Tag: H. G. Wells

Ancient European History – Part 3

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In H. G. Wells’ “The Outline of History,” He writes a couple of paragraphs at the conclusion of his description of the Fall of the Roman Empire.   He discusses the phenomenon of “Caesarism.”

“But while the smashing of the Roman social and political structure was thus complete, while in the east it was thrown off by the older and stronger Hellenic tradition, and while in the west it was broken up into fragments that began to take on a new and separate life of their own, there was one thing that did not perish, but grew, and that was the tradition of the world empire of Rome and of the supremacy of the Cæsars. When the reality was destroyed, the legend had freedom to expand. Removed from the possibility of verification, the idea of a serene and splendid Roman world-supremacy grew up in the imagination of mankind, and still holds it to this day.

Ever since the time of Alexander, human thought has been haunted by the possible political unity of the race. All the sturdy chiefs and leaders and kings of the barbarians, who raided through the prostrate but vast disorder of the decayed empire, were capable of conceiving of some mighty king of kings greater than themselves and giving a real law for all men, and they were ready to believe that elsewhere in space and time and capable of returning presently to resume his supremacy, Cæsar had been such a king of kings. Far above their own titles, therefore, they esteemed and envied the title of Cæsar. The international history of Europe from this time henceforth is largely the story of kings and adventurers setting up to be Cæsar and Imperator (Emperor). We shall tell of some of them in their places. So universal did this “Cæsaring” become, that the Great War of 1914-18 mowed down no fewer than four Cæsars, the German Kaiser (= Cæsar), the Austrian Kaiser, the Tsar (= Cæsar) of Russia, and that fantastic figure, the Tsar of Bulgaria. The French “Imperator” (Napoleon III) had already fallen in 1871. There is now (1920) no one left in the world to carry on the Imperial title or the tradition of Divus Cæsar except the Turkish Sultan and the British monarch. The former commemorates his lordship over Constantinople as Kaisar-i-Roum[274]; the latter is called the Cæsar of India (a country no real Cæsar ever looked upon), Kaisar-i-Hind.”

 

Mr. Wells had his finger on something.  There is a fascination, not with the reality of the actual Roman Empire, but with the fantasy of it as this just, omnipotent, supremely competent and efficient ruler and government.  Now as any student of that era knows this was an almost polar opposite of what the empire actually was.  The oligarchs who reaped the lion’s share of the benefits from the empire’s permanence were heartless creatures who thought of the poor (slave or free) as nothing but animals to be harvested in every way imaginable.

And maybe this gives us a clue as to what kind of government we’re supposed to have.  We’re looking for a system where the humans aren’t treated like animals.  The first thing that comes to mind is the evolution of Socialism and Communism as secular stand-ins for the Christian church.  The “love your neighbor” part of it puts us in mind of the utopian brotherhood that Marx and the other socialists touted as their goal.  But of course, we all remember how those experiments end; death camps, oligarchs (commissars) and bread lines.

The opposite is capitalism with a capitol K.  And we’re currently living through that right now.  And once again we get oligarchs.  But this bunch just send our jobs to China and tell us to stop having children to “save the planet.”  So somehow, we’ve got to figure out a third way.

 

Different thinkers have tried to come up with different ways to allow representative government to more satisfyingly express the needs and will of the people.  Robert A. Heinlein thought that the vote should be restricted to veterans of the armed services.  Some have thought that only people with children should be able to vote.  And, of course, women think they’re the only ones qualified to vote.  There have been schemes whereby the number of votes you have should be based on things like how much you pay in taxes or receive in government benefits.  In other words, the more you pay into the system the more you get to decide.

