Where I talk about true crime and serial killers.

A fan of true crime, psychos, serial killers, celebrity crime and good-looking bad girls and bad boys? Check out this link to my recent guest turn on the Lisa Valentine Clark radio show. We had a great talk about the appeal of this sort of dark entertainment. We touch on the natural morbid curiosity people have always had for shocking, unsolved true crime stories. Jack the Ripper, after all, made blockbuster headlines in Victorian London. Plus, do we really get even more excited when the criminals and alleged criminals are really hot-looking…like Jodie Arias, Ted Bundy, and accused Theranos swindler Elizabeth Holmes? My segment begins at 25 minutes.

A state of moral depravity.

On occasion I wander back to the State of the Nation website to check whether or not I am being accused of plotting an alien invasion or putting the finishing touches on the Illuminati’s plan for creating a Luciferian one-world government. Stories like that amuse me. They’re a source of a good a laugh for the day. But when I looked at their page in the aftermath of the recent mass shooting in Virginia Beach, there was nothing at all to be amused about.

The page was only the site of cynical, moral depravity that has taken root in a sizable percentage of the American population. It is a moral depravity that is being fostered and nurtured by a handful of con artists and swindlers who run webpages like SOTN, the Millennium Report, Before it’s News, and the rest of the Alex Jones wannabes on the Internet. On the very day of a tragedy, these parasites are already at work spinning their—rather predictable and stale at this point—conspiracy theories about another “false flag” attack.

So consider this: on the very day of the Virginia Beach shooting, SOTN had already come to the conclusion that the murders were actually a false flag. Wouldn’t you think that it’s quite remarkable that the people who run this site, where ever they may be holed up in some basement, would be able to put the pieces together and determine exactly what happened even before law enforcement agencies even started their investigation? But investigations, facts, data, evidence, of course, are completely pointless in the bizarro world of SOTN. They already have their set conspiratorial world view they graft onto any major event. They take their master narrative, something that might have been spun from a second-rate self-published conspiracy thriller about a Deep State cabal of Illuminati New World Order supervillains plotting to bring about a global totalitarian order through a series of manufactured emergencies, and graft this narrative onto the events of the day. Then, without any form of evidence—save for links to OTHER CONSPIRACY WEBSITES and their unfounded, unproven allegations—they begin repeating their claims of false flag attacks over and over again, their stories looping back on themselves where links to “evidence” are previous SOTN or Millennium Report postings.

But at the core of these conspiratorial fantasies are the dead, the injured, and the traumatized. The swindlers and the charlatans like SOTN exploit these victims to get page-views, social-media likes, and shares. Individuals who follow these websites must recognize the ugliness, the sheer callous disregard for pain and suffering people running these “alternate news” sites are capable of.

If you want to imagine what the people running the State of the Nation are doing after every loss of life, imagine them laughing with glee and high-fiving each other, happy as they can be that there is a new tragedy to exploit, a new opportunity for page views by the gullible, simple-minded rubes that will swallow every claim of a conspiracy.

And let me repeat something that I have written here before. Every committed State of the Nation fan, please take note. Please jot it down on a paper just in case you might forget and need to refresh your memory. If the sort of New World Order your favorite website claims exists is really out there, orchestrating these mass murders, how come they haven’t yet found and eliminated the entire SOTN editorial staff? Why are the grand plans of the globalist insider Freemasons and Satanists appearing all over the Internet unchecked?

The answer, of course, is simple. There is no New World Order, there are no grand plans, no false flag attacks, no Satanic secret societies, and the people running State of the Nation are not only lying to you but laughing at you as they are doing so.

They are doing the right thing in Maine.

According to this piece in CNN, Maine is now the fourth state to do the sensible thing and prohibit people from opting out of immunizations on religious and philosophical grounds. 

Good for Maine!

Of course, I am almost tempted to take some credit for this. I almost want to claim that I called a meeting at the Jersey City headquarters of the American branch of the Illuminati and gave the order to my minions—just as I had done when I ordered the measles outbreak up in New York, according to the State of the Nation website—but it would be really dishonest of me to do so.

