A Gilded Planet

George Lucas has done it again. He fooled me once, shame on him. He fooled me twice, shame on him. He fooled me three times, shaame on him. He fooled me a fourth time and now I'm starting to think I'm the one that should be ashamed, like I did something wrong. But really, I did nothing wrong. I just bought a ticket to see the new Star War movie. It's not my fault the movie was just as bad as if not worse than the prequels. And let me tell you why. First of all, I don't know how the idea of doing Star War at Christmastimes got past the drawing board. These movie executives are supposed to be smart guys, so I don't know what they were thinking. I've always felt Star War is supposed to be a summer thing like going to the beach. So having the first scene of the new movie be a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony on Tatooine where it doesn't even snow just seemed like the opposite of what you'd want to do to open the first Star War to come out in a decade. S...

10. This week, the National Front Party, led by reliable fascist Marine Le Pen, won the first round of regional elections in France. 9. Another thing happened this week that you may have heard about. Donald Trump, the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, proposed a total ban on Muslims entering the United States.  But he hasn't called for the deportation of all Muslims residing in the United States. At least, not yet. 8. Senator Marco Rubio believes a woman's right to choose to end a pregnancy via abortion should be banned totally even in rape cases. But that stance is within the Overton Window , so he's not a fascist as such. 7.  “It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down any place — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site — any place where radicals are being inspired.”  - Senator Marco Rubio of Florida (source) , who is definitely not a fascist and we shouldn't call ...

There's terror in the air once again. Guns, terrorist sleeper cells, metastasizing civil war in the Middle East, a new season of Game of Thrones that could disappoint fans. 1 There are ordinary decent citizens asking: what's next? Must I buy a gun to protect myself? 2 Right now, in this country, we've got liberals terrified of the endless stream of mass shootings, and conservatives arming themselves to the teeth because they're terrified of terrorists who suddenly seem to be encroaching with unimaginable rapidity on the West. So what are we to do? A lot of religious folks out there see guns as a kind of balm against the fearsome and devilish world out there. 3 But there are plenty of scientists and followers of the scientific path who feel the same way. Likewise regarding those of us with a disdain for guns: you'll talk to believers and non-believers alike who feel we need to have fewer guns in fewer hands, or no guns in no hands at all. There's no single p...

Dear Whiners of Generation X and Generation Boomer and also those Self-Loathing Whiners of My Own Cohort, I have noticed a certain kind of an opinion editorial that pops every other month or so . Sometimes it shows up on some random blog, and sometimes on an established opinion journal such as The Atlantic. The editorial generally goes like this: college students and twentysomethings today really are the worst. They are entitled, childish, coddled and absolutely hopeless as people because they are too obsessed with trigger warnings and participation trophies. They think they are all special snowflakes, but really they are not special snowflakes at all. They need to wake up and face reality because their parents aren't going to be around to hold their hands forever. If you write or share this kind of piece that I have just described, please stop it. You are only adding to a perpetually dull subgenre that without exception fails to engage with contemporary life at such ...

More than a decade ago I chanced upon an old and forgotten Canadian telefilm called Zero Hour that was playing on Turner Classic Movies. The ZAZ filmmaking team had made the movie  Airplane!  by using this old movie's screenplay as a template for their spoof. They just took the script and added a mountain of jokes. And due to my familiarity with the spoof, I found watching Zero Hour to be both hilarious and peculiar. I had seen it before, and yet this was the original and genuine article that I never even knew existed. Reading Flying Saucer Occupants felt like a similar experience to the one I described above. This is a completely earnest 'non-fiction' book focusing on eyewitness accounts of aliens supposedly associated with UFOs. It is written by a well-meaning husband and wife team of "UFO researchers" who "like" to put "odd" "quotation marks" around various words for oftentimes inexplicable reasons. There is no version of...