Tag: pod people

October Viewing – 9

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October Viewing – 9

So, this being October 30th and tomorrow a really long work day, it’s a pretty good bet this will be the last “October Viewing” of the year.  A good friend who has been following this series of posts proposed the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movies as a good subject.  And we both liked how it sort of dovetails with the whole woke Democrat pod-people meme.  You know, how they speak like lifeless automatons and point and shriek if you reveal yourself not to be one of them.

Now my friend felt that even the two reboots were good subjects for the post.  But as in all things I am conservative.  So, let’s harken back to the 1956 original in all its black and white splendor.  Dut, dut, dut daaaah!

Spoiler alert!  If you want to avoid knowing the plot, skip to the boldened text below to just get my opinion.

Sturdy character actor Kevin McCarthy (no, not the politician!) stars as Dr. Miles J. Bennell.  He’s a small-town doctor in the fictitious California town of Santa-something-or-other.  Miles is puzzled to find that several patients are claiming that their friends and relatives have been replaced by visually identical individuals that lack any emotion.  One case is a young child claiming his mother has been replaced.

So, Miles and his girlfriend Becky and their friend Jack and his wife “Teddy” begin investigating a very strange series of occurrences.  Jack finds what looks like a human body but with very indistinct features, almost as if acid had burned away the facial features.  Shockingly, over time the “body” begins to take on Jack’s features.  And more of these bodies begin appearing.  Eventually they learn that enormous seed pods are the source of these transforming “bodies.”

And soon the two couples discover that the great majority of the townspeople are pod people.  The distinguishing characteristic of pod people is a complete lack of emotion in their voice and actions.  While pursuing an unsuccessful attempt to broadcast this alarming news to the rest of the outside world, Jack and Teddy become “podified” and so Jack provides the exposition to Miles and Becky to explain exactly what the hell is going on.

In his sedate pod-man voice Jack explains that spores floating through outer space landed on Earth where they grew into the pods.  If a pod is placed near someone (how near?) and that person falls asleep the pod will absorb the person’s memories and appearance and somehow disintegrate the real person and replace him.  Jack tries to convince Miles and Becky that the procedure is painless and all for the good.  Miles and Becky decide not to cooperate and run away.  They try to escape from town.  But they have to pass through a crowd of pod-people who are loading up trucks with seed pods for delivery to the surrounding towns.  They try to act like pod-people by being emotionless but are given away by Becky’s scream when she witnesses a traffic accident.  Women!

The pod people chase after them but the couple successfully take refuge in a cave that was conveniently around when they needed it.  But when Miles goes out to scout an escape route Becky falls asleep and by the time Miles returns, she’s fully podified and sounds the alarm to the rest of the wooden-faced pursuers to catch Miles.

Sleep-deprived Miles runs in a nightmarish state and ends up in another town trying to warn people on the highway about the pod people.  Of course, they assume he’s nuts and drag him to a hospital where he tells his story to the skeptical doctors.  But just at the end of his story an emergency room worker reports that a traffic accident with a truck full of giant seed pods has produced casualties in the ER.  And so, the doctors get to work calling in the FBI!

Dunt, dunt daaah!

End of the spoiler alert!

So, as you can see this is a hum-dinger of a paranoid’s dream come true.  They’re all out to get you and they’re all monsters.  And the emotionless pod-people are a pretty good stand in for the swarms of antidepressant-doped leftists that walk the Earth all around us and can only summon energy when they point and shriek to their cohort about the presence of some normal human in the immediate vicinity.

And this is the modern horror story.  If you add a violent angle with the imposters capable of becoming murderous creatures like in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” then it’s doubly frightening, especially with the modern special effects available.

But even this old-fashioned cinematic portrayal hits home by showing the confusion when familiar surroundings aren’t what they seem.  And when the truth is doubted by everyone except the growing crowd of pod-people who are coming after you then panic results.  Yep, a perfect nightmare scenario.  It does resemble the current state of our world too.  But I’ll save that for a current events post.

I Lost My Post

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I had an idea for a post and I wrote about six hundred words.  But by four hundred I was starting to dislike the idea.  I walked away from it for a while.  In fact, I watched a movie (“The Boston Strangler”) and by the time I got back I erased it.  It was too much.

