I could probably add "Twelve Angry Men" as I love the theme/message of that movie - that one juror has the internal fortitude to not be bullied by a mob ... and actually convinces one juror - and then 10 others - to change their original guilty vote. IMO this is what would need to happen for one Covid falsehood to be exposed as such.
I wrote a long article about this movie and its important lesson a couple of weeks ago.
Loved the Condor book but did not continue watching the movie because I had imagined the characters differently LOL. Saw the River Kwai at least 3 times, love it. Excellent Guinness (not the beer). Love the Chocolate Factory. Now you make me think of other oldies but goodies. guns of Navarone, magnificent seven, the King and I.... ahhh... such good old movies aren;t made anymore. Gotto check my drawer there must be some more LOL.
Thanks, Ingrid. I bet my readers will come up with some more great selections for this list. Yes, they don't make movies like they used to. My town doesn't even have a movie theater any more. We had one for 100 years ... and then the response to Covid killed it. I wonder what "The Last Picture Show" was in Troy, Alabama?
Yep, but I always thought that movie played on a false narrative - this idea that Russia/The Soviet Union actually would try to invade the American heartland!
I guess Americans thought Iraq would do the same thing. And Iran, North Korea and all the other Boogey Man villains our neocon leaders have created to protect the Military Industrial Complex.
In a "Few Good Men," Jack Nicholson's colonel must have thought that Cuba was a threat to invade America! I've asked this question before: Who really couldn't handle the truth?
There was a study done a few years ago looking into which countries were the least likely to be invaded. The answer was the United States, not because they have a great military and not because of their advanced technology but rather because there are so many guns in the hands of ordinary citizens.
Great point. We also have three big bodies of water guarding us, meaning invaders would have to travel a long way to invade us and would have to have one heck of a Navy. As long as we can keep Canada and Mexico from invading us, we should be pretty safe.
Right. The United States has been invaded for years by a hostile alien force and is still being invaded. Without a shot being fired. Nearly all military age men.
It wasn't about Cuba being an invasion threat. It was about an ideology that produced lenin, trotsky, stalin, beria, vasily blokhin and countless others.
But even Lenin and Stalin didn't preside over any USSR invasion of another country. The USSR did invade Afghanistan in 1979, which was a disaster for that country.
Of course, America did the same thing 31 years later.
I just thought of another movie I should have added to my list - "True Grit," one of my all-time favorite movies. Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne) DID have "true grit." He was NOT afraid to single-handedly taking on Bad Guys, even when badly outnumbered. When something was important or mattered, he rose to the occassion. The world needs more people with genuine true grit.
And it--the must-read Charles Portis book, and both film versions--contains a very important message for us dissidents about vengeance. For more on the Coen Bros. version: see this, which contains bits of political science paper I once did on their version, which I do believe is the superior one: https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/03/mattie-ross-and-america
I just thought of another one - "Wal-E." The message from this film is that we are all becoming too lazy and obese to move or do anything for ourselves. And the State kicks in and supports this by constantly giving us "bread and circuses" (entertainment) so we don't think about anything important.
The re-boot was a success! When I first posted this story about 17 months ago, it got about 1000 total reads and maybe 20 "likes." (I kept plugging it elsewhere and boosted my likes to 42).
Anyway, in an hour or two with the recycled version, I've already gotten more reads and likes than the first effort. Take-away: My Substack is growing! Also, Substack often sends Substack authors blurbs encouraging authors to occasionally re-run old stories (for a new audience). I guess this is good advice.
I don't get it. March 11 will mark the 4th anniversary of this madness. How come seeing celebs dying in front of cameras doesn't push prosecutors to indict the people who caused this worldly disaster?
Because they died of ____________________(insert cause of death here) not the Covid shot. Many do not connect the dots sadly. There is even Pfizer's own list of adverse events for their shot. I think it had over 30 pages which will include many. many of these causes of death.
