Monthly Archives: July 2025

Conspiracies Are Forever

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I hate the term ‘Conspiracy Theory’ as it gives far too much credence and plausibility to these insane and utterly batshit fantasies. In science a theory is something well established by test and falsification as being a model accurate to the data observed as to how the world functions. Conspiracists take falsehoods, unsupported preconceived notions, mixed heavily with idiosyncratic worldview to construct elaborate fantasies justifying the thing that they already want to believe. Once let loose and infecting minds conspiracies are undying, immune to facts, logic, and all evidence.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, antisemitic propaganda invented by the Czars of Imperial Russia has been debunked repeatedly but the popularization of the fantasy of a global plot by the Jews to control the world remains as potent and deadly today as it did 122 years ago when that despicable tract was loosed on the world.

Humanity achieved a technological marvel in 1969 when men walked on the surface of the moon and returned safely but within a few short years, fueled by cynicism propelled by both politics and entertainment Americans began believing in serious numbers that the entire endeavor had been faked. Again, fact and evidence are futile in killing the fantasy and people continue to believe it to this day.

Andrew Wakefield, a British physician, for monetary gain published a falsified study in 1998 linking vaccines to autism, again facts and science were unable to dislodge this destructive meme from the public consciousness and now adherents to his fraud control the levers of America’s medical system.

All this brings me to Trump and Epstein. That Jeffrey Epstein, a New York financier and socialite, rubbed elbows and traveled extensively with celebrities of entertainment, commerce, and government is an accepted fact. It is also a fact that the man was responsible for years of sexual assaults on young girls and women but suffered little criminal punishment for his convicted crimes. It is almost certain that his wealth and connections allowed him to avoid serious consequences for his actions. That others participated either in deed or knowledge of these heinous actions is a reasonable supposition but is not in evidence at this time. His death by suicide propelled more conjecture that others acted to ‘silence’ him but again this is not in evidence at this time.

The lack of evidence has never stopped; in fact, it is a growth medium, for conspiratorial fantasies and those did indeed erupt around Epstein.

Trump and his supporters cultivated these fantasies, fertilized them with their own bullshit, and weaponized, quite effectively, them against their political opponents. The tale grew and grew until to the believers, who accepted with a religious fervor, just knew, even without any actual evidence, that every high democratic person must somehow be entwined in the terrible affair.

Now, with the people who pushed and fed the flames of this firestorm of accusations occupying the very positions that have access to all the ‘hidden evidence’ Trump and his circle want the fantasies to stop. His name is too often correlated with Epstein’s, and it would be best if everyone would just accept the official report and move on to other matters.

But conspiratorial fantasies are forever. They are immune to fact, evidence, and logic surviving no matter the arguments arrayed against them. Those who have held these things about Epstein as ‘truth’ are not going to be dissuaded from their religious convictions by a press release or two.

Will this break Trump’s collation? Will enough followers cease to follow that he loses his ability to the threaten Republicans into submission? I don’t know and neither do you. “Always in motion is the future.” I do know this, he can’t extinguish these flames. Neither those on the right, convinced that Democrats held satanic orgies with these children, or those on the left, certain that Trump raped little girls alongside Epstein, will ever be moved from the convictions that define their worldview.

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Movie Review: Superman (2025)

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Writer/Director James Gunn and cinematographer Henry Braham powerfully diverts from the grim, grounded, and gritty aesthetic of recent DC Comics superhero film gives the audience in Superman a colorful and gloriously goofy rendition of the iconic ‘Man of Steel.’ A trailer featuring the super canine ‘Krypto’ coming to a battered and beaten Superman sets the tone audiences should expect with this movie.

Eschewing re-harvesting the overly tilled fields of the character’s origin story or Marvel Studios’ course of building a cinematic universe element by element introduced in features focused on individual character Gunn drops the audience into a comic inspired universe already in progress and populated by ‘metahumans.’

DC Studios

What writers refer to as ‘the inciting incident’, Superman’s (David Corenswet) intercession into a war and losing in a battle against a new supervillain, happens before the film even starts the character crashing into the frame beaten and defeated. Gunn skips many of the familiar beats found in stories of these characters, hurling the audience into a film where Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) is already aware of his dual identity, allowing the story to focus on their relationship instead of secret identity shenanigans.

This new DC Cinematic Universe is one where the heroes of the ‘Silver Age’ are already present and active. Gunn, rightly, in my opinion, understands that the audience, after 17 years of the MCU, is ready to accept a world of comic book characters without the need to establish and detail each and every origin. As such the Guy Gardner Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) simply fly into their scenes without the scrip stopping to explain them.

Quickly the plot develops as manipulated public opinion turns against Superman and the hero finds himself questioning his purpose on Earth and the challenges doing the right thing in a complex morally grey world. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) fueled by a fiery envy and hatred to destroy Superman is here presented in a composite of attributes that the character has exhibited in various media, he is scientifically and technologically brilliant, a billionaire businessman, politically influential, as well as having a predilection for land and its ownership.