So here I am at the eleventh hour (literally) and I’ve got to come up with an idea.

I’ll just give a slice of life.  I had to travel to the enclaves of blue privilege in the People’s Republic.  I was in Wellesley and Newton Mass.  Now I haven’t been in these Boston suburbs in years but they’re just as hilarious and nauseating as ever.  Now it’s been a year or two since I last saw a “Black Lives Matter” lawn sign but on one street there were four.  And then I looked at the bumper stickers on the BMW’s and every third one had the “We’re Not Going Back” sign or “My Body, My Choice.”  Now this was in the early afternoon so most working age people were at work but I never saw so many dour-looking old waspy females in one place.  It was like some kind of Katherine Hepburn impersonator’s convention.  I flushed two of them when my GPS sent me down a dead-end road.  When they saw my non-BMW car coming down their little Cul-de-Sac of Lost Souls, they looked like they wanted to call the authorities to put a stop to these riff-raff spewing carbon dioxide and testosterone in their little bubble.

At the offices I stopped in everyone seemed sedate and anti-depressed.  No emotions seemed to intrude and no visible life detracted from an air of propriety. Everyone followed the lines and spoke in low tones and wore the right clothes.  It was pretty creepy.

When I headed out, I took Route 9 west and at some point (maybe Natick or Framingham, not sure which) I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts.  And the people were among the living again.  Now they were still New Englanders which isn’t normal people for sure but they weren’t the pod people I had just escaped from.  They were rude, sarcastic and in a bad mood, in other words the typical Dunkin Donuts staff.  But they didn’t creep me out.  And as I drove along, I noticed plenty of Harris/Walz signs but not a single BLM sign.

Rich progressives are an entirely different life form.  They’re tucked away in their cocoon and they have no intention of ever coming out.  Their hermetically sealed world is completely shielded from Haitian refugees eating cats and geese and more importantly impervious to people who don’t think Trump is a monster.  They expect the world to one day consist of nothing but them.  How this is supposed to happen they don’t worry about.  But to that end they and all their friends send people like Elizabeth Warren to Washington to make sure that nothing ever interferes with their cloistered little existence and the measures needed to keep it that way.  It was an instructive day.  It reminded me who we work for.

Updated:

Milo Mindbender commented:

I also drift into an occasional bubble of liberalism, and they believe in free expression, but can’t contemplate someone not agreeing whole heatedly with their viewpoint. It’s not that they want to stop opposing views, it’s they can’t believe anyone doesn’t see the world exactly as they do.
This is the same thing when Martha’s vineyards declared itself a sanctuary city, until refugees showed up, then they used the authorities to relocate them just as fast as they could before it effected their real estate values.
I hope they get a real eye opener in November, and the ballot exceeds the cheat by such a margin that there is no way to consider it legitimate with a straight face.

My Fellow Americans

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One of the things that separates me from the Dissident Right is their perspective on the United States.  They correctly point out that many unconstitutional laws have been enacted that deprive us of our freedoms supposedly guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.  But from this condition they deduce that the United States no longer exists.  Now to me that’s defeatism that seems unwarranted.  And I say this because reversing some of these infringements of our rights would only require the Supreme Court to recognize that the harm that these unconstitutional laws cause outweighs any supposed social benefits they provide.

I admit that all these problems have endured for an enormous length of time.  Going all the way back to the 1960s the affirmative action agenda has afflicted us.  But it’s fair to mention that for almost all this time both political parties have contributed to the support that these laws flourished under.  It’s only since the Trump Administration that the Supreme Court has come close to a working majority of constitutionalist justices. Even now John Roberts is an unreliable conservative vote with nothing in the way of actual courage to address unconstitutional laws.  But assuming that nothing can be done about present circumstances seems very short sighted.  What is necessary is electing presidents that actually want the country to be conservative.

