Gangs of America

On a labor day weekend it seems appropriate to mention the book that I'm currently reading. That book is Ted Nace's excellent and thorough work "Gangs of America" that details the successive rise and falls of corporate power and its influence on the lives of the worlds people.

In it Nace details the birth of corporations as an entity in Europe and their rise to dominance in the world in the 17th and 18th century. He describes the oppressive business practices and appauling treatment of "employees" in pre-Independence America that eventually lead to the Boston Tea Party and the Declaration of Independence.

Nace then goes on to describe how the fiercely anti-corporate conditions and protections of the early 1800s were gradually erroded away in the courts of America, until the landmark and now infamous 1886 Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County vs. South Pacific Railroad. He brings new insight and understanding to the circumstances of that case and its outcome which explain how it came to enthrone corporations as people in American civilisation. From there on he traces the second great rise of corporate power in America from late 1800s through to the end of the 1930s which occured in the name of the social Darwinism, a widely held belief at the time. Social Darwinism was a particularly evil piece of work that believed marking live hard for the unfortunate was good for society and helped weed out the weak elements to build a stronger, more vital society. It seems all to close to an economic form of eugenics, the scheme siezed on by Adolft Hitler to breed a "master race".

Finally the social unrest and rampant unemployment the followed the depression finally got so out of control that in 1937 Roosevelt was elected and his "New Deal" finally put a halt to the rapid decay in workers and peoples rights and put expansion of corporate powers on hold. The thirty or so years following Roosevelt's turn around brought unprecedented economic growth that was beneficial to both the corporations and the people of America. This was a period in which the share of wealth owned by the top 1% of the nation fell from 45% in 1929 to 20% in 1971.

As we all know, or should know by now if you have read "White Collar Sweat-Shop", the years following 1971 have ushered in another period of massive increases in corporate rights, power and the consequent decline in living standards of the great majority of Americans. Since 1971, inspite of unprecedented economic growth, we the people have "enjoyed" thirty years of stasis or decline of middle class and lower class wages in the face of declining social benefits and increased working hours. In the mean time the wealth of the nation has been drastically redistributed up again until the vast majority of the nations wealth is concentrated in the top 5% of the nations wealthiest people.

If you're not one of those one in twenty people who are wealthier, healthier and more powerful than the other 19 in 20 people, then basically you're screwed. The benefit of thirty years of growth have just passed you by leaving you in the dust and feeling less healthy, working harder, getting less education, being depressed more of the time, and questioning anything that gets in your way of consumerism but not knowing why or when that became your #1 goal in life.

One recurring theme of all books on this topic of corporate power in America is that the key factor in its perpetuation is the influence of monied corporations in the courts and in the government of the country. Nace in particular outlines with chilling detail how time after time control of the Supreme Court by lawyers biased to corporate interests has wrecked havoc on the hard-won life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of the American people at the expense of corporate "life", "liberty" and pursuit of "happiness" i.e. wealth.

Anyone who believes that Supreme Court nominations are just boring technicalities that need not concern should grab this book and read it with a passion because their life, libery and pursuit of happiness quite literally lives hangs the thread that suspends the scales of justice enshrined in the body of the Supreme Court. Hartmann's book "Unequal Protection" goes into greater detail about the framing of the United States Constitution and how it was intended that the Supreme Court be more independent from the executive branch.

However the failure of that independence and the influence of corporate money on the elected bodies that determine Supreme Court's composition form a deadly triangle that threaten to topple the very substance of the country and the principles apon which it was founded. In fact, a great many who have studied corporate personhood are inclinded to believe this has already happened and we, the people, the sovereign people, must rush to stop the fall of the country before it becomes irrevocably crushed beneath a corporate plutocracy that will dominate world society for centuries to come.

I'm hoping that the remainder of Nace's book brings forth some concrete ideas that will inspire the average reader, who no doubt feels weak and demoralized by the crushing blows of corporate power they have endured with thus far. It is easy to feel hopeless and helpless, and conclude that corporate rule on our lives and our relegation to have no other role in soceity than consumer is inevitable. Life as only a consumer is a meaningless one that naturally leads to depression. For this we are prescribed legalized drugs for which we pay (of course) to take away the pain and boredom of a meaningless life. Chemically fortified we can return to working and consuming thus sustaining growth of wealth over growth of quality of life, liberty and happiness.