I still think the Mother-of-All-Covid scandals is the massive number of people who must have died from the Iatrogenic protocols, unnecessary panic and collateral damage from the lockdowns. That's government-endorsed/caused genocide IMO.
Minor nit pick: the Alec Guinness officer in Bridge On The River Kwai, does manage to blow up the bridge, at the cost of his own life. He attempts to run at the detonator, is shot, and as he falls dead his body falls on the handle of the detonator, blowing up the bridge.
Nit pick #2: the Godfather quote is from the wedding scene in The Godfather I, not the second movie.
Robert, thanks for the corrections. I have now edited the text to make my descriptions (hopefully) accurate. I had the Godfather scene right 18 months ago when I wrote this and then ran across a clip of this scene, which said this was from The Godfather Part 2 - but, like you say, it IS from The original Godfather.
Wonderful compilation Bill of those older movies . Just wondering if you had a chance to see OPPENHEIMER ? It resonated with me about those kangaroo courts , idealism ,corruption , and the DOD . It has so many parallels to what is going on now ethically and morally.
Yes, I recently watched it. It definitely resonated with me for the reasons you mention. I'm now reading "The Wuhan Cover-Up." Robert Kennedy develops the point of how almost everyone who goes to work in the "biosecurity" field is morally compromised - probably sociopaths or psychpaths (or just going after the easy money and the big grants). These people have abandoned the idea of medicine as a "healing" profession. And they are all ultimately captured by the Military Industrial Complex and/or the CIA.
"Oppenheimer" of course gets into the moral question of whether America should have dropped those two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This, of course, ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. (I do think it saved far more Japanese and Americans by preventing an invasion of Japan).
However, Japan was not innocent on the attrocity front. From "The Wuhan Cover-Up," I learned something I didn't know: Japan's mad scientists dropped repeated bio-weapons on citizens of China for many years (starting in 1937). According to Kennedy's book, these disease-causing agents killed at least 500,000 innocent Chinese civilians (more than were killed by two atomic bombs).
And the experiments the Japanese scientists did on prisoners were every bit as horrifying as those done by Megele et al in the German concentration camps.
I came down on the side of the infantry staging for the invasion of mainland Japan. Relief. the war was over. I figure my counterpart in Japan thought the same. As tragic and stupid as everything was.
The bombs saved millions of lives. The Japanese would have fought to the death, especially on their home island. I don't understand why Japan didn't immediately surrender after the first bomb. It took two demonstrations.
It's been a while since I read about the reasons. First the Japanese high command wanted to fight to the last and there were two bombs. I guess they wanted to be sure both worked.
At this point Bill, I do have a lot of books on this debacle over these past few years and I've distilled the information down to this : I am responsible for my own health , I will give my opinion to others that these injections are not safe, based on no formal religious beliefs, I'll ask if they have done any research on their meds and those going forward with agile licensing ( no testing required and no liability ), have they been watching and listening to the National Citizens Inquiry , are they aware so called health canada is going after our natural health industry and products , and are they aware of the CCP infiltration and the Iranian regime basically saturating our government ? Who really is innocent anymore - I think there are enough atrocities to keep me busy for my few remaining years and keep getting shunned by most . Not a problem , an introvert by nature .
Outbreak (1995): A novel deadly virus of world ending proportions, incompetent bureaucrats at the CDC making politically motivated decisions, forced "quarantine" of a whole city including military in the streets, race for a "cure" while one already exists as a result of bioweapons research but that antidote must be suppressed for strategical purposes, and finally, attempted wipe-out of the aforementioned city for the "greater good" which in this case means the preservation of the bioweapon for possible future use.
Thank goodness the movie is entirely fictional as none of this could ever happen in the real world. Oh, wait.
"The Stand" was made into a pretty bad mini-series, but is arguably Stephen King's greatest novel. That Super Bug that killed 99 percent of the world population was created by mad scientists. I don't know why King gives today's mad scientists a pass.
