Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

The Brave and the Bold: Book 3 of the Hidden Truth by Hans G. Schantz – A Science Fiction Book Review

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Last year I reviewed the preceding volume in the series, “A Rambling Wreck,” and found it a good read.  This year the author graciously provided me with an advanced copy so I have been able to enjoy the present work before the general public.  Ah, behold the awesome power of the Press!

 

I will summarize the type of story it is and then give my opinion on the quality of the story.  The narrative has science fiction elements that include alternate time lines, secret societies, possibly alien creatures and advanced technologies.  It also has elements that would be found in a techno-thriller including conspiracy theories, secret government cabals and corrupt bureaucracies.  But much of the story could just as easily be found in the pages of daily news sites.  There are progressive organizations infiltrating government, university and industry hierarchies with the intent of implementing speech and thought codes and suppressing non-progressive ideas.

 

The story revolves around the ongoing attempt by the protagonists to infiltrate the Civic Circle, attack it and expose it for the evil cabal that it is.  The Civic Circle is the hidden hand behind all the progressive and globalist initiatives going on around the world.  They control enormous wealth and have members at the highest levels of government in the United States and elsewhere.  They have control of the FBI, powerful judges, captains of industry and press, education and entertainment leaders.  They also restrict research into areas that might threaten their stranglehold on advanced technology that is the basis for the “Hidden Truth” aspect of the series.  This hidden truth is the misunderstood nature of electromagnetic phenomena and how it interacts with quantum effects and the basis of reality and time-space.  This is how the alternate time-line aspect of the story relates to the techno-thriller elements.  The technology allows the Civic Circle to know where a crucial event will occur and use force to steer the future the way they desire.  That is why in this timeline there was a President Gore and the 9-11 attack destroyed the Capitol Building.  And President Gore is assassinated and leads to a President Lieberman.  Mixed in with all this is a subplot that is either some kind of occult activity or advanced technology masquerading as the occult.  The good guys include a college engineering student (the hero), a pick-up artist, Vatican ninjas, a Chinese tong group and a Georgia paramilitary group.  Without a doubt the sensibilities and allegiance of the good guys is right-wing.  The Left is always characterized as the corrupt and generally evil side of the population.  In general, the multi-culti progressive values and ideas are pounded on pretty relentlessly in the book.  But since the plot identifies the progressive agenda as the method being used by the Civic Circle to gain complete control over all aspects of western society this characterization aligns with the plot of the story.

 

So how well did the story do its job?  The plot is very intricate and the action moves back and forth as various characters and events influence it.  The main characters have matured since the last book and are involved in all the responsibilities and danger facing their clandestine group.  And in this book the outcome is much more substantial and critical to moving along the overall narrative.  In other words, big stuff is going on.  Being an installment in a series the pay-off is only partial and only some information is added to solving the mysteries of the “hidden truth.”  But there is a satisfying ending to the episode.

 

Who will like this book and who won’t?  First off, if you are big proponent of multi-culturalism or intersectionality you will consider this book an insult to your world view.  In general, if you dislike the right wing you might not be sympathetic to the main character’s point of view and this could ruin the story for you.  Those folks aside, this story will appeal to folks who like hard science fiction, techno-thrillers and anyone who really, really dislikes the Left.

 

I would say it would appeal to people who liked Heinlein’s story Revolt in 2100.  In both stories you have a young protagonist who is mentored by an older character while fighting for the overthrow of a corrupt and totalitarian regime.

 

And finally I liked the story myself.  This volume has definitely increased the interest by making the action much more significant and making the protagonist a more important actor in the drama.  At several points there is excellent suspense when the character is being interrogated by the spymasters of the Civic Circle.  Hans Schantz has crafted his story with loving details.  Everything from the IT needed to infiltrate the Civic Circle’s information network to the architectural details of the lair of the evil Civic Circle.  And for real science fans he goes on to tell us outside of the narrative that some of the Hidden Truth is actually scientific fact that he himself is documenting in peer reviewed papers.