To quote Douglas Adams (which I ought to more often, given the title of this blog)

"This Planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy"

It is clear to me that it is not to late to make a change, and that it is essential to do so for the good of all people on this planet. We must unite and press for a constitutional ammendment that will irrevokably grant natural people, those that are born and die according to the natural cycle of nature, the right to supreme sovereignty over their country and destiny. The effect of this will spread like ripple across the world as American corporations are cut off from exploiting people across the world. It will empower the people to direct their country to act with courage, honour and humility. Yes we will still have the power to screw things up, but it will be at the will of the people and not the will unconcious, inhuman mega-corporations that have no interest other than the perpetuation of wealth and a supplicant all-consuming population.

You can find out more about Ted Nace's book and the issues it addresses at the books web site www.gangsofamerica.com.

Alternative reading

For those that don't watch TV here is some alternative reading hot off the press from alternet.org. Some of them sound just like some of the previous Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul rants, but fortunately they have better writers and editors than I do.

On the redistribution of wealth and crumbling of working conditions theres Labor Day 2003: Nothing to Celebrate. For a couple of "I told you so" articles on the Iraq invasion see Shifting Sands of Neoconservative Logic and Iraqi Civil War Brewing. Finally for a view on how you, yes you, can help reject the consequences of Corporate Personhood from the ground up see A Small Group of Dedicated People Might Actually Do Something.

Must see TV

I really had no idea Dean and Kucinich could be such compelling speakers. Tune into DLCTV if you don't believe me. I can even hear some shades of JFK there when Kucinich is really on a tear. I just hope that the other Democratic "Republican clones" don't make it. Otherwise we're doomed to four more years of speak four words and.... stop from George Dubbyah.... Shrub.

Flash-washed

Okay, I confess, I've been flash-washed, flash-conditioned and flashed-over by the rest of Blumrich's flash animations (thanks to faithful blog reader Joanna for pointing me back to Blumrich's site). So that stuff really does work and now I'm disgusted, incensed, outraged. I just wish I had the huge piles of cash and influence to get some of them shown on public TV where people might actually see them. In the mean time I encourage you to head over to www.ericblumrich.com, or if you can't remember that try the catchy www.bushflash.com and start clicking.

Be warned, these are not all fun, jovial digs at the "idiot son of an asshole". No some are collections of the most chilling anti-war imagery and messages you've probably seen. It goes to show that the exact same techniques used to promote and scare a cowed American public into supporting war can be used to influence them to decry it and impeach Bush (a common theme). So watch "Memorial", "Occupation", "A lie of peace", "Terror, Democracy and Liberation", "Liberation", "Church and State", and listen to Martin Luther Kings speech at the end of "Victory". Then tell me there isn't a better path for America to follow than the one we are currently being dragged down kicking and screaming, and led down like silly, frightened sheep.

Election fraud for dummies

Investigative reporter and author Greg Palast obviously got tired of screaming "election fraud" until he was blue in the face and having no one take notice. Yes its been almost three years now since Bush stole the election in Florida that he didn't even win the popular vote on. Greg Palast investigated a huge travesity of a privately contracted company, hired by Katherine Harris, "scrubbing" the electoral role of 55,000 voters who were incorrectly labeled as convicted felons just because they had a similar name to an actual convicted felon. The majority of these scrubbed voters were black, and I shouldn't need to point out that almost every black voter in Florida votes with the Democratic party?

I'm not suprised that Greg won't let this one go. This is proven election fraud. This is the kind of stuff that we point fingers at foreign countries for, we decry their lack of democratic process, their foney rigged elections, their puppet leaders... and then invade. This one went all the way to the top for different reasons and the democrats bent over and took it while the supreme court bitch slapped them back home with a crushing defeat. In a sane world all it would need would be for Greg to find a court of law to hear the facts, pass its judgement, and throw the whole sorry lot of them in jail. But of course in Florida Katherine Harris and her cronies own the law all the way to the top so that's never going to happen on their guard.

So the 2000 election is old news, but Greg hasn't given up - yet. On the 40th anniversary of the million man march on Washington, and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, he's now promoting a two minute flash animation by Eric Blumrich called "Grand Theft America. It stars the devil's spawn Katherine Harris as "the leader of the gang that purged Black citizens from Florida voter rolls by the thousands, handing the White House back to the Bush family".

I guess if writing a book doesn't work, writing newpaper columns don't work, and appearing on radio shows across the country doesn't work, then a catchy flash animation with rap music in the background might. You never know, it does go along with the theory that an entire generation has become powerpoint conditioned and can only process a message that fits on a few slides of bullet points with catchy graphics to distract us from the true content.