Thanks for putting this back out here so those of us who missed out the first time could read it. Surprised that The Matrix didn't make your list , though many of my personal favorites did.
add another Jimmy Stewart movie Mr Smith Goes to Washington. This is covid and the current regime all rolled into one poignant epic. The new James Taylors of the world are exponentially a lot worse than this man ("Taylor has every paper lined up and he's feeding them doctored-up junk!")
Ok, I think of "I don't think that word means what you think it means" from The Princess Bride which is included in your list. How many words got changed or twisted? Vaccine, vaccination, vaccinated, social distancing, 'safe and effective' natural immunity, etc.
2) Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, the imagery of which was featured on Van Morrison's second anti-lockdown album "What's It Gonna Take?"
3) Never Look Away. This is here for the meditation it contains on the Nazi doctors, and how some of them, and many of their practices, continued on in the West... It's the second of the two great films that Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck did on totalitarianism in Germany, the first of which is...
4) The Lives of Others. Naomi Wolf tweaked its title for her first Covid/Vax Disaster book. What matters most of all at this point is the portrait of the compromising-artist it provides in the character Georg Dreyman, who lives according to an implicit "just let me do my art, and I won't criticize the regime in any OBVIOUS way" deal. So many of our artists are now doing the same. I once co-edited a book of essays on this great film, probably the greatest ever on communism: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813144986/totalitarianism-on-screen/
5) Repentance. An arty and odd film about how a the corpse of a family's deceased father figure keeps showing up and can't be gotten rid of, symbolizing how Stalin haunted everything in the USSR after his demise. I think the Covid/Vax Disaster, and especially its covered-up aspects (including millions of covered-up corpses!), is going to function like this for many decades to come; it will be the unsettled issue that haunts everything.
stalin did invade Poland. And occupied eastern Europe after the war. but the point I am trying to make is the attitude and thought at the time. Not what the correct viewpoint is now. The Berlin Wall, the Iron curtain, the Hungarian uprising, the castro takeover of Cuba, the KGB, the Stasi, the gulags, the red terror 1-3, the holodomor, Katyn forest, Soviet missiles in Cuba. Various soviet backed revolutions in Africa and elsewhere. The C.P.U.S.A. (communist party U.S.A.) the weathermen, etc. domestically. Now of course that has transformed into democratic socialism, the blm and pantifa. Even some of the domestic communists found out what communism really was. Emma Goldman and others.
Yeah, I know all the various wars, invasions and occupations by the U.S. were mostly, if not all, banker's/MIC wars. But that doesn't mean the idea that the Russians coming across the Fulda gap wasn't a real threat. Or even on the DMZ in Korea. They did give out some combat infantry badges there.
I do know that our capstone mission in case of world wide war with the USSR was to parachute into the Kamchatka peninsula.
Which I was pretty sure meant death.
In Guantanamo bay the Cubans shined search lights on the U.S. side so the Marines set up a huge globe and anchor mosaic to be illuminated by the search lights.
And then the wall came down and the U.S. started looking for new enemies. From reading some of the neocon/pnac pieces I thought this meant the chicoms but the muslims saved the day. Probably because 9/11 was less risky and more convenient. Now because of morons and that which cannot be mentioned the enemy is Russia, China, Iran and a great part of the muslim world. Meanwhile western Europe is finished and the Anglosphere isn't far behind.
The idea of forward defense seemed plausible at the time as well.
of course as pointed out no enemy could succeed in invading the U.S. mainland by conventional war. Instead they found a way by stealth and treason. There is always an enemy. And sometimes, maybe more often than not, there really is an enemy. Now the enemy is our own government.
I could probably add "Twelve Angry Men" as I love the theme/message of that movie - that one juror has the internal fortitude to not be bullied by a mob ... and actually convinces one juror - and then 10 others - to change their original guilty vote. IMO this is what would need to happen for one Covid falsehood to be exposed as such.