Look at the difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump.  W was supported by the whole country going into Afghanistan.  Even going into Iraq, the country still put their trust in him.  But after he had done all that could be done to eliminate the threat of a militant Iraq, W decides to go on a democratic nation building crusade in a primitive hell-hole filled with our worst enemies.  He bled our military of the finest young men on the face of the earth.  Then he tried to put Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court but settled for saddling us with John Roberts.  And finally, his multiple national disasters guaranteed that Barack Obama would torture us for eight years.

Compare this with President Trump.  No foreign wars, a tax cut, low unemployment, high economic growth, reduced illegal immigration, manufacturing jobs returning to the US.  And finally, on the Supreme Court he gave us Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.  Not to mention the tough fight he had to wage to get Kavanaugh confirmed.  And that’s the key point.  Fight!  Expecting to gain any ground without fighting our enemies is delusional.  But what you notice is that if you do fight, it improves things on all fronts.  The progressives aren’t all that tough, they’re just in charge.  If you push them hard enough, they give ground.  They’ll shriek about it but they’ll give ground.  That’s what’s so amazing to watch with the Trump Administration.  They’ve been harassed at every turn and started out with no reliable allies but through sheer dogged determination they’re finally bringing the fight to the Deep State and even something as staggering as the COVID-19 crisis hasn’t broken their spirits.  Can you imagine if every Republican administration showed the same resolve and courage?

So that is my rationale for not giving up on America.  Abandoning a thing as great as the United States to weirdos and bureaucrats seems cowardly and lazy.  Getting involved and knowing who you’re nominating is how a republic works.  It’s going to take a coordinated effort to vet the ambitious men who want to run this country.  They need to prove that they are willing to get results and ignore the Left when they call them racists, homophobes, misogynists, etc., etc., etc.

All that being said, that doesn’t mean I think that the United States is functionally the same country it used to be.  I won’t pretend that I feel that everyone walking around are “my fellow Americans.”  There are a few ideological tests that I administer to determine if someone is an American or just a pod masquerading as one.

  • If someone tells me that America is a racist country, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks that restricting immigration is racist, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks that free speech isn’t our right, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks that guns should be banned, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks that the government should tell me who to associate with, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks that the government should tell me who not to associate with, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks Barack Obama was a better President than Thomas Jefferson, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks Barack Obama was a better President than Donald Trump, he’s an idiot.
  • If someone tells me that women need to be advantaged in college or industry, he’s a pod.
  • If someone thinks Michael Brown was an innocent young man targeted by the police, he’s a pod.
  • If someone tells me that I should have to pay money to people whose distant ancestors were oppressed in the United States before my ancestors even got to this country, he’s a pod.
  • If someone tells me that marriage can be between anything other than a man and a woman, he’s a pod.
  • If someone tells me that there are more than two sexes, he’s a pod.
  • If someone tells me that a man in a sundress is a woman, he’s a pod.
  • If someone tells me that a mother should be allowed to put her little boy on hormonal therapy prior to castration because she thinks it will hurt her ex-husband, he’s not a pod, he’s a monster.

Any of these tests will identify people walking around the United States that are in no way my fellow Americans.  They are dangerous people who have rejected the Constitution of the United States as the valid law of the land.  They are working to undermine the best designed government that has ever been devised by the minds of men.

So, in this sense I agree with the Dissident Right that the United States as formerly understood doesn’t exist.  It has been overrun by people who are hellbent on destroying it and should not be considered Americans no matter what their ancestry says about them.  Some of the most dangerous of these are people whose ancestors came here on the Mayflower.  To me there are legal first generation Chinese and Mexican Americans who love this country and believe in all the things that make this country great and are therefore more American than these degenerate descendants of the Standishes and Bradfords.  Sure, there other immigrants who don’t appreciate the great gift they’ve been given to live here.  But I’m talking about the ones that do.  They believe in American exceptionalism and want to be Americans in every sense of the word.  They’re not looking for America to become Mexico or China.  They left those countries for a better place.  They never heard of white privilege or patriarchy or transgender anything.  They just want to raise their families and live in peace.  To me they’re more American than some Boston Brahmin whose family descends from the Pilgrims but disparages America as a racist, sexist, homophobic place that must be taught a lesson and deconstructed to suit the multicultural tastes of his fellow Cloud People.