Lets hope so because if nothing else, the message of "Grand Theft America" is clear: "God Bless Bush's America, God save us all".

Tree dies in fatal SUV "felling"

Sequoia National Park, California. A 1000 year old tree died last Sunday after being involved in a fatal SUV "felling". Reports say the 200 foot-tall giant sequoia tree jumped on the parked SUV "from behind a bush" and then proceeded to "crush it to death, horribly. Horibbly, horribly." The mangled remains of the SUV were later found underneath the tree. Both tree and the SUV died at the scene before paramedics arrived.

Representatives of the Earth Liberation Front denied that they had earlier met with the tree and persuaded it to give its life to the ELF's war against SUVs.

The remains of the tree will be cremated later this month.

You can count me out!

The title of today's blog entry comes from Hudson, a character from the movie Aliens. Hudson decides he's really not up for the job of helping with the salvation of everyone on a planet riddled with blood thirstry aliens. Apparently its dependent on a long trip down a secluded access shaft to a remote transmitter antenna. Getting eaten by aliens on the way and taking one for the team was pretty much a certainty Hudson didn't want to be in on.

So I felt like I'd just heard a Hudson "you can count me out!" exclamation today when the brand-spanking new CEO of my earstwhile employeer spoke out to the entire company about California. That's the state where he'd made his home, where his wife and family lived and where his big fancy house is. "California", he pronounced, "is pretty much upside-down right now. If California were a country, the World Bank would have cut it off by now". He then proceeded to inform us, "There's only one way they are going to put things right and I'm damn glad I'm not living there now paying California taxes to help them".

Well doesn't that just about sum it up? And that coming from mister "I got rich in the dot com boom and reaped all the benefits of the tax cuts because no-one thought to spend the windfall on the common good and the minimum (or sub-minimum) wage earners who prop up the CA economy. No sirey, he doesn't care to stick around an pay his dues. Why is it that a certain segment of the population feel a god-given right to soak up the riches whenever possible and never pay their dues when they are needed?

Doesn't he realize that California produced 13% of the American GDP in 2001, exceeding that of even France (our new found enemy in "Old Europe") and yet its entire deficit (and we're not talking debt here, just deficit) is a mere $1000 per peron? For just a measly $1000 a big fat cat CEO like him could help wipe out the entire deficit of California and make a world of difference to the State. Of course there's an awful lot of people who'll never be able to afford $1000 each - that's all those undocumented workers, some of whom are probably cleaning his house and pool right now - so he'd probably need to chip in say $2000. But for that you buy an awful lot. To him its probably 10% of his property taxes (alone). To the rest of us its huge numbers of school programs don't get cut, huge numbers of day care subsidies don't get cut, huge numbers of arts programs that aren't laid to waste, huge numbers of environmental programs that aren't thrown out the window. The list goes on and on.... Just because someone wants to leave the state and dodge their taxes when the going gets tough. If we all leave the state then what happens? If we all leave the country then what happens? What kind of a nation of tax dodging quiters are we?

Anyway, as I was starting to point out, the 2001 California GDP is 13% of the USA GDP. Remember that George Bush will rack up over $500 billion in deficit spending for this year even when you discount the huge piles of cash he's taking from the social security fund. Therefore compared to the USA as a whole, our budget deficit for 2002 turned out to be around 50% of the national average per capita. And that's for a state with the highest cost of living and the highest wage earners who were most affected by the market crash that started in May 2000 and therefore had the most massive decline in tax revenues. So Mister CEO, I really I think we're doing quite alright thank you very much. And that's inspite of the Enron factor that contributed several billions in debt that California personally footed.

We wont even mention the USA national debt which is currently a staggering $6.8 trillion dollars. On a per captia basis that would be like California owing $700 billion. So when my company's new CEO starts getting all gung-ho and bragging about how fucked up California is, and how we'd be cut off by the world bank for our financial misdemeanors, I'd respectively like to remind him that USA Inc. now owes the world more than 20 times per captia what California does. And mark my words, its the world because a very significant part of our national debt is shored up by foreign capital investments in American financial instruments. If the other 95% of the worlds population collaboratively decided the dollar was no good then, as Hudson would say, we'd be on "one express elevator to hell - going down!"

