‘The City’ is an iconic and constantly recurring theme in Science Fiction (SF) cinema. Huge, sprawling mega-cities are the dominant settings for many SF films. As author John R. Gold points out in his essay Under Darkened Skies: The City in Science Fiction Film, the city of the future is often as much part of […]
Science Fiction [SF] cinema has never received the degree of analytical and theoretical attention devoted to other film genres. In her book Alien Zone, author Annette Kuhn demonstrates that SF has been difficult to define as an actual genre, simply because it encompasses so many different elements. SF films rework and transform established themes and […]
America’s corporations are sitting on close to $2 trillion in offshore bank accounts in places like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. That’s cash that is not being used to create jobs, build factories, or improve infrastructure. In a country where upward mobility is virtually impossible, corporations have become less committed to workers well-being and more […]
Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” John Stuart Mill: “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally conservative.” H.L. Mencken: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” The fact that a thoroughly corrupt and incompetent cretin […]
H.L. Mencken wrote, “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen […]
Scholars have recently presented critical analyses of the popularity of zombies, vampires and witches to help explain the social and psychological implications of the undead in contemporary popular culture. Zombies are quick and easy metaphors that can be used for many purposes, representing any number of different themes. The proliferation of zombies in films, video […]
Whatever the outcome of the made-for-TV “feud” between President Donald Trump and Dr. Evil Elon Musk, the fact is that Trump didn’t “fire” Musk. Musk and his evil DOGE minions spent the last 5 months auditing all of the federal governments computer infrastructure, running AI surveillance scans on all the data. They were looking for […]
Donald Trump believes only HE can solve America’s many problems. At least he believes in something, right? Come to think of it, Adolf Hitler believed in something, too. Quite fervently, if memory serves. It was something really fucking awful, but he sure as hell believed in it. So did enough other people… But this is […]
The USA was one of the world’s greatest mass social experiments; the only country to come into existence as a fully-fledged democracy, “By the People, for the People.” America was the land of the free, home of the brave; a beacon of hope for the rest of the world, blah, blah, blah… Sadly, America isn’t […]
The US century of American economic and political hegemony is collapsing right before our very eyes. Like so many of history’s past empires, petty idiocies and hubris appear to be accelerating this inevitable decline. The real winner in all this chaos is China. Xi Jinping only has to follow Napoleon’s famous advice: “Never interfere with […]
Jason Darensburg's Blog-o-rama 