required by law to do it. Now they have the pathway to accomplish it.

Hyperbolic fiction? Does it really matter now? You can’t do anything to change it even if this isn’t dooms-day, conspiracy, fiction.. do you get that part yet? It doesn’t matter anymore, the country can be bought and paid for by big business and interest groups and they have more money than you so there’s no stopping it now.  Think about this, Presidents select Supreme Court Justices, if Big Tobacco gets their paid-for President and Congress in.. they also get their Supreme Court Justice nominated.

According to the New York Times, during the last election cycled, the Fortune 100 companies alone had combined revenues of $13 trillion and profits of $605 billion. A third of the Senate is up for reelection every two years. Let’s say the largest corporations give an average of $10 million to each Senatorial Candidate. (Of course, to sway an election, it would be more in big states like New York, Texas and California, and less in small states Wyoming, Montana and Rhode Island.) That would be $3.3-$3.4 billion every two years. Let’s say they spent another $4 billion on the Presidential election every 4 years or an average of another $1 billion a year.

For less than 1% of their profits, the 100 largest corporations would likely be able to control the Senate and the Presidency, and through that, the Supreme Court. (This doesn’t even count contributions from the next 400 companies in the Fortune 500, or from slightly smaller corporations.) Good luck passing legislation to limit greenhouse gases, regulate insurance companies, or to reign in the power of the big banks.

So you see, it doesn’t matter if this is fictional bullshit or the reality waiting for us… nothing can be done to stop it from happening. It’s now trust we are to give companies like Big Tobacco,Big Oil, Big Pharma,Wall Street, Big Insurance and we all know they would never do a thing to harm us, they would never screw the public to better their bottom line and bonus’, would they…

We had a good run while it lasted.. But now? Well, corporatist dystopia here we come.

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Christmas Day found my mother in law insisting that we all go to the movies to see Avatar; specifically the IMAX 3D version, but the IMAX Theater was all the way across town… whahh….  I was not averse to seeing the movie, far from it.  It was a movie I was waiting for.  But I would have been happy to see just the regular movie version much closer to where I live.

But… I would have been wrong.  Seeing that movie, in IMAX and 3D, is the only way to see it.  The movie’s raison d’etre is after all, visuals.  That’s the big selling point; something that looks fantastic on screen that you’ve never seen before.  On that basis, the movie fulfilled the hype.  The visuals are lush, fantastic, and certainly something much beyond what I’m used to seeing on the screen. It provides the perfect beauty of a painting with the realism of … well real life.  The visuals of the movie are art, in and of itself.

As for the story… well if you’ve already seen the movie, you know it.  In fact, if you haven’t seen the movie, you still know it.  It’s pulled intact from Hollywood’s grab bag of twenty or thirty standard movie plots.  If you’ve seen any Hollywood movies in your life time, then you’ve already seen this one.  Dances with Aliens is a pretty succinct description.  But good story telling is good story telling.  I enjoyed the movie immensely even knowing how the story would play out.  Knowing the formula doesn’t necessarily ruin a movie for me.  The fun is the journey.

But I didn’t see much more than that.  Good popcorn type fun, but others saw much more into the movie than I did.  Science Fiction author Steven Barnes, who wrote about the movie at the author’s website, had a more unique view of the movie, If Spike Lee had directed Avatar?  Although that seems to be a subject ripe for a Mad Magazine satire, to Barnes it brought up issues of light skinned Na’vi lording over the darker blue skinned ones.  I didn’t even notice if there were various shades of blue among the alien Na’vi.  My view of a Spike Lee directed Avatar would have included the Na’vi calling each other “motherfucker” a lot and including an ending that would be totally incomprehensible to me.

But what really struck me was a finally throw away line at the end of the piece:

Oh…and if Spike had directed Avatar, there would have been at least one black male character to identify with. Say…the other Avatar scientist? Maybe one of the support staff?

What made me marvel a bit at this line is that after watching the movie, I never realized nor had it occurred to me that there were no black characters in the film.  True Zoe Saldana was one of the major characters of the film, but she was in blueface for the entire film so her film character was that of the alien Neytiri.  Anyway, she’s Dominican so it’s unclear to me if she regards herself as Hispanic or as Black.  That’s a whole nuther kettle of fish.

