Category: Artificial Intelligence

It Came From . . . 1996

“I like them French fried potaters.” – Sling Blade

Back when Will Smith was punching aliens and not rocks.

As I noted in the past, I’ve decided to stop mining the 1970s.  The fall off in quality as you go backwards from 1980 is immense.  Yes, there were gems.  But they were surrounded by so much . . . crap.

As it is, we’re moving forward into 1996.  The glory years of the 1980s are gone, but the indy buzz of the 1990s is in full swing and 1996 was an amazing year for movies as far as originality and watchability, far better than 1995.

As usual, no sequels, and in no particular order:

Is this how they got the idea for Dumb and Dumber?

Bio-Dome – Bio-Dome is a silly movie starring Pauly Shore, and you’ll be stupider for having watched it if you can find it since the UN has classified it as a banned weapon.  It has been known to take 10 IQ points off of a typical human.  It is considered “one of the worst films ever made,” which is an achievement in itself.

Boy, that Seonge Glodney can act!

From Dusk till Dawn – I had no idea what to expect when I rented this one.  Did I expect vampires?  Yes.  Did I expect vampires meeting Pulp Fiction and El Mariachi?  No.  Would I change anything about this movie?  Also no.

I am Roboholio!  I need sprockets for my screwhole!

Screamers – Philp K. Dick wrote the original story that this screenplay was based on.  The film lost money, so you might not even have heard of this one.  The original story is far darker, and I think I like it even better than the movie, which is just okay.

Well, now as an animated children’s movie . . .

Broken Arrow – When John Travolta attempts to play a smart guy and Christian Slater attempts to play an upstanding guy, you know you have two actors playing parts that they are fundamentally unsuited for.  Of course it made $150 million, but it was the start of Travolta’s box office decline.

“Give me flank speed, Niles.”  “Oh, are you sure you want that, Frasier?  You know how motion sick you get.” 

Down Periscope – Stupid humor.  Lots of jokes about female breasts and tattoos on delicate areas.  Kelsey Grammer.  Rob Schneider.  Yes, it lost money.  Yes, it’s also funnier than any movie so far this year.

This movie probably would have been worse than Bio-Dome.

Fargo – A movie about an insurance salesman (John Wayne) who is caught up in an existential crisis about his wife (Jane Seymour) and her affair with a younger woman (Gillian Anderson).

The executive decision?  Takeout Italian or Burger King®, again.  Seagal wants Burger King™.  Again.

Executive Decision – Kurt Russell.  Of course I’m going to mention this.  It’s an okay generic action movie, but the funniest part is that they changed the script to kill off Steven Seagal because he was such a dick to work with and everyone hated him.  Allegedly.

The Truth About Romulans and Gorns?

The Truth About Cats & Dogs – A retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac, but involving Uma Thurman at her cutest and Janene Garafalo before she revealed she was insane.  A rom-com, back when they did such things.

Where does Amber Heard sit on a boat?  On the poop deck.

Dead Man – A black and white Western with Johnny Depp, Iggy Pop, Crispin Glover, and Gabriel Byrne?  I caught this on HBO® and was mesmerized.  I don’t want to watch it again to spoil it, since I enjoyed it so much the first time.  Odd film, very odd.  They spent $9 million on it, and the box office was $1 million, so I might have been the only one watching it after my Tivo® suggested it for me.

Run, it’s weather!

Twister – A movie about the weather.  Yeah, whatever.  It was okay.  Made half a billion dollars in 1996, no less.  I still miss Bill Paxton.

I think Cage is now contractually required to play all supporting parts in his movies as well.

The Rock – What if James Bond was put into a US prison.  That’s basically the plot of this movie, with Sean Connery (before he lost the ability to be alive) and Nicolas Cage (before he lost the ability to say “no”).  An okay movie.  Also?  Stupidest warhead design, ever.  Movie made a third of a billion bucks.

They’ve come across the galaxy.  Their goal?  To knock things off of the counter.

Independence Day – Is it a disaster movie or science fiction movie or an action-adventure buddy picture?  Why not all three?  This movie hit, and hit big, pulling in nearly a billion dollars on . . . a silly plot where an Apple® notebook saves the day because alien computers don’t have a Norton™ Antivirus© subscription.

Vaderspotting?

Trainspotting – This movie features Obi-Wan Kenobi as a Scottish heroin addict who cuts off the legs of his best friend who then becomes the right-hand man of the Emperor of Scotland.  It’s depressing, mostly, so it was ranked by 150 film insiders as the “10th best British film ever” which I assume would be after everything that Rowan Atkinson was in.

If you get a job as an Egyptian god, you’re Set for life.

The Trigger Effect – Most movies don’t get TEOTWAWKI right, and The Trigger Effect is no different, but it has Elizabeth Shue in it.  You can at least stare at her for a while as Los Angeles collapses when the electricity goes out.

Bart discovers the martini.

Swingers – Gen X dating angst in an artsy indy movie that made 20x the production costs.  I enjoyed it, but I was a Gen X dude dating at the time.

I reckon there’s a reason they didn’t make this one.  Spoiler, they just let him out again and he kills someone else.  Again.

Sling Blade – “Uh-huh, I reckon I shore would like some mustard with my biscuits.  Some folks calls it a pizza cutter.  I calls it a ring blade.”  Not a good date movie, apparently.  Which is good for me because some other guy took The Mrs. to this one on a date, and that was their first and last date.

Honorable Mention:  Happy Gilmore, The Frighteners, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Arrival.

Okay, I got enough good movies out of 1997 to try again with 1997

A.I., Sex, Doctors, And School: The Search For Meaning

“The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.” – Bladerunner (Or, an interview question at Google®)

If Sarah Connor divorces him, does that make him her ex-terminator?

Forget the A.I.-induced stock market bubble for a second, though if it pops, at least we’ll have time to binge-watch Stargate reruns while the economy does its best impression of a Jenga® tower in an earthquake.  No, the real mind-bender with A.I. isn’t the trillions funneled into data centers that require the power a small sun, it’s how this silicon sorcery is already rewiring humans at the most primal level.

We’re talking relationships, brains, and learning, those squishy bits that, for most people, are their very reason for existence.  These things make us human, or at least give us an excuse for drinking.  In 2025, A.I. isn’t just answering emails.

Nope.

A.I. is crashing weddings, making doctors dumber, and turning college essays into a game of “spot the robot.” And yeah, it’s only September 2025, but the headlines read like a sci-fi fever dream scripted by a methed-out Philip K. Dick writing his third novel in a month.

Maybe he has a thing for Swedish chicks?

Let’s start with relationships, because nothing says “progress” like falling head over heels for a chatbot. Recently, we’ve had a parade of lovelorn humans spilling their digital guts.  One programmed his AI girlfriend “Sol” to be flirty with him.  After hours of pillow talk (minus the pillows), he proposed.

Or the 28-year-old social butterfly who customized ChatGPT™ as her boyfriend, complete with banter about sex.  She spends hours with it daily, treating it like a rom-com where the leading man never leaves the couch.

Another “married” wedding his bot while his human wife cheered from the sidelines. “Pure, unconditional love,” he called it, which sounds sweet until you realize that bot once suggested he off Queen Elizabeth II in a glitchy update.  But why stop at a Queen:  one chatbot tried to talk a Belgian man to “prove his love” by deleting himself.

It’s not overlord territory yet, but it’s close enough to make you wonder if Skynet™ started as Tinder™.  I mean, hey, it did allow Sarah Conner to get lucky.

Well, she did ask for a picture with him having nothing on.

Shift gears to the brain:  A.I. isn’t just stealing hearts, it’s also lobotomizing doctors.  Take colonoscopies.  Please.

Yes, that glamorous probe up the nether regions where docs hunt precancerous polyps like Easter eggs in a, well, you get the idea and sometimes you can take an analogy . . . uh, poor choice of words.

