Reset

The Guy in the Black Hat Meets Berlin is dead.

Long live The Guy in the Black Hat.

Reality

Three observations I made yesterday:

* Here’s a simple one: the Private sector could not manage to be regularly profitable without the Public sector.  A corrupt Public sector hemorrhaging resources (i.e., capital, social, environmental, etc.) in large amounts is the only way we humans seem to be able to drive the large-scale Private sector that would generate the necessary profits to satiate our greed.  Think about it.  Hollywood is a dirigiste film industry, massively subsidized by assorted forms of federal and state-level assistance (Toby Miller, 2002).  Nationalism and other forms of social imaginary generate imagined communities (Benedict Anderson, 1983) that it then re-processes into a system of consumer good distribution across networks.  Private 4-year colleges benefit from being near enough to Public graduate universities to have access to its cheap, energetic graduate labor supply.  And don’t get me started on Halliburton. Without governments there to round up the aggregate labor and exchange value of a populace, the Private sector might as well stay at the level of small to medium-size businesses.  Instead, it is an engine quite clearly propelling us toward the End of Human Civilization.

* I may be destitute since my time abroad, but my ability to write and think has increased volumes since being returned to proximity of the UMass library.  Give me a solid research foundation and I’ll live.

* Arcade scores are only three letters because kids can do so much damage with four-letter words.

Fantasy

Daybreakers (Spierig Brothers, US, 2010)

Everyone thought the premise on this movie was golden, let alone fitting for our times: in the near future, vampires have taken over the world, but now they are starving to death due to a lack of human blood to drink.  “Society” deteriorates as resources dwindle. We rented it on behalf of several recommendations, as well as Kat’s natural affinity toward vampires. Neither of us were impressed by the film’s utterly predictable narrative, overwrought seriousness, flat acting (except from Willem Defoe), ill-timed and gratuitous gore effects, and disastrously stupid protagonists. I thought Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Sunshine, and a host of other good sci-fi media had moved us into the new era of “clever” protagonists, but apparently there are still some stragglers caught in 1998, including this film.