There’s one guy named Curtis Yarvin who believes we need a monarch who should be chosen and overseen in the same way that a company selects and oversees a CEO (Chief Executive Officer).  In some ways this is an interesting idea.  The concept becomes a little fuzzy when he tries to describe what the equivalent is to the Chairman and other members of the Board of Directors.  But he’s right in the sense that the leader of this country needs much more authority in order to get things done.  It seems pretty clear that our system of checks and balances between the three branches of government have failed to produce good governance.  The bureaucracy has become bloated and arrogant and need to be pared back radically.  The judiciary is a hornet’s nest of special interests and influence peddling as are the Houses of Congress.  And the stalemate between the Left and Right is maddening to anyone who wants this country fixed.  We seem to be at a dead end.

What’s the answer?

What More Could Hal-9000 Want from His Crew?

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I was talking to a fellow I know the other day and we got around to, of course, artificial intelligence.  And he mentioned a book, which is probably very popular, that stated that because of the capability of AI replacing almost all human work, the government will have to pay us for just sitting around.  And I revolted at that idea.

Sure, maybe it’s cost effective and in line with how automation is replacing humans.  But I saw it as an awful idea.  Paying people to do nothing is truly a frightening fate.  It brings to my mind the fictional Eloi from H.G. Well’s, “The Time Machine.”  Useless people sitting around doing nothing while the real work is done by monsters (of whatever kind) is dystopian to an extent that I cannot believe sane people would accept.

Now, I don’t have all the answers.  Obviously technical progress will occur.  It’s inevitable.  But progress cannot earn that name if it entails the destruction of human happiness.  And living like some kind of lab animal with nothing useful to do all day cannot be called happiness.  And so, I think we’ve reached a place in human technological ability where we have to start justifying what we create not just by how it increases productivity but also how it maximizes human happiness.  And I don’t mean the kind of happiness associated with someone playing a video game.  Human beings need to accomplish tasks.  This goes for both work and personal activities.  We like to work with our hands and our minds and we’re good at it (to greater and lesser extents depending on the individual).  But you might say it would be impossible to both efficiently produce the goods and services that our society requires and also maximize the job satisfaction of people.

Well, no.  After all the very machines that are supposedly smart enough to replace all of us are also smart enough to optimize algorithms based on human job satisfaction to design the processes and work assignments that would allow this type of job customization to exist.  Industry can be forced to accommodate human beings into their processes.  But in the future, it won’t be a voluntary acceptance.  We will have to use government to force corporations to utilize humans instead of automation.  This will involve using the tax code and other manipulations to incentivize this policy.  And it will take time to force this mindset to permeate the workplace.  But it will be possible to do.  Because in a democracy we have the upper hand if we know how to use it.  And there’s nothing antithetical to capitalism about this.  As long as it’s a level playing field all the companies can compete to make a human-friendly environment and still make whatever profits they want.  They just won’t be allowed to do it without human employees.

And what will happen is the companies who provide the most job satisfaction to their employees will preferentially get and retain the highest quality employees.  What more could Hal-9000 want from his crew?

Thoughts on the Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 2

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There was a lot of good discussion centering around slavery and its negative effect on technical innovation.  After all, why would you need automation to increase the effectiveness of farming or other industrial work if you can just buy another thousand or even ten thousand war slaves for use as laborers on your farm or in your copper mine?  Sure, they cost something but not much and if you keep them starved to the edge of death you don’t even need to feed them much.  Just replace them with younger, stronger slaves.

Of course, every once in a while, the slaves will produce a Spartacus who decides to burn the whole thing down but that’s what the legions are for anyway.  And crucifying a few thousand slaves along the Appian Way is a good reminder of who’s boss.

But even slavery is not the whole story.  When the majority of Romans were plebians living on family farms, and these same farmers were the citizen soldiers who were legionnaires when an enemy threatened, there was a patriotism that made the Romans the greatest military force of their age.  They might lose twenty or thirty thousand men against Hannibal and then come back and field an army just as large from volunteers who served to protect their nation, their families and their homes.