No doubt at the bottom of the elevator shaft George Bush, Dick Chainey, John Ashcroft, Ken Lay and all the rest of their Neo-con cronies would be there to greet us. Oh joy...

One term resident...

I'm sure someone can photoshop or gimp up a better version, but the opportunity was too good to miss...

The low down on the show down

I'm still waiting for someone to pen a gubernatorial send up of Campbell and the Nails song "88 lines about 44 women", that is "270 lines about 135 candidates". I'd write one myself except it took me seventeen names reading down the official A-Z list before I reached a name I'd even heard of - Bustamante (snuggled up next to Camejo). The only interesting thing I could come up with so far is there is no representation from candidates with a last name starting with 'O', 'X' or 'Y'.

Also given the perception that California is full of actors and software engineers, most of which are now supposedly unemployed, it seems we have precious few of either, employed or not standing for governor. In the rush to governors office almost everyone seems to have declared themselves a businessman or woman least they be left behind with the rank and file likes of Bill Chambers (railroad switchman/brakeman) and Ned Roscoe (cigarette retailer).

If I had a vote I'd probably go with the sentiments of this alternet.org article which outlines five myths about the recall.

360-degree pleasure

Thanks to the dude for pointing me at this web site full of amazing 360-degree panaromic VR photos. New ones are posted every week, use the index links on the right hand to go back over the last two years worth of photos. If you don't have the QuickTime plugin required it is worth getting it.

One term too many

We've got one shot to prevent the world from having to suffer four more years of this joker.

So click, print, cut and spray. Then cover your streets, walls, and halls to end the suffering.

Manufactured Excess

Okay, so I was wrong, Arnie is running for governor after all. Yes, I'm probably the last to report this, so late in fact it doesn't even qualify as news. Like many people who are running for governor he's citing some laudible goals: improve education and bring back companies to California to create jobs. Who could argue with that? After all no one ever runs for election on the basis of running down schools, putting people out of work, removing services from the undocumented workers who prop up the economy, increase pollution, and incidentally take a tons of bribes for doing it all.

Unfortunately there's this little problem of our huge deficit and a requirement to get a 75% majority to do anything with the budget. Anyone who doesn't fix those will get crucified in the press. Which pretty much means anyone who comes to power will get crucified. The only thing tha would save them would be another 9/11 and a few more "military actions" to take the presses and peoples minds off complaining about how awful life is.

Arnie is also saying he can't be bought because he's too rich. Well that sounds good too, how honest of him to admit it up front. However it would be nice if he could declare he couldn't be bought because he was morally opposed to bribery and corruption, and it has no place in our government and those that try it had better make an appointment with the attorney general. Period. Because when it comes down to it special interests will find ways to break him down but without money, as they say "everyone has their price". They'll find a way to get him stuck between a rock and a hard place and get a compromise out of him without ever paying a dime. For that, no doubt, he'll eventually get crucified too.

But deep down my main objection with Arnold, given the little we know about his plans for California, and given that he's a card carrying Republican; are basically that he was the first kid on the block to rest a Humvee from the hands of the military and say "Das ist kool!", and proceed to drive one around Hollywood for fun (after they removed the .50 caliber from the roof). The rest, as they say, is history. Many years later I'm taking a walk in my neighbourhood and parked right there in front of me is a brand new Hummer H2 all decked out in... wait for it.... CHROME. Chrome for chrissakes! And get this, it has LOW PROFILE TIRES! Low profile tires?

Fortunately for them hey had thought to leave the parking break on, or it might just have rolled back onto the railroad tracks and gone for a little spin down to the dock yards as a hood ornament of a 1000 ton frieght train. Well, in my dreams. There was no way you could have budge that monster an inch without a hundred friends to help you push, and in any case the low profile tires would probably have exploded as it rolled over the curb.

In the end I know there is little to be done about the onslaught of these monster obscenities. Its not them that is the problem, its the people who have no qualms at all about driving one and think its a fine way to spend their money. As someone once told me, when you see someone driving a $150,000 car down the street, its like a big FUCK-YOU to all the people who could never afford such a thing and who's minimum wage labours at the gas station, at the toll booth, at the burger joint, at the Wal-Mart, make it all possible. It is purchased purely because it can be, and it is status value is purely because of its price tag. This is no one of a kind work of art, this is no rare treasure from the bowels of the earth, this is a manufactured excess, an excuse for the bored to squander our resources in a most obscene fashion.

