The Uses Of Barbarity

Zombie Apocalypse Bloodletting?

Why does ISIS conduct so many grisly executions of people, whether they be combatants or villagers? Is it merely for the shock effect that the accompanying videos will have on the West?

That is hardly to be believed. The shock-effect of the ISIS iconography of violence is a side effect, a neat trick that makes it ever so much more appealing to the people behind the executions, but it is doubtful that it is the main purpose of such barbarism, for the shock-effect may increase the push for military intervention, not decrease it.

No.
The main purpose of ISIS' cruel violence to human beings - not to historical artifacts - is to produce soldiers who suffer from PTSD.

The men and women who have committed the atrocities will return home to their own countries; some will be witting agents of destruction, but by far the greater portion of returnees will be unwitting "Manchurian Candidates" who will be haunted by their crimes - not "brainwashed", but rendered compliant to anyone who is able to give them relief - and who will be driven to desperation to find some way to stop the constant revisiting of the horrors they committed.

They will find surcease of pain through talking with ISIS agents, who will counsel them in the therapeutic ways of violence against their neighbors...

One of the goals of the great satanic ISIS to to create an army of the damned stretching across the face of the earth, never resting from their pain, never finding escape from their damnation, ever prey to the unscrupulous manipulation of someone who promises some form of salvation.

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World War R

 

World War Z or the Fall Of Saigon...

I saw the film World War Z.
It was so bad that I forgot what it was all about, and had to read a review to remind myself.

I do not think I have ever seen a duller film, unless it was the film about ice rink zambonis going rogue,  which was produced in Canada and titled World War Zed.

I see no reason to add my knocks to the already huge knock pile of complaints against Pitt enterprises.
However, the other morning I recalled that I said that Zombie films and Vampire stories are a "Diseased Resurrection" Myth, that our society and times has created for God-alone knows what horrid reasons are hid in our breasts.

Resurrection is the end of entropy.

Resurrection denies the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

There's a symbolic mythos for ya! World War R!


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Cuba's Black Hole

 

The Spaceship USS Cygnus in The Black Hole

If you have never seen the film The Black Hole, I shall let Wikipedia synopsize it for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole

The Black Hole is a 1979 American science fiction film directed by Gary Nelson for Walt Disney Productions...

Nearing the end of a long mission exploring deep space, the spacecraft USS Palomino is returning to Earth...

The Palomino crew discover a black hole in space with a spaceship nearby, somehow defying the hole's massive gravitational pull. The ship is identified as the long-lost USS Cygnus... The Palomino...  manages to move back to the Cygnus and finds itself able to dock to what initially appears to be an abandoned vessel.

The Palomino crew warily boards the Cygnus and soon encounter the ship's commander, Dr. Hans Reinhardt, a brilliant scientist. Aided by a crew of faceless, black-robed android drones and his sinister looking robot Maximilian, Reinhardt explains that he has lived all alone on the Cygnus for years....

 

 Dr. Reinhardt and his Robot, Maximilian

Reinhardt then reveals that he has spent the past 20 years studying the black hole and intends to fly the Cygnus through it...

The rest of the Palomino crew grow suspicious of the faceless drones' human-like behaviour: [one of the Palomino crew] sees a [drone] limping and [another] witnesses a [drone] funeral and discovers the Cygnus crew's personal items in the ship's living quarters...  a battered early model robot... explains that the faceless drones are in fact the human crew, who mutinied when Reinhardt refused to return to Earth and had been lobotomized and "reprogrammed" by Reinhardt to serve him...

 Dr. Reinhardt's "Drones"

When I first saw the film, I thought the drones were zombie-like creatures, who although dead, were kept functioning in some ghastly  science-techno-"there are things man was not meant to know"- manner,  which would have made the film even more gross. Not to say the film was entirely disturbing: Slim Pickens did the voice of the loveable little good robot, and there was an uncommon mixture of horror and slapstick.


Now we turn to this:

Al Jazeera America
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/05/us-stops-force-feeding-guantanamo-inmate-20145172313714654.html

A US judge has ordered the military to stop force-feeding a hunger-striking prisoner at Guantanamo Bay naval base.

The temporary order, issued on Friday by Judge Gladys Kessler, means that staff at the facility cannot feed Syrian prisoner Abu Wa'el Dhiab until a hearing next Wednesday.

"While the Department follows the law and only applies enteral feeding in order to preserve life, we will, of course, comply with the judge's order here," Defense Department spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale said in response to the ruling.

Kessler also ordered the US military to stop taking Dhiab out his cell if he refused to go to feedings and said the government had to keep all videotape evidence of forcible cell removal and force-feeding until the hearing.