But the patricians who ran the senate were greedy and selfish and after a soldier returned home from war, he stood to lose his land because he would default on the debts that he couldn’t pay off due to his absence and loss of harvest.  These patricians would scoop up these small farms and then use their connections to obtain the defeated enemies as slaves and outcompete the remaining small farmers who couldn’t match the efficiency of the large plantations.  And in addition, the patricians eventually discontinued the practice of plebians obtaining conquered lands as colonists.  The patricians turned these foreign lands into even larger plantations for themselves.

So eventually these landless plebians ended up as a discontented rabble living on the bread and circuses that the emperors provided in Rome.  And eventually they ended up in the armies which was the profession of last resort.  So essentially the Roman elites eliminated the middle class.  And eventually that reduced the effectiveness of the legions too.  And finally, manpower was so depleted through destruction of the actual Roman citizens that the legions more and more were populated with barbarians from the fringes of the empire.  So much so that by the fourth and fifth centuries the Franks, Germans, Goths and other pastoral peoples in Gaul and the northern border were the legions.

When Atilla finally invaded the western empire, it was Frankish legionnaires and even generals who resisted him most effectively.  But at this point, the jig was up.  The barbarians realized that the empire was a paper tiger.  Its citizens were downtrodden serfs who couldn’t or maybe wouldn’t take up arms to defend their “nation.”  Being ruled by a Roman emperor or an Ostrogothic “king” was a matter of complete indifference to them.  In point of fact the barbarian could probably provide better protection and possibly the taxes would be lower if the imperial bureaucracy ceased to exist.

So, whether the Romans could have produced more defensible borders against the nomadic Eurasian pastoral peoples, whether Huns, Alans or even the westernmost tribes like the Goths and Vandals is probably immaterial.  If a nation doesn’t have a population willing to defend its homeland, then it is as good as done.

And this was known all the way back in the time of Aristotle.  Strong states had a large prosperous middle-class.  Because this is the group that produces children and believes in the value of the nation.  Not the very rich and not the desperately poor.  Rome committed slow suicide when it allowed the patricians to destroy the plebian farmer/soldiers.  Because the early Romans so thoroughly defeated the neighboring peoples it took five hundred years to produce new enemies to tear down the rotted corpse of Rome but by the time of Marcus Aurelius the damage had already been done.  It just took three hundred more years for Atilla to show up and prove to the Germans that there was nothing there to stop them.

As a footnote I think it’s interesting to see that our modern-day patricians (elites) are busy destroying the working and middle classes and importing migrants to act as cheap (slave) labor to replace them.  What a brilliant plan.  But not very original.

Thoughts on the Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 1

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I have a copy of the first volume of H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History.”  And in a real way the Roman Empire is the center of the book.  His descriptions of the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Greece are all sort of a set up for Rome.  And in a real way Rome is the basis for discussing Medieval Europe but also as a point of comparison, China, India and the Islamic world.  And this is not to say that Wells had a romantic or idealized conception about the Roman republic or empire.  Far from it.  He goes to great lengths to explain why even at the height of the Pax Romana; the something like two hundred years from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius that the people of Rome, with the exception of the truly wealthy, were profoundly and justifiably miserable.  And I can see his point of view.  I only have to remember that renegade Roman citizen from Greece that Priscus wrote about, who willingly joined up with Atilla the Hun, to realize how the fall of Rome was probably an improvement in the fate of Europe as a whole; though maybe not for the inhabitants of the areas that descended into chaos in the fifth century.

Among the many short comings of that civilization, Wells counts a lack of scientific curiosity as one of the most damning.  He singles out the fact that a working steam engine was created in Hellenistic times but the Romans never took this knowledge and harnessed it in the way that modern Europe did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with such inventions as the locomotive.

He further produces as evidence the Romans’ complete neglect of geography as a tool for determining the advantageous borders of their enormous empire.  For instance, if they had realized the outline of the North and Baltic seas and the distance to the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, they might have realized that conquering Germany and the Slavic tribes would have produced a shorter and more defensible eastern border than the one that allowed the Huns to stampede the German tribes into the western empire and effectively destroy their civilization.

