Deja vu all over again

Everything Is A Remix: THE MATRIX from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

The Big Suck Theory

The Undertoad is coming. As Mr. Anonymous observes ...

"Can you feel the action?

Can you feel the wave action? The pull?

... at the beach as the water recedes... as it suctions away from shore like a great inhalation; before the biblical wave strikes...

... that's what I feel now... in every temporary atom of every fleeting cell composing this wave- form mirage I tendentiously 'observe' into this familiar particle- based heap...

(... a good barometer in times past... rather like Sky sensing the storm and retreating to the closet, tout de suite...)

Thar's gold in them thar ills dept.

Is gold being suppressed?

According to the Motley Fool, yeah ...

The money quote. In this case, literally:

"... Whatever you think about gold, there can be no doubt that gold has dramatically re-asserted its immutable role within the global financial realm over the past decade. Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan conceded in 2009 that "gold still holds reign over the financial system as the ultimate source of payment." The world experimented with moving away from gold beginning in 1971 with the "Nixon Shock," but extremely poor stewardship of the key paper currencies has ushered gold back as the sole currency immune to the ravages of obscene debt and competitive devaluation. On that point, the case is quite simply closed.

The question remains, however, whether Western central banks may be intervening in the gold market to mitigate or delay the appreciation of gold against their troubled paper currencies..."

Link to full article:

Is Gold Being Suppressed?

Profound revelation

Obama is the sheriff in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles.

Got Moloko?

Contagion

Director Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is a catchy movie. Infectious, even. OK, I'll stop.

It's a movie about a plague – on the surface. The word alone is terrifying. Plague! It pushes our fear buttons. Contagion doesn't. "Don't Fear the Reaper" never plays. It’s not The Stand. It’s not even Outbreak. The movie is cerebral, which probably equals box-office death.

Soderbergh obviously made a decision: “The world doesn’t need another formulaic ‘Agggggh! It’s the plague!’ Hollywood movie. I’m not going to make that movie. It's been done.”

The basic plot?

Short version: A killer disease appears out of nowhere and spreads. More and more people start dying. Nobody knows what to do at first. People in labcoats slowly figure it out, and deal with it.

Long version: Beth (Gwyneth Patrow) takes a trip to Hong Kong, eats some bad pork, gets sick, comes back to the USA and drops dead. Her husband (Matt Damon) is devastated – and feels worse when his son dies the same way. Then people around the planet start dying. Medical researchers scramble to figure out what’s killing them — hundreds die before they find out it’s a virus. They try to keep it quiet, but can’t. It's a full-blown epidemic -- and the word is out. Various health organizations fight to isolate the virus and create a vaccine while simultaneously dealing with global panic. Millions die before they do.

Soderbergh takes a low-key approach to this juicy material — and avoids Hollywood clichés like the plague. (Sorry.) He approaches the disease's spread like he’s making a documentary on an epidemic that actually happened. Soderbergh's movie is scientifically literate — with a damn smart screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, built on solid medical logic, in the Michael Crichton tradition. Our understanding unfolds, based on the detective work of the movie's doctors and medical generalissimos. The epidemiology (and jargon behind the medical detective work) seems plausible.

As a sidenote, this kind of exposition is a bitch to do without boring the audience into a coma. Soderbergh, Burns and the actors pull it off. The characters start out in the dark. They slowly find out what's going on. We find out at the same time.

We discover that ...

The plague is spread by casual contact. Touch can spread it. It lingers on doorknobs. After an initial outbreak, it spreads geometrically. Two victims become 4, 16…etc. It acts fast. Symptoms don’t present for the first few hours. Then you get sick. It looks like a bad cold or the flu, at first. Then you die.

Soderbergh presents all this with cold, Vulcan logic. (The people in the movie aren't cold; but the director refuses to push emotional panic buttons.) Soderberg's logic defies expectations -- and might piss a lot of people off who expected a different movie.

There are plenty of movies this ain't. It’s not a zombie movie without the zombies. It's not a horror movie. It’s not an action movie. It’s not a suspense movie.

