Prometheus… It has taken 30 years, since 1982's Blade Runner, for Ridley Scott to return to the science fiction genre. Finally, one might add, for Prometheus represents a considerable rejuvenation of the 74 year old director after a long career spent doing polished, small-think popcorn movies only superficially more artistic than his brother Tony Scott's action flicks. Why did it take so long, and why did his genre return involve revisiting his most successful film? (It is a first for Scott, who has never directed a prequel or sequel prior to this.)
 
Prometheus began as a straight prequel to Alien, but during its development morphed into something else. Scott, who had a desire to revisit some of the unanswered questions of the first film, was reluctant to simply rehash the "xenomorph" in Alien. For good reason: the xenomorph itself was relatively uninteresting; despite its bizarre appearance and unique life cycle, the creature had no way of expressing intention and seemed to have only the most primitive motivations. Learning more about it had no emotional stakes, and even so the commercial franchise of Alien sequels had rendered this creature as stale and over-familiar as the Frankenstein monster: just another shambling horror cliche with bolts in its neck and a ratty blazer.
 
Curiously (or not, given the directors), none of the lame, lamer, lamest sequels had bothered answering any of the questions raised by the original film. The origins of both the xenomorph and the "space jockey" (the giant humanoid found in the same derelict spacecraft) had been left totally unexplored. This then became Prometheus' jumping-off point, and with Damon Lindelof revising Jon Spaihts' script to further de-emphasize the role of the xenomorph, the film became a prequel which despite existing under the shadow of Alien manages to launch into a very different, tantalizing direction.
 

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The Avengers… The Avengers smashed some box office records.  But why?

I can't get over how ridiculous those outfits look. This is the number one movie of all time? Jeremy Renner looks like a suburban dad who just came out of the closet (by the looks of it he has mixed feelings). ScarJo has a constant expression of annoyance and/or gas indigestion. Captain America is in a world all his own, where gay, dorky, and weird have fused together much like the thousand discrete pieces of fabric and padding that seem to have gone into making his plush outfit. Are those zippers?
 
Thor, with that novelty-sized styrofoam hammer, looks like a cosplayer who won big playing carnival games. I understand that in the stupid movie version of this character, he's an alien, not a Norse god, which makes his getup all the more bizarre. Only Iron Man, basically a robot, looks like he belongs in a battle to save the world--unfortunately it's a world not worth saving. And we've already seen that movie anyway.
 
I keep thinking I'm going to see this movie at some point--I feel like I've been drafted by box office returns--but when it comes down to the wire I think, "Why?" and do something else.
 
I have stronger feelings about seeing the Spider-Man remake, which at least appears to have some heart. Avengers just looks like a massive geek-out.   

Sweet Smell of Success: Paranoia in the 50s, part 2… Where Kiss Me Deadly hinted at the hangover from McCarthyism, Sweet Smell of Success openly addresses the culture of paranoia and excess of which McCarthyism was an exponent. Released two years after Kiss Me Deadly and Senator McCarthy's own self-destructive spiral, Success presents a thinly veiled attack on Walter Winchell, a powerful gossip columnist who became strongly anti-communist after WWII and supported McCarthy's Red hunts.
 
By the 50s Winchell's power and reach were on a downslope as television began to replace the radio and print world that Winchell was part of. Winchell, who was Jewish, underwent a familiar evolution from FDR supporter, interventionist, and civil rights advocate to a quasi-reactionary who waged battles for both political and petty reasons. One of Winchell's clashes of this period was with Josephine Baker, whom he labeled a communist after Baker complained of racist service at the Stork Club, Winchell's base of operations. His quips were examples of epigrammatic form: "Hollywood's a place where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors."
 

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The Dystopian Kitsch of Hunger Games… The hallmark of the fake dystopia is that it wants to let its audience eat cake. It wants to indulge them with fake feelings and manipulated pity (and piety), feed them melodramatic moments that reassure them of their own correctness. The aim is to produce a rich surge of sentiment, to leave the rational mind disengaged and therefore untroubled when the sugary characters and story dissolve on their tongues as they exit unnourished.