But Barnes comment was a reminder to me of how on a day to day basis that white people are isolated from race.  In America, we live in a white world.  If you’re white in the US, you just don’t have to think about race that much.  If I turn on the TV, I don’t worry about finding someone on the screen to identify with.  Firstly, because there is no one like me, and secondly, being able to live so removed from race and racial issues, the odds are against me not finding a “character to identify with.”  For Barnes, the issue is probably in his face on an almost daily basis.

Thanks to the television of Norman Lear, I grew up watching shows with predominately black casts, such as The Jefferson’s, Sanford and Son, and Good Times.  At least as a child, I had no problem identifying with the characters.  But television, like me, grew up.  Television expanded from 4 or 5 channels in a metropolitan area to 30, 40, then 70 or more channels on cable television, not counting digital channels.  Thirty or forty years ago, everyone, black and white, watched the same shows.  Now both the television and movie audience is much more segregated.  There is a channel for every taste, and ethnic and racial group.  We are gaining in choice, but we are clearly losing something else.  Perhaps a common popular culture?

But maybe, just maybe, there was more to James Cameron’s vision than a casting oversight.  Among the “human” cast, actors Dileep Rao (Dr. Max Patel), Sigourney Weaver (Grace Augustine), and Michelle Rodriguez (Judy Chacon) were the only “good guys” in the film.  Other than Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully, all of the “white” males were bad guys.  Women and Asians were the good guys.  Given Cameron’s politics, that was probably intentional.  It rather fits into the story and Cameron’s worldview.  Maybe Barnes should be glad that black males were left off this list, although in a broader sense, he may have brought up a good point.  One that I would never have noticed if it hadn’t been pointed out to me.

Most stories, but particularly in science fiction, require a sympathetic character that we need to identify with in order to be drawn into the story and to introduce whatever strange world we are being introduced to.  But how much does that sympathetic character need to be like us in order for us to really empathize with him or her?  Do they have to have the same skin tone, the same sex?  And if the movie doesn’t provide that, is it a slap in the face to the viewers who don’t look like our protagonist? 

But I didn’t notice those things watching the film, but I’m pretty sure that if I had walked into that theater and every character had been black, I would have noticed.  The question I can’t answer is, would I have felt as excluded by that theoretical movie as Steven Barnes did from Avatar?

Maybe Spike Lee should take a crack at a remake…

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As a longtime fan of the Stargate franchise, I was looking forward to the new entry in to the Stargate television family, Stargate Universe.  Although I have to admit I was a bit cautious in my expectations.  The Stargate shows, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, have been in my opinion damn near perfect science fiction TV.  The premise, that aliens thousands of years ago had kidnapped humans from Earth and settled them all over the galaxy as slaves via a Stargate, a massive ring that allows instantaneous travel between solar systems, allows just about any type of potential science fiction plot device.  In one episode the heroes could be halfway across the galaxy liberating humans from an evil alien overlord; in the next they could be downtown in Colorado Springs, getting a pizza.  Or sometimes in the same episode.  Humor and current pop culture references kept the show anchored in the here and now, while at the same time allowing the traditional action adventure in the stars.  Earth and the US Air Force manage to beat technologically superior aliens time and again.  Go us!

But when I first heard the premise of the show; humans trapped on an Ancient spaceship halfway across the universe, my first instinct was, “Uh oh, this is going to be Stargate’s Voyager.  Voyager was the second to last in the Star Trek shows, which has a starship from the Star Trek Federation… halfway across the galaxy.  The purpose was to take advantage of the Star Trek franchise but at the same time pull away from the usual cast of situations and aliens, which had started to grow stale.  It was a concept that had only meager success, and showed the franchise was on life support, finally flat lining during Star Trek Enterprise.

But the producers had promised an “edgier” Stargate than the previous incarnations.  Edgier?  Full frontual, or a FX-like use of profanity?  But setting down to watch the premiere episode I was afraid edgier would merely mean the same thing as it meant to the makers of Heroes; cut the lights off and film in the dark.  Note to TV producers: noir doesn’t mean filming without klieg lights.  At this point, the brightness level on my TV is all the way up and I still can’t see what’s going on in Heroes.  If I decide to finish the season for that show, I may just finish it as podcasts and listen to them since I can’t see what’s happening on the screen anyway.

