Invasion of the Puss-Covered Kudzu

I saw the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers last night. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

"It initially received varied reviews from critics, though its critical reception has significantly improved in subsequent years, receiving a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and also being hailed as one of the greatest remakes ever as well as one of the best science-fiction horror films of all time."

Here's what I have to say:

It's shit. Absolute total shit. Despite having at least 3 A-listers on board, it was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. The acting was worse than some school plays I've seen, with some of the top actors of all time phoning in some of the absolute worst performances in the entire history of cinema.

Absolutely zero money was spent on wardrobe, as everyone wore the exact same outfit (as if they were me) over the course of about a week, with at least two or maybe three of the characters wearing the exact same coat, as if they were on sale at K Mart or something at the time.

The last third of the movie was shot in near total darkness from some of the worst angles I have ever seen. The sound quality was shit, the dialogue was shit, the effects were sub-par for movies made during that era, and there's a scene where a dog with a man's face appears out of butt fuck nowhere, for no other reason than to scare the humans and out them in front of the aliens, and then disappears with no explanation and is never spoken of again.

Now the two worst aspects. First, the movie breaks its own rules. When you have a movie where something impossible happens, like alien plants invade and duplicate people or zombies come back to life, you have to establish the rules early on and stick with them to the very end. It's already been established two things: 1. the aliens just float in from space and 2. it takes hours for a person to be duplicated. If we take 1 at face value then why do the aliens need to establish a base in San Francisco and then have pods trucked out to everywhere else? Couldn't they just waft in anywhere and everywhere on the planet simultaneously? This does not make sense. This is a major plot hole. The other major plot hole is 2, it takes hours for a person to be duplicated. For 3/4 of the movie this is a major plot point, because three times people have fallen asleep and we watch the pod grow a duplicate very slowly, slow enough that the person can be woken up and the duplicate will die. Yet somehow, for "drama" or lack of time or whatever, near the very end when Brooke Adams' character falls asleep for like a second, despite there being no pods in the vicinity, she crumbles to dust and a new perfectly formed duplicate appears naked in the bushes instantly to scare Donald Sutherland. This is the second major plot hole, and taken together they absolutely ruin this movie.

And the second worst aspect is the script. This is some of the absolute worst writing I have ever seen. Okay, so we begin the movie, the beginning, the very beginning, where the aliens invade. Maybe two characters are very partially introduced, and then in the next scene hundreds of people have already been replaced. It's like the whole first act was cut out. Brooke Adams (I don't remember any of the characters names except Donald Sutherland was Matthew because they said his name seven, eight thousand times) goes to Donald Sutherland and says "My boyfriend has been replaced, his personality is totally different!" Let's not introduce the character and spend 20 minutes getting to know him so we the audience can be sure he's different, let's introduce him out of nowhere already replaced and just take it as given he's different. The same thing happens with everyone. Characters are not introduced until after they are replaced and we're supposed to take as given that they are different. There's zero chance of getting into the movie because the entire first third, where the world and the characters are introduced, was omitted for whatever reason. It wasn't run time, because the movie was almost 2 hours long and they had time enough to repeat several plot points three times, just so we would get it.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 shouldn't have been released to theaters, it shouldn't even even have been released straight to video, it should have been released straight into the garbage.

Let's Go Die at Area 51!

Some two million idiots have pledged to "Storm Area 51" because "They can't stop all of us." These idiots think they can run to the base, confident in the belief that the base's defenders will run out of bullets (and napalm) before all their ranks are devastated.

Storming Area 51 is a logistics nightmare. Even reaching it is something that's very difficult, and almost impossible on foot. The nearest civilian rest stop is 86 miles from the base. Even running at 200% capacity it may be able to supply a couple thousand people. As for Area 51 itself, the distance from the gate to the buildings themselves is 28 miles of some of the harshest desert on the planet. You would have to be in peak physical condition (and not the people who signed up to storm the base) just to make it there on foot. The world record for marathon, which is less than the distance that needs to be crossed than the perimeter around Area 51, is just over 2 hours. Imagine doing that in 110 degree heat on blinding white salt flats with no shade. The elements themselves will defeat 90% of the people attempting this stunt, and, given the lack of medical facilities in the area, several thousand will probably die from heat stroke even just camping out in the desert.

