Pat @Pat@qoto.org

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FYI...

This is a SOCIAL media platform. If you toot stuff here, expect to have people respond to what to toot and want to engage in discussion...

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Just muted @gricka for failing to respond to multiple inquires.

*****Spoilers: On the Beach*****

What I don't understand about this movie is why everyone was acting like nothing happened. I understand that some people might be in denial about the end of the world, but I think at least some of them would be expressing dread.

If they had five months before the radiation got there, wouldn’t they at least maybe dig a shelter or something? Maybe start storing up food?

Instead they put all of their effort into manufacturing and distributing those pills. I don't think people would act that way.

***** Spoilers *****

On the Beach and Twilight Zone...

The acting in this film, On the Beach (1959), was superb. Everyone gave great performances, with this dialogue that was very difficult. Fred Astaire, whom I didn't include in the trailer, was known for his dancing but in this film confirmed his acting talent. He was one of the greatest dancers on the big screen, perhaps second only to Ginger Rogers, who could dance as well as Fred Astaire, except backwards and in high heels.

Ironically, all of the actors in the film have died except for Donna Anderson, who played Mary Holmes (the one who got hit with the towel on the beach). She's the sole survivor.

In the film, which takes place after World War III, it's presumed that everybody is dead from radiation poisoning except for the people who live in Australia, and that there's intense radiation fallout in the upper atmosphere that is circling the globe and slowly making its way to the southern hemisphere to eventually wipe out all of humanity.

In actuality, fallout in the upper atmosphere from thermonuclear weapons would have a short half-life and within five months would not likely be producing enough radiation to cause acute radiation poisoning, although it would increase the cancer rate. However, a salted thermonuclear weapon could be produced with fallout that has a longer half-life. In this story I think it was a cobalt bomb, but such weapons have not ever been produced.

I mentioned that this was the first major film about nuclear armageddon but there was a Twilight Zone episode about a nuclear apocalypse that came out just one month before this film was released. That Twilight Zone episode was titled “Time Enough at Last”. It’s a very well-known episode about a bookworm who works at a bank and ends up accidentally surviving World War III while seeking solitude during his lunch break in the bank vault. That Twilight Zone episode starred Burgess Meredith.

Several other TZ episodes had themes about nuclear annihilation.

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

On the Beach (1959)

Just a happy-go-lucky nuclear Armageddon film…

Three years before the Cuban Missile Crisis and about a decade and a half after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this film presented its story about the aftermath of global nuclear war. There were a couple of other movies made earlier in the 50s about nuclear war, and of course all those goofy scifi’s about giant insects, but this was the first major film. It starred Gregory Peck, Eva Gardner, Anthony Hopkins, and Fred Astaire, who were all big movie stars at the time. It was kind of a big deal when it came out.

News coverage of the bombings of Japan were highly censored as to the most gruesome parts of the bombings. Film and photographs produced immediately after the bombings by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey were classified until the late 60s, so although people had heard about radiation burns and radiation sickness, most people had not seen any graphic images.

The US didn't want people to understand just how horrible those bombings were, but they wanted to inform people about the possibility of all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, which, with certain types of thermonuclear weapons, had the potential to kill most or all of the world’s population.

The result was this film, On the Beach (1959) which showed no dead bodies at all, it showed no destruction, no burned and leveled buildings, nothing. There's only one guy in the film who was shown to be sick in the entire movie and he was smiling or flirting with the nurse throughout the 45 seconds that he was on the screen. Everyone was almost always shown with smiling faces and having fun and the score was upbeat or silly most of time.

I think if you changed about a half dozen lines in the film, removed five minutes of the guy walking around in a hazmat suit, and adjusted a minute or two of score, people would think it was a romantic drama.

Contrast this with the TV movie The Day After (1983), which was released 24 years later, which showed shocking graphic images of just how horrible nuclear war could be.

The clips from the film that I’ve attached to this toot show just a few of the many upbeat scenes from the film. All the characters in the film knew from the beginning that a nuclear war had happened and that the deadly radiation was heading to where they were in Australia, but they just acted happy and didn’t appear to care at all. Very weird.