I only hope I live long enough to bore my friends kids with tales of when monster trucks roamed the streets and to have to explain to them the concept of a stretch Hummer (yeah, that was parked near the chrome monster) a half a block long with only four people riding in the back. I can hear it now: "you tell it to kids these days and they wont believe yer!".

Donate for change

I usually restrict my gift giving to friends, charities and the occasional non-charity causes. However I've never given to any political cause before, until today that is. Arianna Huffington now has my $50 and I'm sure she'll spend it wisely in her run for Governor. To be honest, if the recall really goes ahead then I don't really think or care if she has a chance of winning, that's just not the point. The point is to get more visibility for the message that corporate greed and political corruption are undermining America. I've read Arianna's writing, I've heard her speak, I've talked with her in person and I know she can really make the other candidates lives a misery.

Of course she'll be weak on experience of government, and the minutae of running a State. But she has high and principled ideals she wants to uphold and I really believe that she would do so if elected. As an independent she really has no-one else to answer too except herself and the people who elected her. And as a naturalized US citizen we know she isn't just using this as a stepping stone to the Whitehouse. So she really would be every money hording, control grabbing, arm twisting corporations and politicians worst nightmare. Regardless, it'll be very interesting to see if how the fight (not race) for governor goes down.

You go girl!

Out SCO code, out I say!

At the LinuxWorld show this week people were selling anti-SCO T-shirts. I'm sure there were SCO minions on the show floor, but they probably weren't showing their true colors for fear of being burned at the stake. Today I spotted an article about a company Aduva that has created a product to detect SCO code in your source code. Once found it automates the replacement of offending SCO code with non-SCO code.

Back at you, you SCO-evildoers!

The election's long gone but the shrub lingers on

Trolling my list of refering sites I came across this well compiled collection of information about the 2000 Florida elections. In the wake of recent published flawys in computerized voting systems, its good to remember just how bad our manual systems were, and in many case still are. Worse still are the people who set them up and administer them.

I'm not saying that digital systems are inherently better than manual systems, it is clear they are currnetly wide open to fraud. However, it seems that someone could apply at least some brainpower to using a computerized front-end to present the voting information, collect the input, and then generate at paper trail that is verifiable by the voter. Is that really so hard?

My improvement to the process is that voters should be able to get a voting receipt that can be used at any later date to anonymously retrieve and confirm their voting selection and that is was counted correctly. Obviously this could not be done over the internet, only at secure terminal where only one person could see the voting preference. Verification of voting could be done by sampling voters, bringing them in and asking them to verify their vote. I suppose the problem then would be a certain number of people would forget how they voted, or deny that the presented vote was correct. How do you solve that? I don't know - I never said these problems were easy to solve! What is a vote anyway?

Maybe on voting day all the democrats should fly west and north and all the republicans to the south and east. No need to count the votes, just split the country in two and let everyone stay where they end up.

Tea-time, now with added darkness

The juxtaposition of my blogs title and its HTML colour scheme has been bothering me for some time. While it may have looked pretty to some designer at Blogger I didn't find it appropriate for a "long dark tea-time" blog. So, I switched to a mosty black, white and grey scheme for added darkness. It looks fine on my screen but please let me know if you're having problems reading the text because of the new colour scheme.

As a small consolation to the chromatically offended I would point I have added a search feature for this blog. Its powered by my old friend Google, just what would we do without Google? Google indexing of this site is usually about a week behind publishing, but that is usually easily enough to catch 95% of recent content and 100% of the archives. Anything you still can't find is your own problem (try your browser's search page feature).

Evasion Haiku

Thanks to Mezzanine Stairs for pointing out an entertaining NPR spot on The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, a new book by Hart Seely.

I found it while looking at some of the 300+ sites that quote George Bush Senior on the dangers of occupying Iraq. The quote in full can be found a Chicken Or Beef where my unlikely trail towards Evasion Haiku started.

For the record here is the haiku...

    Evasion Haiku
    Donald Rumsfeld 12/3/2002
 
    I’m working my way
    over to figuring out
    how I won’t answer.

Its right up there with:

    In Command
    March 2003

    A government is 
    governing, or its not and if
    not someone else is

Or how about the non-Haiku...

  The End of the World
  4/18/2002

  Puffs of dust
  End up crawling
  Up your leg
  And hitting your knee
  Because it's,
  There might be
  As much as an inch
  Or two or three.

And finally, Rummy on Bush at Camp David...

