Crappy Halloween: Haunted House Films Are Really About the Nightmares of Gentrification

From PopPolitics.com courtesy of Alertnet:

Artemio and I always end up having long discussions about horror films and politics, so he called me up after seeing the haunted house film Cold Creek Manor. "It's all about gentrification!" he said. "It's a piece of crap, but still ...

[...]

Rich city folks move out into the country and find themselves up against nasty poor locals and a ghost in another recent vengeful-spirit film, Wendigo. The more I thought about this recurrent motif, the more I realized: the modern haunted house film is fundamentally about gentrification. Again and again we see fictional families move into spaces from which others have been violently displaced, and the new arrivals suffer for that violence even if they themselves have done nothing wrong.

[...]

The spate of slow-moving zombie films that followed in the wake of "Night of the Living Dead" represent a capitalist nightmare of communist revolution: the brain-dead bloodthirsty working class, desiring nothing but our destruction, rises us up to besiege "us" in our comfortable homes, our malls, our military bases.

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This is a really good read, an insanely over-analysis of the underlying messages in monster movies. It's usually a display of classism from the perspective of the elite, where dirty poor peope or "monsters" have good reasons to hate "us" and try to kill "us" but "we're" still the "good guys." I'll never watch a zombie flick in the same light.

[Why Hillary should not be president] Weapons Industry Dumps Republicans, Backs Hillary

From Independent UK courtesty of Alternet:

The U.S. arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Mrs Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street's favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months

[...]

This week, she said that, if elected president, she would not rule out military strikes to destroy Tehran's nuclear weapons facilities.

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It's clear to me, and hopefully most liberals, that Hillary is not one of us. I still refuse to accept that she's got an automatic win if she's nominated for the candidacy, I think Democrats are way too scared of NOT nominating her. Kucinich may not look like a winner, but put him in the presidential debates with the Rebublican candidate and I guarantee you a landslide. It's not going to happen though. And at this point I wouldn't be satisfied with Obama either, at least not much moreso. I guess now that the defence industry has taken their eyes off him he might not be obligated to cater to them if he gets the presidency, but he probably will anyway.

Obama and Clinton are corporate Democrats who I do not want to be president. How can people like me possibly get Kucinich where he needs to be?

Voodoo Fest grocery list

Who I saw at Voodoo Fest:

FATTER THAN ALBERT!
Earl Greyhound
Vavavoom
GALACTIC (featuring Chali 2na [of Jurassic 5] and Lyrics Born)
Jose Conde y Ola Fresca
Lez Zeppelin
Donald Harrison plus the Congo Nation
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE!!!!

Bones
Rotary Downs
Circa Survive
ZYDEPUNKS!!
Fleur de Tease
BIG SAM'S FUNKY NATION
Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals
(the fake) Smashing Pumpkins

Plain White T's
(Red Jumpsuit Apparatus SUCKS)
Christian Scott
TROMBONE SHORTY & ORLEANS AVE.
The New Orleans Bingo! Show
Paolo Nutini
COMMON!
Wilco

Rumsfeld Flees France, Fearing Arrest

From IPS News courtesy of Alternet.org:

U.S. embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris organized by the Foreign Policy magazine after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint against the man who spearheaded President George W. Bush's "war on terror" for six years.

Under international law, authorities in France are obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the alleged torturer is on French soil.

[...]

"Rumsfeld must be feeling how Saddam Hussein felt when U.S. forces were hunting him down," activist Tanguy Richard said. "He may never end up being hanged like his old friend, but he must learn that in the civilized world, war crime doesn't pay."

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BAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Wiretapping at its Worst

By Brian Beutler of Media Consortium, posted on Alternet.org:

In an Oct. 12 letter to Democratic lawmakers, Randal S. Milch, senior vice president and general counsel to Verizon, admitted that, in tens of thousands of instances over the last two years, his company has provided government officials with subscriber information without court orders. According to the letter, that information has included subscriber names and addresses, local and long-distance telephone connection records, and methods and sources of payment.

[...]

He argued [in 1995] that, [...] "It is impractical to identify a particular phone. This is perfectly in line with constitutional protections. After all, the right to privacy guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment is an individual's right to privacy; it is not an inanimate object's right to privacy. Roving wiretaps targeted at particular suspects rather than specific phones should not cause alarm."

Barr's testimony was cited in the House Report on the Comprehensive Antiterrorism Act of 1995 as justification for an expansion of federal wiretapping authority.

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Randal S. Milch is a scumbag. He claimed in 1995 it was okay to wiretap a phone because the Fourth Amendment doesn't guarantee a phone's right to privacy, what kind of lunacy is that? The kind that Congress eats up 24/7, even today.