I can’t recall ever being so surprised by a film as I was upon viewing Tarantino’s latest, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. As with most of his films, each is an experience more than a film. Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, et cetera, these works of art stick with you, but he appears to have outdone himself with Hollywood. I can’t speak as a pinky-out critic of any caliber, merely someone who enjoys fun movies. And I sure-as-heck found it in this movie. Where to begin? The movie saunters through a beautiful, 1969 Los Angeles. Too beautiful, in fact. Every ad, every face, every car, every conversation, has an angelic quality. The love of films themselves is apparent is almost every shot. Margot Robbie is blindingly beautiful as the doomed Sharon Tate, and she exudes a high voltage joy in each scene. Yet the obvious, dark undercurrent weaving its way throughout is the inevitable Manson massacre that begins to feel palpable the farther you go into the film. It gets worse the more attached we get to the characters that we know won’t survive. Robbie’s Tate in particular. Her unearthly beauty and charm casts such a spell that you, audience goer, feel increasingly helpless as the film builds to the bloody climax, that you badly want to defend her from the inevitable but know that you can’t. You can’t rewrite history.

And here is were Tarantino uses the ace up his sleeve.

Ever heard a crowd of people cheer in a theater? You will if you see this movie. Perfect strangers were veritably sky-hooting in unison during the last ten minutes of the film as their secret fear did not come to pass.

So, Spoilers.

Manson’s killers descend on Cielo Drive at around midnight on August 8th, 1969, yes, but something quite unexpected occurs. All you could really say is that the catharsis of half a century, from an entire generation, was suddenly loosed in cinemas around the nation. Brad Pitt’s character, Cliff Booth, high as a kite from smoking an LSD-laced cigarette, is confronted by Rex, Susan, and Patricia. At this moment we, the audience, wholeheartedly believe that we will witness his death, along with DiCaprio’s character and that of his wife. And yet. Cliff’s lucidity returns in a flash while facing the hippie scum, and with the click of his tongue, he commands his beautiful beast of a pit bull to attack Rex. Suffice to say, Rex and one of the female killers is shredded by the dog. The third gets torched by an utterly sloshed Leonardo DiCaprio, wielding a flamethrower that had been used as a prop from a previous film. The audience laughing and cheering throughout.

It’s in this moment of revenge that the audience realizes how much they’ve despised Tate’s killers. We have always hated the pieces of human excrement that took the life of an 8-month pregnant Sharon Tate even if we didn’t realize it. And probably most of us have harbored the barbaric desire to see them get what’s coming to them. And, in this film at least, they do receive it.

There’s so much more to the film than just the build-up to the Manson murders. For instance, was Bruce Lee really as much of a jackass as he was portrayed to be in the film? Watching the film in the moment, you couldn’t care less, and the subsequent dressing-down he receives at the hands of Pitt’s character is fairly satisfying.

Was 1969 Hollywood, and its inhabits, really as beautiful as Tarantino’s portrayal?

The best parts, for me at least, are the various disembodied moments; a young Roman Polanski taking his french press coffee to a backyard table in the morning, An electric Tate taking in a matinee of one of her own films. Brad Pitt weaving in and out of traffic. The exquisite dialogue-heavy scenes that Tarantino is known for. It is the perfect summer movie.

Very informative article from The American Conservative: The doctor monopoly is killing American patients

In school we never learn about the American Medical Association’s efforts to shut down 80% of medical schools during the early twentieth century. Yet it happened, and that organization’s continued stranglehold on medical education is causing the needless deaths of thousands of American citizens.

Tulsi details Kamala’s hideous record as a California prosecutor in a matter of seconds during tonight’s Democratic debate, exposing Kamala’s corruption on a major network. Kamala had no response. She won’t recover from this, and neither will Biden once Tulsi similarly exposes his sordid past. Once Kamala and Biden are out of the way, what other candidate could stand in the way of Tulsi’s nomination? And once nominated, how could Trump hold a candle to her?

I’ve always wondered who writes the bills that are voted on. Lawyers, lobbyists? How about CIA analysts? It appears that SB 3153 is a direct product of the intelligence community, handed straight to Congress with the expectation that it’s signed into law as is.

Here’s the write-up at Zero Hedge

And here is Ron Paul on the bill:

The newly-approved Pentagon budget.

For perspective, the budget for rest of the government over the same time period is $1.3 trillion.