  Camp David
  1/9/2002

  We had our dinner,  went to bed, 
  and I think he came in and someone said
  "Do you want to go to a movie?"
  I didn't want to go to a movie. 
  I'm not sure that was that night, 
  but it was one of those nights. 
  In any event, that's the last thing I need is a movie. 
  My whole life's a movie!

Yes folks these are the real deal. Poetic justice? I hope not!

The finest congress money can buy

Its good to know some thing never stay the same. While GWB is out raising over $200M, I read to day that the title of todays blog entry is actually a Mark Twain quote. I came about it as I was checking on whether Mark Twain ever really said "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco". Apparently, according to Snopes none of his books, writings or private correspondences ever included the famous quote. Of course it doesn't mean he didn't actually say that to someone all those years ago and it never got written down, but the source of this quote is definitely questionable. Well you learn something new every day!

My favourite Twain quote?

"For every problem there is always a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong."

It sounds exactly like the kind of solution you get when you have

"The finest congress money can buy"

So go enjoy the summer and feel free to rebuke those who dare to impune its warmth with Twain's words.

Terminally speaking: Rise of the Machines

Well sometimes it helps to blog your thoughts out loud. Tonight Joanna dragged me kicking and screaming to "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines". Okay, so I wasn't kicking and screaming, but I was filled with trepidation. Since I'm damn glad I didn't see any spoilers for Matrix 2 and double damn glad I didn't see any for this movie I wont give any here, but...

I will say that inspite of all the mediocre reviews I'd seen for T3 I have to say I really quite enjoyed it. As sequels go I'd rate it higher than Matrix Reloaded. While T3 has special effects a plenty, and cliches a plenty it just had more plot. I beleive that the people who gave this a "B" probably didn't watch the original two movies, or if they did and just filled them under "Arnie: Cool Action Flicks" and promptly forgot about them or the darker, more sinister story line.

Fortunately for me and Joanna (okay she was kicking and screaming, but I held her down and pinned her eyeballs open) we'd recently watch both T1 and T2, I can say that definitely helps. T3 is just one of those movies, where you really need to know what preceeded. Apart from the humour they didn't try too hard to make it stand alone and most sequels are just plain better to be made and viewed that way. Of course being a big Hollywood movie they do make some efforts to make it palletable to neophytes, however most of the laughs were all in references to the first two movies. And just like the second movie they did manage to introduce quite a few (okay, maybe too many) cliches from the first movie. But as a devotee of the series I've just gotten used to that even though it makes no sense at all in such chronologically fragmented movie.

As a fan of the "thriller" genre I prefer my thrills dead pan. I just do not really like any laughs with my thrills. When people laugh in a good thriller its a different kind of humour, very natural, just like real life and you're still on the edge of your seat. So if it was my one criticism of T2 and T3 it would be the self-referential laughs. If T3 or T2 had been like T1 then I'd be very happy - dead pan action and thrills. I really wish a directors of thrillers would film and produce alternate versions that have no superflous made-for-Hollywood humour, it would do us thriller fans a big favour.

Of course if they do that then it wont be another happy-go-lucky action flick that we can laugh off and say "That'll never happen". No we might actually go home wondering about how dark life can be and how we should try harder to make the world a better place. The unfortunately thing for me is, inspite of all the humour, inspite of it being just a Hollywood movie with an actor I'm all too familiar with, I can look at this movie and believe it really could happen. Its no joke. The only thing it takes is for people to be removed from the loop which wont be due to a sinister Skynet, or some unfortunate military chap plugging in his virus ladden laptop one morning. No, it'll be corporate profiteers secretly pulling the wool over our eyes while a government they have essentially hijacked does their bidding and sets the life=money=war=death train rolling. Wait a minute, didn't that already happen?

There, see I knew I could get politics into an otherwise perfectly mundane movie review :-)

Anyway, for those that haven't seen it, and saw T2 or T2 and T1 I'd recommend T3 as definitely worth a look. Relative to most Hollywood action flicks I'd give it 7.5 out of 10.

My one wish after seeing this movie: please don't make T4, its time to let the machines rest and let the humans stop having to watch over their shoulder for the next Disney Animatronic character chasing down the street. T3 was a perfect ending closing for the series closing all the loops and tying up the loose ends, and its hard to imagine that there is anything more to be said or done that doesn't ruin it all. So Arnie, just give me the word... tell me "I wont be back" and I'll rest easy tonight. After all it isn't every day that an actor gets to be a wrecking ball and a door jam in one movie, what more could he want?