 

I heartily recommend The Brave and the Bold.

The Monster Hunter Files – A Fantasy Book Review

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Larry Correia has successfully built up the Monster Hunter brand to the point where other authors like John Ringo and Sarah Hoyt have now penned volumes of the series.  I have not previously read any of these non-Correia additions to the MHI world but I wasn’t worried about continuity problems when I picked up the Monster Hunter Files short story collection.  After all, when you let other authors share in your fictional world you are assuming that their writing style will be different and that they will be interested in different aspects of that world or at least emphasize things differently.

And this is definitely the case for the authors and stories in this collection.  In some cases, authors with established characters are embedding these known quantities into the MHI world.  When that happens the fans of that author will be the ones who can best judge if the character was faithfully transplanted into the MHI universe.  But Larry’s fans are the ones who will decide if the fit is successful.  There are seventeen stories in the collection with writers as well-known as Jim Butcher, John Wright, John Ringo and Jonathan Maberry.  And there are authors that are less well known.  But the success of the stories also depends on whether the author’s take on the material fits well with the MHI style.  And finally, the individual reader will provide the most important component of what is a good or bad story, namely his individual tastes.

And indeed, that is the case for me.  Regardless of the skill of the author or even my taste for that author’s work, the primary consideration is whether the story is entertaining.  And that will be a continuum.  Some stories are enjoyable on several levels and can be easily identified as the stand outs.  Others may be okay and don’t rate top billing.  And some just plain don’t work for me.  Relevant to that is the interesting situation that the one Larry Correia story is not actually my favorite story in the collection.  I have to assume it’s not because the other stories are more genuinely MHI than his.  That would be hard to argue.  It’s just because they happen to be better stories by my criteria.  And this is the beauty of the multi-author anthology.  You discover new authors whose work you find you like.  My personal favorites:

1)            “The Manticore Sanction” by John C. Wright

2)            “The Gift” by Steve Diamond

Plenty of the other stories are good and were enjoyed but these two were the best for my tastes.

I would say the story collection is a success.  In fact, I see no reason why additional volumes couldn’t be published.  One idea that I think would be interesting is a volume of stories entirely from the point of view of the monsters.  This is actually sort of the case in the story “Huffman Strikes Back” by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Julie Frost.  The stories in such a volume would have to be handled carefully to make it interesting but it would be a departure and provides totally different points of view on the familiar characters and situations from the conventional monster hunting narratives.  After all there are a number of important monsters including some of the Shacklefords.  Highlighting their points of view in the stories would be entertaining and could provide insights that can’t be easily obtained from the conventional perspective.

Psycho – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Re-Posted from October 2017 in honor of Halloween.  Boo!

In honor of Halloween I’ve gone through the Universal Classic Monster Movies.  Moving along let’s look at the first modern horror movie.  And let’s start by defining what a modern horror movie is.  Well, what it isn’t is Frankenstein or Dracula or any make-believe monster.  In fact, it isn’t even a more contemporary monster like a zombie in “Night of the Living Dead.”  The generation that had lived through World War II and the Korean War and was living under the threat of nuclear annihilation probably couldn’t pretend to be afraid of rubber-masked monsters.  What they could fear was the monster that might be living behind the eyes of the boy next door.  Insanity was a monster that they knew had broken free before and once loose inflicted real horror on all in its path.  So that’s the modern horror movie monster, a homicidal maniac.  And before there was the Red Dragon, or Hannibal Lector or Saw there was Norman Bates.

Psycho was based on a novel by Robert Bloch, who wrote genre fiction in Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy and Mystery categories.  It was inspired in part by a truly depraved serial killer named Ed Gein but the details of the story mostly came out of Bloch’s imagination.

But the reason Psycho is the subject of this review is that Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make that movie.  Always an innovator and aware of the need to push the boundaries of what was allowable on screen, he produced a film that fit its time.  The sexual nature of the relationship between Marion Crane and Sam Loomis is highlighted.  The murder scenes although tame by today’s standards are truly frightening.  For audiences of that time (1960) some of the scenes would have been shocking.