This is going to be a quick note on a cuff as I make my way through Amazon’s glorious-because-it’s-what-would-happen series, “The Boys”. Based on the premise of how superheroes, with all-too-human flaws, would operate in the real world, the show fully explores the inevitable power-drunkenness, vaunting egotism, and corruption that powered humans would exhibit if they really existed. And the worship by the public that blinds them to their flaws. So, maybe I should warn: spoilers?

Okay.

So early in the first episode, a lightning fast “supe” runs straight through a major character’s girlfriend, instantly killing her in gruesome fashion. The grieving man is later approached by an FBI agent, who informs him that “Supes lose hundreds of people each year to collateral damage”, to which the character responds, “No. Come on, that’d be all over the news. People would be screaming bloody murder.”

Sound familiar?

Isn’t there one particular pharmaceutical product that inspires that same blind worship on the part of the public, and encouraged by a snake’s den of corporate, regulatory, and government interests? All of whom share the same desire to suppress the true casualty rate and long-term health effects of this product? A casualty and injury rate that is never reported on by the corporate press, because people would be screaming bloody murder?

Isn’t there one particular pharma product that seems to be wearing an invisible cape, wreathed in holy light? And isn’t there one pharma product exempt from safety testing, from legal liability, beyond reproach? And isn’t that just the environment for the cancerous growth of unchecked corruption? We know it, and we know it hasn’t earned that esteem. Modern vaccines are riding the coattails of the earlier, and questionable, successes of the polio and smallpox vaccines. Undeservedly so.

You’ve got to hand it to the architects of the modern American State: they’ve perfected the art of pitting citizens against one another, separating them into groups and letting them fight. And our capacity to fall for the ruse every single time is uncanny. Whether by race, by the size of our paycheck, by political outlook, etc., we Americans allow ourselves to be filed into one or another group, and quarrel with the group we are instructed to. It’s pathetic, really. Our desperate, primitive need to identify with some tribe, even in this exceedingly modern era, is exploited to maximum effect, and we become sitting ducks for just the right turn of phrase that slips past our capacity for critical thought, triggering an emotional land mine, and years, decades, a lifetime later, we finally realize that we never actually chose to fight these ridiculous culture wars. We’ve been duped. Our emotions are manipulated masterfully by high artists of propaganda. We find ourselves among the ‘Left’ or the ‘Right’, the ‘capitalists’, the ‘socialists’, or whatever, and all the while the government grows, and as it grows it exploits, and wages war, and legislates to its heart’s content. Captured and controlled by myriad industries, the government becomes their tool to exploit the quarreling masses’ wallets and futures. Our true enemy is not our neighbor, our fellow citizens, however different they may be from us. Our true enemy is our own government. The chains that had been forged, over two hundred years ago, have irreversibly corroded, and lay broken at the feet of a beast that few believe to exist at all. Instead of turning our attention and anger toward it, we direct it at our fellow victims. And this monster of our own creation watches the spectacle, and laughs.

I can think of no other word to more accurately describe the mindless reverence bestowed upon one particular pharmaceutical product than ‘religion’. ‘Cult’ works as well. The fervor, the superstitious awe, the virulent desire to censor critics and forcibly convert the masses smacks of vulgar fundamentalism, and should be plainly stated. Despite the evidence that vaccines did not save the human race from infectious disease (clean water, clean food, proper nutrition, and good plumbing did that), the evidence that any immunity derived from vaccination wears off within five years, that the toxic load of aluminum injected into infants could, ironically, be causing irreversible damage to their immune systems, these people blindly, and militantly, promote vaccines as some God-given panacea. But vaccines are pharmaceutical products, produced, marketed, and sold by pharmaceutical corporations. The same corporations that have sordid histories of corruption, fraud, and criminality. We are welcome to question all manner of pharmaceutical products, but when that product resides within a syringe, the acolytes of the vaccine religion descend, quickly attempting to stamp out the fire of criticism before it spreads. How this is any different than any other deranged, totalitarian dogma from history?

Many foresaw the dangers of our government’s development of tools to combat “terrorism”: they would eventually be aimed, not at terrorism, but at any individual or group they chose. All the War on Terror tech eventually trickled down to local law enforcement to fight the War on Drugs, and other run-of-the-mill crimes. Now it will be used to suppress criticism of a pharmaceutical product, so long as that product resides within a syringe:

The Guardian: Anti-extremism software to be used to tackle vaccine misinformation

Bizarre string of news reports suggesting that the Pentagon’s experiments with insects between 1950-75 could be responsible for outbreaks of Lyme disease.

Gizmodo: Pentagon ordered to to tell Congress whether it weaponized ticks and released them into the public