h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yup. Cass seems to have seen a *very* different version of 'Citizen Kane'.

I am not sure I have ever seen the full movie of "Citizen Kane"..

I tend to avoid voluntary subjection to "thrills and spills" roller-coaster rides when you place yourself so totally in the hands of strangers giving them free licence to manipulate you and your feelings for their own motives, though not quite yet as in Aldous Huxley's "Feelies".

I have just spent some time Googling Orson Welles filmography to try to see whether my memory might be triggered, but to no avail.

Perhaps it was not even Welles, but a poor substitute. "You are such a disappointment to me, Thomas".. Welles really could put people down.

Cass

SPOILER: 'Snowbud' was his

*Rose*bud.

I was thinking of the snow globe he drops.

I was looking up Orson Wells and extraterrestrial and all that came up was War of the Worlds.

In terms of an actual woman relating to a visiting alien, there was The Day the Earth stood still, but my rememberance of that is the woman never acted anything but platonic.

another possibility is "The Man who Fell to Earth"

Looking at the range of Welles' work- especially perhaps that "cinema noire" period of the late forties and just about early Fifties (if you put things in a space dimension rather than purely Earthly) I decided that it a needle in a haystack task for a non-film buff..

But can "Platonic Love" never be seductive?

Audrey Hepburn "A Nun's Story".

Cass

Well I googled 'david bowie "the man who fell to earth" earthworm' and didn't get the quote.

Weirdly, the fourth hit mentioned the book I'm reading at the moment.

It's not on imdb either.

The scene that sticks in my mind is Candy Clark peeing herself when she saw Bowie without his human makeup. Or in his alien makeup, depending how you look at it.

Earth Girls Are Easy?

or maybe the Day the Earth Stood Still?

The only thing that it makes me think of is some things said by some scientists on the subject of "alien invasions". I think Phil Plait discussed it in his book "Death From The Skies". A common theme of sci fi films is that of "Mars Needs Women" that aliens would invade to procreate. However that's just completely implausible as biology, anatomy and chemistry of extraterrestrials would be so divergent from us as to make us completely incompatible, even more so than between terrestrial species. As closely related as we are to chimps and bonobos, we don't find them attractive and even if we did, our biological make up would surely be about as compatible as humans and crayfish.

No Zoidbergs.

Anyone else remember a BBC Radio series-Fifties early Sixties- that was based upon a plot line with (a) a sudden urge connected perhaps with radio signals from space that made human beings want to procreate and to bulk up (b)the arrival of some space-craft with some new creatures from space a bit like the return of the dinosaurs, only they were feasting on people- aliens who did fancy human flesh- but only in that way, and (c)then Earthlings realising that this was not the alien invasion. The intelligent ones were waiting and just adapting the Earth habitat by introducing some of their own favourite food species.

Obviously we beat them off.. But I cannot recall how. No doubt the many owing so much to the few etc as usually happened in those space disaster movies.. A bit "Day of the Triffids" really. Just as well perhaps that sea-water levels are rising. You never know when a bit of sea-water is going to come in handy.

Cass

Actually- while sci-fi fiction has come up-- I suppose I could post on the "popular conversation" thread some thoughts about the applicability of H.G.Wells story "The Country of the Blind".

For those who do not know the story, Wells used a South American proverb "In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is King" and invented a story in which the population of an Andeian valley had become cut-off from the outside world, and then suffered a blinding sickness that impacted so gradually that they were able to create a viable sightless world.

Then a mountaineer fell down into the valley, badly injured, and was rescued and nursed back to life by the people. There was love and a welcome. But he could never be "one of them". So the elders decided that the problem was his eyesight. They scheduled surgery to take away his sight. He died amongst the impassible heights trying to escape.

Cass

Can't see it, myself.

Today is a hge day for Occupy across the United States and elsewhere. This is the day when Occupy has organized a huge nationwide protest against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), extremely secretive organization which works to undermine democracy with corporate dollars, described in the article below as a "speed-dating service for lonely legislators and corporate executives":

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/02/alec-occupy-wall-street-protest-f29

The hash tags on this event are #F29 and #ShutDownTheCorporations. You can monitor the #F29 livestream roundup here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/29/1069358/--F29-Livestream-Roundup

Occupyh2g2

Two young lawyers who belong to Democracial Real Ya and 15M movements (the Spanish Occupy, more or less) Have iniciated an investigation about the Euribor. It has received lots of support in the web.

This is the site ( available in several languages)

http://opeuribor.es/en/

<<<what we have is an interest rate -Euribor- based on a survey self-made by EBF banks. A survey is what determines an interest rate and the price of money in a market? What balance checks are there between the two parts signing a mortgage? Isn’t a survey subject to manipulation by members of the European Banking Federation? How can governmental organisations undertake an investigation of the calculation?<<<

So, we have the markets or the arch-angel Gabriel who comes to announce us, the Virgin Mary, the euribor rate. We are perplexed, but...

"A survey is what determines an interest rate and the price of money in a market?"

No. The market will determine it. People may use many means to calculate the price at which they will try to sell anything.

But if they get it wrong they will miss the quantity target that suits them. Because if it is too cheap they will sell too much (what happened during the period when individuals and countries were piling up so much bad debt) and if it is too expensive no-one will buy it. Even in cases like that of Greece and Italy where national sovereignty is having to submit to EU pressure- it is still the market reality which will determine events, for these measures are all designed to try to ensure that the Financial Markets will continue to lend these countries the money that they need in order not to go bankrupt and cease to operate as States at all.