It is the first time a judge has ordered an end to force-feeding of a prisoner in Guantanamo...

It seems to me that the government does not know what to do with the people in Guantanamo, yet will not part with them, nor put them on trial.

It will not even let them die.

Perhaps we can look forward to zombie drones in Gitmo in the near future.

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Raccoon City: Nation's First Real Zombie Outbreak

In the Sacramento Bee:

MIAMI -- Only the police tape, the bloodstain on the ground and a grotesque mystery remained after the brutal attack on the MacArthur Causeway in which one naked man was shot dead by police after he attacked another naked man and began eating his face...

 http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/28/4521279/questions-remain-about-why-naked.html

This is too perfect... too perfect.
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Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/28/4521279/questions-remain-about-why-naked.html#storylink=cpy

Premonitions of Zombies

Alzheimer's and other dementias are expected to at least double within the next few decades. I suppose this is part of the future we have subliminally been glimpsing in our spate of Zombie films. Of course, mostly young kids watch such films, and they learn that the way to deal with the brain-dead is to kill them.
Well, if the "brain-dead" refers to us afflicted with varying degrees of dementia, I guess I know what form that future will take.

I have found that most popular "scripts" come in many forms: films, books, and "urban legends" and things we think about. The only thing different between a film about Zombies and my thinking about Zombies is the level of expertise brought to bear in creating a finished product: mine is singular and crude, while the film is a joint effort and polished......

... it is the "polish" that makes us think it is all a dream, a fiction, and it will never happen. We are used to a roughly hewn future. But when Disaster comes, it comes well-formed and with a cast of thousands.

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Zombie Media

Post production work is almost finished on my new film, Cable TV Zombies, so look for it to open at a theater nearby. I shall not take a break and get right into my next one, sort of an thriller with an erotic undertone, El Laberinto Dos Sostenes. Cable TV Zombies, or CTZ as I shall hereafter call it, missed the primaries, but will be around in good time for the general election. At the risk of giving it all away, it is all about how a malfunctioning satellite, about the size of a bus, falls to Earth, scattering its radioactive material (!?) around a cemertery, thereby (as usual ) causing some of the more obnoxious inert types to rise from their graves. A crowd of these Zombies converge on major Media centers and take over the cable TV coverage of politics, with special focus on a network called Fuchs ( note: German for "fox" ) News and this gives us a chance to make numerous sophomoric puns on the network name by some of the sillier Zombs. There is the usual Sunday Morning Political Talk shows with Zombie hosts asking inane questions ( "What is you opinion of passing the Deficit on to our grandchildren...particularly since we will still be around?" -Surely not? Well, yes. We're Zombies after all...or more properly, Re-Animated Previously Used Life Forms. -I say, do you think they'll be pissed? Who...? -The grandkids...will they be pissed? Probably. Very probably....very irate. They'll probably piss on yer grave. -No! Well, it's good, then, that we no longer inhabit the loamy mess!") There are Zombie books about The Greatest Generation and Zombie books about How Great Is Ronald Reagan and Zombies get jobs as columnists for major newspapers. ("I wuz in the airport the other day and saw a book about Kipling. I ate a few pages, then did a regurge...like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, only more pompously. I asked the constant reader why Kipling ? Or, more succinctly, why do Democrats "kiple"...or not "kiple"...I ferget which.") A new Zombie jumps into the presidential race, speaks to the Zombie generation - a demographic that seems to encompass just about all the populace - and is elected president. We invade Iran on February 1, 2009. Zombies do not see things as infinite shades of grey, just black and white....or warms brains or cold. Shadings of meaning...cause Zombie...go insane, as if being insane is worse that the formaldehyde Dawn of the Dead that comes every day after a thermonookler exchange. (NOTE: ever cool Zombie Semiotic here! Think of Nuclear War, think of millions killed! Think of the life-giving sun ever afterwards in a pukey haze...think of the Sun floating in a jar of formaldehyde accompanied by a wrinkled raisin Earth, circling forever and waiting for the Medical Examiner of the gods to arrive.) I could not post a trailer, but I managed to get the Woman Newscaster from Fuchs News. Notice her hair is black. This was the Art Director's idea to differentiate Zombie Media ( black hair and crazed and lusting for eats ) from the usual Media (blond hair and accentuated bosoms and leering guys ). And her name is Ann.

"We will be covering the Election outcomes like flies on dead meat. Stay tuned.Speaking of dead meat, there's an accident working to clear at 24th and Lex. Many brains scattered..."