BE HIP OR BE HBO

If you want to get an HBO series these days, you either apparently have to be (a) very famous and be, like Martin Scorsese or Kate Winslet, or (b) be a really bad actress/director, who for some reason thinks that this, yes, this right up there... is how life works. You know, the "hipster" way. You know, the kind of shit that we have already done with Reality Bites... a long time ago, and that one had Winona Ryder and a brilliant, little song called "Stay" by Lisa Loeb (wondered what happened to her).

I mean, what the hell? What does it say about today's industry when even the hipster shit of 17 years ago was better than that? I mean, seriously. And fuck yes, I do want you to get off my lawn, too!

But hey, what do I know, because I am not the daughter of somebody famous, like all the others involved here, in this venture, called Girls.

The pay cable network has picked up to series Girls, Lena Dunham's comedy pilot executive produced by Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner. The 24-year-old prodigy Dunham wrote, directed and starred in the pilot, about the assorted humiliations and rare triumphs of three girlfriends in their early 20s: Hannah (Dunham), an eternal intern at a publishing house in SoHo and a hopeful writer; Marnie (Allison Williams), a sexy, bitchy and ambitious assistant at a slick political PR firm whose goal id to practice environmental law; and Jessa (Jemima Kirke), a space cadet with hippie tendencies who wants to be an artist/educator. The parallels with Sex and the City don't stop here. Like Carrie, Hannah has a handsome carpenter as a boyfriend too, played by Adam Driver. Dunham, who served as co-executive producer on the pilot, is being upped to executive producer for the series alongside Apatow and Konner. She has been garnering awards attention for her second feature Tiny Furniture. Illene S. Landress is joining the project as a co-executive producer. The series marks the professional debut of Williams, daughter of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who booked the HBO pilot shortly after graduating from Yale last year. Additionally, the project co-stars another famous offspring, David Mamet's daughter Zosia.

So, one girl is an eternal intern (who exactly does that work, unless you have very rich parents?), we have one corproate bitch who actually wants to save the world (probably without losing her dance club pass and the three free appletinis per night) and a space cadet, yes, a space cadet who wants to be an artist in New York. Or maybe an educator. Or something.

I am just shaking my head at the creative brilliance that makes it onto television these days, and yes, I am bitchy. I have the right to be bitchy. The producers I was in touch with regarding THE CAGE, and hey, these people only produced BRAVEHEART, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST and APOCALYPTO, among other things, they got told by HBO that the folks over there wouldn't even think about looking at the pitch, because I didn't have an agent. I had producers, but no agent.

Perhaps I should have been squeezed out of a famous person's vagina. Or gone to Yale. Or just be, you know, more hip. Yes, I am bitchy. This is exactly the reason why I don't even want to talk to Hollywood people anymore. Because in the end, quality doesn't matter. No, really, it doesn't. And yes, THE CAGE was high quality.

And sometime during this year, I will prove that to you.

THE BIG FACEBOOK FRAUD, COURTESY OF YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS

All around the world, so-called "business reporters" are going bonkers at the news that super-awesome fraudulent vampire squid Goldman Sachs has "invested" 450 million dollars in genius wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg's social network Facebook, effectively giving it a current virtual value of 50 billion US dollars.

And there was much rejoicing, you know, the kind of rejoicing that is shouted out by people who are in the media and merely vomit out every first-line press release as the truth, without looking deeper into what is actually going on.

But there was much rejoicing, because with Facebook, what could possibly go wrong? Never mind that there are no publicly disclosed records on revenue, cost and profit. Don't worry, folks! It's Goldman Sachs! They know what they're doing, as they have so wonderfully shown by creating funds for the clients in the housing crisis that had the financial world collapsin (and never mind what they are telling you, that collapse is still going on, but now it is in slow motion and thus no longer worthy of the punctual reporting done by reporters who have the memory of a goldfish).

And there was much rejoicing, because, hey, didn't you hear? The dude had a movie made about him, and it was a good one. And he just was awarded by Time the "Person of the Year" cover, and hell, if that isn't a good timing, isn't it?

See, it always comes down to timing when you are about to commit a fraud.

Your marks must believe that this is all real, and you put on a song and dance show in the media, helped by those who have supposedly studied economics, but are either too stupid or too lazy to look at what is going on beneath the surface.

450 million! That means 50 billion evaluation! Awesome!

Only then you start to wonder, where exactly does that money come from? And what is Goldman Sachs going to do with its stake?

