Austrian Evolution

"You're nasty!" Trudy Richardson, often accurate in the vernacular

One doesn't mind the original Predator, as the 1987 make was suspenseful. Did it add anything to the process of elimination narrative contingent to horror genres? Only that it was well done, kept your eye on the ball, made you reconsider Schwarzenegger's psych-out warfare with Lou Ferrigno when they were competitive, and on a primal level, offered a certain degree of faith in brawn juxtaposed against unknown lethal menace. Nice camp, crass sequels that did not know what to do with a culture based on killing as a form of conversation, which leads me to the question of price tags for junk food.

Star Trek, in the canonical sense, give the Klingons exaggerated moral values via and through which we reconsider human nature. The Predator franchise has one basic keynote which doesn't quite hold its rationale: that sentient species can evolve simply to kill in sophisticated manners that can leave them vulnerable to extraordinary effort in one on one battles. Predator versus Alien, Predator versus the unknown species that could wipe out a Borg cube, Predator versus Vladimir Putin, mixing their phosphorus blood with vodka, but how can an advanced species so hell bent on a Gothic spooky carnage have advanced using infrared technology without having the acuity to flag someone like Fareed Zakaria for using a very quick sleight of hand in his parentheses, that totalitarian state model transitions do not apply to oil rich states?

To some degree we're all analysts, excluding those with brain lesions, who need not insist on a place at the table, but foreign policy always makes certain assumptions about the stability of national identity, when beneath the surface there are always tensions, and greater or lesser degrees of sovereignty, perhaps not strictly applicable to islands at the mercy of the Pacific Ocean, but the analyst, like the clergy, seeks to help us understand what the issue is and what the solution entails, often missing the surprise, entirely. "Oh the Arab Spring is a good thing..." Most of them missed that Bashar al-Assad would move along the spectrum from westernized despot being wooed toward secular moderation to a pariah as the Syrian civil war emerged, now being compared, with ominous parallels, to Franco's consolidation of power in Spain as a preamble.

We don't know what we don't know: Ebola could gain a foothold in China, escalating tensions on the Russian border, or Hindu nationalism under Modi could spark an unanticipated ignition, or a real alien could infect us with their version of the measles. I don't bank on guarantees.