But Hitchcock didn’t make just a scream fest.  The movie is a complete story.  Each of the main characters and many of the smaller parts are skillfully crafted with loving detail and come to life on the screen.  And one character who has been dead for ten years and only survives inside the tortured brain of a madman gets several good lines including the closing soliloquy.

And here is one of the strangest twists of the movie.  The monster gets to tell his side of the story.  In the scene where Norman Bates brings Marion a meal, he tells his side of the story and even gives his mother’s side too.  Obviously, it’s couched in self-delusion and the confusion associated with a split personality but he describes his life as being in a self-inflicted trap that he no longer even tried to escape.  And he admitted that he depended on his mother as much as she depended on him.  And the portrait we see is personable, sympathetic and pitiable.  Of course, this just sets us up for what follows.

Norman’s sexual frustration is illustrated in the voyeurism we are shown and of course the maniacal rage is on display in each of the murders and the attempted murder.  When the psychiatrist comes on at the end as a deus-ex-machina, he not only explains the origins of Norman’s psychosis but also reveals that there have been additional women victims of “Norman’s mother.”

And finally, in the soliloquy that ends the dialog, we really get to meet the monster.  Mother tells us how sad it is that Norman must be punished and how innocent she is of all the blood.  But the dishonesty and the cruelty are on display and at the very last image of “her” we see the monster showing.  And the very last image we get is Marion’s car being winched out of the swamp (her coffin being exhumed from her grave).

What do I like about this movie?  Everything.  The actors are excellent.  The dialog is perfect.  Even the music and sound effects reinforce the action on the screen.  I don’t watch this movie often because I don’t want to wear it out.  But it’s the perfect adult horror movie.  The only thing that gives it competition is Silence of the Lambs.  I find it to be the perfect embodiment of the modern monster.  Man.

What Can We Learn from the Death of Gab?

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Vox and the Z-Man have posts up on the shutting down of Gab.

http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15418

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/10/they-cant-say-i-didnt-warn-them_28.html

There are a few ways of talking about this.  First off, we can discuss what is lost by a Gab shutdown.  Personally, I’ve never really completely understood Twitter or Gab.  It just seemed like everyone linking to everyone else but not actually reading the content.  What the actual value of that is escapes me.  I tried reading my linked content many times and found it a muddled mess.  Maybe that’s what happens when a million people are mixed in a blender together.  But I will confess I probably just didn’t know what I was doing.  So, all in all from a personal point of view it won’t actually affect me.  Now, maybe it has actually been useful for other folks for communication and publicity.  If anyone has found it valuable, say so in the comments.  But from my point of view it wasn’t very useful.

The next way we can look at it is what can we learn from how it was shut down.  Andrew Torba was vehement that he wanted freedom of speech to be the defining characteristic of Gab.  That sounds like a laudable ideal.  In practice, however, the content became pretty foul.  There were some pretty crazy people on the site.  Now, it’s unclear how much was just trolling by those looking to destroy Gab and which was legitimate nutbaggery.  But regardless, the result was unpleasant and chaotic.  Not being a Twitter user maybe I’m just unaware that this is par for the course in a social media arena.  If that is so then it sort of reinforces my impression that Twitter and all these social media environments are toxic places that are mostly about battling your enemies for sport.  I run a very different type of website.  It’s a microscopic place compared to Gab (never mind Twitter).  But we have to deal with the same questions of how to regulate the written interactions between real people.  I have the advantage that I can monitor the discussions on my own.  The scope is possible in a small venue.  For a place like Twitter or Gab it becomes expensive and difficult to maintain a consistent policy because of the need for multiple individuals with their individual points of view.  With respect to freedom of speech on my site, I tell people they can speak their minds but keep it reasonable.  Obviously, that isn’t a highly precise statement.  What I’m trying to say is stay within legal and cultural norms.  Different people have different perspectives on those and the only standard that I have to decide on what conforms and what doesn’t is my own judgement.  But that isn’t too different from any other venue where people interact and debate.  I’m guessing that a truly free speech site will always be a sort of giant demolition derby.  If your site is perceived as being on the right-wing it is clear that you will be punished whenever the opportunity presents itself so allowing the crazier individuals to let it all hang out will eventually lead to the situation that occurred at Gab.  So, the lesson to learn is a fully free speech site is not going to happen in the present environment.

