Could extraterrestrial aliens really invade earth?
The human race could be devastated if aliens were to learn of our existence and venture to Earth, warned British scientist Stephen Hawking on Sunday. But how could extraterrestrials really invade Earth?
For the record, it doesn’t get much better than a good alien invasion book.
Yes, James, you’re still an idiot. If you keep doing those vanity Google searches that keep leading you here, you may as well see it in big letters.
Because so many people lack the intellectual capacity, or, perhaps intellectual honesty, to get it. Peggy Noonan touches on this.
Now, Arizona has drawn a line in the sand just north of the border:
But the larger point is that Arizona is moving forward because the government in Washington has completely abdicated its responsibility. For 10 years—at least—through two administrations, Washington deliberately did nothing to ease the crisis on the borders because politicians calculated that an air of mounting crisis would spur mounting support for what Washington thought was appropriate reform—i.e., reform that would help the Democratic and Republican parties.
Again, I seriously believe that those on the wrong side of this argument are either intellectually incapable of getting it; trapped behind some absurd feel-good idealistic world view, or they are being intellectually dishonest. Of course the lack of intellectual honesty falls mostly upon politicians hoping to leverage an open border policy to their advantage as exemplified in the above quote.
As far as an example of intellectual inadequacy, one need look no further than Britain’s Gordon Brown:
On the campaign trail this week, he was famously questioned by a party voter about his stand on immigration. He gave her the verbal runaround, all boilerplate and shrugs, and later complained to an aide, on an open mic, that he’d been forced into conversation with that “bigoted woman.”
He really thought she was a bigot. Because she asked about immigration. Which is, to him, a sign of at least latent racism.
Believe me, that sort of ridiculous logic is rampant here in the USA.
It is a fact that unchecked, illegal immigration cannot continue in to this country without grave consequences. It’s really as simple as that, and goes no further than that, especially in to the realm of “race”.
I wonder how many of the hundreds of thousands of people marching to commemorate May Day are aware of the monstrous ideology they are giving props to? You know, that pesky little fact that Communism is responsible for more deaths than all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. The sheer numbers--80-100 million deaths--dwarf that of what Fascists were responsible for in World War II. And remember, Communism and Fascism are basically two sides of the same coin.
Shame on the ignorance.
if Lish edited Carver so heavily, then is what we think of as “Carver-esque” really Lish?
Communicating without metaphors would be like eating without taste buds. I know, I just used a simile to describe a metaphor ... My head hurts.
Perhaps this will help.
Philosophers have long wondered about the connection between metaphor and thought, in ways that occasionally presaged current-day research. Friedrich Nietzsche scornfully described human understanding as nothing more than a web of expedient metaphors, stitched together from our shallow impressions of the world. In their ignorance, he charged, people mistake these familiar metaphors, deadened from overuse, for truths. “We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers,” he wrote, “and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”
Reading this:
Dr Venter, who has been chasing his goal for a decade, is already working on projects to use synthetic biology to create bacteria that transform coal into cleaner natural gas, and algae that soak up carbon dioxide and turn it into hydrocarbon fuels.
made me go, hmmmm.
I can see it now: The global ecosystem overrun by artificially created carbon dioxide consuming algae, humans must now produce massive amounts of Co2 to save earth.
I posted it on a screenwriting BB. Have at it!
Proves that we’re all screwed.
A ZOMBIE attack would need to be countered hard and early to give civilisation any hope of surviving, according to a mathematical study.
A Canadian team - which includes an Australian researcher - has done the maths on what would happen should zombies really appear on the streets.
The first thing that comes to my mind is, I hope they didn’t get grant money for this?
Stephen Hunter writes this concerning depression era bandits Bonnie and Clyde; both the historic and film versions.
That point is that the legendary Penn movie that invented the New Bonnie and Clyde was such a ideological crock that it deserves placement in that list of other leftist crocks mistaken by gullible critics and film lovers as somehow great: Beatty’s own Reds, the appalling JFK, and the toxic oeuvre of Michael Moore and his tribe of screwball clones in the documentary field, as well as the recent spate of angry, misguided Iraq war films.
This really is not news; when Bonnie and Clyde was released and soared, following an initial few weeks of failure, the Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko launched a mini-crusade to restore Clyde and Bonnie to their actual dimensions, as vicious murderers, no matter that (as the ad copy said) they were young, they were in love, and they robbed banks. The only thing that mattered about them, Royko said, was that they killed, and killed a lot of people. The critic of the New York Times, Bosley Crowther, then the oldest, whitest guy in New York, also dared to denounce the film; he not only felt the lash of social ostracism and contempt, he may have even lost his job as a consequence.
I thought they were both idiots. I know better now.
Heh.
Are simply crimes. But, unfortunately, some defendants are less equal than others.
“Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This quote, from the Englishman William Blackstone, aptly describes the aims and priorities of our own American system of justice . . . Unless, that is, you are a liberal crusader who is out to get someone because he was accused of a “hate crime.” In that case, Blackstone’s formulation is turned on its head: better to convict ten innocents than to give people a symbolic impression that “hate crimes” aren’t more serious and worse than all other crimes.
To give people special consideration based on gender, sexuality, race ... anything is simply wrong. Think about it; two people are murdered under similar circumstances. The only real difference is that one victim is, say, homosexual, and the other is straight. Why should the severity of the punishment be more with regards to one victim over another?
Can someone please answer that?
No, waterboarding is not torture, no matter what some people say. But even the most pacifistic among us would agree that some people should be waterboarded just because.
Ever wonder how tabloids get such juicy stories?
A reporter with the National Enquirer allegedly checked Brooke Shields’ mother out of her nursing room on Thursday by posing as a friend, according to People. Teri Shields, 75, suffers from dementia.
Damn.
An interesting article on cliches in film, or more accurately, how they have changed. There are the givens like the fact that no matter where someone on the screen lives in Paris, the Eiffel Tower will always be visible through their window. Really, keep your eyes open and you’ll notice it.
Fans of traditional western movies, for example, know that the gunmen on the American frontier settled their disputes fair and square, meeting in one-on-one main-street pistol duels, ideally at noon. I was shocked when Elmore Leonard said he made it a rule to omit that scene from the western books and movies he wrote. He claims no one would ever be so foolish as to do that.
Good on Elmore Leonard. Thankfully, for the most part, you’ll never see a western movie with two pistol-swinging gunmen facing each other down in the middle of main street. Nowadays, mainstreet is turned into a gritty, gut-shot, messy bloodbath. Think of Open Range or Unforgiven. Watching Open Range, I remember thinking that it felt like watching Vietnam War footage.
One “wisdom” not mentioned in the article is that, as of the past few decades, Republican or Conservative means bad.
When I was very young, I wasn’t subjected to much television or film. It’s not that I’m that old (46), it’s just a result of where I grew up at. The 60’s and 70’s, in the mountains of Idaho didn’t lend itself to much television. Try to see what kind of reception you get with rabbit ears while living in a town of 400 or so people at the bottom of the second deepest canyon in North America. Also, there tends to be very little in the way of local theater going experiences. What people mostly did for entertainment was bitch about the weather and government, and read a lot.
The reason I bring this up is because while growing up, my young eyes and ears caught much of what the old-timers would say and talk about. There was a certain standard of how a “man” was supposed to act. I still have vivid memories of ranch hands standing around the fireplace, holding cups of coffee and talking about one thing or another and through it all, for the most part, there was a certain code of behavior that was pretty cut and dry. That’s not to say that there were not those who did not or would not live up to expected standards. They just weren’t respected. In hindsight, I realize that human behavior is what it is and has not changed much for perhaps thousands of years, but, often times, people like to put on a good and/or righteous face. A few years later, when I became more exposed to film and television, I saw, in westerns, much of the same kind of “code” of behavior that I witnessed as a child when men with names like Jake, Jasper, and Arlin stood around that stove holding their coffee talking in low-toned, rumbling voices.
At the time I wondered if this code of behavior presented in the western films was a reflection of reality, or if the reality was a reflection of the cliché. I still haven’t figured that one out because I’m pretty sure that Jake, Jasper, or Arlin hadn’t had much exposure to films and television as well. Of course, I’m sure that they all had lots of experience reading Louis L Amour and other writers of the Western Mythos. I also must point out that some of the most well-read individuals I’ve every met were simple, rural types that I’ve come across in remote villages and mountain campsites. Show me a real cowboy who spends a good portion of their life in the outdoors away from people, doing the things that cowboys do, living the lonely life that cowboys do, and I would be willing to bet that they are extremely well-read. Think about it, what the hell else is there to do out there in the great wide open? You will rarely see something so incongruous as a bow-legged, filthy cowboy with a wad of tobacco in his mouth, punctuating his dialect with “y,all”, “fixin’”, and displaying the manners of someone ill-equipped to handle social interactions beyond telling his dog to “Git in the back of the truck” while at the same time, in casual conversation, throwing out a quote by Keats or Oscar Wilde or applying a Shakespearean incident to an anecdote. Trust me, this isn’t all that uncommon.
Which brings me back to the whole cliché thing. Sometimes the anti-cliché is the cliché.
Go figure.
My wife is my absolute best friend, period. Somewhere, back in some sequestered section of my brain, I vaguely remember being single and--God forbid--dating. Oy, what a nightmarish thought. For those of you out there in the dating world I pity you.
“Don’t tell me that you and your wife have an arrangement’”; “Don’t hit on my friend(s) first. Yeah, I saw that”; “Don’t ever say to me, ‘Your breasts don’t look like the ones in my magazines’”; “Don’t lick my face - I get flashbacks from Silence of the Lambs”; “Don’t ask me if my friend might be interested in a threesome”; “Don’t try to guilt me into something - you are not my mother, and you don’t have her skills.”