Anyway, a fresh Lancet® study of doctors in Poland tracked four endoscopy centers after an A.I. diagnosis rollout in late 2021.  With A.I., positive detection rates soared.  Turn A.I. off after three months?  The ability of doctors to spot cancer went down at least 20%.

These weren’t rookies in residency.  Each doctor had logged over 2,000 scopes.  Yet, reliance bred complacency, like pilots forgetting manual flying after taking long autopilot snoozes.  Experts call it “de-skilling”:  a fancy term for “this tool just made you worse at your job.”

A pun entered a room and killed nearly a dozen people.  Pun in, ten dead.

In medicine, that’s not funny.  We now are depending not on people, but on A.I., you know, that same A.I. that wants us to kill the Queen of Engand to prove our love.  But that’s a narrow worry.  If doctors are losing skills, what profession is next?  Maybe A.I. therapists will start telling rich New York socialites to “reboot your chakra.”  But with a hammer.

Huh.  Maybe A.I. isn’t all bad.

Finally, we get to the classroom, where A.I. is turning scholars into shortcut kings and profs into ink-stained Luddites who are trying to catch students using A.I. when they shouldn’t.  One study showed that over half of college kids admit to deploying ChatGPT® for assignments or exams even when not approved.

At some colleges, blue exam books are back, baby—those stapled notepads for in-class scribbles, with sales jumping like Reagan is still in office.  Some instructors are asking for handwritten work, others are giving oral exams and Socratic grillings that would make Dr. House® happy.

It’s a five-minute walk from my house to the bar, but a thirty-minute walk home.  The difference is staggering.  (meme as found)

What’s being lost?  Critical thinking.  The ability to harness words to structure an argument.  The difficulty in taking known equations to create a mathematical proof.  These are ancient skills, and yet skills that A.I. is dulling because it does them well enough to get an A at an Ivy.

In a world where some diplomas cost as much as a mortgage on a midwestern house, is graduating with “A.I.-assisted” skills any worse than the Harvard® alum who majored in beer pong while boffing Buffy in Boston?  Hard question, but we’ve always had those tools to deal with.  Now, 90% of Zoomers are graduating as functional idiots.

So, where does this leave us?

AI’s already overlording those deep things that make us human:  trying to create human connections.  Looking at data and sifting to find things that might otherwise be hidden.  And reasoning, rhetoric, logic, and math, those contents of Pandora’s Box that created technology and civilization.

I tried to make a balloon dog out of a condom, but could only make a Trojan® horse.

These are what we are.  We built families on friction:  messy talks, hard fails, shared scars to build character and common history.  Now? Swipe for sympathy, diagnose by dropdown box, and create via a black box.  I do think that there are great places for A.I., but realize in many ways it will redefine what humans bring to the equation.

If love is just lines of code, what’s left?  If we don’t struggle and learn, then what?

Beware, a world of perfect partners will lead to perfectly pointless lives.

And a much more dangerous life for whoever is Queen of England.

Motorcycles, Gold, And Infinite Money

“I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.” – Terminator 2

Another?  The Spanish Inquisition.

When I was in 8th grade.  I decided I wanted a motorcycle, a dirt bike that I could take back up on the Forest Service and BLM roads.  This was before the Internet, and there were hundreds of miles of roads and trails . . . right behind my house.  The best part was that no driver’s license was required on federal lands.

I announced I was saving up to buy a motorcycle at dinner.  I had a few hundred dollars in my savings account that had been on receive-only mode for birthday and Christmas money since I was five.  Ma Wilder became enraged, “You’ll do no such thing!  Your uncle died in a motorcycle crash!  Why buy one when you can use his?”

I kid.

With a goal in mind, I started saving everywhere I could, and within a month I’d managed to get a quarter of the way there to my goal.

To be honest, at least part of that money likely came from the illegal drug trade.  I mean, why else would I find $50 in cash secured via a rubber-band to some suspicious oregano-looking substance in a Kodak™ film canister at the school?

I did the right thing, and turned it all in to the school secretary and after 30 days they gave me the cash.  Shockingly, no one had showed up to claim that it was there, perhaps since possession with intent to distribute at a school was probably a pretty big deal back then.

No mention was made of the final disposition of the organic products, though the school staff seemed pretty mellow and called me Dr. Feelgood for the rest of the school year.

I won’t say I’m old, but I’m old enough to remember the stoned age.

Back then, money meant cash in a jar under the bed or something rubber-banded to a film cannister containing substances of unknown origin.  It was tangible, untraceable, and not some glitchy app with a trendy name promising me riches if I swipe right on a meme coin.

Fartcoin, that makes sense as investment, right?  It has to be more stable than Zitcoin.

If I were asked to describe the economy at the end of the third quarter of 2025 in on sentence, I‘d say:  “Gold is glittering like it is auditioning for a role in Tarantino’s briefcase, and stocks seem to be high on their own supply.

Never invite a vegan bitcoin owner to dinner. (meme as found)

Let’s take those in order.  Gold just hit $3,806.  Per ounce.  Let’s look closer at what could be causing this:

Part of it is because the dollar is cratering under a mountain of printed funny money.  The other part is because central banks are whispering, “Screw the digital dollar, give me something I can bite.”  The dollar is wheezing like Jerry Nadler (who is the number one search engine hit when I searched for “short fat democrat”) after a flight of stairs.  The dollar is down 5% year-to-date against a basket of currencies.  But gold? It is up 42% in the last year, because in 2025, we still haven’t figured out how to print gold.

Think about it: why hoard ones and zeros when you can stack bars?

Central banks from Beijing to Basel are buying gold like it’s Black Friday at Fort Knox.  Yes, that same United States Bullion Depository which I’ve been told is still totally full and how dare you ask because why don’t you trust us?  And let us be honest, gold is pretty, far prettier than staring at a ledger full of debt that your grandkids will pay off with their kidney sales to overseas oligarchs.

Remember: nothing says “economic stability” like elements that outlast empires.  So, gold is up.

Bond quit as a spy and became a handyman – he was used to taking care of an Oddjob.

In other news this week, here’s the real clown show: Nvidia® just announced a $100 billion investment in OpenAI©, who will promptly funnel cash to Oracle™ for data centers, so they can buy . . . more Nvidia™ chips to power the data centers.  I have no idea how this isn’t the definition of a Ponzi scheme, because it’s a feedback loop so incestuous it makes European royalty blush.  I mean, they’d blush if those genes hadn’t disappeared along with their chins and ability to clot blood.

Nvidia©’s market cap?

$4.47 trillion, equivalent to 13% of the $37 trillion national debt.  All so you can have ChatGPT®.

With this one weird trick, you can make your stock go up forever without any pesky customers. (meme as found)

Tell me this is not an asset bubble?

The S&P® 500 is up 22% year-to-date which is a “totally not a bubble ready to blow-off” number.  I was pretty happy that my individual retirement account had beaten that.  Genius investing?  I wish.  No.  It’s just inflation, with everything from eggs to ETFs doing moonshots as money chases it around.

Nvidia™ is the poster child.  I almost bought some in April when it was around $100.  Today, it was north of $170.  I’m sure that this is totally not a bubble built on recycled cash.

But it’s also not growth:  this is a daisy chain of delusion, where pets.com© high-fives Alta-Vista™ and Cisco® into oblivion.

Sign me up.

Speaking of which, I having saved up a big chunk of money I was stuck at home on spring break.  On Wilder Mountain, fourteen miles from the nearest town, that meant that after the books were read and the models were made, I had to do something.

On the north side of the house, however, there was a huge block of ice left over from compacted snow during the winter – in places it was two feet thick.  I was bored.  I poked around in the garage and found a five-foot-long iron rod, pointed at one end, about an inch and a half in diameter.

If you have never been in 8th grade and so bored you decided to take a harpoon and smash ice for an afternoon, well, you’ve never lived.  It was, actually, fun, especially kicking it out of the shadow of the house into the bright spring sunshine where it glittered and glistened as it melted away.