And finally, we can look at what should be changed to avoid this waste of resources.  The first thing that comes to mind is an analysis could be done to find out exactly what are the useful functions that a Twitter, Facebook or YouTube serves and how, if at all, they could be replicated in a competing right-wing entity.  I am hardly qualified to do such an analysis but I’ll at least attempt to discuss some of the more obvious answers.  The two most important functions these sites accomplish is communication and commerce.  The sites allow people to find their audience.  To the extent that they are right-wing sites I guess that will help pre-select for the audience intended.  The second function is allowing content creators to monetize their product.  This will be tied into advertising revenue.  From what I’ve heard advertising revenues, even on established giants like YouTube and Instagram, are shrinking drastically.  What I think this all means is that a viable right-wing social media site will be a site where content providers will pay a fee to obtain visibility and the site will provide amenities like video storage space, band-width and some amount of moderation of the trolls.  Eventually, popular content producers will be able to sell advertising on their videos and other content products.  To me this seem to be the future of right-wing social media.  And it seems like a reasonable model.  Eventually the site will develop other ways to monetize its value.  Subscriptions like Netflix and Amazon eventually will be the end state.

So that’s my take on what can be learned from the Gab debacle.  Experience is the cruelest teacher but the most effective.

Codevilla’s “Our Revolution’s Logic” Resonates on the Right, but is He Right?

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Codevilla’s lengthy article outlining the path forward he sees for the American republic is ricocheting around the right-wing blogosphere pretty heavily.  And that makes sense.  Here is a civic nationalist of unimpeachable credentials sadly confirming what the Dissident Right has been saying for several years.  Codevilla’s thesis is that we’ve gone over the cliff and there’s no going back to a united America.

Without a doubt, the naïve belief that a third of the population can publicly foment the disenfranchisement of 60% of the population without damaging the unity and even the existence of the nation has been exploded.  But does that mean that a coalition of people (of whatever ethnicity) who would prefer to live in a country corresponding to the pre-1965 way of life can’t be cobbled together?  Of that, I’m not convinced.  The Left has appealed to all the various grievances of women, minorities and sexual deviants against the traditional society as a way to build a coalition.  But what would happen if you take away the advantage for that coalition?  What if protected status was removed from these categories so that there was no longer any advantage to uniting under the banner of victimhood?  Suddenly moslems, feminists and trans-women don’t seem to have that much in common.  Just looking at the various minority groups, it doesn’t appear that East and South Asians have very much in common with Hispanics who don’t really get along very well with black folk.  Suddenly it makes a lot more sense for all of us to play by the rules that actually protect each group from the law of the jungle.  The real losers in this type of situation would be the really weird characters in the LGBTQ camp.  It’s pretty certain that there are much worse societies to be noticeably strange than in pre-1965 America.  Just ask the queer folk in Iran (if you could find any alive that is).  And considering the recent statistics on female college degrees and employment advancement I think women are the least entitled to demand special privileges.

I think what made the social and political situation in the last couple of decades seem like a lost cause to the Right was the fact that the only Republican leaders that we had on the scene weren’t really on our side.  Even in the short time that Donald Trump has been on the scene and even hog-tied as he has been by the machinations of the Deep State it’s obvious that our ideas are not unacceptable to the American electorate.  Imagine if a relatively united Republican establishment started to actually espouse the welfare of its constituency on a consistent basis.  I think we could easily sway many of the groups that currently vote in lock step with the Democrats.  What is needed is an assertive stance in demanding the end of unconstitutional practices that disadvantage and disrespect the majority of American citizens in the name of grievances that have no basis in reality.  The American legal system provides more than sufficient protection for all law-abiding individuals and the American business climate when nurtured by a responsible government provides opportunities to thrive for anyone who wants to work.

