Remember when the peanut gallery renamed:

Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day
Mount McKinley to Denali
Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska
Squaw Valley to Palisades Tahoe
Jefferson Davis Highway to the Richmond Highway
Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty
Fort Benning to Fort Moore
Fort Hood to Fort Cavazos
Washington Redskins to the Washington Commanders

Cleveland Indians to the Cleveland Guardians
North Dakota Fighting Sioux to the Fighting Hawks
Valparaiso Crusaders to the Beacons
Aunt Jemima to the Pearl Milling Company
Uncle Ben’s to Ben’s Original
Eskimo Pie to Edy’s Pie

Cream of Wheat kept the box but erased the chef
Land O’Lakes removed the Indian Squaw
Mr. Potato Head to just Potato Head
Boy Scouts of America to just Scouting America
Yale’s Calhoun College to Grace Hopper College
Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School to the School of Public and International Affairs

Dixie State University to Utah Tech University
Manhole to maintenance hole
Master bedroom to primary bedroom
Mentally ill to non-binary
Normal to cisgender
Blacklist to blocklist

Settlers to colonizers
Felon to justice-involved person
Illegal alien to undocumented noncitizen
Women to birthing persons
Hispanic to Latinx....

...so spare me your BS whining about @realDonaldTrump renaming the Gulf to The Gulf of America or Lake Ontario to Lake America.

I’m sure he does it to get your panties in a bunch and I voted for that too.

This is an edited version of a rant by my digital penpal R. Davis.

If you do not have an X account it is worth starting one just to follow her.

——————————————————————————————————

The Seven Years of History behind Seditious Six

What the legacy Pentagon press corps refused to cover.

The Seditious Six video did not came out of nowhere in November 2025. It developed over a period of about eight years among academics, NGOs, and activists, with the final goal to rewrite the relationship between the military and the executive branch.

The story begins all the way back in January 30, 2017 — ten days into the first Trump presidency — Rosa Brooks published a piece in Foreign Policy laying out four ways to remove a sitting president before his term ended: impeachment, the 25th Amendment, resignation under pressure, and a military coup. Of the last, she imagined the moment senior officers would look at a lawful commander-in-chief and refuse:

The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.

Brooks had been Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy , a political appointee inside the Pentagon from 2009 to 2011, reporting to Michèle Flournoy. Before the Pentagon, she was special counsel to the President at George Soros’s Open Society Institute . After it, she went to Georgetown Law, where she still holds a professorship and participates in the university’s national-security program.

One year after that article ran, a new organization was quietly incorporated. National Security Action - co-chaired by Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes and future Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan — was funded largely, in Puck’s words, by Alex Soros since its inception.

Rosa Brooks joined its advisory council.

Stage one: the personnel (2018)

Brooks would spend the next three years helping to operationalize her 2017 paper.

In late 2018, she joined the advisory council of National Security Action — the organization assembling the personnel that would eventually staff Biden’s national security positions. Prior to joining, she sat on the board of Open Society Foundations’ U.S. Programs, the grant-making entity upstream of the money that funded it. She was a senior fellow at New America — which itself takes $1 million-plus annually from Open Society — running its Future of War program, the intellectual shop studying exactly the civil-military questions her network would later litigate.

One person. Four seats. The board of the funder, the think tank writing the framework, the council assembling the staff, and ... then, the project that would rehearse what that staff should do with power.

Stage two: the rehearsal (2020)

In late 2019, Brooks co-founded the Transition Integrity Project. In June 2020, TIP ran a set of war games modeling how a contested 2020 election might unfold — including scenarios turning on whether institutions, up to and including the military, would recognize the outcome. It operated under the umbrella of Protect Democracy, which had taken $650,000 from Open Society. John Podesta participated. So did roughly a hundred other senior figures. Only about ten of their names are public. The rest have never been disclosed.

In 2017, Rosa Brooks had asked whether institutions had options to oust a President. By 2020, she was rehearsing these scenarios with over a hundred people in Georgetown University.

Stage three: the legal machinery (2024)

By 2024, allegations that Georgetown University was undermining electoral choices had intensified. Mary McCord, former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security, runs the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, the same national-security faculty home as Brooks. She had spent 2020 building ICAP’s model against unlawful armed force: fact sheets to all fifty states, coalitions of attorneys general and police chiefs, and — in her own words from a November 2020 Brookings panel — “I manned the voter intimidation helpline throughout the day.”