There are a number of nods and references to 1978’s Superman The Movie, most notably even in the trailer is that the score by John Murphy and David Fleming is inspired and around the well-known theme written by the legendary John Williams. There are more subtle callbacks, in the background of one scene Perry White (Wendell Pierce) can be heard shouting ‘Don’t call me Chief!’ This Lex Luthor has a large number of people assisting his villainous plot including one referred named Otis a nice Easter egg but one that is expanded in the credits where his surname is revealed to be ‘Berg.’

There is a major change in the canon of the character, one on which a great deal of the plot revolves about that is sure to upset some fans. To avoid spoilers, I cannot reveal it here but when it unfolds people familiar with the history and lore of Superman will see it. Personally, I was fine with it, but others may not be.

James Gunn’s Superman is about as far as one can get in tone and style from Nolan’s Batman Begins, but both are crafted by talented director/writers who knew exactly the kind of film that they wanted to see on the screen. It was a fun frolic but one with heart and soul and a powerful theme that we are not tools of our parents designs but of our own.

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The Accidental Hero of Superman ’78– Otis

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WB Studios

I was 17 years old and in my senior year of high school when Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie hit the screens in the United States. Despite never being a deep fan of the comic books and possessing only a surface knowledge of the character, this was still a movie that I rode my bicycle a couple of miles to the local twin cinema to see. I can recall quite vividly pumping the pedals quite hard and fast with John Williams’ icon score replaying in my head as I went home from that screening. While not as campy as the Batman television series of 1966 and a far cry from the grounded, gritty DC superhero movies of the ‘Snyderverse’ to come in the next century, Superman: The Movie set a high bar for superhero films in general, and Christopher Reeve’s excellent portrayal as Clark Kent/Superman remains in the minds of many unmatched.

What is surprising is that after 47 years, the number of people who do not quite grasp that the plot of the film and its resolution rotates around the fumbling failure of one henchman.

Otis (Ned Beatty), while a seductively costumed and faux-injured Ms. Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine) distracts the Army’s security detail escorting a nuclear-armed ICBM, alters the missile’s targeting at the behest of his supervillain boss, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman.) Later, Lex learns that Otis bungled his assignment inputting only three updated coordinates instead of the required four. When it comes to the second missile, this time being transported and guarded by the US Navy, it is Ms. Teschmacher whom Lex sends to corrupt the missile’s targeting, ensuring it hits his intended target: the San Andreas Fault line to create ‘New West Coast’ that he will own and control.

Lex Luthor’s plan is when both missiles are launched Superman, due the missiles divergent courses, will be able to intercept only one. But to ensure even that outcome does not come to pass, he chains lethal kryptonite to Superman and drops him in a pool to drown.

When Ms. Teschmacher learns that the other missile will detonate its nuclear warhead over her mother’s town of Hackensack, New Jersey, she betrays Lex Luthor and rescues Superman but only after he promises to save her mother first.

It seems an idiotic mistake for Lex Luthor to send his expendable nuclear warhead to the hometown of his expendable girlfriend but of course that was never Lex’s plan. That missile is the one whose targeting was charged by the bumbling Otis, who failed to input the coordinates correctly. Because it was not the warhead that would create the ‘New West Coast’ Lex never bothered to correct that mistake leading to the targeting of Hackensack and Ms. Teschmacher’s betrayal.

Without Otis’ ineptitude, Superman would have perished, and Lex Luthor’s plan would have succeeded. Otis is the accidental hero of Superman: The Movie.

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Schoedinger’s 5th Amendment

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There’s been a bit of a celebratory mood on the right side of the political spectrum with the report that President Biden’s doctor pleaded the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination during recent congressional testimony. This is taken as evidence that supports the conservative accusations of Biden’s mental decline.

However, when Trump pled the 5th Amendment more than 400 times during his testimony, that is only evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and not any evidence of actual guilt or wrongdoing.

Here’s the truth: When a person pleads the 5th Amendment, it is a null result revealing and supporting nothing. There are plenty of reasons why someone’s lawyer would advise them to take the safer course even when they are not concealing any crimes of their doing. For many people, being investigated by the government is a financially ruinous event, and it’s best to avoid opening any avenues for someone, particularly political enemies, to start such an investigation.

When someone draws an instant conclusion from a person taking the 5th Amendment, that reveals much more about the preconceptions they hold than it does about the person testifying.

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Star Trek’s Canon

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The other day I was engaged in a discussion, not an argument mind you, on Twitter concerning Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and its violation of Star Trek’s established canon.

I myself am not bothered by violation of ‘canon’ if the result are more interesting character, deep stories, and compelling plotlines.

Paramount Studios/CBS Home Video

It is interesting to remember that Star Trek was not designed to have a rigid history with a lore and a canon well-defined. The original series is a product of 1960’s television and, in that day and age, television worked quite differently than it does today at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. A program was deemed successful if it ran for at least 5 seasons of 20 plus episodes. That produced enough episodes that the series could be ‘stripped,’ run on weekday afternoons in random order. Season five episodes might precede season one episodes so there were no continuing storylines, one episode rarely affected the events in another.

Star Trek, and here I am referring to the original run, the original cast feature films, presented a contradictory and inconsistent ‘canon’ for its future history. Here are some examples.