Well, for some reason, Bloomberg News got a hold of the relevant documents, and all of sudden, boys and girls, it doesn't look quite as kosher anymore, and we all know that if you are in New York, you better be kosher, or... oh what the hell, if you are in New York and on Wall Street, you don't need to be kosher, because you have all the wrong people working for the administration and the Fed.

With a serious apology to original reporters Max Abelson and Christine Harper, who uncovered this and have written about it here, let us take a closer look at their story, shall we? And then we will go, hey, haven't we all heard that before?

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. clients considering whether to buy shares in closely held Facebook Inc. should take heed: Wall Street’s most profitable securities firm could unload its own holdings without letting them know.

In the very first sentence, we already see what is at stake here. Goldman Sachs, with a lot more information that its investors, gives itself the right to sell their own stakes without informing the investors that they are selling the tiniest stakes to, through a special fund that they have set up and get dumb fucking money in, for a company that the dumb fucking money doesn't even know makes a profit, will ever make a profit, knows nothing of its internal workings, in other words, skirting every rule and regulation once more. Gosh, didn't we have that already? With the derivates market? Trust us, folks. We would never defraud you!

In the last sentence of a one-page investment profile sent to private wealth clients, the firm explains: “GS Group may at any time further reduce its exposure to its investment in Facebook (through hedging arrangements, sales or otherwise), without notice to the fund or investors in the fund.”

Yep. This is the same company that has done this before, and they are doing it again!

The offering document, obtained by Bloomberg News, shows that $75 million of the $450 million investment in Facebook by Goldman Sachs is coming from Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, a hedge fund that handles client money. The firm’s own $375 million investment will probably be cut to $300 million because Goldman Sachs expects to sell $75 million to third parties or to the fund it created so clients could buy a stake in Facebook.

A day or so later, and the fund is already closed, so you better believe that there were enough retards available to spend money on this. But hey, Goldman Sachs even tells the idiots that they are not telling the "investors" everything, see?

“There may be conflicts of interest relating to the underlying investments of the fund and Goldman Sachs,” according to the Facebook offering document’s disclosures section. Material in the documents “is not guaranteed as to accuracy or completeness.”

Oh, and didn't we say that they had done it before? Right on, here we go!

Goldman Sachs paid $550 million in July to settle fraud charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission relating to the 2007 sale of a mortgage-linked investment called Abacus. The company said it made a “mistake” by failing to inform clients in the 2007 deal that it allowed a hedge fund betting against the investment to help put together the deal.

Ah, yes. Defrauding is fine, if you are Goldman Sachs. And even when you get caught, the penalty (all of it handled in secret) wil amount to nothing more than a slap on the wrist, and if you are wondering as to when 550 million become a slap on the wrist, then know this, it became that when we started to defrau people on a scale of hundreds of billions of dollars.

To get a stake in Facebook, Goldman Sachs clients are required to make a minimum investment of $2 million by Jan. 7 in what’s described as limited partnerships based in the Cayman Islands and Delaware. Goldman Sachs is charging 0.5 percent of any capital committed to the partnership as an “expense reserve” as well as a 4 percent placement fee and 5 percent of any gains, according to the document.

Here we get to know that Goldman Sachs will make money no matter what, but let's not dwell on that too much, just look at the fact that all of these things go through "Limited Partnerships", and where? TO get a stake of the most miniscule propoprtions of a company that you as an investor are not allowed to know anything about? Ah, yes, the great American tax havens Delaware and the Grand Caymans, you know, where all money goes to get its dick sucked by beautiful black women bringing you little drinks with umbrellas in them!

A letter addressed to “potential investor” that introduces the Facebook investment profile ends with a two- sentence paragraph. The first asks potential investors to contact a Goldman Sachs representative for further information. The second says:

“Do not contact Facebook.”

Yep. Don't talk to the company that you have invested in. Don't even fucking approach them. All line of information will only have to through Goldman Sachs, which has above told you that they are not required and in fact will not give you all relevant information to make an informed choice about your investment. And who can dump their own stake behind your back, based on secret information that only they have.

And barely anybody outside Bloomberg has reported it. In Germany, for example, Der Spiegel is still in the throes of business lust, giving their readers the notion that, yes, it is a bet on Facebook's future, but that in the end, everything and anything is above board.

Nothing has changed. Nothing at all. Supported by a largely retarded (and/or bought) media, the next bubbles are being inflated, the next long cons are being put in motion, and wait for the moment that they will burst, and kids, they will.