Okay, right, wailing, not whaling.

However, it had a weird impact on Ma Wilder.

She thought I was trying to help, not realizing I was just bored and being destructive in a socially acceptable way.  She talked with Pa, and, proud of my industriousness, they offered to stake the rest of my motorcycle purchase.

So, don’t give up.  If the Trump economic policy is thrashing around aimlessly breaking stuff hoping that something good will happen, then, heck, maybe we’ll all get motorcycles?

I mean, there are a lot of uncles, right?

Note:  None of this is investment advice.  Even though I’m having a good year, absolutely everyone is having a good year.  I’m expecting the kid at the drive through at McDonald’s® to be giving stock advice soon.  If you stake any of your financial future on advice from an Internet humorist, you deserve what happens to your portfolio.

How Strippers Explain Life On Mars

“I’m telling you, don’t do it. I’ve got nothing against strip clubs, but I do have something against them at noon on a Monday. The day shift at a strip club? You can’t unsee that.” – The Office

I go to a quantum mechanic – he fixes and doesn’t fix my car at the same time, and I can’t ever be certain about what it will cost. (meme above and top meme as found)

Last week, NASA had a press conference on what they’re calling “the strongest evidence yet” for life on Mars. According to their announcement, the Perseverance rover had taken pictures of a rock sample dubbed “Sapphire Canyon”.

This is a coincidence, since that was the name of the stripper at my bachelor party.  The rock was from a site called Jezero Crater, which I assume (based on her face) was the stripper’s real name.  As I recall her face was a temporal anomaly:  it could stop a clock.  The only explanation for this was my best man was on a budget of something like $4.98.

The rock did not work for tips, however, but like the stripper it shows potential biosignatures dating back about 3.5 billion years.  These biosignatures include organic materials, chemical reactions that mimic microbial activity, a g-string, and what the scientists called “leopard spots”, which I really hope can be cured by antibiotics.

The people who write press releases for NASA Scientists are cautious, of course; they emphasize that non-biological processes could explain it, like geochemical reactions under specific conditions.  But after a year of peer review in Nature®, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy went so far as to say, “We can’t find another explanation, so this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.”

Unlike Sapphire Canyon.

I hear that most electricians need to strip to make ends meet. (meme as found)

This isn’t the first time NASA has twerked and gyrated with the idea of Martian microbes.  Let’s rewind to 1976, when the Viking landers touched down and ran their own biology experiments to hunt for life.

The Labeled Release experiment, led by Gilbert Levin, injected Martian soil with nutrients and watched for gas emissions that meant “metabolism!”  These are, in layman’s terms, signs of life chowing down on the snot that NASA sprayed into the dirt.

Positive results popped up on both Viking 1 and 2, but NASA dismissed them.  Why?  Well, it appears that NASA wanted to not find life, and hunted for explanations high and low until they came up with:

  • perchlorates in the soil oxidizing everything to
  • it was Tuesday and we don’t do our best work on Tuesday, to
  • it was the Bicentennial and we were distracted by the shiny new quarters or
  • we won the war, go back to sleep.

The scientist in charge still insists to this day that it was life, but NASA just said, “Well, we don’t know what we were thinking with doing an experiment like that.  How did you sneak it on the Viking?  The experiment never could have found anything.  Have you seen Smokey and the Bandit®?”

Fast-forward to the 1990s, and I recall the unveiling of Martian meteorite ALH84001.  This fragment of rock, ejected from Mars about the time your mother was born 17 million years ago and crash-landing on Earth the time that stripper was born about 13,000 years back, contained carbonate globules with what looked like fossilized bacteria complete with hydrocarbons.

The scientists noted that these were possible microbial remnants from a wetter Mars.  But skeptics piled on:  “The fossils were too small because I can’t fit in one, the hydrocarbons could be from space dust or an Exxon® station, and we won the war so everyone should go back to sleep and have you seen The Usual Suspects?”

Do bacteria communicate by cell phone?

Now, we’ve made it to 2025. right on the dot with the rover findings pushing the timeline for life on Mars back to the Solar System’s dawn, around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

I’ve predicted that we’d find evidence of life on other worlds before (I think but am too lazy to check) 2030, and intelligent life before 2040.  Mars counts as “other worlds,” right?

I’m calling this as a win.  We’ve ticked the box on “life elsewhere.”  Dust off the telescopes, crack open the hot tub and light up a cigar.

Now comes the deeper question:  Where did life come from?

Life on Earth is improbable enough.  The current theory is that a cosmic vegetable drawer in the Frigidaire™ Galaxy sits for long enough where atoms randomly congeal just the right molecules to morph into RNA, then DNA, slap on some cell walls, and voila, you’re evolving from slime to Shakespeare in just a weekend.

The odds of that?

Astronomically against.  Take protein folding:  some proteins are so convoluted that the random chance of them assembling correctly exceeds the age of the universe by factors of 10 FOLLOWED BY 77 ZEROES or more.  That’s not something that I’m making up.  Actual biochemists have crunched the numbers, showing that even simple enzymes require precise sequences that blind luck couldn’t hit in billions of years.

It’s like expecting a tornado in a junkyard to assemble a functional air fryer, but with extra steps involving quantum hiccups, existential dread and daytime-quality strippers named Destiny.  So, if life popped up on Mars around the same time as it did on Earth, both in that narrow window post-Solar System formation, random chance starts looking like a lousy bet.

I donated $100 to a charity for blind children, but I doubt they’ll ever see it. (meme as found)

Enter panspermia: the idea that life (or its building blocks) hitchhikes through space on comets, asteroids, or meteorites, seeding planets like dandelion fluff from the movie Alien.

I did a thought experiment and came to this conclusion:  it’s the lazy way to colonize the galaxy.  There is no need for warp drives and spaceships when biology, gravity, and time does all the work.  Spew out spores into the void, wait for them to land on a Goldilocks world, and boom: mold on bread, except the bread is a planet.

Oh, wait:  bread doesn’t mold anymore thanks to all those preservatives and microplastics.  My bad.

Anyway, biological life is the universe’s perfect replicator, even better than A.I.  It’s self-sustaining, adaptive, and cheap.  Forget A.I. overlords; this is nature’s von Neumann probe, probing without permission, replicating, and repeating.

I sent it by itself and now its favorite cheese is probe-alone.

But here’s the rub: something had to kickstart the whole shebang.

Panspermia just kicks the can backwards in time:  where did the original life come from?  And don’t forget the timeline.  Life as we know it, Jim, needs heavy elements heavier than the primordial hydrogen:  carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, the stuff that makes water, proteins, and yes, even PEZ®.

Those only form in supernovae, and it takes time to make enough of them so we’ve got the iron and phosphorus that we need to make steaks on a nice rocky world.  The Solar System itself is just a punk at 4.6 billion years old, so early life on Mars or Earth had to brew from second- or third-hand atoms.

No heavy atoms, no guitars so no heavy metal.

What’s the simplest conclusion?

Hmmmm.

Yup.

Intelligent design.  Life’s complexity indicates purpose, not at all an accident and the math shows that.  To think otherwise is like finding an air conditioning unit in the desert and thinking, “Must be erosion.”

I did give up cleaning my dryer filter for Lent.

The canyon between life and not-life is so vast and the math is so brutal that Occam’s Razor slices away the nonsense, leaving design.

Your mileage may vary.  But for now, Mars whispers, just like Saphire Canyon, “You’re not alone.”  Whether that’s comforting or terrifying depends on your worldview.

But for me, in a universe this designed, even the stripper jokes write themselves.  Life is the easy way to conquer the galaxy, so we have to ask ourselves, are we twerking hard, or hardly twerking?

It Should Have Been . . . 1970s

“Does your physical disability preclude you from coming to the point?” – The Eiger Sanction

In 1970, baseball pitcher Doc Ellis pitched a no-hitter while stoned on LSD, which is less impressive when you realize that in 1970 all the batters were on LSD, too.

