Orthographical Scraping

Not their technology, our technology!-- Jason Cope

I freely confess that my page views from Russia perplex me. They surge in my darkest moments, engaging in confirmation bias or astonishment, even ridicule, perhaps exploitation, then recede when I have a valid critique, or perhaps to them, I am a unique specimen, the now wavering invalid who defied Google, the Philadelphia police, University of Pennsylvania’s psychiatric procedures, and my rental agent, only to fall to family and a shyster excuse for a wheelchair technician. Such largesse would not be granted to me in the post-Soviet Putin era, not being an apt love interest for the traitorous Edward Snowden, but whatever is going in the globe’s largest, but sparsely populated nation, which could be quite easily defeated by the Chinese military, something which I am sure our intelligence agencies know better than I on the sheer strength of numbers alone, I was not manipulated by Russian propaganda during the election cycle. Like many in the right wing, Trump was not my first choice during the primaries, but I was then an independent, and do not engage in backing a particular political horse, state or nation-wide, all that often. Trump prevailed, and I was actually going to throw my vote to the libertarians. Instead, I took pity on my aunt. I concede, during my unhappy engagement with Yabberz, that some of the spin on the Clinton Foundation may have been doctored, but this was not an influence on my vote. That goes to Monica Lewinsky and the Starr Report, because it is just possible that we would have been just that more vigilant about the rise of Al Qada and Osama bin Laden had we the people not been in an uproar about impeachment and sexual impropriety during President Clinton’s second term.

Now, the dowager defended Bill in her communities, as the Senate voted down the House articles, but in the aftermath of two decades of terrorism and failed neo-conservative warfare, I put the onus for this on the Clintons. Had the Clinton administration heeded the rising temperature of Islamic radicalism, GW would not have had a rationale for Iraq 2.0, in our failed game of chicken with Baathist prawns. This is how my pyramid is built, and continuously disappointed, my gravitation toward anarchy no better or worse than what has gone before. District 9 remains my favorite niche film in the science fiction genre, and I’d argue that it isn’t quite as ironclad for progressive tolerance as meets the eye, though it never references apartheid overtly, because native black South Africans inhabit an anomalous place in the energy of the documentary narrative. Regardless of Blomkamp’s intent, we come away uniquely challenged by his unique little gem: first contact might neither be as transcendent or malicious as the industry often feeds it to us. Arrival tilts its axis on the same pole, and opts for the benevolence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Starman, never quite considering Blomkamp’s striking thought that we’d wind up with Serbian camp conditions instead. Having been around since Khrushchev and the fabled shoe tactic, I have no love lost for collective state models, nor modern leftist cult style corruption which results in the death of Putin's opposition. I have been disenfranchised by corruption on the American left, and while I may not be the enemy of Slavic mindsets, don’t presume I am your appeaser either. Implosive anger such as mine often leads to attacks on the social altruism towards which we naturally incline, such as those striking Austin. I’m quite aware of that, though in this case, if law enforcement is correct that this involves music industry figures, that adds up to quite a bit of specious hemlock. So we wait and see, wondering if Greg Abbott will have a political life after his tenure.

That Nick Gillespie liked two of my tweets since I started supporting Reason isn't a job contract, and it doen't mean Brian will green light my next pitch. The magazine is just this side of too California for my tastes, but since I desire to keep exploring libertarian themes, it is nonetheless a small hope against alarm at the occasional spastic tremor.

Braque Boxes

James once suggested to William Dean Howells that he should consider publishing a story on incest.  --Michael C Clark, shoulder ghost

I may not have had the diction on hand then that I have available today, but even before my father smashed my stereo to avoid smashing me, and there were several of those instances, signifying the luck of the draw that my immediate family wasn't subject to annihilation, I knew in my pre-collegiate days that Pete Townshend's solo smash was too effective as a corrosive force on my naivete. Elton and Bernie may have dangled homoerotic lyrics like a choice pork medallion, but they did it with an adolescent simplex. Townshend is darker in Empty Glass, a sick perverted bastard if ever there was one, and yet, in the musical traditions that fermented British rock, the album is a work of art, much like Birth of the Nation put the movie industry on the map due to its technical accomplishments, despite the ferocity of its repressions. Blomkamp speaks to this aesthetic complicity in District 9. He was speaking my language before my blogging unwittingly gave voice to my somewhat unrealized convictions, before I butted heads with secular liberalism, whether Zionist, academic, or LBGT.

The plot does have certain inexplicable elements. Christopher seems to be a lone intelligence amid a swarm of alien idiots who cognate slightly better than great apes, and Copley's Wikus survives a paranoid military of a paranoid government and its equally brutal gangland counterpart, but that given, it is a film that has caught up with what it is possible to achieve in science fiction when authors treat the genre with respect. In watching Blomkamp's mock analysts, we see reinforced how our own analysts stand as a bulwark, giving power the benefit of the doubt. When the Petraeus scandal broke, David Brooks gaffed, sitting in his Newshour chair, "I had lunch with him [the general] last week."

This signifies that Brooks gets access in the Beltway, but little else in what the public should know, could know, about the people we pay to run our governments; District 9 signifies this -- it is a film  integral to Africaan guilt (and those Dutch polyglots should feel guilty) but applicable to the rest of us. It is honest in its view that the legal collapse of apartheid does not magically fuse Europeans and Africans like Siamese twins, although Henry Louis Gates, whose chip on the shoulder practically vibrates, says we are all biologically African! How can caste subjugation be so pervasive? Gates makes Rand's ideological lunacy seem sympathetic.

Blomkamp should have won the best foreign film Oscar, but that would have been risky, an anti-establishment gateway.