Assuming even 10% of the people stupid enough to go manage to cross the desert, Area 51 sits on a US Air Force base. The Air Force has napalm, and they're not afraid to use it, at least in built-up civilian areas in Iraq.

This is Napalm. Water cannot put it out. Yes, they can stop all of you.

Napalm aside, those signs all over the desert warning of the use of lethal force are not jokes. People have been shot, to death, trying to access Area 51. Even if 10% of the keyboard warriors decide not to sleep late and actually storm Area 51, and if 10% of them are surprisingly fit enough to make it the nearly 100 miles through the desert to the base, that means 20,000 people will be on the receiving end of, at the very least, rubber bullets, active denial weapons (which will stop you in your tracks unless you are very stoned on PCP or something), tear gas, and other rather cool non-lethal weapons.

This is Active Denial. It will stop you.

There are also legal ramifications in attempting to storm Area 51, as this Internet lawyer can explain. Even if you are not killed, pelted with rubber bullets, or sent to the hospital for dehydration, you will be sent to jail and fined perhaps half your monthly welfare check.



One can only pray to our Lord Thanos (the best alien, by the way) that at the very least 10% of these idiots do decide to go through with this jackassery so that the universe can become more balanced, as all things should be, through their removal from the gene pool. Best case scenario ALL of them decide to go and balance the universe.

A man can dream, can't he?

Expansiveness

Swami Kriyananda talks about other worlds, the limitations of the body, and the relationship between the frontal lobes and superconsciousness. Runs 19 minutes.

Area 51 Insider Testimony

Ufologist Richard Dolan talks to a retired operative with the CIA, "Anonymous", who reveals what he saw at Area 51 during the Eisenhower administration. Is this deathbed confession genuine or is it fake? I can't say, but it is interesting. Runs 17 minutes.

Richard Dolan on Disclosure

UFOlogist Richard Dolan explaining how ET disclosure would reveal the true structure of global government. Who really runs the world? Who would have authority to tell the public? Would the want to? Runs 10 minutes.

The Ramey Memo

Since we're on the subject of aliens, here is more evidence that a flying saucer crashed at Roswell in 1947. It is a photograph of General Roger Ramey holding a paper with some text on it, standing behind a deflated balloon and some foil and balsa wood. The paper in his hand has come to be known as the "Ramey memo." Using computer analysis it is possible to read at least some of the text of the memo, including key words and phrases such as "disk," "weather balloon," and "victims of the wreck." With this analysis it is unambiguous that a cover up was in place not even a week after the crash and that there were casualties involved, meaning the explanation that seven foot tall crash dummies that would not exist for another three years could not explain the eye witness accounts of bodies at the crash site.

The Bible Code II

Michael Drosnin wrote two sequels to his book The Bible Code, one of which I have read, one of which I will never read. You might remember Mr. Drosnin from other posts.



If you have read the first Bible Code book but have not read the second, please do not. The two are worlds apart. Here is a brief synopsis:



Michael Drosnin, a hard-nosed journalist and ardent atheist, having proven the existence of a code in the Bible, he now has morphed into a combination of Indiana Jones and James Bond. Drosnin writes powerful men (Clinton, Bush, Arafat, Sharon, etc.) letters about the code and the end of the world, but he always leaves out the key details, because "no one would believe them," until his books are published. He wrote to Ehud Barak that the code said he would be the next Prime Minister of Israel in an early election in 1999, but he did not think Barak would believe him if he included the date, so he conveniently left that detail out of his letter but included it in the book. Drosnin conveniently leaves us no records for which to prove any of his stories. Two pictures of code tables appear on each page, taking up about 100 pages total.