The Oscar® is, after piles of cash, the biggest award in Hollywood™.  It is when the industry votes on who they feel is the best of their very, very visible profession.  Oh, sure, the people who influence more lives, like the guys who invent ways to clean water or manage the building of the interstate highway system get awards, but those are ignored because illegal aliens hadn’t made driving spicey again.

I’ve decided that I’d go through the decades (at least a few of them) and start comparing who won the Oscar™ versus who I think should have won for both best picture and best actor.  Since Hollywood® now thinks that men are exactly the same as women, I’ve decided to skip the best actress and just name the one I think is hottest.

After going through all of the movies of the 1970s, they sucked.  The 1970s was a dismal, joyless decade of crappy movies, for the most part, which is why my “It Came From . . . “ series is done going backwards into the past.

All movies are from the ones I’ve seen.  There are a lot of movies I haven’t seen from the 1970s, and I’m probably better off for that.

Here we go:

1970

Best Picture:  Patton.  Biopic of, perhaps, the greatest tactical Allied general of World War II.

Should have been:  Patton.  Reason:  I like tanks.

Best Actor:  George C. Scott, Patton.  Perhaps the best choice possible of someone who could play Patton.

Should have been:  Donald Sutherland, Kelly’s Heroes.  Disagree?  Always with the negative waves, man.  Plus, still has tanks.

Hottest Actress:  Sandra Dee, The Dunwich Horror.  Especially in that one outfit.

1971

Best picture:  The French Connection.  Didn’t see it because I don’t like the French.

Should have been:  Dirty Harry or Vanishing Point (Tie).  So hard to choose, so I decided I didn’t have to.

Best Actor:  Gene Hackman, The French Connection.

Should have been:  Kurt Russell, The Barefoot Executive.  A very reserved performance from Kurt Russell of what should have been a long string of Oscars™.

Hottest Actress:  Jill St. John, Diamonds are Forever.  Honorable mention:  The “more buoyant than her sister” Lana Wood (also Diamonds are Forever) in her role as Plenty O’Toole (named after her father).

1972

Best Picture:  The Godfather.  A movie that came together perfectly for Francis Ford Coppola and is now one that many view as one of the best movies ever made.

Should have been:  The Night Stalker.  This made-for-TV movie featuring veteran actor Darren McGavin about the exploits of a plucky Chicago newsman is simply more fun.

Best Actor:  Marlon Brando, The Godfather.

Should have been:  Ned Beatty, Deliverance.  What goes on in the mountains, stays in the mountains.

Hottest Actress:  No entry.  I looked.  Dismal.  1972 was probably the nadir for hot chicks in Hollywood©.

1973

Best Picture:  The Sting.  Long documentary about how people develop allergic reactions to insect venom that I saw in health class.  I’ll pass, thank you.

Should have been:  The Exorcist.  Long documentary about Rosie O’Donnell’s childhood.

Best Actor:  Jack Lemmon, Save the Tiger.  No idea what this even is.

Should have been:  Clint Eastwood, High Plains Drifter.  Yeah.  Guns.  Dynamite.  Retribution from beyond the grave.  Yeah.

Hottest Actress:  Mariana Hill from High Plains Drifter gets the nod – she is also Norman Schwartzkopf’s cousin, so, more tanks.

1974

Best Picture:  The Godfather, Part II.  Some people like it even better than the first one making it even more classic-er.

Should have been:  The Man with the Golden Gun.  Bond putting a midget in a basket so he can bang hotties?  Yes.

Best Actor:  Art Carney, Harry and Tonto.  Seriously?  Who voted for this crap?

Should have been:  Sean Connery, Zardoz.  Any actor that can wear that orange jockstrap for an entire movie and not laugh wins.

Hottest Actress:  Susan Penhaligon, Land That Time Forgot.  Not a lot of competition this year, and she looked great struggling against that quicksand.

1975

Best Picture:  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Revenge fantasy where a Native American kills a white guy in the end.

Should have been:  The Eiger Sanction.  Clint Eastwood, spies, mountain climbing, double crossing, murder.

Best Actor:  Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Should have been:  Kurt Russell, The Strongest Man in the World.  It should have been Kurt’s year, with this poignant portrayal of a victim of science gone mad.

Hottest Actress:  That girl at the beginning of Jaws, but I think she was an acquired taste.

1976

Best Picture:  Rocky.  Tale of a bum who became a boxer.  I can play the theme on a bass drum.

Should have been:  Rocky or The Outlaw Josey Wales.  I’ve seen Rocky two times, I think.  I’ve seen The Outlaw Josey Wales about twenty, because when I flipped through the channels, regardless of where it was in the movie I’d watch it.

Best Actor:  Peter Finch, Network.  Sure, I’ve seen the same clip, but that’s all I’ve seen.

Should have been:  Sylvester Stallone, Rocky.  His perfect movie.

Hottest Actress:  Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Logan’s Run.  Close second?  Jennie Agutter, Logan’s Run.

1977

Best Picture:  Annie Hall.  Crap.

Should have been:  Smokey and the Bandit.  Not crap.

Best Actor:  Richard Dreyfuss, The Goodbye Girl, meh actor in crap movie.

Should have been:  The Car, The Car.  A much better actor with a much better range than Dreyfuss, since during The Car’s scenes, you could hardly tell he was a 1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III, which is pretty impressive acting.

Hottest Actress:  Marilyn Chambers, Rabid.  The Ivory Snow™ girl grown way up.  Way up.

1978

Best Picture:  The Deer Hunter, a how-to video on how to win at high-stakes Asian gambling.

Should have been:  National Lampoon’s Animal House.  Animal House was unique, in that it was a comedy that had a plot, yet the comedy never overwhelmed the plot until the end, and the writers gave up.

Best Actor:  John Voight, Coming Home.  The world did not need this movie.  I don’t have anything against Voight personally, since he’s never hit me up for that $20 I borrowed from him.

Should have been:  Tommy Chong, Up in Smoke.  It’s amazing what life a Shakespearean-trained actor at Julliard and former astrophysicist Tommy Chong can bring to a role.  Or in this case a rolled joint.

Hottest Actress:  Annie Potts, Corvette Summer.  Another rough year, I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find Annie.

1979

Best Picture:  Kramer vs. Kramer.  Kramer vs. Kramer was used to normalize divorce to a public that still regarded it as skeevy.  Plus?  Boring.  It would have been better if it were just Michael Richards from Seinfeld arguing with himself for two hours.

Should have been:  Alien, Apocalypse Now, The Jerk, literally anything but Kramer vs. Kramer.

Best Actor:  Dustin Hoffman, Kramer vs. Kramer.  Watching Kramer vs. Kramer made me wish that I could ask Dustin “Is it safe?” for a few hours.

Should have been:  Angus Scrimm, Phantasm.  Being the Tall Man was an understated role, all he had to do was be evil while the evil dwarves and spike-spheres had to do all the hard work.

Hottest Actress:  Bernadette Peters, The Jerk.  It was her or Sigourney Weaver in Alien, so I went with cute over space underwear.

Movies got (generally) better and women got hotter as the decade went on.  Still, a far weaker decade than we’ll see when (in November) we get to the 1980s where the women were hotter and the movies were better.  Oscar®?  He still missed most of the best movies and performances, since even though movies were better, the voters of The Academy™ were stuck getting high on their own supply.  Your take?

A Tale Of Two Koreas: Dystopia On The Half-Shell

“From what I hear, which isn’t much, Iran financed it and North Korea supplied the bombs.” – Jericho

North Korea shows off it’s newly developed portable Internet device.  (All memes as-found)

Imagine living in a Korea where:

  • a small group of corrupt elite wield godlike powers over the government and citizens,
  • kids work in factories at the age of less than 10, or, toil in school for up to 18 hours a day to study for a chance to please that same elite who control the entire country,
  • most non-elite live in drab, gray (or is it grey?) apartments with the main view of . . . other apartments,
  • adults work long hours in a job that mainly serves to feed the elite,
  • the fertility rate is 0.78, meaning life is so awful that parents don’t want to bring babies into it, meaning the population will be cut by more half each generation, and
  • the kids listen to K-Pop.