In The Conscience of the King when McCoy asks Spock to share a drink with him, Spock comments his father’s race was spared the dubious benefits of alcohol to which McCoy replied, “Now I know why you were conquered.”  Who conquered Vulcan? No one, this bit of history was discarded.

Pon Farr the mysterious and secretive collection of rituals and biological drives surrounding Vulcan reproduction. Which is it: the thing that ‘no outworlder may know, save for those few who have been involved’ or something Saavik can just casually explain to David Marcus? Additionally with this aspect of Vulcan biology is it something that Spock hoped he would be spared as he said in Amok Time or is it a predictable cycle of every seven years as mentioned in The Cloud Minders and again in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock?

In Space Seed it is established that in the late 20th century a cadre of scientists employing eugenics bred a number of humans with superior abilities creating dictators that sparked the Eugenics War. Eugenics is directed and controlled breeding in human to produce desired traits. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Chekov explains to his captain that Khan was the product of later 20th century ‘genetic engineering.’ Eugenics, which is breeding for traits, and genetic engineering, which is gene alteration for traits is not the same thing, however advances in science and the public’s understanding of science made the genetic engineering a much more likely scenario, so ‘canon’ changed to fit public perception.

Here’s a biggie. Is it Federation policy to leave planets and cultures to adhere to their own destinies without coercion or as in A Taste of Armageddon or do they have standing general orders for the genocide that any ship’s captain can employ?

My point with these examples is not to ridicule or mock the original series, which I adore, but to demonstrate that a rigid lore or canon has never been an essential element of Star Trek. Strange New Worlds does break accepted ‘canon’, but it does that to give us wonderfully complex and interesting characters and stories so in my book it’s a plus not a minus.

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Movie Review: Magic (1978)

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For many people, the astounding acting skills of Anthony Hopkins exploded into their perceptions, despite decades of on-screen performances, with his Oscar-winning turn in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. That is not the case with me. I was wowed by his portrayal of William Bligh in 1984’s The Bounty, but I first experienced Hopkins in 1978’s Magic.

20th Century Fox

Adapted by legendary screenwriter William Goldman from his novel of the same title and directed by legendary actor and director Richard Attenborough, Magic is a psychological horror film centered on Corky Williams (Hopkins), a stage magician who utilizes a ventriloquist’s dummy, ‘Fats’ (also voiced by Hopkins), as part of his performance. When his agent Ben Greene (Burgess Meredith) informs Corky that a medical exam is required for his upcoming television network special, Corky flees the city for the isolated Catskills town of his childhood, reconnecting with his high school crush Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret). But ‘Fats’ may have other ideas about what is best for Corky.

The trailers and commercials for Magic hinted at possible supernatural causes for the film’s horror, and Attenborough used a deft and light directorial touch to keep things off balance concerning ‘Fats.’ But this story and movie is essentially a horror of the human mind and how it betrays itself when faced with crushing psychological trauma and an inability to escape it.

With limited settings and cast, Magic is a film that could have been produced for television, but Goldman as writer, Attenborough as director, and cinematographer Victor Kemper use the limitation to create an atmosphere of dread and claustrophobia even in the open woods of the Catskills.

I was seventeen when I walked to the local twin theater to see Magic, and the film has stuck with me over the decades. Unnerving and powerful in its use of what would become known as ‘the uncanny valley,’ Magic is a prime example that horror is not always found in ghouls, ghosts, and vampires but sometimes within the tortured soul of the outcast.

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More Thoughts on Severancev

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Apple TV +

In May I posted that I had begun watching the Apple+ series Severance. It’s about a group of workers for the vast and powerful Lumon corporation who toil under a condition called ‘severance’ where their work-selves, called ‘innies’, exist with no knowledge or memory of their lives outside of work, called ‘outies’, and their ‘outies’ have no memory or knowledge of anything that their ‘innies’ experience.

At the time I wrote that post, I had watched two episodes, and now I have watched the entirety of seasons one and two. I had commented that the series, while stimulating my intellectual curiosity, hadn’t really grabbed me emotionally. While my emotional investment has grown, it has never reached the levels that it has with other genre programs. I remember dreading the ending of Andor because some of my favorite characters are never mentioned in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and therefore would likely end up dead by the end of Andor. Severance is fascinating and the characters have grown on me, but I think this division of their nature, central and essential to the show, is also creating a barrier to full engagement.

That said, I do not regret watching and have thoroughly enjoyed the ride that is Severance. The show’s creative team is also doing a bang-up job handling what is in essence a mystery show. The first season ended with a massive revelation for the viewers and the characters that created a cliffhanger, which I despise. I watched season two dreading what sort of cliffhanger they would craft for this ending.

And they did not.

Oh, they certainly did not wrap up all the various storylines and threads. There are a ton of things to propel the show into a third season, but there was also resolution to the reveal from the first season, some clear explanation of some of the strange and mysterious work that the corporation commissioned from the severed, along with expansion of the world and the characters. Instead of another stupid cliffhanger, they properly teased the next phase of the story without making it feel as if they were never going to resolve the issues already raised.

Well done.

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