Yasser Arafat is a very pious, kind-hearted man and all Israelis are war mongerers. And God does not exist, and here is an irrelevant code table.



Oh, and Michael Drosnin doesn't believe in God.



1998, Drosnin puts forward his ET "theory".





He finds references to DNA being "brought in a vehicle" and immediately jumps to the conclusion "when I found that encoded in the Bible, I couldn't believe it... DNA, the molecule of life, sent to Earth in a spaceship." (p. 144) It didn't say that. Just as every time he reads the word "computer" in the code when the actual Hebrew word says "thought", Drosnin reads "vehicle" as "spaceship" when it does not say that. A virus could be a vehicle to introduce a new gene into a cell, why should we believe that the word "vehicle" means "spaceship" when nothing indicates that it does? And what is the code for DNA itself? DNA is just letters, unlike the words and names used in other codes, so it might mean something completely different. It might just be nonsense. Just in case, here are four more code tables with useless words that can't be checked to mean anything.



Drosnin then says he had to call many nameless scientists to find out what they thought and just so happens to call Francis Crick, who wrote about the same idea decades before, and surprise, Crick agrees! Who would have guessed? Until you check out the back of the book, where Drosnin says he interviewed Crick years before about panspermia and he just crafted the story of trying to find reputable scientists who agree with his ET "theory" to make the book more interesting. Yes, someone who time and time again talks about being a "just the facts" hard-nosed journalist lied to make his story more interesting.



Michael Drosnin, by the way, does not believe in God. And Yasser Arafat was the nicest man he ever met, and he really, really wants peace, but religious people will kill him if he makes peace with the war mongering Israelis.



2001, Drosnin is in Israel trying to reach the Israeli PM because he has vitally important information from the Bible code about nuclear war in 2006. When an advisor asks what that information is, Drosnin says "I need to meet with the PM, because the code says if peace is not reached there will be nuclear war." The advisor replies, "tell me something I don't know," to which Drosnin drones on and on "You don't understand, I have to tell the PM face to face that the world will end if peace is not made!" "Okay, we all know that, what else?" "Damn you by the God you believe in, the world will end if you don't make peace and I must see the PM to tell him this!" Lather, rinse, repeat, ad nauseum.



1998 Drosnin must look for an "obilisk" and a "steel ark" in the area near the Dead Sea called Lisan, because it contains the key to understanding the Bible code, which was created by aliens who seeded the Earth 4 billion years ago, because Michael Drosnin does not believe God exists. He tries to get the Jordanians to let him dig, but they refuse.



2001, Drosnin confronts Colin Powell. He asks to see President Bush because the world will end if peace is not made and he must tell the President. See above. Drosnin must save the world from religion and nuclear war, because he does not believe in God, but the code is real, and created by ET, and warns of nuclear war in 2006.


1998, I think, who knows, the book keeps skipping around for no reason. Drosnin is back playing Indy again, talking about how it is vital to find this ark, or maybe it is a tomb of the original alien who brought DNA to earth, who the hell knows. Whatever it means, here are six more code tables, many are repeats from other pages. In case you were wondering, ET made the code, because Drosnin doesn't believe in God.



2001? Drosnin tells people in Israel and the US where bin Laden is hiding. He leaves that out of the book in case bin Laden buys a copy and then runs away. He hints pretty hard that it may be in Libya. Anyway, nuclear war will happen in 2006, and we have to find that thing that is still hiding in Lisan, maybe.



There is a nice appendix that describes the original rabbi experiment and its paper in Statistical Science, a refutation that was published without anyone reading it, a rebuttal of the refutation that was refused publication because codes a priori cannot exist, and there can be no evidence for something that cannot exist, and the opinions of some credible scientists who tried to debunk the code but ended up proving it exists who think refusing to publish any response is anti-science.

Roswell

Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Dick French talks about how he was ordered to investigate and debunk flying saucers. He says they're real and that he'll be surprised if they stay a secret for long.

Ancient Aliens

A more accomplished inventor than Edison, a more sinister killer than Hitler.