And the only winner on the field, once more?

Is the vampire squid, where nobody ever goes to jail, where all of them go to work for your government, and it doesn't matter if it is a Republican one of Black Barry's White House. They long ago bought them. Don't expect help from them. They are not your friends. They are not doing the jobs that you elected them for. And the media is not doing the job it is supposed to do.

And the clock is ticking.

FORGOTTEN "HEROES": RAY COKES

I am old. Yes, old enough to still remember when MTV was standing for something, and when it was funny and sarcastic and, well, crap, but good crap. One of those who made it good crap (and the guy who had a quirky sense of humour and very likely served as the blueprint for all those TRL type bullshit that followed, but was hoted by people who never were and never could be him)?

Ray Cokes. Together with "Camera Andy" and "Nympho Nina" (barely seen, but always providing a sarcastic voice in the background), Ray Cokes made a wonderful live show called MTV's Most Wanted in the early 1990s, and he was old enough at the time...

... yes, I said it, old enough...

... to understand real humour as well as crap humour.

Ladies and gentlemen, one of those who shouldn't be forgotten, and who had more of a cultural impact in the 1990s than you might think, all across Europe, from a small TV studio in Camden. Give him a hand, will you?

SHERYL CROW, MTV OR WHY I TOTALLY DESPISE THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

In 1994 I stood in front a small music club in Cologne. It wasn't that it was that much of an assignment, but by some quirk of fate or luck I had been able to snatch up a press ticket from the Culture Section of the Bonner General Anzeiger, where I worked at the time. A lot of these tickets were never used, because the head of the department had absolutely no interest in promoting anything that was younger than a hundred years old and was preferably played by a full orchestra.

Most of the other journos, much more jaded than I was at the time, didn't even bother to look at the slush pile of younger artists, most of them unknown or barely known at the time, and if that makes you wonder, it has only gotten worse today, where not even the abrest minimum of PR is done, unless you have Wonder Tits or are some gayish-emo-type boi that one can put on magazine covers (and no, I love gayish emo-type bois, visually speaking. I think they are beautifully unearthly and alien and glamorous, but that is not the point. The point is that in another three or four years it is black midget muscle dwaves, or whatever strikes the music industry's fancy, it is a rigged game).

In 1994, I took of from work a little early and drove the roughly 20 miles to Cologne, parked my car and waited outside at the music club, which was still about an hour from opening. I was so early, in fact, that I could watch the band arrive, and with it, the tiniest little person you could imagine, all smiles and still a year or so away from being surrounded by bodyguards.

"You here for the show?" she asked me.

"Yeah," I said.

"Gonna be a good one," she promised.

"I hope so," I said, "because I like to write about it."

"You're a reporter, then?" she asked.

"Yeah. Regional rag," I said.

"What you like?" she asked.

"Oh, you know. Springsteen. Bryan Adams. Bon Jovi."

"The usual suspects?"

"And Enya."

"Enya?"

"I'm open."

She laughed. Her band was already inside. We were still talking.

"I think you're going to enjoy this," she said.

"Looking forward to it," I said.

And that is how I met Sheryl Crow, when Tuesday Night Music Club was all she had to offer up, roughly an hour's worth of a concert, in a small, cramped club that would be filled with about 120 people, and a sound that was hammering to you from a poorly rigged stage. And on that stage was her, singing her tiny heart out. And know what? She was taller on stage, as artists often are, as if they know that this is their moment, and only the best truly rise up to it.

And she did. I loved her from the first time she opened her mouth and made sure that I bought her CD right there on the spot, having her sign it after the show, when she was all sweaty and happily grinning from ear to ear as she made her way through the dispersing small crowd, finding me.

"Did you like it?" she asked me.

"Loved it," I said.

"Could have been a better performance," she said.

"Could have been a bigger club," I said. "But I think you'll fill them, the bigger clubs and the stadiums, pretty soon."

"Will you write that?"

"If my editors let me."

She laughed, and laughed again when I had her sign the CD, which is something I rarely have ever asked for. In fact, other than Sheryl Crow I had only one other artist who I met and asked for a signature, during my time at NBC, and her name was Heather Nova (and I had already bought her very first CD and loved it, which reminds me that there are still CDs I have to convert again, gah).