Cass

Cass,
http://opeuribor.es/en/what-is-euribor/
That page explains what is Euribor. It ends with this:

“With the merging of Thomson and Reuters, the world’s biggest corporation for the delivery of financial information is created. The same corporation that calculates Euribor. Is there a conflict of interest and competitiveness if the company that monopolises and charges for this information is the same one in charge of calculating key data that needs to be neutral and objective?”

You say:
<<<for these measures are all designed to try to ensure that the Financial Markets will continue to lend these countries the money that they need in order not to go bankrupt and cease to operate as States at all.<<

The ECB lend banks money at 1% of interest, a money that is lend to those states at the interest “the market reality” decides. Be it Reuters or Standard and Poors or any of those enlightened brains that didn´t see the coming financial collapse or that even recommended to buy toxic assets in 2008. Those are the same that manipulate absolutely all.
Now we know the Euribor too. No wonder I say.

I´ll remind you that banks have played a major role in the current financial situation. Banks, the IMF, and other organisms alike. They have been gambling with toxic products, they have been speculating with whole nations economies, as if it was a casino.

The bailouts are for the banks, so that they can recover the lends those countries have borrowed at exorbitated rates (rates that are manipulated)The bailouts arent to help those countries.

It´s the Emperor new dress. We have to believe whatever Brussels and The Sacred Markets say, otherwise we are stupid .



End with a meaninful example of this crazy situation: the Goldman Sachs company, “the one which rules the world” according to a City broker, falsified the economic data of Greece so that it could enter the Euro. Brussels looked at the documents with a blind eye.

I call all that Legal organized criminal mafia. Others prefer "Markets reality"

Maria

But as we are very aware in the UK with the Bank of England keeping interest rates artificially low- this is very much because of the collapse of market economics and the need to preserve the infrastructure without which the modern world as we know it will collapse- perhaps not a repeat of the second half of the Thirties. History does not repeat itself.

Like nasty bacteria evil evolves too, and it is historically closely allied to the collapse of Empire and the Wilsonian promotion of self-determination and the idea of a League of Nations in which "Nation would speak peace unto Nation". Such dreams were only imaginable because of the global economic and financial system that existed down to 1914 based upon the British Empire and the Pound Sterling as the global base-currency.

There is much discontent in the UK because, in spite of Quantitative Easing and the very low interest rates, banks are not "hitting their targets" for lending. Well with such low interest rates no-one has much incentive to lend, but in any case it is not and never was the role of "High Street Banks" to "invest". Sound banking involved lending people money against real assets presented to them as collateral that guaranteed repayment.The problems are low asset values with the morinbund state of the housing market (most small people's main asset) and no clear idea of where economic growth is going to come from, and therefore what it will be worth producing.

But the current "Perfect Storm" in which our "Ships of State" are struggling to stay afloat- in some cases like the "Costa 2" under-tow and being taken of course [nb. Greece]- has come from two recent phases of history:

(a) After the collapse of Communism and the "Big Bang", global Capitalism was able to sweep into former Communist or Socialist countries and achieve massive economic growth and profits. It seemed to be "The End of History" and a final triumph of Free Trade Capitalism. In fact what we saw was a "fin de siecle" period of monstrous "feeding frenzy" Capitalism as happened in the USA in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century.

(b) To some extent one could say that Al Quaida and the targetted attack on the World Trade Centre was a fight-back by Islamic extremists against this new form of Capitalist "corporatism"- for it can not really be called Imperialism because supra-national corporations and organisations were above most States, as the post-Second World War reality still (in the West at least) held on to the ideas of self-determination and human rights with small states. And this in a situation in which science was increasingly undermining any belief in the ability of Humankind to run the World, as had been believed even just after 1945.

The immediate response to 9/11 was a 20% fall in the stock values of the entire world, which therefore in money terms became 20% poorer- with terrible implications for all who lived on subsidies and foreign aid. The West responded by calling on all consumers to keep their nerve and to go out and spend, spend, spend. Easy money became the main strategy by which the people in "The Developed World" were encouraged to "do their bit" to defeat the extremists.

Thus those of us in the Developed World were persuaded that we could somehow live primarily as Consumers, Producing next to nothing because it was now much more Cost-Effective to produce in the developing world. There were huge returns for Investment Banks, and the Finance Industry became a dominant part of NB the UK economy, with people getting big salaries spending on all kinds of service industries at Home and abroad, and paying a disproportionate amount of the tax revenue of the UK..

Then the unsustainability of the whole system brought a crash, and at least one or more generations has to be re-educated in the need to actually be Producers- that is making things that foreigners will wish to buy in order to exchange for the things that we wish to buy from them. There is no such thing as a free lunch- as came up yesterday in the Leveson enquiry.

But I have probably once more replied to you at too great a length.

Cass

CASSEROLEON, Banks have no interest in lending, because they are making much more money through market speculation. That is why we can't get a business loan to start a business. That is what is driving the cost of commodities, and why supply and demand no longer does.

And if you look at the board rooms of these very few investment banks, you see the same names over and over. It is the 1%, and they control everything in the world, including the price we pay for bread, through market manipulation.

It's worse than that.

One way of looking at the banks' recent travails is that they were undercapitalised. They did not have the assets at the retail end to mitigate the risks they were taking at the investment end. But they've got wise to this - not by reigning in risk at the investment end but by keeping a tighter grip at the retail end. I even heard one banker give this as a justification for high retail bank charges. And he even managed to keep a such straight face that perhaps he was actually fooling himself.

I'm not saying that they're wrong. From their point of view they *have* to compete with one another at the investment end or else risk going under, and this means taking on board ever greater risk.

And, of course, yer man from Trier wrote about all of this quite explicitly.