I wrote a long article about this movie and its important lesson a couple of weeks ago.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-fighting-the-indoctrinated?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Loved the Condor book but did not continue watching the movie because I had imagined the characters differently LOL. Saw the River Kwai at least 3 times, love it. Excellent Guinness (not the beer). Love the Chocolate Factory. Now you make me think of other oldies but goodies. guns of Navarone, magnificent seven, the King and I.... ahhh... such good old movies aren;t made anymore. Gotto check my drawer there must be some more LOL.
Thanks, Ingrid. I bet my readers will come up with some more great selections for this list. Yes, they don't make movies like they used to. My town doesn't even have a movie theater any more. We had one for 100 years ... and then the response to Covid killed it. I wonder what "The Last Picture Show" was in Troy, Alabama?
You can add in the Red Dawn Movies. Small group of resistance fighters make big impact on the bad guys. Like Star Wars but more contemporary.
Yep, but I always thought that movie played on a false narrative - this idea that Russia/The Soviet Union actually would try to invade the American heartland!
I guess Americans thought Iraq would do the same thing. And Iran, North Korea and all the other Boogey Man villains our neocon leaders have created to protect the Military Industrial Complex.
In a "Few Good Men," Jack Nicholson's colonel must have thought that Cuba was a threat to invade America! I've asked this question before: Who really couldn't handle the truth?
There was a study done a few years ago looking into which countries were the least likely to be invaded. The answer was the United States, not because they have a great military and not because of their advanced technology but rather because there are so many guns in the hands of ordinary citizens.
Great point. We also have three big bodies of water guarding us, meaning invaders would have to travel a long way to invade us and would have to have one heck of a Navy. As long as we can keep Canada and Mexico from invading us, we should be pretty safe.
Seems like there might be a slight problem there…
Right. The United States has been invaded for years by a hostile alien force and is still being invaded. Without a shot being fired. Nearly all military age men.
It wasn't about Cuba being an invasion threat. It was about an ideology that produced lenin, trotsky, stalin, beria, vasily blokhin and countless others.
But even Lenin and Stalin didn't preside over any USSR invasion of another country. The USSR did invade Afghanistan in 1979, which was a disaster for that country.
Of course, America did the same thing 31 years later.
I just thought of another movie I should have added to my list - "True Grit," one of my all-time favorite movies. Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne) DID have "true grit." He was NOT afraid to single-handedly taking on Bad Guys, even when badly outnumbered. When something was important or mattered, he rose to the occassion. The world needs more people with genuine true grit.
And it--the must-read Charles Portis book, and both film versions--contains a very important message for us dissidents about vengeance. For more on the Coen Bros. version: see this, which contains bits of political science paper I once did on their version, which I do believe is the superior one: https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/03/mattie-ross-and-america
I just thought of another one - "Wal-E." The message from this film is that we are all becoming too lazy and obese to move or do anything for ourselves. And the State kicks in and supports this by constantly giving us "bread and circuses" (entertainment) so we don't think about anything important.
The re-boot was a success! When I first posted this story about 17 months ago, it got about 1000 total reads and maybe 20 "likes." (I kept plugging it elsewhere and boosted my likes to 42).
Anyway, in an hour or two with the recycled version, I've already gotten more reads and likes than the first effort. Take-away: My Substack is growing! Also, Substack often sends Substack authors blurbs encouraging authors to occasionally re-run old stories (for a new audience). I guess this is good advice.
I don't get it. March 11 will mark the 4th anniversary of this madness. How come seeing celebs dying in front of cameras doesn't push prosecutors to indict the people who caused this worldly disaster?
Too many guilty accomplices.
Because they died of ____________________(insert cause of death here) not the Covid shot. Many do not connect the dots sadly. There is even Pfizer's own list of adverse events for their shot. I think it had over 30 pages which will include many. many of these causes of death.
I still think the Mother-of-All-Covid scandals is the massive number of people who must have died from the Iatrogenic protocols, unnecessary panic and collateral damage from the lockdowns. That's government-endorsed/caused genocide IMO.
I include my dad’s death in this though I can’t prove it.