Anyway, that’s my take on the situation.  That’s why I haven’t despaired yet for the ability of America to revive.  I’m not saying any of this will happen.  I’m speculating that it could be done.  I also freely admit that it’s a long shot.  But if recent history has shown us anything it’s that long shots do actually happen.

I’m interested in your opinions.  Do you agree with Codevilla that all that’s left is dividing up the country or that there’s still a path forward for a United States.  Feel free to leave your comments below.

Scientists Real and Imagined – Part 2

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Re-posted from 2017 in honor of Halloween

In the first installment of this post I documented my education into the real world of scientists, how they saved the world from giant mutated insects and invented important stuff like flying cars. That time period was the 1960s. It was a carefree time full of youthful high jinx such as race riots and the Manson Family. Fast forward thirty years to 1993. A little movie came out called Matinee. It was about the 1960s. The movie employs a device that I like to call “a movie within a movie.” It’s called that because within the movie you are watching there is a movie being watched by the characters in the movie! It’s a wild concept.

The name of this internal movie is MANT. That’s a portmanteau for man-ant. The eponymous victim of this movie has been transformed from a man into a hybrid man/ ant creature. Once again radiation is involved and eventually the MANT reaches gigantic proportions. And right on schedule arrives the scientist that has glasses and a beard and explains all the technical jargon about this scientific problem. And by an amazing coincidence it’s our old friend Dr. “You’re Wiser Than We Are” from “The Thing from Another World” (Robert Cornthwaite). I mean, what are the odds? He makes such valuable pronouncements as “human/insect mutations are far from an exact science” and “My friend, you’ve suffered some of the worst that our little friend the atom has to offer. It can power a city or level it!”

I was fascinated by the changes I noted in Cornthwaite between the time he was in “The Thing” and “Mant”. No longer was he sympathetic toward the monsters. His allegiance had shifted back to humanity. I attributed this change to the smoldering resentment he felt after the Thing back-handed him into a wall in the earlier movie. Such ingratitude by the monster pushed our friend back into the Humanity First camp once again. I knew this was valuable information. I wrote it down!
Outside of the movie Mant (but inside of Matinee) a teenage girl (played by Lisa Jakub) is swept up in the drama surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis (and the premiere of Mant) in the southern Florida town of Key West. This girl is the daughter of beatniks and she has her world view changed by exposure to a young Navy brat who also happens to like horror movies. When the movie ends Lisa has gotten over her prejudices against military families and monster movies. What does this have to do with this post? Well it does link us back to the military but hang in there. I have another half-baked segue coming up.
Fast forward to 1998 and a blockbuster called Independence Day erupts onto the cinematic stage. Now it just so happens that there is an ex-Navy pilot named Russel Kay and by a strange coincidence (or is it) his daughter is played by Lisa Jakub! But her love of a navy brat in the last movie has landed her in this movie in a family headed by a delusional alcoholic ex-military flier. Although it’s not apparent how she feels about horror movies she definitely suffers some of the worst of what our friends the aliens have to offer. In Independence Day, the role of scientist is handled by Jeff Goldblum. He is an environmentalist computer scientist who’s always worried about recycling and is totally opposed to nuking the aliens. He’s worried that fallout is worse than extermination of the entire human race by death rays. But by the end of the movie he comes around and cheerfully nukes the aliens on their home base.
I was thinking of dragging this forward by following President Whitmore forward into Lake Placid (well the crocodile is very large) or following Jeff Goldblum into Jurassic Park and Independence Day 2 which has all kinds of scientific mumbo-jumbo and giant creatures but I’m getting tired.
Suffice it to say that even really stupid people and fat-headed scientists can see reality if monsters and giant insects start slapping them around.
And now my patient readers, the payoff.
All of this research has allowed me to formulate a unified theory of scientific behavior. Apparently all scientists are morons and can only learn about reality by being hit over the head by it. Therefore, I propose a new policy. Whenever a scientist dictates a policy based on fat-headed stupidity he should be forced to endure the solution himself until he either sees the error of his way or dies from the paradox of settled science.
For instance, if a climate scientist declares CO2 the death of the planet then he should not produce any of it himself. Now, I don’t propose that he cease breathing. Even though technically respiration is nothing but exchanging O2 for CO2. Let’s just let him slide on the breathing. But that’s all. No internal combustion engines or heating systems or electricity. In fact, nothing produced by technology supported by the industrial revolution. So that also eliminates batteries and solar cells and everything else made in a factory. And finally, I remind everyone that burning coal or oil or even wood produces CO2. So, this scientist is telling us to give up every bit of science going all the way back to the paleolithic age. So, let us limit our friend the scientist to killing fur-bearing animals and eating their flesh and wearing their pelts for warmth. Of course, he’s probably a vegan but we all have to make compromises when inconsistencies crop up.
That’s my plan in a nutshell. It should be amusing to see Al Gore dressed like Fred Flintstone and trying to catch a squirrel for breakfast.