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#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #film #movie #AI #WWIII #NuclearWar #Australia #Hiroshima #Nagasaki #dance #the1950s #ColdWar #calamine

(fair use video clips)
Sorry, I messed up the aspect ratio on this video and cut off a little bit on the bottom.
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accessible video description:

Video opens with a submarine in the ocean with a number on the side that says 623, then a man in a lighthouse makes a phone call as a radio announcer talks about the nuclear war, then it shows a man and a woman on a bed talking, then it shows two military guys talking about a country club, then people on a beach where a man flicks a woman in the butt with a towel, then it shows Peck and Gardner talking and smiling, then sailors ogling at a pretty woman (Gardner) as she walks near their ship, then people dancing, then Peck and Gardner walking as she talks, then a bucolic scene of a horse in a field as the horse does a trick for a sugar cube, then a guy pretending to be sick lying in bed smiling and flirting with the male nurse with Peck and Dr. King giving him false hope, finally the closing title over an image of the same submarine moving on the surface of the ocean.

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Did you know that a respirator helps with allergies?

If you wear your respirator when you are around pollen or pet dander, you most likely won't get your allergy symptoms.

Also, a properly worn respirator, like a N95 mask, prevents infection and spread of disease from all variants of the flu, as well as COVID-19.

Take care out there.

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Sorry @TruthSandwich, I had to delete/re-edit my toot and it left your toot hanging...

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Why would anyone in their right mind support a country that just killed more than a million of its own citizens?

The US just killed more than a million Americans, which is why I no longer support the US.

After a very long life of loving my country, I'll likely support the next viable non-violent revolution that comes along in the US...

Read more as to why I've made this decision...

https://qoto.org/@Pat/109690264430646689

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#USPol #COVID-19 #corruption #revolution #misanthropic #BigPharma #OldMedia #pandemic #CDC #reset #MSM #media #biden #trump

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responding to:
https://qoto.org/web/statuses/110369768730837515

This is not about one man.

It's about the power dynamics of an entire country -- the government, the president, Congress, the CDC, the pharma companies, mainstream media -- all of them. They're all responsible for killing a million Americans.

When was the last time you heard somebody talk about this on mainstream media? Answer: never.

They're all responsible.

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populist: n. - a believer in the rights, wisdom, and virtues of the people.
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#Election #populism #democracy #PopularSovereignty #WeThePeople #MisunderstoodWords #liberalism

I thought about sardonically using the hashtag #ReplacementTheory on this one but decided not to.

#TruthBeTold

The Pilgrims were illegal immigrants, but the Americans still used them as farm workers to pick corn.

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#TruthBeTold = A statement that is logically or literally true (or partly true), but seems to imply something that isn’t true or is just plain weird. (for rhetoric, logic or propaganda studies… or just for fun)

#immigration #illegal #undocumented #FarmWorkers #farm #agriculture #Pilgrims #NativeAmericans #Nauset #Wampanoag #corn #3Sisters #Americans

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Dog whistling lets people "claim that anyone says anything because you can easily hear the alleged dogwhistles that aren't in the actual literal contents of what the person says".

-- Steve Pinker, Reason Magazine, Jul 10, 2020

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Fun Fact

Did you know that when someone uses the word "dog whistle", they may not be talking about an actual dog whistle?

#DogWhistle #Pol #dog #whistle #whisper #coded #meta #SelfReferential

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

The Outer Limits, “The Sixth Finger” (Oct. 1963)

I think everyone's familiar with the Outer Limits, the science fiction television series in the 1960s. This series is required viewing if you want to study the 1960s because many of the plots were metaphors for societal problems of the times.

In another thread someone mentioned the meme about AI art mis-drawing hands with six fingers and it reminded me of this episode, which itself, speculates about super intelligence.

As with most sci-fi at the time, a lot of the science facts in this show are wrong, but the philosophical examination isn't far off. The machine that the scientist uses in the film and the premise is really just there to provide a platform to think about what it would be like to have an intelligence that was so far beyond current human capabilities.

I highly recommend this one.

(Note: Some copies of The Outer Limits that are on streaming services have spoilers right at the top of video, so you might want to skip the opening segment.)

