PEOPLE. A SPACESHIP. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

So I’ve been to the movies. And I have a blog.

You see where this is going, don’t you?

Pandorum

Pandorum starts with a promising premise – two spaceship flight crew members wake up from suspended animation on a ship that appears to be dead. With no memory of their mission, they have to figure out what’s wrong with the ship – and what happened to the crew that was supposed to relieve them.

What follows, unfortunately, is a clunky mashup of Alien, Resident Evil and space-mission-gone-wrong films. The eventual explanation for what’s going on (which, incidentally, looks nothing like what the promo poster to the right implies) might have worked if the screenwriter put a little more thought into it (or been a little more consistent) or at least wrote dialogue clever enough to get the idea across. But he didn’t.

Still, probably the biggest weakness is the creature design. When yr doing a film like this, the secret is to come up with something iconic enough that stands out from the rest of the pack, something people will remember. Repurposing the leftover vampire costumes from I Am Legend is NOT a way to achieve this.

Fail.

Is there anybody out there,

This is dF

TERRORISTS WIN THE WAR ON TERROR BY TERRORIZING THE COURTS WITH THEIR TERRIFYING TERRORISM

I was rather stretched for time back when New York, the GOP and America in general was freaking out over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 defendants being taken to New York to stand trial. Which is as well, as I was thoroughly baffled, bamboozled and perplexed by all the hoopla.

Well, let me put that another way. I wasn’t surprised by the hoopla. Hoopla is what America does best when it comes to Teh Terrorz. I just couldn’t get my head around the reasons behind the hoopla.

Because as near as I could tell, the main objections were (1) Bringing terrorists onto US soil is extremely dangerous, even if the terrorists are still in jail and (2) It’s especially dangerous to try them in a civilian court (even though that’s how we’ve tried every other terrorism case in the US in the entire history of the US) because OMG what if they WIN? Then terrorism will be legal and we’ll all DIE!

Neither of which makes even the slightest bit of sense to me. So I figured I must be missing something, and that I needed time to work through the details – which, as I said, I didn’t have back when the story broke.

Luckily, that worked out pretty well, because since then, the BlogoNet has done all the heavy lifting for me.

Glenn “Constitution Boy” Greenwald has a pretty good (albeit really long) summation of what Eric Holder has in mind, how it adds up to a case of very selectively applied Rule Of Law (in essence: we’re only going to use civilian courts for slam-dunk cases, and use military tribunals for the ones the DOJ might actually lose) and why that’s a bad idea (at least if you don’t want yr justice system to resemble North Korea’s).

If that’s too much work, Fafblog brilliantly sums up the whole Gitmo Terrorist-Storage Offshoring dilemma as “Schrodinger's Guilt”:

If they stay in the box they might be guilty, but if we open the box they might not be.

Exactly.

Order in the court,

This is dF

KEEPING AMERICA SAFE THROUGH REVISIONIST HISTORY

Trivia time!

Q: How many terrorist attacks occurred on US soil during the George W Bush administration?

A: Zero.

Source: Bush's former press secretary Dana Perino.

True. 9/11 and the anthrax letters all happened during Bill Clinton’s term. Or maybe it was Obama’s. Who cares? It’s Fox News, and 9/11 happened when THEY say it does.

Just shoot me,

This is dF