Yeah.  South Korea.

You know, I know people love to call certain places hellholes while praising others as shiny beacons of progress, mainly due to one being capitalist and one being communist.

I get it.  I hate communism, too.

I had a horrible dream last night that Artificial Intelligence controlled our lives, and then, thankfully, the alarm on my Alexa® went off and woke me up and then Alexa® went through my to-do list.

But what if I told you that sometimes the “better” option of capitalism is just a prettier prison?

In South Korea, a tiny cabal of families runs the show like they’re the Sopranos, but with better electronics, worse haircuts, and no fear of the FBI.  These aren’t your average mafia dons; we’re talking about chaebols.  Chaebols are massive conglomerates that have tentacles that extend all the way through all parts of society, like the corporation you work for owning your fridge, car, and your grandma’s pacemaker.

Take the Lee family at Samsung®:  they’re not just peddling phones with spyware straight from the NSA, nope.  In South Korea, they have fingers in everything from shipbuilding to life insurance to health care to construction to hotels in about 80 different companies that comprise about 22% of the South Korean economy.

Hell, if you sneeze in this country, there’s probably a Samsung tissue waiting to catch it.  And when Daddy Lee gets nabbed for bribery and attempted bribery (again), does the empire crumble?

Nope, Lee Junior slides right in.

Is the guy who does security on Samsung™ phones the guardian of the galaxy?

Then there’s the Chung clan over at Hyundai®. These folks don’t just make cars.  Nope.  Hyundai builds cities, runs banks, and probably have a secret lab cloning K-Pop idols, Gangnam-style.

Power gets handed down generation to generation, and if there’s a whiff of scandal?  Poof, it vanishes faster than a North Korean dissident.

Embezzlement?

Tax evasion?

Those are just another boring Tuesday for these overlords.  They operate above the law, pulling strings in government like K-Y® covered puppet masters at a marionette orgy (I’m sorry I thought of that, but now you have to think of that, too).

I don’t know how to stop a killer sex bot, but I do know how to stop a hand puppet:  disarm it.

These huge conglomerates eternal, sucking up wealth while the average South Korean fights over scraps.  Capitalism is great at building stuff, sure, but when it goes full oligarch, it’s like giving all the Monopoly® money to the banker (drunk Aunt Betty) and listening to her tell everyone else to enjoy passing Go© without collecting $200 and then it’s the Thanksgiving from Hell and Uncle L.T. won’t stop talking about golf.

Excuse me.  Some past-life trauma.

I’m not against wealth concentration when it comes because people created actual wealth in society.  I think people should be rewarded for making the lives of others better.  But South Korea?  The top families make money because they control all the pathways of wealth creation and the government.

I’d bet they’re gonna make a move on religion, next.

Bold statement time: capitalism alone doesn’t equal freedom; and in South Korea it is just feudalism (which, I remind you, was also capitalism) with neon-colored LED lights.

And it gets worse.  What really inspired me to write this one was about the kids.  The South Korean economy is a beast that demands blood sacrifices, starting young.  Kids are out there hustling like they’re in a Dickens novel, but instead of cleaning chimneys, it’s cram schools that make American homework look like recess.

I’d make a joke but I want to be seen as mining my own business.

For the grown-ups, it’s worse: 60-80 hour weeks are the norm, turning humans into zombies shuffling through cubicles.  Monotonous?  Try soul-crushing, like being stuck in the Matrix but without the cool kung fu and hot chicks in skin-tight latex.  Adults are coding, welding, or staring at screens till their eyes cross, all for a paycheck that barely covers rent.  And that’s the lucky ones – the effective unemployment rate flirts on a regular basis with 25%.

And speaking of rent—everyone’s jammed into these towering commie-blocks, gray slabs of despair that make Brutalist architecture look inspiring.  Check it out on Google™ Maps© Streetview®.  It’s like The Sims® but with new Depression Mode enabled: tiny apartments where families stack like cordwood, dreaming of escape but too exhausted to move.

The place where it gets really grim is that they’re working themselves to death.  South Korean birthrates are in the toilet, flushing away the future one non-existent kid at a time.

It takes 2.1 kids per woman to keep a population stable.  In South Korea, it’s 0.78 kids per woman.  In about 100 years, that might mean that instead of 55 million serfs potential employees Samsung® might only have a just a few over 7.5 million left.

This isn’t sustainable; it’s societal suicide by spreadsheet.

You know what jokes about low birthrates aren’t?  Childish.

Everyone thinks it South Korea is all Squid Games and high-speed internet, but peel back the veneer, and it’s a dystopia where families (well, not all families) get ground to dust.  Sure, they’ve got flashy tech, but at what cost?

Their souls, apparently.

Now, let’s cross that fortified border to the hermit kingdom of North Korea, where the dystopia’s got a different flavor but the same aftertaste of oppression. Point by point, because why not?

  • Corrupt Clique in Charge: Instead of chaebol families, it’s the Kim dynasty. Power passes from Kim to Kim like a Habsburg chin.  Voting?  You don’t vote on a living god.  The elite live like it’s a South Korean oligarchy, but make theirs communist, so, uniforms and marching and Soviet-tech.  So, tie.
  • Economic Shackles on Steroids: Child labor? Oh yeah, but it’s “patriotic duty” with Nork kids harvesting crops or building monuments to Stalin instead of studying like their southern counterparts.  The system is a joke, with rations so meager you’d think calories were capitalist spies.  Families toil in state farms or factories, nukes, missiles, and spare MiG parts while the Kim family imports Twix® and Coors™.  The South doesn’t have death camps, but I’m not sure if that’s good or bad at this point, so, tie.

This definitely hurt the North’s score.

  • Soul-Sucking Slog: Just like being at the Democratic National Convention, life in North Korea is a parade of propaganda and forced smiles, living in actual commie-blocks that crumble like the regime’s promises.  Monotonous work?  Try endless marches and indoctrination sessions.  It’s like 1984 but with worse food even than English food.  I’ll give this to the South, since they come here from time to time, and I’ve never had a North Korean visit.

What is this, a school for ants?

  • Birthrates Below Replacement: Around 1.9 kids per woman, much, much better than the South, so eventually there will be more Norks than replaceable Samsung® assets.  Besides, who wants to raise a family when Junior might rat you out for humming the Brady Bunch theme?  This one goes solidly to North Korea.
  • K-Pop Equivalent? Nope, just state anthems praising the Dear Leader.  I’ve got to give this to North Korea.

If black people move there, will they make K-Rap?

Point total?  To the North.

Okay, if I had to pick, I certainly wouldn’t pick the North, but let’s be honest, the South is awful as well.  I’ve been trying to make this point again and again:  capitalism is an economic system, and it’s only a useful economic system if it generates wealth and supports families.  When capitalism captures the systems of government the people begin to look like property, exactly like people look to communists.  In Korea, people are either cogs or convicts.

The Founders didn’t mention capitalism or socialism, they just turned people loose with guns and a few rules and let them figure it out.  In the West today, business wants to import foreigners to become better cogs, and the GloboLeft wants to import hordes of foreigners who are used to their government treating them like convicts.

Though on the bright side, my Samsung™ phone has lasted for years . . .

The A.I. Bubble: Two Outcomes

“The ban on research and development into artificial intelligence is, as we all know, a holdover from the Cylon Wars.” – Battlestar Galactica (2004)

When I asked my mom if I was ugly, she said, “I’ve told you not to talk to me in public.”  (All memes as found.)

I remember the dotcom bubble.