I have loved music, ever since I have been a kid. All kinds of music, ABBA excluded (at another point in this blog I have written as to why). I have bought a great many CDs and have gotten some to convert from my friends, others from my friends on hard drives that they had converted, but more than anything I bought the hell out of them.

Not anymore. Some people may think that this has something to do with piracy and the devaluation of music as an artform. And while that may be the case for some out there, it is not the case with me. I stopped buying CDs with the exception of those I deem worthy of such purchase, because the music industry started to devalue the artist.

When I switch on the radio, there they are, the same fucking twelve songs that are being pushed into the charts and onto the airwaves, and they sicken me. When I switch on MTV, there they are, they bullshitters and pre-processed, pre-packaged performances of those who are chosen to become the latest product, the latest brand to be pushed down our throats, without giving us the chance to choose, to discover, to define new, exciting musical artists.

None of them I would like to meet. None of them I would like to talk to, because from their songs, from those dreadful, emptied, delusional and soulless songs, stitched together in Frankenstein laboratories in Sweden's pop centres.

I have an Australian friend these days, and she sometimes tries to show me new artists, new songs, all the way from down under. She has an open mind and an eclectic taste, and at least one CD was bought because she linked me to a song, seven times, before she could find one version on YouTube that hadn't been shut down, because, see, even telling your friend from across the world about a new singer that you should listen to... is piracy.

It's bad. You are bad.

Record stores all around the world have gone the way of the dodo. New artists are barely, if ever pushed, unless they are the complete package. The songs are not important. It is important how you look, right, Lady Gaga? Right, Rihanna? Right?

All of them, having substituted substance with flash, burning brightly on our reality television lit skies that has been Music Television in name only and sports hosts that are so bland, so paper-thin that they seem to have come straight out of a United Colors of Benetton ad.

They have nothing to say, only to sell, and so do the artists they have on, people who have no opinions, only options, who have no stories, only tall tabloid tales. They are the musical version of porn, all the parts are there, but they don't add up to a body, and so sex? Sex is the only thing that the music industry is selling these days.

I don't buy into it anymore. I don't buy them anymore, because I know that the good people, the ones who have something to say, they are no longer in that industry. They have been pushed out, been pushed aside, are now independent, are now lonely voices in the desert of what the internet is.

Over Christmas, at my parents, I watched a bit of telly with them, and there I was greeted in the promo jingles for a channel, by Kate Perry, glitter and plastic glamour, whispering the channel's motto "We love to entertain you" in a studio get-up that could have probably paid for half a record recording, and that makes Kate Perry the worst kind of whore, selling out to be what most of those "stars" today are, corporate spokespersons.

Hey, I am Christina Aguilera, buy me perfume, be like me! Hey, I am kate Perry, I am all bubbly, what, haven't you seen me on the Simpsons? If you haven't, I know at least one country, Germany being the one, where I will haunt you every fucking ten minutes, with the corporatised song "Teenage Dreams" that now stands as a jingle! How awesome is that?

The music industry has devalued itself. Where are they, in those business plans, those spreadsheets? Those bands like The Who, like Queen, like Pink Floyd, like Genesis? Where are they, those artists that have something to say? Who write their own songs that are universally appealing? Who are not writing about hos and glitter and bling and how fucking brilliant it is to get wasted every fucking night and fuck every human waste every night?

Yes, that is right. I am looking at you, Ke$ha!

But not just you. I am looking at all of you.

IF NOBODY ELSE WILL SAY IT, THEN I WILL: NIGGER! (OFFENDED YET?)

It is amazing to which lengths the American establishment goes to white-wash its history, not even stopping at the doors of literature. Literature, for those who never cared, is always a reflection of its time and socio-economic frameworks and thus must always be read in that context, describing both the author's station at his or her travel through life as well as a description of the times during which the book was written.

And said work was written at a time when the word "nigger" (no, I am not going to have my balls shrink at the fear of possibly having offended a black person, and no, I am not going to call them African Americans, either, because... hey, have you noticed? There are black people in France. And in England. And in Germany, too, now!).

In my lifetime alone I have had to keep up with the political phrasing becoming more and more "inoffensive" and by that I mean that white people, especially white Americans would like to hide their prejudice and racism behind words that at their surface seem to be neutral. Words matter, yes, but not nearly as much as the thoughts behind them. Take that away, and you are left with meaningless shells. Nigger turned to Negro turned to Black turned to Coloured turned to African American.