As for this last claim I have my doubts.  This would have required the Romans to occupy all of Eastern Europe, up to and including Poland, Ukraine along with parts of southern Russia and Iran.  In defense of my ancestors, I would remind Mr. Wells that those areas are very, very much colder than Italy.  Getting Roman colonists for these Hyperborean locales would have been a real stretch.  But let’s assume that the emperor Trajan at his height was aware of the geographical imperative to conquer these areas and that he had made it happen.  What then?

Would the Roman legions and the citizens have repelled the Huns when they came crashing into this Eastern border in the fifth century AD?  Well, that’s the question.  It has been stated that by 180 AD the empire was weakened by a series of plagues that reduced population but also because the downtrodden peasants refused to have children under the onerous conditions they lived under.  This seems to fly in the face of the archeological evidence of bustling cities and far-flung trade with India and even China that sent enormous quantities of silver and gold eastward into Asia from Roman coffers.

What is the truth?  I’ll give my opinion in the second part.  But feel free to give your ideas in the comments.

Those Damn Gutians

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I was reading an old edition of H. G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” today.  The book is over a century old but in surprisingly good shape.  Well, anyway, Wells speculates that the pattern of nomadic herdsmen invading and conquering settled farming communities goes all the way back to Mesopotamia and the Semitic tribes raiding the Sumerian cities.

From what I remember the Sumerians are believed to be the first farmers.  And that goes back at least six thousand years ago.  That brings us all the way back to the neolithic.  So, for our whole history as “civilized” creatures we have been battling against the steppe barbarians just to keep the food that we grew ourselves.

And that brings to mind the movie “Seven Samurai” where the farmers pay samurai to fight off the bandits instead of handing over their harvest.  The problem is that bandits and samurai are almost indistinguishable depending on the circumstances.  If you think about it whether you give your tithe to the church and your “rent” to Charlemagne or have it stolen by the Vikings must have been a relative distinction.  Now, of course, the king didn’t burn your house, rape your wife and take you all as slaves (speaking by and large) but he did make it awfully difficult to get through a long cold winter.

So maybe we’ve come a long way here in the good old U S of A.  But consider.  Suppose you have a small retail store in Brooklyn NY and for the last five years every day several street criminals shoplift several hundred dollars’ worth of your stock from your shelves.  And the police have even stopped arresting these crooks because the George Soros backed District Attorney won’t prosecute them and won’t keep them behind bars for even a day.  In what sense are you any better off than a Sumerian farmer or a French peasant in Charlemagne’s day?  On paper you have the backing of the United States military, nuclear ICBMs and the New York State penal code in all its multi-volume grandeur.  But in a very real way you’re actually worse off than those ancient examples.

At least the Sumerian and French peasants were allowed to try and resist their marauders.  If they could organize around a local king or nobleman, they might successfully fight off their attackers.  But in Brooklyn if you took up arms (metaphorically of course, guns are strictly forbidden) and arrested the perps yourself, you’d probably be prosecuted by that same District Attorney for any and every bogus charge he could make up.  And God forbid the thieves were injured during the arrest.  You’d never see the light of day again.

We are reaching a point where the breakdown of civilization in parts of our country will make it impossible for people in the other parts of the country to do business with them.  The risk to life and limb and the losses in capital will make it impossible for people in the safer parts of the country to imagine walking into these death traps.  In fact, it’s already happening.  Chain stores like Rite-Aid and CVS are quickly closing down their branches in places like Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, and Oakland, California and New York City.  This will further degrade the environment of these places and hasten the day when anyone with any sense runs away from these hellholes.

I’ll close with the thoughts of the ancient Sumerians when discussing the marauders who afflicted their civilization:

“The Gutians, people who do not know permanent settlement, with human feelings but the instincts of a dog, body shape like that of a monkey, Enlil sent them from the mountains, like locusts they are covering the entire land.”

Well, apparently some things never change.