In all seriousness, this is a step in the right direction. But it’s also staggering to consider that in 2019 only three other states—California, West Virginia, and Mississippi—have ended religious exemptions to life-saving vaccinations. As I have written before, are we completely committed to returning to the Dark Ages where we are willing to let people suffer and die out of superstitious fear when the power to prevent diseases exist? When it has existed for decades and has saved lived for decades? 

This issue is so frustrating because we see the political power of people so ignorant as to not realize that the religious liberties guaranteed by the Constitution are not without boundaries. Your rights to practice the worship of your invisible magical beings does not outweigh others’ rights to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. People are not allowed to infect others, to spread death and disease out of religious liberties. Saying that people ought to be allowed to opt out of vaccinations on religious grounds is like saying that I had visions where my deity commands me to drink a half a bottle of whiskey every Friday night, then get in a car and drive it as fast as I can, and I must be allowed to do so by law enforcement lest my religious liberties be trampled upon.

The First Amendment rightly protects people’s consciences and allows them to believe as they choose or not to believe as they choose. But it does not give them the right to force their beliefs on others and it certainly does not give them the right to put others’ lives in danger because of religious belief.

So now the rest of the states need to do the right thing, too, and they must protect the lives of their citizens. There must be no exemptions to vaccinations allowed for anything other than medical reasons.

No, you should NOT have the right to do your own research and make a choice!

This is an interesting article from a couple of weeks ago that was just brought to my attention. It’s a piece by Jennifer Reich, a sociologist and author of the book “Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines,” condensing the topic of her book. Both the book and the article give a glimpse of the complex decision-making processes of people who refuse to vaccinate their kids. 

Reich especially focuses on the kind of damage unvaccinated children can do to herd immunity, or the way measles epidemics can spread when a large enough segment of a population is not immunized. Parents refuse to consider the greater, herd immunity factor because, as Reich argues, of a cultural atmosphere of hyper-individualized parenting. Parents who have come to believe that vaccines are harmful to their children will quickly and readily ignore the greater good in an effort to protect their own children from a perceived threat.

This complete and total disregard for the greater social good is as infuriating as the fact that somehow at the start of the twenty-first century so much of the world, even parts of the so-called developed world like the U.S. and Europe, is slipping into a new Dark Age of superstition, ignorance, and beliefs in unsubstantiated pseudoscientific crap being shoveled all over the internet by charlatans and conspiracy theorists. And remember what I wrote in several of my posts here: I’m a libertarian and I am all for individuality. I am passionate about forms of government that allow their citizens as much individuality as possible. But I am also passionate about empirical scientific facts, about reason and rationality. Vaccines work! Period! This is a fact that has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. We know that vaccines work just like we know that that Earth is round. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism!! This, too, has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. And vaccines are not a New World Order/Illuminati/Satanist plot to depopulate the world, or whatever deranged fantasies predators and nightcrawlers like Alex Jones, State of the Nation, The Millennium Report, and the rest of the festering moral cesspool that is the “truther” community keeps propagating for attention and profit.

Reich’s article also points out the other frustrating aspect of the hyper-individualistic parents; the parents who want to have the “right to do their own research and make up their minds about vaccines.” Is this sort of behavior not want to make you test which is harder, your head or the nearest concrete wall? Is this not the height of the most toxic sort of hubris, the most insane form of solipsistic behavior? I definitely think so. And, remember, I’m the individualist libertarian! However, facts are facts. Consider the following: if any of these concerned parents suddenly heard a banging and wheezing noise come out of their car’s engine just a moment before said car sputtered to a stop and died on the side of the road, what would they do? Would they pop the hood, roll up their sleeves and go to work trying to fix it right then and there? Would they whip out their smart phones and Google “how to fix dead engine?” Of course, not! They would call a tow truck and have that car taken to an expert to fix the problem. So sorry, folks, but this is why I have no patience and sympathy for the let-the-parents-do-the-research-and-make-up-their-own-minds crowd. The average Middle American soccer mom does not have the ability to research the issue on her own and come to accurate conclusions. Unless that soccer mom has medical training and is a physician, she has no business making decisions about whether or not to vaccinate! This is also why I am once again being uncharacteristically un-libertarian in favoring very tough punitive legal measures against people who refuse to vaccinate their children.