You may think that to be progress, but it isn't, not really. They are still niggers in the minds and hearts of a rather large proportion of white Americans, and if you don't believe that, start looking for the black people at any given Tea Party rally. Or start looking for the Latinos, who are not a race, by the way. Not genetically speaking. Neither are the Jews. Nor the Muslims, both of the latter denoting by and large a cultural and religious community. Why? Because anybody can join (once they follow the rules).

You cannot choose to be black.

You cannot choose to be gay, either, but that is a topic for another discussion.

Completely side-stepping the topic of "how the hell did America look like in the late 19th century", it is now the norm to be inoffensive, unless of course you don't count the fact that "nigger" has been replaced with superficially inoffensive words like "urban". So, whenever you hear that phrase, you know that it actually means "nigger", but hey, who can be angry at "urban", for it only means that you be living in dem big city blocks, right?

Yeah, right. Only that has become a synonym for black people ever since them white folks decided to pack up and leave for the Spielbergian suburbia (in which there is never a black person to be seen, ever, and if you were to substitute E.T. in his movie with a black person, you'd have the quintessential "Magic Negro" story, which have entertained a great many generations of white folks. Watch the movie again. Close your eyes. Imagine E.T. being a black man. You'll find that once you open your eyes again, things in the world will look quite differently).

But we cannot allow ourselves to think about these things, because they tear down the veneer of acceptance, the lie of tolerance that is needed to work in today's doublespeak world, in which meanings are always inferred, never stated, in which prejudice is hidden in empty words, but never spoken.

And since Black Barry has been in the White House, underneath that apparent "victory", these things have become buried, not to be talked about, other than in "birther" theories, and I have talked about it before on this blog, and who has read here repeatedly knows that I am not a racist myself.

Neither do I believe that blacks are by their history and nature magical, better, improved or more enlightened, which is merely the liberal version of racism, descending from Kipling's "White Man's Burden" and twisted around, in a semi-worship for those who have never been in power, thus they need to be that somewhat rarest of species (again, this doesn't merely pertain to black people. Jewish people still delude themselves to be better, chosen, and what have you, based on those centruies of persecution).

But let us come back to literature. Literature, as Doctor Who would tell you, are fixed points in time and space. They cannot be altered, must not be altered, for with such change they would lose the meaning. And let us not even get into the fact that nobody should ever have the right to alter an author's work, for whatever reason, good or bad, merely because it no longer syncs up with the current(s) of time.

But that is what is happening right now. Where? Oh, kids, only in America, where "Twain scholar" Allan Gribben has unilaterally decided to take out all references to "niggers" and "Injuns" and various other things that might be considered offensive by "today's readers"

Did I tell you that said scholar is sitting right in the middle of Alabama? Yes, that's right. Alabama has taken the lead in protecting niggers from white people! Like a lot of Southern states are so eager to rewrite their history of the 19th century to make it look like niggers, uh, negroes, uh, African Americans were actually quite happy with slavery and fought in overwhelming numbers for the South during the Civil War! Don't believe me? Start googling for Virgina textbooks. Start looking at how many of recent "parades" and "celebrations" are purposefully leaving out that little fact that the South was a really fucking racist part of America.

So was the North, by the way, and Lincoln's role in all of it is somewhat murky, too (I know! Shocker, right?). And Mark Twain wrote about those times, in his worldwide classics Tom Sawyer and especially in Huckleberry Finn, which brings together and deconstructs both the myths of niggers and rednecks, because when you think about it, Huckleberry Finn is the most redneck, lower class white kid you will find in modern literature, and both he and Jim have done more for humanising and stripping away prejudices than almost all political speeches up to Martin Luther King's "I had a dream" moment.

By taking these words out, certain parts of America will in another generation or so go, "what? We never called them niggers. Or niggas. Look at Mark Twain! He never wrote that shit, and he was living at that time!"

Can't you see it? Bristol Palin in 20 years time, in her anchor position at Fox News, getting all huffy and puffy about it? Trust me, kids, that is exactly what is going to happen. It is part of a process that has been going on for a long time now, giving new meaning to words and erasing the old meanings, then looking back at a time that never was but at a time that they then see as the actual history.

Doublespeak. Newspeak. Orwellian. Old George was one of the people who could see the future by seeing through his present. And so was Mark Twain.

And this is not merely a change for "political correctness".

This is rewriting history.

Word by Word.

Idea by Idea.

Until everything is now. No past. No future.

And Fox News will tell you what the present is.

