The schedule for next month’s ISIL conference/retreat in Phoenix is gloriously online. I’m doing an equality dance and a Rand/class-conflict dance.
Archive | December, 2009
Lords of Barsoom, Part 2
I don’t know about you, but the Dejah Thoris I remember would have had no difficulty escaping from this incredibly flimsy-looking cage:
Did I mention that this is going to be very bad?
Lords of Barsoom
While Disney and Pixar have been putting together a big-budget version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, due out in 2012, apparently the folks at the Asylum – who have churned out a number of low-budget direct-to-dvd Burroughs and Verne adapatations, as well as such cleverly-titled films as Transmorphers, Snakes on a Train, and AVH: Alien vs. Hunter – have been working their magic on the same source material with Princess of Mars, another direct-to-dvd extravaganza that I hadn’t even heard about until a passing reference on AICN this morning. (Here the main goal seems to be to hitch a ride on Avatar’s coattails; when the main Barsoom movie comes out, I imagine the Asylum will emit a sequel.)
You can see a trailer and some stills at this site. Yes, that’s Traci Lords as a blonde, white-skinned Dejah Thoris; and yes, those are two-armed tharks. Yes, this looks very bad. Yes, I’ll have to get it.
Carson Defends Carson
Check out Kevin Carson on Rachel Carson, DDT, and global warming. (And don’t miss ex-agorist J. Neil Schulman’s creative interpretive stylings in the comments section.)
The Land of We All
Check out Charles’ latest Freeman article, this one on the healthcare debate.
(The title of this blog post comes from a piece by Richard Mitchell.)
A People’s History of Pandora, Part 2
Libertarians are divided on Avatar (which I haven’t seen yet); check out Peter Suderman, Stephan Kinsella, Peter Klein, David Kramer, and Lester Hunt.
Lester writes, inter alia:
What makes the business corporation in this movie so evil? Well, it engages in the following practices: using military force to invade and conquer foreign lands, slaughtering wholesale numbers of the inhabitants and burning their dwellings, all in order to steal their property. … Gee, I thought, I can’t think of a single business corporation that engages in those particular practices. Office Depot doesn’t, and I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Dell Inc don’t either.
So in the comments section I responded:
I can’t think of many businesses that engage in those particular practices all on their own. But I can think of plenty of businesses that have either gotten governments to engage in those practices on their behalf (examples range from the East India Company to the United Fruit/Brands Company) or have themselves engaged in those practices on some government’s behalf (e.g. Blackwater, DynCorp).