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Thursday, April 2, 2009

Quorum of Socialists

Bond. James Bond. Is not what he used to be. Once a suave, sophisticated man of the world, 007 is now a brawler and special effects stooge who wears polo shirts.



Dress code at MI6 must be business casual.

In Quorum of Socialists (sorry, Quantum of Solace) The bad guy (who was he again? Oh yeah, forgettable) is trying to dry out the poor people of the Bolivian desert region. What they did to him, and why exactly it took an international conspiracy to manipulate the indigenous impoverished of South America, is not explained. Evidently though, the only way to get to them was by damming their water supply. I guess Sandinistas and AKs were in short supply that year.

But the real red of the movie came from the lines of the (forgettable) bad guy.

Like this gem, delivered early on by the *baddest* man in the world, on the poorly guarded docks outside a warehouse in Haiti. Yeah, James was sitting just on the other side of the chainlink, watching the whole thing.

Bad guy says

The Haitains elect a priest who decides to raise the minimum wage from 38 cents to one dollar a day, not a lot, but it is enough to upset the corporations where they are making T-shirts and running shoes. So they called us and we facilitated change.


We facilitated change. Obamastyle. Lol, okay, bad guy didn't say what kind of change they facilitated, we're probably to assume it was an overthrow of the Haitian government. But most likely, if they really wanted to hurt the poor people (which seems to be his m.o.) they forced the government to raise the minimum wage to two dollars a day.

In "The Ugly Truth About the Minimum Wage" Jim Cox explains how to put the greatest hurt on the poor.

The venerable Thomas DeLorenzo takes on the T-shirts and running shoes slander. No one says where the polo shirts were made, but everyone knows T-shirts and running shoes are handcrafted by tiny babes in horrible sweatshops where no one has health insurance. Right?

But our bad guy isn't into running shoe factories anymore. In what has to be the most laughable setting ever in a movie, bad guy meets his client in Fuel Cell Hotel.

I'm sure the watermelons loved that concept. It reminded me of the old home in Oklahoma that was built of coal, with straw in the interior of the walls for insulation. I'm sure they could have use it in the Bond film, except... it burned down a few years ago.

So here we have bad guy, in Fuel Cell Hotel, in the middle of the desert. What does bad guy do for a living again? Oh yeah. He collects water.

Or as he put it,

You don't need another marxist giving resources to the people, do you?

This is the worlds' most precious resource. We must control as much of it as we can.


So who is the opposite of a Marxist that buys water rights under a green banner?

Maybe T. Boone Pickens should be suing the Bond franchise.

At the very least, let's he hope he never builds a windmill hotel, and if he does, he keeps his water resources close at hand.
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For some reason, I can't find any links to the Oklahoma coal house online. Maybe they were too embarrassed, but if somebody has one, please let me know. In the mean time, just to prove that people really do build buildings out of coal (and say wonderful things about them, like "1933 -- a year when building a house out of fuel made sense").

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Fuel Cell Hotel reminds me of my all-time favorite antique from Antiques Roadshow.



Yes, that is exactly what it looks like. A small glass model of the Hindenburg, fill with FUEL from the Hindenburg. Made into an ASHTRAY.



(please can I have one?)

1 comment:

  1. I want a Hindenberg ashtray conveniently full of fuel too - to hold my spliff while I slam my shot of Jagermeister! - better than a can of oil in the desert.

    ReplyDelete