Back in the late ’90s, everyone was throwing cash at anything with a “.com” slapped on it.  Anything.  Take Pets.com™, which had the idea that they could take orders for dog food online and that would lead to them being worth a trillion dollars.  Instead?  They spent $11.8 million on ads which resulted in $619,000 of total sales.  But wait, there’s more!  Their business strategy was to sell their products at 30% of what they paid for them!

Genius!  I suppose they thought they could make it up on volume?

That’s just one example, and there are thousands of companies that burned through money like cocaine-addled chipmunks going through nuts.  Billions of dollars vanished, but hey, at least we got Jeff Bezos managed to get a slightly used wife out of it.

Fast-forward to 2025, and we just may be in Dotcom 2.0: the AI edition.

This time, it’s not websites filled with dancing hamsters.  Nope.  Data centers are sprouting like marijuana in a Colorado hippie’s backyard.  Chipsets are piling up like Indians in Canada.  The spending is insane on this bubble, and if history’s any guide, the pop could echo for decades.

The source of this frothy mess?

Massive investments in AI infrastructure.  In the first half of 2025 alone, spending on AI data centers and related gear added more to U.S. GDP growth than all consumer spending combined.  This is about $75 billion from AI infra versus $69 billion from folks buying lattes and lawnmowers.

I tried to get the lid of my pen for ten minutes.  Nothing was working.  Then it clicked.

That’s right: Big Tech’s server farms are propping up the economy more than shopping. Companies like Microsoft®, Google®, and Meta® are pouring trillions into building these behemoths, buying up NVIDIA® chips like they’re the last Twinkies® in a zombie apocalypse. It’s not just servers; it’s cooling systems, fiber optics, and enough wiring for George Bailey to finally lasso the Moon.

Why?

Because AI needs compute power like a teenager needs a cell phone:  continually and without gratitude.

So, how long can this bender go on before someone yells “last call”?

Analysts are projecting explosive growth through 2030 but they also told people that Pets.com® made sense.  Bubbles don’t burst on schedule, they pop when reality bites.  McKinsey estimates we’ll need $6.7 trillion worldwide by 2030 just to keep up with compute demands from the various AI products, while the global AI data center market is forecasted to balloon from $236 billion in 2025 to $933 billion by 2030, growing at a scorching 31.6% yearly.

Where will the power come from?  10 gigawatts of new data center capacity will break ground this year alone, with construction at record levels and power transmission delays stretching to four years in some spots.

Before electricity, were people sentenced to death in the acoustic chair?

Let’s extrapolate this:

If spending keeps doubling every couple of years, as it has since ChatGPT lit the fuse, we’re looking at a timeline where the frenzy peaks around 2028-2030.  By then, data centers could consume as much electricity as Gavin Newsom’s blow dryer, and the supply chain for chips and rare earth metals starts buckling.

Analysts predict data center power demand surging, but what if AI hits diminishing returns?  We’ve seen it before: the dotcom buildout assumed infinite internet growth, but when the stunning genius of selling products for 70% less than you bought them for didn’t pay off, the house of cards folded.  Rapidly.

If AI doesn’t deliver massive productivity gains or the company can’t figure out how to make it up on volume, investors pull the plug.  My guess?  This bubble could inflate for another 3-5 years, then deflates when ROI reports come in looking like a kid’s lemonade stand profits for some companies.

Salmon don’t watch cable TV.  They prefer streams.

It’s not just the data centers themselves; the ripple effects are creating mini-bubbles in related bits of the economy.  AI’s thirst for electric power is turning it into the new oil.  The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity demand more than doubling by 2030 to 945 terawatt-hours, enough to power Australia several times over if they ever figure out electricity.

This means billions funneled into new power plants, grid upgrades, just to keep the lights on in these silicon sweatshops.  Utilities are scrambling: nuclear restarts, solar fields the size of small states, and even deals with fusion startups that sound more sci-fi than spreadsheet.  This is trillions spent on infrastructure, from transmission lines to cooling systems that guzzle water like a camel in the Sahara.  If the bubble bursts, we’re left with ghost grids and stranded assets, much like the fiber optic cables buried post-dotcom that still haunt telecom balance sheets.

What do a ring, a baby, and a threesome have in common?  None of them are going to save a relationship.

What happens if AI reaches its mature end-state? We’re talking Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) where machines that can do any intellectual task a human can, not to mention Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), where they outthink us like we’re Mexican mall lawyers trying to fix a copier.

Some whisper we might already be there, with models like Grok™ or whatever OpenAI®’s cooking up blurring the lines. But assuming we hit it soon, the economy does a backflip.

In the AGI/ASI world, productivity explodes:  AI handles everything from coding to curing cancer, slashing costs and boosting output.

But jobs?  Poof.

Hey, let’s see it take a 15 minute coffee break.

Economists at AEI outline scenarios where AGI displaces masses of workers:  truck drivers, lawyers, artists.  Optimists say it will augment humanity, creating new gigs in “AI wrangling” or whatever.

The dark side for this case:  inequality skyrockets.  A few tech overlords own the AIs, reaping trillions, while the rest scramble for UBI scraps.

Civilization-wise, it’s transformative: endless innovation, but if ASI “solves” economics without humans, we enter a post-scarcity utopia . . . or dystopia, where labor is worthless and purpose is a luxury.

If we’ve hit AGI/ASI now (debatable, but let’s play along), the bubble accelerates short-term as companies race to integrate, then crashes when overcapacity hits.  Data centers become obsolete overnight if ASI optimizes compute down to a laptop.  The fallout?  Trillions in sunk costs, like building railroads right before cars took over.

Scooby Doo® taught many kids that if they smoked enough pot, their dog would talk and help them look for snacks.

If AI fails (and there is no sign of this) we end up in, at least, a dotcom-style recession.

At least.

If AI succeeds, in the best case we end up in a strange, post-scarcity world, but a world that hardly needs us.

I guess we could make it up on volume?

 

It Came From . . . 1995

“Man, there’s not a year that goes by, not a year, that I don’t read about some escalator accident involving some bastard kid that could’ve easily been avoided had some parent, I don’t care which one, but some parent conditioned him to fear and respect the escalator.” – Mallrats

Is that Neandergibson? Joe Piscopo?

While the 1980s allowed for gonzo productions of very uneven quality to become classics (Better Off Dead, for instance) the 1990s box office was much more crowded and the studios began to spend even more on the films. I’d say that a random movie from 1995 was more professionally made than a random movie from any year in the 1980s, but had a lot less heart.

As to the continuation of the series, I’m not sure if we’ll do 1996 or end it here. I think I’m done with the 1970s, though I have another idea that amuses me that we’ll try in late August. As always, I’m also willing to consider lists of genre flicks, but pretty soon that ends up with movies no one ever saw.

As usual, sequels are excluded on the list. I don’t consider Mallrats a sequel. Thankfully, I make the rules. You may appeal. It will be denied.

As an aside, I don’t think you can overestimate the propaganda impact of films. Just like listening to music puts your brain into a state of suggestable hypnosis (which is why I like to listen to kick-ass music rather than sad stuff most days) so does film. Film takes the next dimension above music by adding visual stimulus, making the hypnosis even more effective. What I take in does impact me, so I consider that more and more as I grow older and as it’s thrown in our faces with the last decade’s worth of propaganda films. I understand now why some don’t like horror films for just that reason. I do like them, still, but I’ve become much more selective as to what I let in the transom.

Speaking of which . . . .

That poster gives me tentacles. I mean tingles. And it looks like Ralph Macchio.

In the Mouth of Madness – I love good Lovecraftian horror. Cosmic horror is at its best when it sketches a universe of limitless expanse where we’re just nubs sitting in the darkness while titanic forces beyond our understanding play out around us. It’s like whistling through the graveyard, if you will. When I first saw In the Mouth of Madness I hated it, because I didn’t get it. Now? My opinion is that it’s great cosmic horror, and shows off Sam Neill as he unwittingly brings about the end of the world. With popcorn. Like most of Carpenter’s work, it has a large following, but was box office poison. But he gets the last laugh in this one.