October Viewing – 2

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So, I enjoyed my recent first foray into old horror movies with Dracula enough to give it another whirl.  Tonight, I was going to try the Mummy but last night TCM had some Lugosi movies on so I picked “The Island of Lost Souls.”  This is a 1932 film starring Charles Laughton as Dr Moreau; a scientist who experimented on surgically converting animals into humans.  Lugosi has a relatively small part as one of his experiments.  He looks like a man-wolf and functions as, “The Sayer of the Law.”  This movie is just a renamed version of H.G. Wells’ story, “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

Okay, the first thing to take into account is that Laughton is a much better actor than your typical horror movie mad scientist.  Now granted, this isn’t “Mutiny on the Bounty” so he has to work with what he’s given but Laughton sells it well.  The rest of the cast is adequate to the task at hand.  And the movie does deliver the climax that a fiendish Frankensteinian scientist will always reap; destruction at the hands of his tortured creations.

The highlights of the movie are of Moreau portraying an omnipotent ruler as he commands the obedience of his many creations.  On a hill in the jungle, he rings a gong twice, cracks a bullwhip and shouts down to his assembled subjects repeatedly, “What is the law?”  And the Sayer of the Law gives the various answers at each repetition of the question,

“Not to walk on all fours.  Are we not men?”

“Not to spill blood.  Are we not men?”

“Not to eat meat.  Are we not men?”

And this is enough to quiet the beast within each “man” when the night awakens his blood.  And if they become especially restless, he reminds them of “The House of Pain.”  This is where Moreau rearranged their living flesh to simulate a human form and apparently anesthetic was not part of the program.  Just the mention of it triggers howls of fear.

But when Moreau orders one of his creatures to murder an outsider, a man like Moreau, the creatures put together the pieces of the puzzle.  Moreau ordered one of them to spill blood, so, “the law is no more!”  And a man like Moreau was killed, so Moreau could be killed!  And so, dragging Moreau into the House of Pain for some unskilled surgery of their own was now on the agenda!

The subplot where Moreau tried to get an outside human male to fall in love with the “panther woman” who was his most successful attempt at mimicking the human form is somewhat interesting.  And the antics of the sailors who show up in a couple of sections of the story provide a slight amount of comedy.  But the real story is Moreau playing god to his creations and the inevitable revenge reaction destroying him.  H. G. Wells was a good writer so it is no surprise that his story is somewhat fun to watch in its first Hollywood portrayal.  I very much enjoyed rewatching Island of Lost Souls.  And I assume that Charles Laughton is the main reason.  Now, without a doubt he hammed up his portrayal as needed.  But his Moreau is a successful portrayal of the mad scientist.  Kudos to Mr. Laughton.

 

Brought To Its Logical Conclusion

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Political Science is, as far as I can tell, a misnomer. Since Plato and Aristotle first attempted to define the various forms of government, I doubt that science has ever been a fair word to describe what goes on. Maybe it’s because humans are inherently irrational or maybe it’s the nature of large groups of people that they defy the attempt to establish a stable social order. But whatever is the basic reason, history demonstrates that human society only infrequently and temporarily provides happiness to the majority of its citizens.

For most of human history a small royal or hieratic minority enjoyed the lion’s share of the wealth and resources of great nations and empires like Egypt, Sumer, Babylon and Persia. The great mass of the people in these places were dirt farmers or slaves who survived on what the priests and kings left them after the taxes were collected. It only seems to be the case that for short periods after the breaking up of an empire or when new territories are first occupied or if a migratory people manage to remain independent of the settled systems of control that you see freedom and some measure of human happiness.

The Dorian tribes maintained their independence after the downfall of the Mycenean civilization until the Macedonians under Philip and his son Alexander conquered them. The Roman citizens/farmers/soldiers were free men until the patricians figured out how to use foreign slaves to drive the small farmers into bankruptcy. After sacking and pillaging the Roman Empire the various Germanic tribes probably had a thousand years before the industrial revolution rendered them all wage slaves or worse. And the United States had the 1700’s and 1800’s when their government mostly left Americans alone to enjoy their lives.