And in the premiere episode Air, that started to look like what they meant.  The quick premise of the show, is that a planet that has unique properties and Stargate, has a secret military base.  The  Earth base personnel, who were on the planet to discover the mysteries of the “Ninth Chevron” figure out how to use the unique gate just as the planet comes under the attack of perfectly timed aliens.  Beating a hasty retreat through the Stargate, the base survivors discover themselves on board an Ancient (a humanlike highly technological race that disappeared tens of thousands of years ago in the Stargate mythology) starship, with no means to power the ship’s stargate to get back to Earth.

Naturally the ship is in total darkness when they board.  Edgy.

The first couple of episodes of the show revolve around the crew trying to wrap themselves around solving the most basic survival needs, as the episode names indicate, Air, Light, Water… Episodes filled with the grimness and stress of their situation, but little humor or action to break the ice.  Frankly, not bad episodes, but not great either.   However I’m embarrassed to say it took me until the most recent episode, Justice, to figure out what “edgy” was supposed to mean.

The producers were not doing the Stargate version of Voyager; they were doing the Stargate version of Battlestar Galactica.

Galactica (the updated version, not the 1970’s feathered hair version) was almost revolutionary in it’s approach.  It stripped out the aliens, weird spatial phenomena, time travel, technobabble, and other props of the SF genre and just left the people; highly imperfect people.  Heroes were not always heroic, or truthful, villains were not always villainous, or lying.  Galactica raised the bar on TV science fiction, making it an adult drama, and the Emmy’s that Galactica won during its 5 season run bear that out.

So I consider myself fully on board with Stargate Universe now, and feel free to recommend the show, although with caveats.  While Galactica had me hooked with the first miniseries that launched the show, I’ve been mulling over Stargate Universe.  I was not hooked until recently.  It may be that just my expectations of what a Stargate show should be made me blind to what the producers were trying to do with this version of Stargate.  This isn’t your geeky father’s Stargate.  It definitely has a different feel to the show, dare I say edgier?

Why bring this up now?  The show has been on for months.

True, but the show is on a brief hiatus until the spring and tomorrow the Syfy channel is running all nine of the previously aired episodes back to back all day.  So if you are out of work, nerdy, and somehow missed the previous showings, now is a good opportunity to catch up.

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“Not so fast, let’s see what we’ve got here..,”

I think that’s been the request of everyone over the last few weeks when it comes to ‘climategate’. Well, everyone except every conservative on the planet. To them this was Christmas morning and they were foolish children who could not wait another second to open their presents. Conservatives like Sen Inhofe who thinks that global warming is grand hoax, rejoiced a these emails because now global warming is over and done, that they won and we lost and those who believed it can get a ‘real life’.Yes, the world got together and conspired to perpetuate this hoax upon the entire world so Al Gore could get an Oscar and to make George Bush look bad.

Ok, that’s silly. I really don’t know why the world would want to create this ‘hoax’  that we as human race were hurting the planet, much less know how a conspiracy of this magnitude could be kept secret; but that’s obviously what happened if you listen to the conservative media and conservative bloggers like my friend Lil Mike.

When the news of the emails broke, there was an outcry from the conservative mainstream media that liberal news wasn’t covering the story. It took Jon Stewart about 30 seconds to disprove this theory, but if there’s one thing we know about today’s conservatives it’s that they don’t want to be held to a standard of truth themselves, they just want to hold everyone else to an impeachable standard. Besides, they just knew global warming was bunk. How did they know you wonder?  Well Sean Hannity tells us that it’s not real because it snowed in Huston.

Wow, you mean global warming is a hoax because it got cold in winter time? Well, I’m convinced…or I would be if I was a conservative. But I’m not and it’s not because I have some kind of agenda. In my opinion global warming is a bummer. Not only because of the effects on the planet but also because of the effects on my lifestyle. I enjoy all my electrical amenities, my small SUV, my virgin toilet paper and my beef.  So global warming is an inconvenience to my personal lifestyle and I would love to bury my head in the sand and forget about it. But living on the east coast of Florida and seeing the increased numbers,frequency and sheer size of some of the last few hurricane  not to mention the heat? Holy shit, this past June was the hottest we’ve have… ever, and  it’s 10 days before Christmas and we’re still having almost 90 degree temperatures.  So no, I can’t afford to ignore something of this nature because like it or not, this has been the hottest decade recorded.