Yes.
We are indeed liked-minded on this.
Minor nit pick: the Alec Guinness officer in Bridge On The River Kwai, does manage to blow up the bridge, at the cost of his own life. He attempts to run at the detonator, is shot, and as he falls dead his body falls on the handle of the detonator, blowing up the bridge.
Nit pick #2: the Godfather quote is from the wedding scene in The Godfather I, not the second movie.
Robert, thanks for the corrections. I have now edited the text to make my descriptions (hopefully) accurate. I had the Godfather scene right 18 months ago when I wrote this and then ran across a clip of this scene, which said this was from The Godfather Part 2 - but, like you say, it IS from The original Godfather.
Here's the scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voNs3aHZmQM
Wonderful compilation Bill of those older movies . Just wondering if you had a chance to see OPPENHEIMER ? It resonated with me about those kangaroo courts , idealism ,corruption , and the DOD . It has so many parallels to what is going on now ethically and morally.
Yes, I recently watched it. It definitely resonated with me for the reasons you mention. I'm now reading "The Wuhan Cover-Up." Robert Kennedy develops the point of how almost everyone who goes to work in the "biosecurity" field is morally compromised - probably sociopaths or psychpaths (or just going after the easy money and the big grants). These people have abandoned the idea of medicine as a "healing" profession. And they are all ultimately captured by the Military Industrial Complex and/or the CIA.
"Oppenheimer" of course gets into the moral question of whether America should have dropped those two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This, of course, ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. (I do think it saved far more Japanese and Americans by preventing an invasion of Japan).
However, Japan was not innocent on the attrocity front. From "The Wuhan Cover-Up," I learned something I didn't know: Japan's mad scientists dropped repeated bio-weapons on citizens of China for many years (starting in 1937). According to Kennedy's book, these disease-causing agents killed at least 500,000 innocent Chinese civilians (more than were killed by two atomic bombs).
And the experiments the Japanese scientists did on prisoners were every bit as horrifying as those done by Megele et al in the German concentration camps.
I came down on the side of the infantry staging for the invasion of mainland Japan. Relief. the war was over. I figure my counterpart in Japan thought the same. As tragic and stupid as everything was.
The bombs saved millions of lives. The Japanese would have fought to the death, especially on their home island. I don't understand why Japan didn't immediately surrender after the first bomb. It took two demonstrations.
It's been a while since I read about the reasons. First the Japanese high command wanted to fight to the last and there were two bombs. I guess they wanted to be sure both worked.
At this point Bill, I do have a lot of books on this debacle over these past few years and I've distilled the information down to this : I am responsible for my own health , I will give my opinion to others that these injections are not safe, based on no formal religious beliefs, I'll ask if they have done any research on their meds and those going forward with agile licensing ( no testing required and no liability ), have they been watching and listening to the National Citizens Inquiry , are they aware so called health canada is going after our natural health industry and products , and are they aware of the CCP infiltration and the Iranian regime basically saturating our government ? Who really is innocent anymore - I think there are enough atrocities to keep me busy for my few remaining years and keep getting shunned by most . Not a problem , an introvert by nature .
Outbreak (1995): A novel deadly virus of world ending proportions, incompetent bureaucrats at the CDC making politically motivated decisions, forced "quarantine" of a whole city including military in the streets, race for a "cure" while one already exists as a result of bioweapons research but that antidote must be suppressed for strategical purposes, and finally, attempted wipe-out of the aforementioned city for the "greater good" which in this case means the preservation of the bioweapon for possible future use.
Thank goodness the movie is entirely fictional as none of this could ever happen in the real world. Oh, wait.
"The Stand" was made into a pretty bad mini-series, but is arguably Stephen King's greatest novel. That Super Bug that killed 99 percent of the world population was created by mad scientists. I don't know why King gives today's mad scientists a pass.
Nice list. Glad you included "Being There". I'd add "Idiocracy".