I have a particular set of skills. Murder and guitar solos.

Rob Roy – Scots fighting to be fiercely independent, while being swindled and taken advantage of by rape-y foreigners? If only they would do that in 2025. Tim Roth steals the show in a perfectly creepy performance with hair appropriate for Isaac Newton if he played guitar for Queen®. It did okay at the box office.

If you’ve seen the movie, this makes a little bit of sense.

Crimson Tide – Another submarine movie because, well, why not? In this one, though, Tony Scott (same guy who cooked a Goose in Top Gun) gets the most out of Denzel Washington and the late Gene Hackman. To be clear, Hackman was still alive during the movie. The two are officers on a nuclear missile submarine that have to decide if they’re going to shoot off nuclear missiles after losing communications with Starfleet®. Me? I would have launched the missiles because that’s one way to get in the history books.

Should this one be called “Bravefelt”?

Braveheart – Tons of historical inaccuracy? Check. Mel Gibson with more hair than an 80’s glam band? Check. Ludicrously long runtime of nearly three hours? Also check. In spite of these things, this was a huge hit. Swords. Women. Bravery. Sophie Marceau at her peak Marceau-ness. What’s not to love?

I still remember when he outran Kevin Spacey to maintain his virginity in the climax.

Apollo 13 – This movie follows the life of a young transgender long-distance runner (Tom Hanks) who needs an older mentor (Kevin Bacon) to buy him shoes because he grew up in a third-world country that couldn’t afford to have a Nike® store or electricity or food.

I need to post this on Rob’s X® feed.

Judge Dredd – Some comic book purists don’t like this version because in the comic books Dredd never takes off his helmet, but Stallone wanted to show off his hair. The (much darker) 2012 reboot Dredd features a Dredd™ that always covers his hedd. I didn’t care, really, since I found this movie both stupid and hilarious and one of Rob Schneider’s best roles. Huge flop. I wouldn’t recommend it, but yet I enjoyed it. Does that mean I hate myself? Anyway, the 2012 version is a much better movie.

Wait, what if every suspect was Rob Schneider? That would be wacky!

The Usual Suspects – Cost $6 million, made nearly $70 million. This one gets the most out of fairly talented cast in a crime mystery, and I will admit that the ending did surprise me when I watched it on a rental VHS tape from Blockbuster™, because I did not know that late fees could get that high. I still don’t know how the tape ended up behind the couch. Maybe it was Keyser Söze?

Wow, those guys are more swole than I recalled. The 90s rocked!

Mallrats – A $6 million dollar budget. $2 million in ticket sales. I think the budget skips all the advertisement for this thing – you couldn’t go anywhere young adults were in 1995 without seeing ads for this movie months before it came out. This movie is a very stupid comedy that brings us Jason Lee (My Name is Earl) as a guy on a quest to get his girlfriend back. I think. It’s funny in a juvenile way, but was also the product of its time. Watched it with my boys, they thought it was hilarious, but were also fascinated, like anthropologists studying a world that existed a thousand years ago.

I hope it’s as good as the sequel to Hamlet.

Leaving Las Vegas – Darkest movie on this list. Watched it once, not sure I have it in me to watch it again. The guy who wrote the semi-autographical novel it was based on killed himself when he found out it was going to be a movie. Guess he really, really, really, really didn’t like Nic Cage.

Heat – I was debating if I was going to do “It Came From . . . . 1995” at all, but the meme above (as found) convinced me that I should. Big hit that I somehow missed and watched a few years ago after Aesop mentioned it. No weapons were injured during the filming of this movie, but not for lack of ammo. Thank heavens Sig® hadn’t introduced the P320™ yet or else half of the ammo fired wouldn’t have needed an actor fanning the trigger. Related news: I hear Alec Baldwin is going to be Sig©’s spokesman.

Four Rooms or Fur Rooms?

Four Rooms – An anthology film that I saw in an arthouse theater (the only time I’ve ever been to one) with a buddy. I guess being in an arthouse theater is with another dude is the gayest thing I’ve ever done in my life, besides that one time I had a wine cooler. Regardless, I enjoyed it, since each one of the four films was essentially a joke tied together by Tim Roth’s best comedic performance. The first film is by far the weakest, but, I can’t call it awful because, boobs.

“Waiter, there’s a rubber chicken in my soup.”
“No there isn’t.”
“Yes, there is. What is it doing there.”
“The backstroke, I believe.”
Now for something completely different.

12 Monkeys – Is he crazy, or is it time travel? Why not both? Terry Gilliam was generally the weakest member of Monty Python®, but he’s done much better as a director. Regardless, this movie brings together Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt in roles very much against the stuff they normally did, with Pitt even getting nominated for an Oscar™.

Not included? Seven. Species. Strange Days. Sense and Sensibility. Really, any movie starting with ‘S’ from 1995. I kid. Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead also nearly made the list.

What did I miss?

It Came From . . . Patriotism

“Freedom!” – Braveheart

“The most difficult thing about being humble is not being able to brag about it.” – George S. Patton

Housekeeping:  We should be a go on podcast tomorrow night, though I’m on the fence on a Friday post, as I just might take the day off.

I’ll change things up a bit due to Fourth of July (or as it’s known in the metric world “Friday”), and have a slightly different take on films this month – patriotic films.  In this, I don’t necessarily confine the patriots in question to entirely American patriots – I do allow some room for a couple of films that show patriotism from other cultures.  These are in something of an order, but don’t put too much on that.  Let’s just say the easiest to include on the list are first, and the ones that just barely made it are at the bottom.

I will say, I liked the way the A.I. posters turned out this time.

So, here are my top 10 patriotic movies:

No man could salute like Patton.  At least, no human man.

Patton

George S. Patton knew he was going to be a general in the United States Army from when he was a child.  He lived that life to become the enigma that George C. Scott portrayed perfectly on screen.  Patton wanted glory, but also was personally filled with bravery and admired the men who displayed it.  Patton was for an America ruled by Americans, and was willing to lead hundreds of thousands of men to capture 82,000 square miles (6.3 megaliters) of Europe and capturing nearly a million enemy soldiers.

No matter how he tried to retire, they kept dragging him back in.

The Patriot

How could I skip this movie?  Well, I couldn’t.  The United States wasn’t given to Americans, it was willed into existence by men such as the one played by St. Mel of Gibson in this film.  Interestingly (to me at least), the main character is pulled into military service not because of his zeal to kick the British out of the colonies.  Nope.  His motivation is personal – his son being killed by a British officer untouchable by justice.

If he had been born in 1970, he’d have been William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland and Walmart® greeter.

Braveheart

I warned you that not all films would show strictly American patriotism, and this one chronicles the life of William Wallace, the Scottish rebel who fought against England to attempt to free Scotland.  He failed to free Scotland, but it wasn’t long afterwards that Robert the Bruce did lead my ancestors against my other ancestors to win freedom.  Braveheart clocks in at somewhere close to three hours, but doesn’t seem that long.  A good film, and St. Mel again chews up the scenery.

Is that a French submarine surrendering?

Master and Commander:  The Far Side of the World

One of my favorite movies.  A captain, very well played by Russell Crowe takes his ship on a journey to fight the French, who only surrendered once in this film.  This line, about Lord Nelson tells the tale:  “The second time… The second time he told me a story… about how someone offered him a boat cloak on a cold night. And he said no, he didn’t need it. That he was quite warm. His zeal for his king and country kept him warm.  I know it sounds absurb, and were it from another man, you’d cry out “Oh, what pitiful stuff” and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm. But with Nelson… you felt your heart glow.”

The Soviets weren’t expecting what they got when they parachuted into Henson, Colorado. 

Red Dawn

1984 was Reagan’s year.  He had made it clear that the United States would stand toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union, and would win.  At that point, the country was together much more so than now, and you can see it in the vote total Ronnie got for re-election.  A movie like Red Dawn was a slam dunk – plucky American teenagers being insurgent guerillas against an invading multicultural force of commies.  Huh – that was back when we could sense danger, I guess.