Back in 2009 I watched a program on what was then called The History Channel (now just History, which is ironic as it no longer has anything to do with history but is instead reality shows about ambiguously gay garbage men and all sorts of utter crap) called Ancient Aliens. At the time it was the most viewed program ever aired on The History Channel (over 2 million views). The program presented speculation that many of the things ancient people built, supposedly with one foot still in the stone age, which modern technology cannot replicate (the Great Pyramid took 23 years to build, supposedly by thousands of people pulling stones along a ramp that would have stretched for several miles and contained several times the voulme of material as the pyramid itself, and with the entire world's supply of boom cranes it would take at least 100 years to build and cost more money than the GNP of most countries; the Stone of the Pregnant Woman at Baalbek weighs over 1000 tonnes and does not have enough surface area to attach sufficient ropes for it to be moved), and proposes that it is possible that extraterrestrials visited Earth and had some role in these astonishing accomplishments.



From there it degenerated into idiots claiming that absolutely everything in the universe was done by ET, and has retconned itself at least once.



According to the man with the hair, show producer and host Giorgio Tsoukalos (according to wiki his day job is running an ET themed amusement park, which sounds wicked cool until you realise that it's probably all desk work and meeting with people with deep pockets), all the world's religions were started as cargo cults by ET (because things like God/gods, angels, and anything nonphysical is laughable on its face, and because no one ever used entheogens until the 1960s), every single artefact "looks surprisingly like" some modern machine which isn't the least bit odd considering that ET is supposedly millions of years more advanced than humans and yet is using Apollo era technology, ET started the American Revolution and was in communication with the Free Masons, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and maybe gave Sam Adams the recipe for beer, ET was behind the works of Shakespere and Leonardo da Vinci (because if you use a computer to distort da Vinci's paintings you can make ET heads or something), ET is responsible for every war in history, selects every US President, and mines the atmosphere for gold, somehow. Apparently "ancient astronaut theory" is no longer a theory, it's a deus ex machina for everything in the universe (except explaining where ET came from and if there is an even older race of ancient aliens who created the ones that visited Earth, and why the definition of "ancient astronaut theory" keeps changing for every episode).



In Season One ET visited the Earth looking for gold or liquid water (gold being a very heavy element should actually be more abundant on Mercury than Earth, and water is very common throughout the universe and can be found in huge quantities on the outer planets) and they found primitive ape creatures which they infused with ET DNA (or ENA) to make humans to mine the gold. Once they had enough they left until Roswell in 1947.



In the latest episode ET visited the Earth millions of years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs with laser weapons so the planet would be free to grow humans to mine for ratings on History's sister channel H2. The reason this change in ET agenda was never explained.



Here's what Charlie Sheen has to say about Ancient Aliens:

Science News 28 September 2010

The UN has appointed an ambassador to greet alien visitors. Now when ET comes asking to be taken to our leader they won't be directed to some star chamber meeting room where the Bilderbergers are discussing the future of world politics, they'll be taken to see astrophysicist Malzan Othman. The propaganda machine at the other wiki says the story is fake. Who am I going to believe, them or the Daily Telegraph? That's not a tough choice.



















In other news, Jimi Heselden, the inventor of the Segway, died. He accidentally drove one of his devices off a cliff. I never thought those things were very safe, or practical, or didn't look completely stupid. What more proof do people need that these things are a bad idea? (Corrected 30 September. I put the wrong name for the Segway inventor.)

Starchild DNA

The infamous Starchild skull has had a DNA test done, demonstrating that it possesses a long string of DNA that is not found in any known creature. This seems to indicate that it is not human. The scientist who did the test suggests that it is an alien that was implanted into a human mother who gave birth to it on the earth. Why this alien IVF experiment was conducted is anyone's guess. Lloyd Pye, owner of the skull, is now seeking funding to develop a complete sequence of the Starchild's entire genome (it's called the Starchild due to its small size despite later evidence that it was an adult at the time of its death).