Back to the emails. It wasn’t a ‘liberal’ media conspiracy to hide the news of the stolen emails, it was an effort to say “Hold on a second, lets see what we have here before we get all weepy with joy at catching someone red-handed”, you would think atleast Sarah Palin would have been on the side of those showing restraint. Since she’s condemned the media for making things up ,you’d think she’d want them to get it right.. But this kind of story is like crack to a crackhead, so of course the conservative mainstream media was jonesing to exploit,misrepresent, and bastardize it.

Thankfully we have real journalist who did wait, who did investigate and who did not jump on the tea-bagging bandwagon..

Review: E-mails show pettiness,

not fraud

Climate experts, AP reporters

go through 1,000 exchanges

LONDON – E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Yes Virginia, 5 reporters and seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy have weighed in and it’s not global warming that’s bunk, it’s the believers and pushers of ‘Climate-gate’ who have been found wanting. But even knowing this, will the  vast conservative media network still shill for the oil companies and play to their ‘drill baby drill’ base?  You Betcha!

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As much fun as Climate-gate has been generating the past few weeks, it’s almost hard to remember that Climate-gate is actually autumn’s second big global warming story.  The release of the book Superfreakonomics generated the first global warming contretemps, just as the weather got chillier and leaves began to fall.

Superfreakonomics is the sequel to the wildly successful Freakonomics, by economists Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in which the authors apply standard economic analysis to all sorts of other behaviors not traditionally examined by economists, such as the economics of drug dealing, incentives for cheating for Chicago public school teachers, and predicting what the most popular children’s names will be in the future.  Probably the most controversial issue they researched was the link to legalized abortion and declining crime rates.  Their conclusion?   There is a link; a finding that did not engender themselves to many on the right.

This time it’s the left’s turn to get skewered.  Levitt and Dubner turn their economic analysis to solutions to global warming.  First it’s important to note that Levitt and Dubner are not global warming “deniers” or “skeptics.”  They accept the media/Al Gore consensus that global warming is happening and it’s largely manmade.  What sets them apart is what to do about it.  They find it cheaper and more cost effective to resort to geoengineering. 

One method in particular strikes them as particularly cost effective.  In 1991 Mt. Pinatubo erupted, pumping 15 to 300 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere and reduced global temperatures by about half a degree Celsius for years.  Levitt and Dubner asked themselves, wouldn’t it be more cost effective to try to duplicate that effect rather than strangle our economy for decades at a cost of trillions?  Turns out someone is already working on the idea:  Intellectual Ventures is a company that is developing a workable, and affordable, method of cooling the planet.  They figured that 100 million tons of sulfur dioxide per year would be enough to reverse warming.  It sounds like a lot except that we already pump 200 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere per year.  We just aren’t getting it high enough in the atmosphere.  IV came up with a plan that would send, via a hose, pumps, and helium balloons, sufficient amounts of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to stave off any warming for an initial cost of $20 million, and operating costs of $10 million a year.

Find me another global warming solution cheaper than that.

Naturally this threw the true believers into fits.  I’ve always suspected that global warming was as much a religious belief as scientific theory.  The Superfreakanomics attackers basically confirm that (to me anyway) by arguing that the main issue is to change human behavior. Oddly, they even argue that the computerized climate models would have to be far more accurate in order to make such a plan work (More about why that is so funny later). If there was a real consensus on the right and left that anthropogenic global warming was actually happening, that is probably where the divide would be:  The right would want the most cost effective method that would impact people and business the least, and the left would want to control human behavior, control the global economy, and have international bodies tax nation-states to mitigate the results of climate change.

Since the true believers are primarily on the left, their “solutions” dominate the debate, with geo engineering considered as much a heresy as Arianism was to the early Christian church.

Which of course brings us to Climate-gate.

The contents of the e-mails have been gone over so many times on so many websites that they hardly need to be rehashed here.  The critical summary is that the Climate Research Unit’s scientists conspired to, fire editors of scientific journals to control the peer review process, cite instances in which they use “tricks” to massage the data, and delete data in order to avoid a Freedom of Information Request; a crime, and in fact, they now admit to deleting all of their original climate station data, leaving only the “value-added,” massaged data left.