Thanks for putting this back out here so those of us who missed out the first time could read it. Surprised that The Matrix didn't make your list , though many of my personal favorites did.
Those should be on there. I had to stop somewhere ... but we picked up many great additions in the Reader Comments!
add another Jimmy Stewart movie Mr Smith Goes to Washington. This is covid and the current regime all rolled into one poignant epic. The new James Taylors of the world are exponentially a lot worse than this man ("Taylor has every paper lined up and he's feeding them doctored-up junk!")
Ok, I think of "I don't think that word means what you think it means" from The Princess Bride which is included in your list. How many words got changed or twisted? Vaccine, vaccination, vaccinated, social distancing, 'safe and effective' natural immunity, etc.
Ones left off Bill's list:
1) 12 Monkeys, for reasons I explained in "Out of Denial's Frying Pan, into the Fire," https://pomocon.substack.com/p/out-of-denials-frying-pan-into-the?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
2) Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, the imagery of which was featured on Van Morrison's second anti-lockdown album "What's It Gonna Take?"
3) Never Look Away. This is here for the meditation it contains on the Nazi doctors, and how some of them, and many of their practices, continued on in the West... It's the second of the two great films that Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck did on totalitarianism in Germany, the first of which is...
4) The Lives of Others. Naomi Wolf tweaked its title for her first Covid/Vax Disaster book. What matters most of all at this point is the portrait of the compromising-artist it provides in the character Georg Dreyman, who lives according to an implicit "just let me do my art, and I won't criticize the regime in any OBVIOUS way" deal. So many of our artists are now doing the same. I once co-edited a book of essays on this great film, probably the greatest ever on communism: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813144986/totalitarianism-on-screen/
5) Repentance. An arty and odd film about how a the corpse of a family's deceased father figure keeps showing up and can't be gotten rid of, symbolizing how Stalin haunted everything in the USSR after his demise. I think the Covid/Vax Disaster, and especially its covered-up aspects (including millions of covered-up corpses!), is going to function like this for many decades to come; it will be the unsettled issue that haunts everything.
Thanks for the lesser known good choices.
stalin did invade Poland. And occupied eastern Europe after the war. but the point I am trying to make is the attitude and thought at the time. Not what the correct viewpoint is now. The Berlin Wall, the Iron curtain, the Hungarian uprising, the castro takeover of Cuba, the KGB, the Stasi, the gulags, the red terror 1-3, the holodomor, Katyn forest, Soviet missiles in Cuba. Various soviet backed revolutions in Africa and elsewhere. The C.P.U.S.A. (communist party U.S.A.) the weathermen, etc. domestically. Now of course that has transformed into democratic socialism, the blm and pantifa. Even some of the domestic communists found out what communism really was. Emma Goldman and others.
Yeah, I know all the various wars, invasions and occupations by the U.S. were mostly, if not all, banker's/MIC wars. But that doesn't mean the idea that the Russians coming across the Fulda gap wasn't a real threat. Or even on the DMZ in Korea. They did give out some combat infantry badges there.
I do know that our capstone mission in case of world wide war with the USSR was to parachute into the Kamchatka peninsula.
Which I was pretty sure meant death.
In Guantanamo bay the Cubans shined search lights on the U.S. side so the Marines set up a huge globe and anchor mosaic to be illuminated by the search lights.
And then the wall came down and the U.S. started looking for new enemies. From reading some of the neocon/pnac pieces I thought this meant the chicoms but the muslims saved the day. Probably because 9/11 was less risky and more convenient. Now because of morons and that which cannot be mentioned the enemy is Russia, China, Iran and a great part of the muslim world. Meanwhile western Europe is finished and the Anglosphere isn't far behind.
The idea of forward defense seemed plausible at the time as well.
of course as pointed out no enemy could succeed in invading the U.S. mainland by conventional war. Instead they found a way by stealth and treason. There is always an enemy. And sometimes, maybe more often than not, there really is an enemy. Now the enemy is our own government.
Thanks. These are all good points imo.