But eventually, some group figures out how to game every political system to monetize people’s misery. So, I guess there’s no surprise that we are currently staring into the jaws of the latest empire to appear. But I think this one is different. I think they’ve decided they don’t need serfs. At least not many. I think the plan is to just get rid of us altogether. Now, they don’t mean to liquidate us. They just plan to impoverish us and make it so we don’t produce children. And it seems to be working quite well.

So maybe what we are seeing is the first real instance of political science. Of course, happiness for the masses isn’t what they were calculating. Someone ran the numbers and said, “Hey, guess what? I’ve found a stable government. We get rid of everybody but the elite and we let robots do all the work and we live like kings forever! Sure, we’ll need a few Morlocks to keep the machines working and keep the robots in line but we can put them underground or in China so nothing will disturb us while we eat pineapple, passion fruit and papaya in the Garden of Eden.”

So, we’ve been sentenced to extinction by Amazon/Google/Microsoft and our executioner is Joe Biden. The ignominy! I’ll have to say, it’s a little humiliating to be genocided by the Eloi. Things like being hectored about climate crimes by Al Gore, John Kerry and Greta Thornberg are almost as bad as being bankrupted by green energy madness. Being browbeaten about white supremacy and white privilege by an army of AWFL Karens is almost as bad as being told that things like usable highways, reliable electric power and freedom of travel will soon be things of the past.

They do seem to be organized so they may succeed. I hope at least that the Morlocks start eating them before we’re gone. That at least would be a consolation.

Time After Time (1979) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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Malcolm McDowell is H.G. Wells.  He has invented a time machine and is about to use it to explore the past and future from his home in 1890, London.  But at a dinner party where he is announcing his project one of his friends John Leslie Stevenson steals it to escape from the police who have discovered that he is Jack the Ripper.  Stevenson is played by David Warner that I only know from his turn as Bob Cratchit in the 1984 version of A Christmas Carol.

After the time machine returns empty from the Ripper’s escape Wells follows him back to 1979 San Francisco.  No explanation is given as to how the time machine can also move through space but since this movie isn’t very good, we won’t quibble about unimportant gaps.

In San Francisco Wells meets up with a currency exchange bank clerk named Amy Robbins played abysmally by Mary Steenburgen and naturally they fall in love and we’re trapped into listening to their various thoughts on women’s liberation and casual sex.  It’s pretty awful.  Amy thinks her “career” at the bank is her whole life.  She left her husband because he wanted her to raise a family.  The monster.

Wells finds Stevenson and he tells Wells that 1979 is the greatest place in the world for Jack the Ripper with casual sex and easy access to women and sharp knives.  Then there is this ridiculous chase scene where the two Englishmen are running around on the streets of San Francisco.  It looks ludicrous and they’re not really running very fast.  Then supposedly Stevenson is killed in a minor car accident.  Wells takes this opportunity to see the Redwoods outside of San Francisco and talk to Amy about women’s lib again.

Then we find out that Jack the Ripper must not have been killed because women start turning up butchered.  Wells tells Amy that he’s from 1890.  She tells him he’s nuts and to prove to her that he is telling the truth he uses the time machine to bring her forward a week and she finds a newspaper that shows that Jack the Ripper has killed her the day before.

So, they go back to the week before and try to catch the Ripper and save Amy’s life.  Cars get flat tires; Wells is arrested by the police as the Ripper and it appears that Amy is murdered and hacked to pieces by the Ripper.  The police let Wells go because he couldn’t have killed Amy while he was in custody.  But, big mistake, it was Amy’s friend who was butchered and now Stevenson has her hostage and wants to trade her life for the key to the time machine.