All damaging to be sure, but the most damaging of all to me is the “Harry_read_me.txt.”  This documents the attempts of one of the programmers to translate the climate data into something that could be modeled on the climate modeling software.

Basically its crap.

 In fact, it’s so bad that I think the true state of climate modeling is even worse than I thought it was, and I never thought it was sophisticated enough to determine if climate warming was man made or not.  Since none of the climate models predicted the post 1998 cooling, I figured they weren’t any good, but these revelations make me think that we are not even in the ball park of reasonably close climate modeling.

A few weeks ago, before the news on Climate-gate had broken, someone claimed that nothing could convince me of anthropogenic global warming.  Ah but there is.  Build a computerized climate model that can accept the inputs of climate that we already know we’ve had, say, from 1960 to 1990, and see if it can predict the climate for the next ten years, to 2000.  Since we already know what the weather actually was for that period of time, reasonably close results would give us an indicator if the model actually works.  Then maybe you could put in the variable of increased CO2 and see if it shows increased temperature; global warming in other words.

But we still are not even close to doing that.  In fact we are still so far off from that I despair of seeing that combination of software and processing power for decades, if ever.  Certainly it won’t be ready for the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, which started today.  Not that they need actual science for the conference.  They are basing their conclusions on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which bases their science on, you guessed it, the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit!

About a year and a half ago I wrote a blog expressing my doubts of manmade global warming, and it looks to me as if everything that has come out since then have made my doubts grow.  However if you are a true believer, nothing, not the CRU e-mail scandal, or even the actual halt in global temperatures since 1998 will deter you.  The delegates to the Copenhagen conference, with their 1,200 limos and 140 private planes, are true believers.  President Obama, who will be flying in next week to put his stamp of approval on whatever agreement comes out of the conference, is a true believer.  And the EPA, which as of today announced that carbon dioxide will “pose a threat to human health and welfare,” are true believers.

Even if global temperatures continue to fall for the next 10 to 20 years, it may be at least that long before the AGW skeptics start to get some traction.  We’ve already had 10 years of no increase in global temperatures with no let up on the true believers dominating public policy in virtually every industrialized country on the planet.

It might take a new ice age to thaw out that consensus.

Almost immediately after news of the name of the shooter at Ft. Hood was made public, the left and the media girded it’s loins and prepared to do battle, to defend Major Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who killed 13 and wounded 31 more before being brought down by two civilian police officers.   Not defending the killing of course; that was beyond the abilities of even the New York Times to pull off, but defend him from his own motives.

The Nation was first out of the box with it’s defense:  Any mention of Major Hasan’s religion was Islamophobia.  Of course I’m suspicious of any word that tries to medicalize an opinion.  That’s like saying some opinions are akin to a mental illness.  That’s not even two steps away from an old Soviet psychiatric hospital.  Phobias are of course irrational fears, so I’ll let the reader determine if they think any suspicion about a radical islamist ideology is “irrational” or not.  Certainly Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security Secretary, seems to be more worried about an anti-Muslim backlash than the current anti-infidel one.

That’s different of course from plain old prejudice and bigotry.  Which of course, you can also be accused of for noting that Hasan said “allu akbar” before his rampage.  If a Christian says something like, “in the name of Jesus Christ the Redeemer, take that!” and opens up on a crowd of innocents, we don’t question that the gunman probably had some sort of religious motivation.  Allu Akbar?  Nothing to see here, move along…

Speaking of Allu Akbar, CNN tried to edit that phrase right out of it’s coverage.  As the milblog Mudville Gazette demonstrates, CNN went back and re-edited the article that interviewed PVT Joseph Foster, who heard MAJ Hasan yell “Allah[sic] Akbar!” to try to imply that Foster may or may not have heard it.  CNN, hard at work with the defense team already.

Almost immediately after news of the shooting began, the internet began to buzz with the name of …Timothy McVeigh.  Why McVeigh?  What does McVeigh have to do with this incident?  Nothing of course except… religious extremism?  Yes, apparently, in the collective mind of the left, McVeigh is some sort of Christian Terrorist; a factum that had never came out during the investigation or trial.  McVeigh, although raised Catholic, variously identified himself as either agnostic or atheist.  Apparently having blond hair is enough to have your religion classified as Christian in the minds of the American left.  I’m sure Christian ministers from Sao Paulo to Nairobi will be surprised by this.