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#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #film #movie #AI #evolution #chimpanzee #intelligence #the1960s #utterly #smart #halfsmart #tuppence

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accessible video description:
the video shows an shortened version of The Outer Limits introduction; then it shows a young woman walking into a laboratory and talking with the scientist in the laboratory; then it shows the same woman in a pub with a young man who is filthy from working in a coal mine and the woman’s mean sister tells her to deliver another loaf of bread; then it shows a scientist controlling a lever pushing it toward the position marked “forward” and the man is inside a chamber, he is all clean, but he is affected by the machine somehow; then the scientist opens the door and the man is covering his face with his arms so the audience can't see what he looks like and a scientist looks at him astonishingly and it fades out.

(fair use, unauthorized trailer)

#TruthBeTold

*****Spoiler*****

This one is 100% true. By wording this TruthBeTold this way and showing a picture of a salamander playing the keyboard of a musical organ, it deceptively makes the words “electric organ” sound like the musical instrument, but in this case “electric organ” means a biological organ (electrical organ) in some aquatic species used to produce an electric charge that is used for navigation, to stun prey, or for defense, like in the electric eel. Electric eels belong to the a genus under the taxonomical infraclass teleost. By capitalizing the word “Teleost” in connection with the Ancient Egyptians, that word appears, to those unfamiliar with that infraclass, to be referring to some esoteric civilization predating the Pyramids.

#TruthBeTold

Electric organs were one of the first things to make use of electricity. They were used hundreds of years before Franklin wrote about his lightning kite experiment. In fact, the Teleosts used them even before the Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids.

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#TruthBeTold = A statement that is logically or literally true (or partly true), but seems to imply something that isn’t true or is just plain weird. (for rhetoric, logic or propaganda studies… or just for fun)

#FrankZappa #music #sound #electricity #organ #axolotl #fish #invention #nature #Benjamin #Franklin #SparkOfInnovation
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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Her (2013)

This one's about an ambiguously gay man who interacts with an AI through his mobile device. This is a really boring movie – practically the whole thing is just this guy talking to the AI in his mobile device. It's supposed to be set in the future but there aren't many sci-fi techie devices and the cars look like they were made 10 years before this movie was made.

This film has essentially an all white cast. There's only one very minor bit part at the very beginning of the film played by a black actor, Lisa Renee Pitts. This technique of literally marginalizing black actors in movies, placing them at the very beginning or very end of the film has been used by pro-racist Hollywood for a very long time, at least since the 1980s.

There’s one Chinese character who is the girlfriend of the character played by Chris Pratt. That character, a minor supporting role, is played by Laura Kai Chen.

Because of the racial bias in the composition of the cast, I'm not recommending this film at all. Also it's just a boring movie. I’m including it here in the Film of the Week series because AI is a popular topic right now.

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #film #movie #cell #AI #race #racism #641 #mobile #letters

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It's a Wonderful Life

Bank Run

#svb #FirstRepublic #WesternAllianceBancorp #JPMorgan #GoldmanSachs #FDIC #Fed #corruption #confidence #BeenThere #DoneThat
#revolution

There were also three bit players in this unauthorized trailer; Irma St. Paule, who plays the woman reading poetry, Fred Strother, who plays the crazy guy from Pluto, and the guard at the elevator, whose name I’m unsure of because the credits are unclear.

The magical realism in this film comes from the very subtle or ambiguously unreal things that happen. Magical realism doesn't include things that are acknowledged to be unusual by the characters or the narrative. The filmmakers of 12 Monkeys used magical realism to create a feeling of unease or confusion in the audience.

In this trailer, there are three examples; the bear suddenly appearing behind the guy in the hazmat suit (there wasn’t enough time for the bear to walk into that position), the woman’s shoes changing from black to silver, and the guard’s face changing at the elevator. They could easily go unnoticed by the audience. (Although I suspect women are more likely to notice the woman’s shoes changing color than men would.)

When Willis looks at the guard after the guard’s face changes, he appears to be looking suspiciously at him, but the motivation for the look is ambiguous because he could be questioning why the guard is not trying to stop him from escaping, or he could be questioning why the guy’s face changed. (The first face looks like it may be the same as the face of another character from the future.)

There are a lot of weird and unusual things that happen in this film that are not magical realism because they are part of the narrative and the characters of the story acknowledge that they're weird and unusual, like all of the animals running around in the city, or the crazy actions of Pitt’s character. Or time travel itself, which is unreal in this film, but is a main part of the narrative.