And so I say it, that word, that horrible word, so that we won't forget it. So that we will never forget it and the times it stood for, those times when it was okay to see somebody as inferior, as little more than a beast (with an entirely big cock, watch out, ladies), run only by instinct and in need of guidance by "englightened  Christian Whites".

Say it with me, and remember.

Nigger.

[UPDATE] Well, Keith Olberman did talk about it last night on his show, but even there, he and everybody else, really is skirting around that word, as if you spontaneously combust if speaking it out loud, even in the context of a scholarly or political debate.

THE CONVERSATION THAT COULD HAVE STOPPED THE PROPAGANDA LIES ABOUT SADDAM'S STATUE BEING TOPPLED BY "GRATEFUL IRAQIS"

It is worthy to note that in 2003 the propaganda of Saddam statue being toppled (one of the most iconic, for often repeated images on world-wide television, with barely anybody ever questioning to verify it) could have been prevented by a simple conversation, such as they should happen in every newsroom.

Only they don't happen. Not anymore. And even at the best of times, they barely ever did. And so, this is fiction, and it will likely make its way into my series THE CAGE, so don't think about stealing it, eh?

EDITOR

Don't bullshit me, girl. I'm watching the shit on television right now. You telling me that it's not what's actually happening?

GARRELS

I'm telling you that, yeah.

EDITOR

It's fake? Is that what you're saying? Just so that we are clear. That is what you're saying?

GARRELS

Yeah.

EDITOR

You willing to bet your ass on it?

GARRELS

Yeah.

EDITOR

That's good, because if you're doing this story, you're betting my ass on it, too, and I have grown rather fond of my ass. I like to sit on it. You know, here, on this chair. It's a good chair. My ass loves that chair. They, like, are almost married to each other, and my ass is too old to date another chair.

GARRELS

So we do the story?

EDITOR

Do the story.

The editor hangs up. Looks at the newsroom. Looks at the television screens that show the statue being toppled. Smiles.

EDITOR (TO HIMSELF)

Well - looks like we are going to have an exclusive.

STEVEN SPIELBERG TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND HIS OWN HYPOCRISY, INADVERTENDLY DOES TV SHOW GLORIFYING AFGHANI TERRORISTS!

And here is TNT's new STEVEN SPIELBERG PRESENTS: FALLING SKIES TV show, which has Doctor Carter from ER fight aliens on American soil the good old-fashioned American way, which means with a Taliban-style beard, a Taliban-style pick-up, having a machine gun put on its back... but of course that is entirely different, because the aliens are unknown quantities that drop bombs from the sky on unsuspecting farmers and engineers, who then rise up and...

... Sorry, folks. Are people in the entertainment industry so fucking retarded they don't even see the hypocrisy here? As I already discussed here, the capacity of American self-delusion (and by that, I mean the delusion coming from all people in power, so don't worry, it is not merely an American one, but hell, you are the only ones making fucking television shows from it) is apparently limitless.

American "freedom fighters" blowing up shit = good.

Everybody else? Is a TERRORIST!

Yep. it is that whole "being exceptional" thing again.

Wouldn't you wish that one of those aliens were to sit down one of the humans here and explain the Galactic version of the Bush doctrine to him? It would go something like this.

CARTER 

We... are nothing We couldn't hurt you, even if we tried! Fuck me, we are on a small planet on the other rims of the galaxy, that's like bombing a summer home in Mis-fucking-souri because you don't like the fact that it's there!

ALIEN

You won't stay here. We know. We have been watching you for a long time, and if there is one thing you do, you spread. You've spread across your planet, you are killing it, and yet you spread. One of these days, not too far away, you will look up at the skies and you will think to spread out there. You will kill to do so. You will try to take what isn't yours to take. You think you are special. You even have a god that tells you that you are. That you are alone. Alone in the universe. And that everybody else is inferior to you. One of these days you would have come. To us. With your guns and your bombs and your arrogance. We can't allow that happen. There's a planet out there, just thirteen light years away. It is filled with crystal trees that sing to its sun in the morning's hours. You would come there. You would take root there. And you would kill that planet just as sure as you are killing your own. We cannot allow you to come out there. And we cannot allow ourselves to wait for you to change. Not anymore.

But noooo... can't do that, now, can we?

P.S. Yes, I am very much aware that this blog is supposed to be shut down for the foreseeable future, but damn it to hell, if I see something like that, I just want to vomit at the computer screen. And take a hammer to Steven Spielberg's head. Not necessarily in that order.