McVeigh makes a poor defense for Hasan though, even by the standards of the left, but hey, if you throw enough stuff on the wall, some of it should stick.  But what’s stickier than McVeigh is just being plain crazy.  Dr. Phil made exactly that point when he asked, “how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act.”  Alan Colmes, normally a not-too-crazy liberal, made essentially the same point on the O’Reilly Factor:

COLMES: It’s an isolated incident. It’s one guy who went crazy.

CROWLEY: It’s about closing Gitmo.

COLMES: No, it’s not.

CROWLEY: It’s about matriculating these guys into the criminal justice system.

COLMES: It’s about.

CROWLEY: Come on, Alan.

COLMES: .you’ve got an incredible overreaction to one crazy person.

CROWLEY: He was not crazy. And he’ll tell you he’s not crazy.

COLMES: Okay.

CROWLEY: He’s just like Zacarias Moussaoui stood up in a U.S. court and said, I’m not crazy, I’m al Qaeda. And this is typical American B.S.

O’REILLY: I don’t know why.

CROWLEY: .which is exactly what it is .

O’REILLY: Colmes, I don’t know why you’re saying he’s crazy. He seems to be lucid.

COLMES: Oh, (INAUDIBLE). So someone who commits an act like this is not crazy?

O’REILLY: Well, look, then every murderer would be crazy.

COLMES: Yes, I think you’re going to do something like this, you’ve got a crazy (INAUDIBLE).

O’REILLY: Okay, so you couldn’t convict any killer on anything. They’d always get off on insanity.

COLMES: No, I wouldn’t necessarily get you off on insanity. But the claim, if you’re going to do something like this, you got a screw loose.

So if by definition, anyone who kills is crazy, well, nobody is guilty I suppose. 

Of course, there’s crazy and then there’s crazy.  The New York Times firmly came down on a more damning indictment of the stress of  military deployment driving Hasan to his act of ter—oops sorry, I mean acting out from profound stress.  Now I don’t want to minimize the stress of a deployment, I’ve experienced it myself, but Major Hasan, unlike the troops he would have counseled, wasn’t going to be thrown in the midst of a firefight in Afghanistan.  In all likelihood he would have been safely ensconced at Bagram AFB or one of the larger posts and in would probably never have heard a shot fired in anger (unless the war goes much more badly for us).  And Major Hasan, with no wife and children, wasn’t affected by one of the most stressful parts of deployment: separation from a spouse and children.  As far as military deployments go, Hasan’s would have been much more comfortable and danger free than the vast majority of troops he would have been sent there to support.

So everyone is carefully tiptoeing around the motives.  The President, who was quick out of the gate in determining the motives of a police officer towards a Harvard professor, suddenly feels that we “cannot fully know” the motive.

But no, let’s not rush to judgment.  The left would never do that would they?  Not like with the Holocaust Museum shooter that the left immediately blamed on right wing talk radio, but who turned out to be a hater of neo-cons, Bush, and McCain, and of course, was a 9/11 truther.  If he was listening to anything it sounds like it was Air America.

And of course the hanging of the census worker in Kentucky with the word “FED” scrawled on his body.  With no suspect in sight, the left had no problem targeting again, the right wing, and Glenn Beck.  Of course now, the case looks a little different, and police are thinking that this was not a murder at all.

The Army Chief of Staff, General George Casey, made clear that whatever the motive, the Army will continue to worship the gods of political correctness, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Really?  Diversity is more important than preventing massacres?

As for me, if someone described as a devout Muslim kills 13 and wounds 31 while shouting Allu Akbar, and thinks that non-Muslims should be set on fire, had contact with a radical, jihad promoting imam in Yemen, and had been described by colleagues, as expressing anti-American views, then I think there is a problem.

An Army that is so diverse that it allows enemies and people in direct opposition to the Army mission and the United States is a little too diverse in my opinion.  Does the Army really need to be diverse enough to include Jihadi’s, guerrillas, and traitors to the United States?  Whew, that’s one big tent!

BRA–FUCKING–VO

I haven’t been to a movie that suspenseful/creepy/’what the fuck’ scary since Blair Witch..

and yes, Blair Witch, when it came out it creeped the hell out of you people and you know it… Paranormal Activity is 10 times the creep,tension, and bone-chilling scare..