Apparently we men must adhere:
...to impress, men need to be hugely successful, but pretend that they are not. And this is only one aspect of the almost impossible balance that needs to be struck. Men need to convey sexual desire without sexualising the person in front of them, need to be authoritative, opening doors, paying bills, deciding where to go and so on (recent research found that 60 per cent of women would consider it a bad first date if they paid), yet treat women as absolute equals. They need to flatter without seeming overly impressed, they need to care about their appearance (but not too much), and when it comes to chatting up, they need to take the initiative, and absorb any humiliation that comes their way, without seeming at all arrogant or pushy.
I can tell you right now that if I was still single, date night would consist of a six pack, a roll of duct tape, and my right hand.
Earlier, my wife and I watched a splendid film entitled Les Invasions Barbares--in English it translates to The Barbarian Invasions. If you don’t mind reading subtitles, I highly recommend it. One thing that struck me was the stinging indictment the writer/director delivered concerning Canada’s version of socialized health care. The film isn’t about Canada’s socialized health care system, to be sure. But I can’t decide if the filmmaker was indeed making a statement or if he was simply portraying a fact of life in a Canadian hospital; much of the film takes place in a hospital. You know, if you make a film, say, about a bunch of skiers in a mountain town in the Colorado Rockies, the film isn’t about the Colorado Rockies, but mountains will be present in the film as a simple matter of fact. If the film’s treatment of Canada’s health care is even remotely indicative of reality, I’m telling you right now that I want no part of it. Just saying.
Okay, moving on. Related to my previous post I direct you to this article. It touches on the notion that, basically, most American voters are probably not well enough educated on the political issues of the day to be voting. Well, to be honest, I may be throwing out a bit of hyperbole, but you get the drift.
Studies of this sort make it pretty clear that political ignorance matters—not only for individual votes, but also for election outcomes.
Gee, ya think?
For example, a team of psychologists led by Alex Todorov established that candidates for governor, senator, or representative who are rated as “competent” by people judging them solely on the basis of photographs are considerably more likely to win real-world elections than those who look less competent. Brief exposure to the photographs—as little as one-tenth of a second—is sufficient to produce a significant correlation with actual election outcomes. A follow-up study showed that the electoral advantage of competent-looking candidates is strongest among less informed voters and those most heavily exposed to political advertising.
It makes one wonder how the hell any democracy can work. Again, this all comes back to the above hyperbole. Should there be some kind of test to determine who should be able to vote? Should voting be relegated to those who have a vested interest, such as tax payers? I mean, it’s amazing to me how many people don’t even know who their representatives are, or can’t identify the three branches of Government. Granted, knowing the basics of how our country works does not guarantee political sophistication, but, at least, if someone is interested enough to give a damn, they may have a better chance of being able to cast a reasoned vote, right?
Alas, it all may be a valiant attempt at pissing up a rope:
For one thing, voters’ perceptions may be seriously skewed by partisan biases. For example, in a 1988 survey a majority of respondents who described themselves as strong Democrats said that inflation had “gotten worse” over the eight years of the Reagan administration; in fact, it had fallen from 13.5 percent in 1980 to 4.1 percent in 1988. Conversely, a majority of Republicans in a 1996 survey said that the federal budget deficit had increased under Bill Clinton; in fact, the deficit had shrunk from $255 billion to $22 billion. Surprisingly, misperceptions of this sort are often most prevalent among people who should know better—those who are generally well informed about politics, at least as evidenced by their answers to factual questions about political figures, issues, and textbook civics. If close attention to elite political discourse mostly teaches people to believe what the partisan elites on “their” side would like to be true, the fundamental premise of books such as Rick Shenkman’s—that a more attentive, politically engaged electorate would make for a healthier democracy—may be groundless.
If the above is true--and I’m leaning towards it--than it does not bode well for the future of any democracy.
Let’s see, started out the post discussing a fine film and a question regarding it, then ended on this note.
Probably time for bed.
STOP CHANGING YOUR SHIT AROUND!!!
Jesus. Nothing I HATE worse than people changing crap in an attempt to make it better. Yahoo has been doing this a lot lately. I use My Yahoo for an internet based mail client. I have the home page set up JUST THE WAY I LIKE IT! I like simplicity when it comes to my web browsing experience. I know right where my e-mail is. I know where everything is. That is until you CHANGE EVERYTHING AROUND!
Yahoo changes their shit and then I have to search for the link to change it back. No, Yahoo, you’re not improving my experience with you. You are pissing me off.
Stop it.
Stop it.
STOP IT!!!
I’d love to find the little geek responsible and pimp slap his/her ass so hard their great grand children feel it.
Daniel Medley was born and raised in the mountains of Central Idaho and now lives in Utah with his wife and son.
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