Stevenson tricks Wells and after getting the key takes Amy with him as he heads to the time machine.  Wells takes a car and somehow figures out how to drive at night in a crowded city and follows them to the machine.  There he begs for Amy’s life but Stevenson decides to take her with him but somehow in a way that doesn’t make any sense she escapes him.  As Stevenson enters into the machine and begins setting it for the future Wells removes another key from the outside of the machine and this sends Stevenson to “infinity,” whatever that means.  Hoorah for Wells and Amy.  Now Amy decides that her bank job isn’t as important as marrying Wells back in 1890.  And they live happily ever after.

This movie is so bad that it both sucks and blows.  The special effects are laughably bad and cheap looking.  They remind me of some effects that they used on Gilligan’s Island.  The dialog is awful and the 1970s disco hedonism is embarrassing.  Mary Steenburgen is an awful actress but this part is even below her talents.  The quality of this film is at the level of a made for television movie.  McDowell and Warner are decent actors but they aren’t given anything to work with here.  It’s all too silly and badly done.

Not recommended.

The Dead Zone

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Tonight, I was talking to a friend who lives in Manhattan.  He was so claustrophobic from the endless lockdown that he decided to go to a restaurant.  That means he was so sick of being trapped in his apartment that he was willing to eat outside at night in temperatures below the freezing point.  He then walked twenty-five blocks just so he could be outdoors and feel like there was some normalcy to his life.  But that illusion was quickly dispelled.  He told me that at one point there were twenty city busses in virtually a convoy headed up Madison Avenue, all empty.  They probably weren’t attempting to maintain this configuration but since nobody was attempting to ride on them and since there is virtually no traffic, they basically pile up at the slower traffic signals and form this absurd wagon train.

Think about it, Manhattan at Christmas time and the streets are deserted.  The stores on Fifth Avenue are not just empty but looted and boarded up and the ruinously expensive transit system is empty and running like some sort of ghost of itself through a modern-day necropolis.  Well at least something has finally come along to put an end to the “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” crowd interviews.  They’ll just set up a zoom meeting between Miley Cyrus, Mariah Carey, Yoko Ono and the ghost of Cindy Lauper’s hair stylist.

Any other year in the last hundred and fifty years and Manhattan during Christmas week would be standing room only in every store, restaurant, sidewalk, hospital, jail and stairwell.  Money equivalent to the gross national product of medium sized countries would be changing hands in the upscale boutiques, restaurants and jewelry stores and every little kid for fifty miles around would be trooping past the giant Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center on his way to seeing Santa Claus at Macy’s.

If you remember the H. G. Wells’ book or the movie adaption, “The Time Machine,” in the far future humans have devolved into two populations.  On the surface are beautiful but effete people called the Eloi.  They are completely passive and only survive because their food is provided by the other population, the underground dwelling, monstrously ugly but technically capable Morlocks.  We learn that the Morlocks are cannibals and they harvest a certain number of Eloi by summoning them into underground air raid shelters by means of an old-style air raid siren.  And the Eloi are so bovine that they never think to question that none of those going underground ever come back.

Honestly, is it really a stretch to say that we have become the Eloi?  Maybe not all of us and maybe not quite to the point where we are literally thrown in the soup pot but the difference is one of degree not kind.  Granted the worst of it is in the Blue States and Cities.  In these places the situation is worst.  They’ve sacrificed the livelihoods and future of the small business owners and the educations and mental health of all of their children to play games with the mortality statistics from a flu that only strikes the very old or the very ill.  And even in places where they followed all their absurd rules the same number of people died as in the places where restrictions weren’t enforced.  And at the same time the Morlocks have unleashed another plague on us.  They’ve empowered the Antifa/BLM monsters to cannibalize what’s left after the COVID harvesting is complete.  That is assuming COVID is ever really allowed to end.

It makes you wonder what it would take to wake these people up.  In the Time Machine movie what it took was an outsider who wasn’t conditioned to their passivity to show them how to fight back.  Today I’m not even sure that something like that would work.  There is no fight left in them.  They’ve become domestic animals, cattle.