The story framework is a medical detective story. Inside that framework, Soderbergh’s human drama is character-based. The drama revolves around the decisions the characters must make, the pain they feel, and the bad shit they force themselves to face. He create a movie about endurance, mental toughness and problem solving. It's a study of grace under pressure.

The disease is bad, not Biblical. The 1918 flu epidemic killed 1% of the planet’s population. This disease is fatal to 12% of the population. That’s pretty bad. Even so, most people are immune.

While the disease is bad, the plague of panic it spawns is worse. (As it says on the posters, "Nothing Spreads Like Fear.") Soderbergh, again, shows us a plausible response on the part of various government entities (the Center for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, etc.) and the public. Cops and nurses go on strike. Our country's states close their borders to other states. There's looting. To make matters worse, there’s conspiracy theory.

Jude Law plays the human vector for this virus of the mind -- a pissant blogger who rants and rattles cages. Thanks to a mix of fearless and greedy motives – his character accuses the government of a hiding both a cover-up and a secret cure; he advises his on-line followers not to take the vaccine the CDC finally develops — and take a worthless homeopathic medicine instead. But he only does limited damage.

Despite the promise of the poster, Soderbergh's central characters don't panic. They keep it together. They get the job done.

Damon puts in an excellent performance as a regular guy whose wife — Paltrow's character — just dies at the start of the movie for no reason that makes sense. Laurence Fishburne is the courageous — if coldly calculating — head of the CDC. (But he’s not so noble that he won’t slip the woman he loves a tip to get out of Atlanta as fast as she can.) Kate Winslet plays another courageous medical detective who puts herself at risk to trace the history of the disease.

Thanks to these quiet heroes, the CDC ultimately creates a vaccine. In a standard Hollywood movie following the Blake Snyder beat-sheet, this would turn out to be a false hope. (Sigourney Weaver thinks she killed the Alien — but she didn't!) People would seem cured — then start dying. There’d be a last minute rush to find a real cure. I expected that ...

I also expected rioters getting shot; the conspiracy theorist taking a bullet to the head; more gore; more death. I didn't get it. Soderbergh dishes out some gross stuff, yeah, a sawed-off skull here, a dead kid there — but that's not the movie's focus. It's not about bad shit. It's about people dealing with bad shit. But it could just as easily be Katrina or the tsunami that hit Japan. The disease is bad — but not Book of Revelations bad.

Lots of people die, but TV, Internet, phone service and electricity don't die. Civilization frays, but doesn’t break down. Ultimately, life goes on. Soderbergh could've rattled our cage with the possibility that it wouldn't. It could've been much more lurid — and dramatic.

But it's not the movie he wanted to make. The movie he made is great. Forget the movie you expected, and enjoy it.

It grows on you.

Quote of the Week

"The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced-placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Mass., Princeton, N.J., and New Haven, Conn., to the financial and political centers of power."                             
                                                                                                                           --Chris Hedges

No way out

Great stuff. Shades of The Prisoner ...

The Seneca effect

OK, here's a cute little tidbit from our old pal Seneca, that wacky stoic philosopher from ancient Rome. Let's call it "the Seneca Effect." Basically, stuff falls apart a lot faster than it gets built. I.e.: Rome wasn't built in a day. But it took about a day to sack it. But let's quote the man himself ...

"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."
Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, n. 91

The money quote from the Oil Drum blog:

"... Could it be that the Seneca cliff is what we are facing, right now? If that is the case, then we are in trouble. With oil production peaking or set to peak soon, it is hard to think that we are going to see a gentle downward slope of the economy. Rather, we may see a decline so fast that we can only call it "collapse." The symptoms are all there, but how to prove that it is what is really in store for us? It is not enough to quote a Roman philosopher who lived two thousand years ago. We need to understand what factors might lead us to fall much faster than we have been growing so far. For that, we need to make a model and see how the various elements of the economic system may interact with each other to generate collapse..."

And now here's something we hope you'll really like ...

Cynical Seneca