Our Revolution’s Logic – Angelo Codevilla – An On-Line Article Review

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In an earlier post I said that Angelo Codevilla’s article was sure to be interesting and depressing.  And so it is.  Basically he seems to concur with the Dissident Right on the point that there is no longer any going back to one America.  His thesis is that the Progressives have let the genie fully out of the bottle and the Right is now radicalized to the point that there will be an unending ratcheting up of tactics on both sides.  And he does not think political victory by the Right will deter the Left.  They are now in the go for broke business.  And of course the most apt metaphor for this situation is the Corcyran Civil War in Thucydides.  There we see class warfare unleashed to its most diabolical conclusion, complete annihilation of the hated enemy down to the last man.  The only ray of sunshine allowed is if Republicans win the next few elections we’ll able to convince the Progressives to peacefully divide the country into mutually exclusive populations of us and them.  So the story is bleak.

Luckily I’m an optimist.  I still think we may beat the bastards.  But I don’t say Mr. Codevilla can’t be right.  He makes a convincing case.  Well, I’m still staying up for the Mid-Terms.  They should be very instructive.

It’s a very long article and there are no laughs but if you are interested in a political perspective on the Resistance and what it will spawn from a very thoughtful writer of the Right you might want to read this.  If you want the Cliff Notes version I’d say start prepping for the troubles.

 

Our Revolution’s Logic

Scientists Real and Imagined – Part 1

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Re-posted from 2017 in honor of Halloween

 

On Saturday afternoons when I was a kid I used to watch Million Dollar Movie on Channel 11 and was able to enjoy such science fiction classics as “Attack of the Crab Monsters” and “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.”  Right away I figured out that really big creatures that had been exposed to atomic radiation really liked to attack.  But as I became more sophisticated in my sci-fi viewing I eschewed such childish cinematic offerings in favor of more cerebral tales.  No more ridiculous giant crab stories.  I graduated to “Them” which is the realistic depiction of an attack by giant ants exposed to atomic radiation.  In this classic of the fifties I learned that scientists were old and wore glasses and looked like Santa Claus (except for the girl scientists who were young and didn’t even look like Mrs. Claus and tended to end up with the FBI agent who starred in the film, who in this case was James Arness of Gunsmoke fame).  And the best ones had British accents (or at worst New England accents).  Also, no matter what their area of specialization (e.g., physics, botany or myrmecology) they were all equally adept at battling giant creatures exposed to atomic radiation.  And they were full of esoteric and valuable information.  I found out that the plural of antenna wasn’t antennas but rather antennae!  This inspired in me a life-long love of the classical Greek and Latin languages.  And the most important characteristic of scientists was their love of knowledge.  Because of this thirst for knowledge, they were willing to venture into tunnels and basements where even the ubiquitous soldiers in their WWII vintage uniforms were afraid to go.  It also meant the scientists were very likely to be munched on by the mutant du jour of the story.  But you know, science.  So that is how I came to admire scientists.  They were cool and smart too.  And they always, always, always figured out how to kill the monsters.