Island of Lost Souls (1932) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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This movie is a cinematic retelling of H. G. Wells’ novel “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” As opposed to the majority of the creature features and horror flicks this film has a very substantial actor involved. Charles Laughton plays Dr. Moreau. He’s a scientist who was chased out of the civilized world for the experimentation he was doing on animals. So, he lives on a small island in the South Pacific and a boat skipper delivers a cargo of live animals once a year. As the story opens up the boat picks up a survivor of a shipwreck. This survivor, Edward Parker, is headed for a nearby island but he gets into a beef with the captain and gets dumped into Moreau’s launch as it is transferring the animals to the island. When he arrives there, he notices that the island is inhabited by the strangest looking people imaginable. Most of them resemble apes in pants. Later on, when Parker walks out in the jungle he is accosted by a group of the natives and has to be rescued by Moreau. Moreau sounds a gong and the natives assemble and to the accompaniment of Moreau’s cracking bullwhip they recite their creed.

Moreau: What is the law?
Sayer of the Law (SOTL): Not to spill blood, that is the law. Are we not men?
Moreau: What is the law?
SOTL: Not to eat meat, that is the law. Are we not men?
Moreau: What is the law?
SOTL: Not to walk on all fours, that is the law. Are we not men?

Incidentally, The Sayer of the Law is Bela Lugosi but his face is so completely covered with fur that the only way to tell is by his unmistakable voice. Parker is confused by all that’s going on and in the next scene he hears agonized screams coming from Moreau’s laboratory. Breaking in he thinks he is witnessing Moreau vivisecting one of the natives without anesthesia. And now Moreau explains to Parker the truth about the natives. They are actually animals that Moreau has modified through biochemical and surgical modifications. The laboratory where Moreau performs these modifications is called by the patients, for obvious reasons, “the house of pain.”
Moreau uses a subterfuge to keep Parker from leaving the island because he wants to carry out an experiment on him. He has manufactured a woman out of a panther named Lota and he wants to test whether she reacts like a woman when brought into contact with a man, Parker. This experiment is a success until Parker notices that Lota’s fingernails have reverted to panther’s claws.
And just at this point Parker’s fiancée, Ruth, arrives at Moreau’s island to bring him home. But Moreau cancels his Lota plan and instead plans to test his male creatures by having one of them kidnap Ruth. When this plan is thwarted Moreau orders one of his creatures to murder the ship captain who is helping Ruth to free Parker. But when the creature realizes that Moreau has ordered him to break the law by spilling blood he goes before the assembly and tells them that the law is no more. And then they figure out that since the captain is like Moreau and since they can kill the captain then by the transitive law of monster logic, they can kill Moreau. And that’s just what they get ready to do. While Parker and Ruth are escaping out the back door to safety on the boat, the creature mob catches up with the whip wielding Moreau and back him into his compound. Finally, in desperation when he has reached the wall, he reminds them that they are at the house of pain. The Sayer of the Law makes one more imaginative leap and has the mob drag Moreau into his laboratory and using his own surgical instruments they gleefully vivisect him to the rousing accompaniment of his screams.
I get the feeling that Laughton enjoyed this part. He played the part with great verve. He endowed Moreau with humor and perverse curiosity in the details of his cruel experiments. And like all good mad scientists of the 1930’s he does mention to Parker that he knows what it’s like to be God.
From a special effects point of view, the creature costumes are pretty cheesy. More interestingly it does appear that certain of the actors playing creatures had facial and other anomalies that could not have been simulated. But even if the special effects were rudimentary this is an interesting plot. Moreau’s relationship with his creatures is nuanced. Their obvious investment in the concept of their humanity is pitted against the fear and hatred they feel toward their creator. Moreau is a cruel god but he is completely absorbed in the wonder of his ability to create people. He doesn’t realize his peril when he provides the forbidden fruit of knowledge to his creatures by breaking his own law and by demonstrating that regular humans are mortal. Good story, fun horror movie, good work by Laughton. Recommended.