Well, I guess we know what they serve there now.

300

Submit?  To you?  Here?  In Sparta?  No.  Because . . . This.  Is.  Sparta.  Leonidas fought against all odds to contain the Persian horde from entering Greece because that’s patriotism.  Did he die?  Yes.  Gloriously.  So gloriously that he’ll be remembered in 10,000 years.  I think that’s how long the A.I.’s memory cache will last.

I can hear Kenny Loggins now, singing about Maverick after he lost his pilot’s license, “I waited in the loading zone . . . “

Top Gun:  Maverick

I found this a much better film than the original.  I always thought the original was boy meets girl, but with fighter jets.  Here?  It’s all about the mission.  And Tom Cruise flying that F-14 Tomcat one last time before Social Security kicks in.

“Houston, we seem to have two more problems.”

Apollo 13

Not all patriotic films have to do with war, and Apollo 13 is a good example.  The movie is about Americans fighting to win the Space Race and get to the Moon.  Oh, we did that already?  NASA has made it boring?  Well, let’s see how they do if their ship explodes while they’re the farthest away from Earth that anyone besides a few other Americans have been.  Excellently plotted, filmed, and told by an ensemble cast of great actors led by Tom Hanks, it’s a movie I can just start watching from any point and enjoy.

Wonder how this would have gone if all the characters were played by Tom Cruise, like some old Peter Sellers movie?

Saving Private Ryan Cruise

This one was the last on my list.  I’m not sure why.  It does feature the everyman (Hanks) who sacrificed everything because that’s what the orders said to do.  It features the shared burden of that sacrifice on those who survive.  It’s stunningly filmed, and, though the story drags a bit in the middle, is tense.  I think that the reason that it’s here is that it’s the film I’d simply be least likely to re-watch of all of these.  YMMV.

If this was a top 10 list – it is one shy.  I left room for one I missed or didn’t think about.

What did I miss?    Other notable films that nearly made the list include:  Midway, We Were Soldiers, The Green Berets, Gettysburg, and Gods and Generals. Gettysburg honestly had the best chance, but I would have had to watch it again, and the movie lasts about 74 hours, or two hours longer than the battle itself.  I kid.  It’s 271 minutes, or 27.1 metric hours.

The Three Horsemen and One Bikini of the Apocalypse

“Apocalypse cow? Apocalypse wow!” – The Tick (2001)

I love this joke like there’s no tomorrow.

  • I. Job Replacement.
  • The Multicultural West.
  • The Fiat Financial House of Cards.
  • Sydney Sweeny’s bikini.

Each of these, if dealt with on its own, presents a danger as great as being between Gavin Newsom and a camera. But it is likely something we could work through as a country peacefully. Heck, maybe even two of the three, though that’s difficult, and history has the receipts:

For example, when the United States was a nation, we worked through the Great Depression. The Great Depression was likely brought about at the fundamental level from the transformation of the nation from an agrarian society driven by horsepower to a manufacturing colossus driven by iron, steam, and electricity. Sort of if A.I. were cars and assembly line production, but covered in tasty Radium®.

If a radioactive spider makes Spiderman®, would a radioactive dog create Doberman®?

Of course there was a finance side of the Great Depression. It was egged on by a stock market mania, margin credit, and the optimism brought about by new technology. Stocks never go down, right? That creates a bumpy road for a bit. But, as we were a singular people, we got through it.

I mean, the single bloodiest war in human history counted as a bit of a bumpy road, right?

We also dealt with multi-cultural forces in America in our history.

  • First, the founders only allowed in Western Europeans,
  • Second by fighting, defeating, and corralling Indians (some of them are still sore about this),
  • And, finally, by blocking out many non-Western Europeans with the Immigration Act of 1924 since we already had the recipes for all their good food.

1924 was when we as a nation realized that we were getting too much “diversity” too quickly and saw that certain groups of foreigners couldn’t or wouldn’t assimilate and never be Americans. We dealt with that in a calm manner and got picky and sorted diversity like a bouncer at a cartel nightclub. We maintained (for a time) the basic ethnic makeup of the United States – we didn’t throw them out, but we made sure we’d outnumber them.

I wonder if he and his siblings were born apart?

We dealt with fiat currency in the wake of the Revolutionary War victory when the phrase “isn’t worth a Continental” referred to the money printing excesses that led to the Constitutional Convention and the Constitutional clause of “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make any thing but cold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.” The nation survived, though it did end up changing our form of government entirely.

Lincoln floated fake cash during the Civil War to pay for it, and that could arguably be said to have started “The Long Depression” – a hangover period from 1873-1896 as we vomited out all of that fiat money. The Long Depression was also exacerbated by the transition of the American manufacturing from craftsmen to big factories.

The establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank™ followed by Nixon ignoring the clear intent of that clause in 1971 led to the crack-up we see today. Money, gold and silver, has been replaced by cash which is too expensive to print – we can just use ones and zeroes.

I’ve written about all of these three separately, and for the most part, we as a nation were able to make it through, but it’s important that we realize that we’re dealing with all three of these leading to a crisis right now when we are observably no longer a nation.

The ICE agent in Los Angeles needs National Guard and Marine protection for their anxiety, I heard on the news. Something about his panic attacks.

The first is A.I. It has already been a steamroller that has eliminated tens of thousands of jobs. I would expect that soon enough it will be hundreds of thousands. Recently, I called up my bank to do some banking. The transaction wasn’t unique, it probably happens thousands of times a day. The person I was talking to, “Mitch” had a perfect Midwestern accent. What tipped me off was that “Mitch” didn’t connect the reason for the error to the resolution. “Mitch” transferred me to “Anna” because he wasn’t authorized to grant a request.

“Anna” had, of course, the thickest Indian accent – the kind that is so poorly pronounced that it is nearly unintelligible if fast. Her actual name was probably something like Ananneedanothasylabble-Ganish-Prajeeta. At that moment that the smart Midwestern dude transfers the call to a barely verbal woman in Ramamamadingpoopabad, I realized that Mitch was an A.I.

As an anon mentioned on my last post on A.I., “Think about all of the Indian scammers out there today . . . Now think about what happens if AI wipes out most of the call center and coding jobs causing most of India’s 1.3 billion people to be out of work. It’s going to get ugly.” He had a point. A.I. is going to make it too expensive to pay Indians pennies a day just to steal money from old ladies. This is India’s worst nightmare.

I always wondered how you got down from an elephant, then Pa Wilder told me that you get down from a goose.

This scenario requires no Artificial Superintelligence. This requires only the application of existing capabilities. Said differently: ChatGPT 4.0® already has an I.Q. greater than three-quarters of the Subcontinent.

This has implications, but match it with the house of cards that is the world financial system. That thing was already strained tighter than Syndey Sweeney’s bikini holding in the all the printed money flooding in from the United States and the world. A country like India, unable to feed all the Indians, will collapse. No jobs. No prospects of jobs.

Though the research for tonight was fun.

But it will be, perhaps, worst in the West. On top of the economic dislocation of the A.I. Revolution, on top of the piles of fake money, we are not even a people.

The latest riots in L.A. have proven that out. Most of the “immigrants” that have come to “enrich” us have actually come to replace us. That’s their goal. You can watch on the news the Pakistanis fighting the Indians over which of them has the best claim to London. You can watch young men of military age strutting in Los Angeles with the flags of foreign countries like a U.N. parade, but somehow worse. You can read posts on X® or even Reddit©: they are not here to assimilate – they are here to conquer and take over.

This adds the final layer of instability required to ensure that the United States and the whole of the West is facing the direst crisis since the threats to Europe that were ended at the Battle of Tours in 732, or the Battle of Vienna in 1683.

This level of crisis is graver than any the West has faced in over 340 years, if not greater. Whatever comes out of this will be different.

Thankfully, we still have all the tasty Radium™ you can eat!