But I disagree with the Dissident Right in the sense that we can fight to restore this country.  We are not outnumbered and we are on the side of common sense.  Our mistake has been to follow behind some other of these Cloud People who claimed to be on our side.  The Bushes and the Romneys are no different from the Clintons and the Obamas.  All of them are the enemy.  We need to find competent men who will fight for us and use them to change this country back to what it was.  We don’t even have to change the rules.  The Constitution hasn’t been changed.  Only unconstitutional laws have been allowed to stand.  Knock those laws down and we get back our country.

And the first thing I’d do is go after affirmative action for women.  There isn’t even a bad excuse for it anymore.  There are now more women than men in colleges and graduate schools.  Women have been advantaged for so long in corporate America that claiming they need affirmative action is a joke.  Ending the protected status of women needs to happen now.  Women can be shamed into admitting that they are taking advantage of unfair laws.  It’s an easy win and would be a good first step in cleaning up our unconstitutional mess.

Well my fellow Americans, that’s enough ranting and raving for now.  I hope you had a pleasant Memorial Day weekend.  Hopefully by the Fourth of July we’ll be past most of this COVID-19 nonsense and enjoying a real barbecue instead of the cut rate version we’ve had today.

The Pod People Strike Back

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Google is in the news.  They are demonetizing and de-platforming the haters.  And who are the haters?  Whoever they say they are.  And so is PayPal and Patreon and GoFundMe and on a less important front so is Facebook, Twitter and all the other leftists who are still smarting over Trump’s win.  If you make money from monetizing your website through Google advertising then this can be a big deal.  If you have a YouTube channel you could find a stream of income that you’ve depended on shut off.  And it’s not something you can appeal.  If they shut you down, that’s it.

I’ve been reading on a few sites that alternative sources for monetizing and funding are coming into being.  For instance a payment site to replace Patreon ( amusingly named Hatreon) now exists.  Stripe and Square perform similarly to PayPal but haven’t been banning rightwingers (yet).  WeSearchr and Counter.Fund also provide crowdsourcing to the right.  Gab provides a Twitter alternative.

So, problem solved?  Probably not.  Google is a behemoth of a company that controls the lion’s share of internet advertising.  They also dominate the search business.  And this is the way to control what gets seen and what doesn’t.  If they think your site is guilty of thoughtcrime all they have to do is make it invisible and it will dry up and wither away.  That is a big problem.  There are other search engines like Brave and DuckDuckGo and, and, and …  But most people google things they’re looking for.  What’s a deplorable to do?

Well, mostly wait.  We should start using all the alternatives because we need to make a start.  But don’t fool yourself into thinking you can move a mountain with a teaspoon overnight.  There’s no magic bullet for 100 years of ignoring the problem.  These institutions are entrenched and they don’t like you and they want you to go away (meaning drop dead).

One thing we can and should do is network.  Find like-minded folks and communicate and support each other.  If they sell stuff, look at it.  If it’s as good or even almost as good as stuff from the pod people buy it instead.  And when you do buy from them let them know why.  And if you have stuff for them to buy let them know and maybe they will.  Support these alternative institutions and spread the word.  Put links on your site if you find something good.

And it’s not all gloom and doom.  Look at the Dragon Awards.  Only two years running and already it is a fantastic alternative to voting in the fully converged Hugo Awards.  I used to waste money voting in that thing.  And that money was then spent on feeding SJWs at the WorldCon.  Instead I can vote in the Dragon Awards for free and have a much greater impact.  And that is a direct result of the puppies (sad and rabid) standing up to the pod people and saying we don’t believe you and we’ll go our own way.

So, there are cracks in the wall.  And if you apply pressure at these weak points damage can be done.  And don’t forget, Trump isn’t a friend of Silicon Valley.  They don’t like him and he doesn’t like them.  If he sics the anti-trust dogs on them Google will grovel pretty quickly.  It will be interesting to see if the investigation into search algorithm tampering is resurrected.

So be of good cheer and go out and deplore with a smile on your face and a song in your heart.  Somewhere out there in the bowels of Google the pod people are beginning to fear you.