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The JQ… The list of things we can say about anything is getting smaller and smaller. That's the result of our experiment in equality and diversity, which force us into stiffer, more regulated expressions because equality is really about conflict.  When you hear equality your first thought should be who has control of its definition, who gets to be more equal than everyone else using emotion or threat or violence.  Blacks talk about racial equality while ignoring their violence and racism, gays talk about marriage equality while ignoring their social pathologies, women talk about sexual equality while ignoring their social advantages, and Jews manage to be the sum of all these.  Equality is the ultimate fighting word, it's a demand and an accusation and an immunity all at once. It's axiomatic. You only say equality when you want something from someone.

Jews have had something to do with this aggressive, self-seeking equality, or if you prefer "social justice". It is advanced as an inarguable good by secular Jews and defended by religious Jews as falling under tikkun olam, "repairing the world". The Jewish question is how diversity and equality and social justice seem to bring the most advantages to Jews themselves, even though they run an apartheid state, openly complain about intermarriage, control an outsized percentage of wealth, and dominate media and political life. Were this any other group they would be subject to open scrutiny, even moreso by the group they've taken power from. But the silence around the Jewish question is the most compelling evidence of its salience.

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Men's rights… It seems semi-controversial on the right to say this, but I have a very low opinion of the "men's rights" movement.  I am well-acquainted with the inequities of family law, but men's rights has much of the same problem as white nationalism and PUA culture, which is that it is a psychological retreat into black and white thinking.

To me there are two main problems:  being overly concerned with your own welfare (which belies tales of selfish ex-wives) in a system that evidently damages everyone, and ignoring all the problems on your own team while working up a good hate for The Other.  Ironically, men's rights is a movement of bitter men who definitely don't know why women are unhappy, which suggests why their relationships might have failed.  Their two central arguments, that women have an incentive to divorce and that child support is a burden unfairly heaped on men, both have very problematic (well, outright stupid) premises.  Meanwhile, their blame women stance has zero appeal to normal human beings, who see a much different, more complicated reality than the men's rights caricature.

Then there's this:  How many guys want to argue about female behavior, and then go off and have casual sex with girlfriends, enjoy the benefits of a woman's added income to a household, and jerk off to a lot of porn and sexualized culture?  Ugh, those feminists have brainwashed women! Guys, look in the mirror.  You've bought completely into the feminist culture--the part of it that works out well for you, anyway.

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A note to readers of National Review… Rich Lowry writes:

Needless to say, no one at National Review shares Derb?s appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks in this instantly notorious piece here.

This is it, this is the time and issue with which to create a rift within conservatism.  Lowry is right:  the staff at National Review are essentially liberal quislings who want low taxes and war for Israel.  They are not conservatives.  And more importantly, on this issue they are aggressively lying to and misleading conservatives.

You should not believe these "appalling" things, says Lowry (using the tone of a moral hysteric).  How much more evidence do you need that Rich Lowry doesn't give a damn about you and yours?  You see, he's protected by wealth and social status.  You're not.  But he wants you to adopt his moral psychology, even though it is harmful for you to do so if you do not share his wealth and social status.  In effect, he wants you to come to harm so that he can maintain his standing with his liberal friends.  They all, in fact, want you to suffer for the privileges of their class.

The question is, do any National Review readers share Derb's "appalling" view?  I suspect many do.  Many are aware that blacks are less intelligent, more inclined to criminal behavior, more morally corrupt, more tolerant of violence and particularly violence directed at non-blacks.  (Has any black pundit voiced qualms about whether Trayvon Martin deliberately assaulted George Zimmerman?)  They are aware of these things even if they are afraid to voice them, just as they are aware of similar differences between men and women.

Many parents leave moral instruction to chance and liberal institutions.  That's just the way Rich Lowry wants it.  He's got to secure his place at dinner parties, you see.  I hope you don't mind living with the rising tide of immigrants, being led by airhead pseudo-conservative tokens, or having your safety threatened by things that the staff at National Review aren't going to do anything about.  But if you do mind, for God's sake cancel your subscription today!  Turn your back on these fools!

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