But one Saturday, Million Dollar Movie was playing another sci-fi film, “The Thing from Another World.”  I was suspicious at first.  If it was from another world how did it get here?  Had it been exposed to atomic radiation?  Would there be enough scientists?  These doubts plagued me.  But I decided to give it a whirl.  Encouraging signs emerged quickly.  The creature was indeed radioactive and there was a whole passel of scientists assigned to this movie.  One of them even had a New England accent so things seemed to check out.  And reassuringly the US military was available for monster eradication duty once the scientists had done the heavy lifting of analysis.  Early on a problem arose.  This creature was man shaped.  He was bald and had strange hands with hypodermic finger nails.  But he was no more than eight feet tall.  This was highly irregular and seemed to throw into doubt his qualifications for his own movie.  Also the scientists in this movie were extremely assertive and gave the military officers a lot of lip.  And it seemed they didn’t know their primary function, figure out how to kill the monster.  This was very confusing.  The leader of the scientists kept saying that regardless of how many humans the creature killed, science demanded that no force should be used against it.  He kept saying (in a really annoying intonation) that the creature “is wiser than we are” and that “it’s our duty to die to preserve the knowledge this creature possesses.”  Even as a youngster I intuited that this head scientist was what we called back then “a loser.”  How could this be?  He was a scientist!  He had the answers.  I found this very puzzling and dispiriting.  I searched for some reason for this failure on the scientist’s part to want to kill the monster.  Eventually I developed an hypothesis based on a detailed comparison of “Them” and “The Thing from Another World.”  At first glance nothing jumped out.  But once I checked the cast members it all became clear.  As mentioned above, in “Them” the part of the FBI Agent and eventual boyfriend of the scientist’s daughter is played by James Arness of “Gunsmoke” fame.  It turned out that the part of the Thing was played by none other than James Arness!  Well obviously if Arness was the prospective son-in-law of one scientist, then it stood to reason that a fellow scientist would not turn on him.  What was at work here was the kind of professional courtesy that, for instance, police confer on each other’s family members.  Now it made perfect sense.  Crisis averted.  I could become a scientist without becoming a loser.  But I was troubled by all that talk of monsters being wiser than us.  And not killing them but instead letting them kill us.  It was very strange.

Fast forward forty years.  I work as an engineer.  I am surrounded by R&D PhDs.  They all look and sound like the head scientist in “The Thing from Another World.”  They drive Priuses and have Tolerance and Coexist, Bernie and Free Tibet bumper stickers on their cars.  And suddenly it all makes sense.

Scientists Real and Imagined – Part 2

A Manatee for All Seasons

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For fans of Larry Correia, Wendell T. Manatee is running for the Senate under the Libertarian Space Cowboy Revolution Party.  Larry interviews Wendell, shamelessly hawks his manatee campaign bumper stickers and manages to make a number of good points in the proceedings.

Hoon for America. Manatee Party Stickers Available Now

Even NBC News Thinks the Dems are Heading for a George McGovern Disaster

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Hard to believe NBC News is talking sense.  They are comparing the hard left turn the Democrats took in 1972 to the freak show that’s happening today.  Of course the difference is that the number of imbeciles has increased significantly in the interim.  But for anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex the spectacle on display during the Kavanaugh meltdown should have been sufficient to scare him off the Democrat side.

Pretty good read.  https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/how-will-democrats-do-midterms-richard-nixon-s-1972-re-ncna923076