Monthly Archives: May 2022

My Upcoming Geeky Artistic Weekend

Which artistically is starting tonight, Thursday.

Tonight, I plan to go out and see the foreign language Finnish horror film Hatching before it vanishes from theaters in my area. (I must admit I adore my AMC A-List subscription that makes rolling the dice on movie so much easier.)

Also tonight is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. My sweetie-wife and I will be giving the series a try. Now, I’ll confess that lately the trek shows have not been working for me but hope springs eternal.

Saturday evening I plan to venture to San Diego’s Balboa Park for more experiments in night photography. Last weekend when I left the secret morgue I spied the California Tower lit by colored lights and thought it would be a good subject for my meager photographic skills.

Sunday morning my sweetie-wife and I will go out and catch the new Doctor Stranger movie.

All in all I am looking forward to this weekend.

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Why David French is Likely Wrong

David French, social conservative and never Trumper, has said for quite a while and reiterated his stance in the wake of the leak from SCOTUS, that overturning the precedent of Roe v Wade and its associated constitutional rights is far less consequential than most people assume. His argument is built upon three core legs and in each of these I think it is likely events will prove him wrong.

The three premises of his arguments are as thus:

  1. Few voters actually value the abortion issues highly
  2. The nation is already divided by the states into stable abortion zones.
  3. With the issues delegitimized as a right and returned to politics the compromise nature of politics will cool the waters and finalize into an agreed upon solution.

To support his premises that few voters actually care about the issues French often cites recent election data and he is particularly fond of Youngkin’s victory this year in Virginia. Exit polls do indeed show that few voters listed abortion as a driving factor in their decisions. However, this follows on decades of the issues being ‘settled law’ and if you are under 50 your entire life had been one in which this was a right. It is true that the storm has been gathering for some time and with the 3 justices appointed to SCOTUS by the previous administration this outcome was highly predicable. But I would contend that there is a vast emotional gulf between what is predicted and an event happening. A live example of this is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For months we have been warned that Russian was likely to invade it democratic neighbor. For weeks the US warned that the invasion was coming soon, not likely, not possible, but actually coming. The American electorate cared very little. Ukraine was not pressing political issue. And now it is. That seems very odd, we have quite clear polling that people really didn’t consider Ukraine very important, so they shouldn’t now when the easily predictable thing came to pass. But they do. Because it a very different thing to speak of possibilities and another to have reality come crashing into the consciousness. Being told smoking causes cancer and being told you have cancer are emotionally quite different in their impact and I think the same mechanism will be at work here. For decades people have been warned their rights are in danger and now those rights are gone. It is quite likely there will be a political firestorm.

Yes, the nation is already divided into states with abortion freedoms and those without. Far more abortions, even controlling for population, in California than Mississippi, but there is no reason to believe that will hold after the destruction of the right. Already liberal at the national level are scrambling in search of a way, probably in vain, to pass national legislation on this issue. I have no doubts that future government with the GOP in control will also attempt to pass laws criminalizing abortion nationally. After all, if you sincerely believe that this ‘murders children,’ a premise I do not accept, then how can you do nothing to stop it once you have cleared the barricade that has barred you from doing so? No, once Roe is dealt with the next objective will be a national legal movement. I am sure French would argue that it is against conservative principle to overrule the states with a national law. I will point out that there is no ‘conservative principle’ that held the GOP back from embracing and literally idolizing Trump. No ‘principle’ will stay their hand here.

And now we come to the most delusional and wish-casting section of his argument, that political compromise will be found.

We have a repeat of the trouble from the second premise, if someone believes that abortion is murder what possible compromise can that person make? How could they say, you may ‘murder these babies but not these?’ It’s preposterous but set that aside for the moment, either because it is untrue, the political movers and shakers do not hold this belief dear to their hearts or because it is impractical the third legs still collapses. Because of physical sorting and gerrymandering fewer and fewer political areas are competitive between the two camps, California is not going to compromises and give ground to the powerless GOP within the state and Mississippi will behave the same toward the Democrats there. As with every other issue before us there is absolutely no incentive for any political party to compromise. It only opens you up to attack from your more dedicated factions and wins you nothing in the contest. The battle has now crossed no man’s land and the two factions are going to be in hand-to-hand knifing fighting.

Of course, this will not stop with abortion. Yes, the leaked said that this reasoning doesn’t apply to anything else at all, but this is from the same liars who proclaimed Roe as ‘settled law.’ Sadly, the war only grows.

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Secret Morgue #3: Final Report

The Secret Morgue, hosted by Film Geeks San Diego, is a one marathon festive for themed horror films with 12 hours of movies, munchies, and madness where the titles of the presentations are secret until actually screened.

Returning after a two-year pandemic hiatus the theme for Secret Morgue #3 was ‘witches.’ IN addition to the films and catered food we were treated to a lecture on the history of witches and witched in Comics.

Film #1: HAXAN (192) From Sweden this silent film, in a beautifully restored edition, if part ‘history’ and part narrative focusing on the myth of witches in the Middle Ages. I had never seen this movie and it was a pleasure.

Film #2: The Witchfinder General (AKA The Conqueror Worm) (1968) Vincent Price stars as Mathew Hopkins self-proclaimed Witch Finder General dur the English Civil war of the 17th century. The story presents no actual witches but the very real terror of unchecked power and prejudice. My sweetie-wife reminded me that we had watched this on DVD together but somehow I had forgotten it entirely.

Film #3: City of the Dead (AKA Horror Hotel) (1960) A flawed film with a bunch of brits pretending to me Americans as a small New England town is beset by a witch burned there in the 17th century. College students and professors arrive searching for a missing friend and unravel the mystery. With a better budget and script the core concept could have been quite good but a lackluster production and meandering script undercut what works.

Film #4: Inferno (1980) Written and directed by Dario Argento this is the middle film of Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy, between Susperia (1977) and The Mother of Tears (2007). The narrative of the movie is quite fractured, split among several viewpoint characters, most of whom come to grizzly ends, and as is typical of Argento’s work, mood, image, and style supersede story. It doesn’t quite have the dream logic of a David Lynch film nor the defined narrative of a typical story leaving it somewhere in a no man’s land between the two.

Film #5: Black Sunday (AKA The Mask of Satan) (1960) Director Mario Bava worked in a number of genres, mystery, Giallo, and of course horror. This film stars Barbara Steel in two roles as the 16th century witch, condemned along with her vampire lover, and the 18th century princess destined to be the witch’s vessel to revivification. Set in the eastern European country of Moldova, Black Sunday is a stylish gothic horror with impressive in camera transformation effects.

Film #6: Lvx Aeterna (2019) Written and directed by Gasper Noe of Irreversible fame this film is in a mock documentary style following two actresses, playing fictionalized version of themselves, who are about to portray witches burned at the stake. It is a short film, 50 minutes, but the late hour, my exhaustion, the foreign language soundtrack, and promised intense flashing sequences cause me to fear a possible migraine trigger and I instead left early but this is in no way a comment on the film’s quality only my own self-preservation in face of possible intense agony. (Driving into headlights at night with a migraine is not recommended.)

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