This movie is on par with seeing the Exorcist the 1st time…the original Amityville Horror the 1st time.. reading your 1st truly scary Stephen King and then turning the lights on to sleep… I never knew ‘foot steps’ could scare/creep the utter fuck out you..

It’s a true ’scary’ movie, not a ‘horror’ movie… it’s old school walking in the cemetery on Halloween at midnight with your friends or being home at night and you hear a sound and the worst part of all, the dog heard it too so you pull the covers over your head a pray..

Crowd-reaction-wise…I have never been to a ‘horror’ movie like this one before. The previews they show of the audience hiding their faces,cringing and screaming it dead-on.. we cringed,we held our breath, we screamed, we laughed out loud.. we said.. “OH shit!” Oh Fuck” and one black dude down in front during an extremely suspenseful,utterly cringe worthy and quiet part said “OH hell no!” and the whole place laughed because the tension-release demanded it, only to be immediately built back up when your attention was on the movie again.

I seriously recommend this to anyone looking for a great suspense/tension filled scary movie.. and go see it at night, in a theater at a time when there will be others there.This movie won’t be as good at home or at a matinee.It will still be awesome, but like a comedy show is better when you’re a part of the actual audience, this would be just that much better seeing at the theater.

I won’t talk about the parts in the movie because I really don’t want to give anything away but, it’s ‘involved’… meaning there’s a slow story line that builds up tension to such a extent and it does it so often that you are just exhausted from it, your muscles are actually sore from being so tensed up for so long…  and after each tension release you can’t help but let out a nervous guffaw, you know that laughter when you’re scared/tense beyond control and you just can’t help but laugh to release some of it?

There were parts when I said “if this happens I’m walking out”!!   HA! It produces a total ‘fight or flight‘ response in you because if you’re like me, you’ve seen all the scary/horror movies ever made so you’re just agonizingly waiting for that one part, the “If  he finds her in the corner I’m getting the hell out of here!” …“If something comes through that TV you have to leave with me”, part where  you can’t look.. but even worse, you can’t NOT look!

I hate hate hate building up movies like this..  But even after reading TIME’s review.. It didn’t matter, I was still creeped me right the hell out..

…Oh, sweet Jesus, that nice couple Katie and Micah are about to go to sleep again! They already suspect that their house is haunted. Micah has propped up his video camera in their bedroom to record any unusual phenomena, so they’ll know what awful thing happened the previous night, while they were sleeping. The bedroom door moved a couple of inches and then … moved back

Big hairy deal, say cynics who were bred on gross-out horror movies. Show us heads exploding, chests busting, legs sawed off. Yet the packed audience at a late-night screening of Paranormal Activity in Times Square this past week didn’t need gore effects to be scared witless. Yes, they knew it was only a movie — one that, like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and plenty others before it, used “found footage” to give a patina of realism to the fanciful events that were dreamed up by writer-director Oren Peli and are endured by actors Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston (using their real names). But when that door moved, the crowd’s collective gasp just about sucked all the oxygen out of the theater.…

yes, Oh sweet Jesus is the perfect description… HA!

…A horror-movie revisionist, Peli follows a less-is-more strategy. He knows that waiting for the big scary jolt does more damage to the nervous system than getting it. The tension builds slowly, as the apprehensive Katie, a student, and the skeptical Micah, a day trader, feel the first emotional tremors. The movie keeps us in its grip because we never leave the couple’s haunted property and because all we see is what the camera has recorded when held by Micah or Katie, or when left on at night to monitor their bedroom. That claustrophobia creates a bond between the couple and the audience; they can’t escape, and neither can we.

Peli downplays shock and emphasizes suspense: a shadow creeping across a wall or the ripple of an unseen form under the bedsheets. The gore scenes in splatter movies carry a sadistic punch, but those are outside most moviegoers’ experience. What Peli is interested in is dread, a feeling everyone is familiar with. (Will I lose my job? Has she found someone else? Why hasn’t our kid come home yet? What’s that strange rash?) Movies take that anxiety, crystallize it…

and finally

A thousand people sit as one in the dark, as fretful and enthralled as a child hearing a bedtime story and wondering, What happens next? No, I can’t bear it! No, I have to see!

If you do anything for Halloween.. go see this movie..

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