Now I do agree with Reich’s argument—and the arguments of many other dismayed doctors and scientists—that the real villains in the recent measles outbreaks are not necessarily the parents themselves. The parents are merely gullible and ignorant of scientific and medical data. And, of course, they are also fearful. I completely understand the kind of dread fear any parent might have over the thought of their child becoming sick, disabled for life, or dying. I am completely sympathetic to the fact that any decent parent will always fear for their child’s health and welfare. But the real villains are the ones who feed on this fear, who exploit it, who tell parents lies.

The real villains are the anti-vaccination activists, the conspiracy-peddling vampires like Jones, the State of the Nation editorial staff, The Millennium Report web page, the Call for an Uprising YouTube channel and the rest of their sociopathic ilk.

Don't EVER make the fans angry!!

Last week I was interviewed for this CNBC article about the final season of Game of Thrones coming to a close and all of the controversy surrounding it.  Could the future of the show's DVD sales, a spinoff series, and producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' involvement in upcoming Star Wars films be jeopardized by all the fan hate?

So I guess I called it right in the article. Apparently the fans were so infuriated by the final episode that many are vowing to retaliate now. Many are promising to stay away from Star Wars if Benioff and Weiss are involved, vowing to ignore a spinoff series, and there is that goofy Change.org petition to remake the entire season.

Reportedly, George R.R. Martin, author of the original novels, has hinted that he will take his remaining books in the series in a different direction. Again, as I called it in this article.

The power of culture and audiences should never, ever be underestimated. There are many who think the media are a completely irresistible force upon the minds of malleable, vulnerable audiences. People who believe that are very wrong.

As I was saying..."A Companion to the Action Film"

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm proud to have my chapter on Asian action films and their impact on Hollywood included in this new book by James Kendrick.

A genre that is often overlooked by film studies, this book includes essays by the most accomplished scholars of action cinema, including Lisa Purse, Mark Gallagher, Cynthia M. King, Susan Jeffords, and Yvonne Tasker, among others.

Far from being an entertainment of just shallow, kinetic spectacle, action films, as the essays in this volume explain, have long reflected a wide a range of social, political, and gender issues and controversies American society has wrestled with for over a century now.

So check out this book...and check out some of the best action films ever made.

The joy of horror!

And for a complete change of pace, check out this article about horror films on the Rewire webpage I was interviewed for. Horror's one of my favorite genres and this piece has a good discussion about why telling scary stories is one of the oldest forms of story telling.

When I teach my courses on horror films and media theories, we often come around to the discussion of horror and our need to feel fear. In fact, probably the first stories cave people told around the campfire were horror stories. The uses and gratifications theory of how audiences make their choices in entertainment and information also raises interesting questions about why people might be so enthusiastic to seek out films and books that will keep them up all night with fear. Our need to seek out a safe scare, the opportunity to experience the kind of fear you can stop at any time by changing the channel or closing the cover of the book, probably has a lot to do with it. Research has also shown that fans of extremely graphic horror films--the kinds that have been termed "torture porn"--like to watch such films as a sort of personal test. How long can they watch the blood and gore and mayhem before they cover their eyes?

But horror is most effective when it mirrors the real world and symbolically speaks to fears we have in our every day lives. The article discusses how the major horror films that attained iconic status over the decades had also been extremely effective metaphorical mirrors on the times they were made in.

Check it out for my comments and also great comments from James Kendrick, film professor from Baylor University who edited the new book "A Companion to the Action Film," in which I have a chapter on Asian action films.