In January 2024, she told NBC News she was applying that same model to the military:

“We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.”

The same year, Rep. Pete Sessions put the effort on the congressional record, alleging a coordinated campaign to “suppress Article Two provisions defining presidential control of the military.”

Stage four: the academic scaffolding (fall 2025)

In June 2025, the

Democracy Defenders Fund

— with, in its own words, “the assistance of Mary McCord of ICAP” — published President Trump’s Deployment of the National Guard Is Unlawful and Unprecedented, arguing that his move to federalize the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. § 12406, without invoking the Insurrection Act, was exactly that.

• Brooks published in

  Daedalus

  , the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, arguing the traditional civil-military framework is inadequate against “authoritarian threats.”

• McCord published

  “When Deference Is No Longer Due”

  in Just Security on October 14, 2025 — a direct argument against judicial deference to a president’s military determinations.

The five-month runway (summer-fall 2025)

In the summer and fall leading up to the Seditious Six video, interlocking organizations primed messaging that would result in the Seditious Six video:

• Summer 2025 —

  About Face

  , a veterans organization, launches its “Right to Refuse” campaign.

• Jul–Aug 2025 — National Security Action publishes a

  “Military and Intelligence” messaging one-pager

  , and the following month runs a

  battery of national-security message-testing focus groups

  .

• Sep-Oct 2025 —

  Win Without War

  puts “Not What You Signed Up For” billboards at military bases, telling troops to question their orders.

• Jun 17

  , refreshed

  Nov 11, 2025

  — the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force publishes, then updates one week before the video, its “Refusing Illegal Orders” FAQ for service members.

• Nov 18, 2025 — six Democratic lawmakers release the video.

Reports said five of the six lawmakers had been recruited through

New Politics Academy

, a candidate pipeline. One of the six, Rep. Maggie Goodlander, is

married to Jake Sullivan

, the co-founder of National Security Action.

Soros: the family and money behind these eight years

George Soros’s personal wealth flows into the

Fund for Policy Reform

, a 501(c)(4) with roughly $841 million in assets; Alexander Soros sits on its board. The Fund sends hundreds of millions annually to the

Open Society Policy Center / Action Fund

, where Alex Soros also sits. That entity is the

documented primary funder

of National Security Action, a majority of everything the organization has ever raised.

Open Society appears at every node of the eight-year construction:

• National Security Action —

  $4.9M+

  from Open Society.

• New America (Brooks’s think tank) —

  $1M+ annually

  .

• Protect Democracy (TIP’s umbrella) —

  $650K

  .

• Win Without War —

  $2M+

  , plus

  $1.5M+

  to its parent, the [Center for International Policy](

  https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/grants/past?filter_keyword=Center+for+International+Policy

  _.

And the man who ran the Soros advocacy checkbook,

Tom Perriello

, sat on National Security Action’s advisory council, the organization his own entity was funding.

The Pentagon press corps never looked

I searched “National Security Action” across 1,600-plus transcripts from Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS, the Council on Foreign Relations, Heritage, and dozens of other institutions, and the organization appears zero times. Its co-founders appear in more than seventy of those same transcripts, always under their government titles.

Its website currently lists no staff, no board, no advisory council, no annual report, no financial disclosures. When Puck’s Julia Ioffe asked the organization to confirm the most basic facts about itself, she

hit a wall

:

Nobody... not even the various comms people working for N.S.A., would tell me who is on the organization’s board or confirm that the group’s funding comes from Soros.

The organization that placed dozens of people in the Biden administration barely exists in the public record. And yet they, among other Soros-backed institutions, were at the center of an eight-year campaign to rewrite the relationship between troops and their commander-in-chief.

This institutional incuriosity is the legacy of the old Pentagon press corps.

Now Armie Hammer’s character shoots the immigrant murderors and rapists European governments import and enable in a less artful but more topical movie, Citizen Vigilante. Is he a psychopath or an avenging angel?

The unpolished brutalism of this film matches the brutality of what happens to women, children and the elderly every day in Europe and the U.S. because of the invasion of imported, unvetted immigrants.

Click the image to be taken to a free streaming.

Plutarch, in his Lives of the most famous ancients, offers an explanation of AWFuLs who become childless cat ladies or apologists for open borders that allow in rapists, etc.:

“...the soul has a spring of affection within it, and is formed not only to perceive, to reflect, and to remember, but also to love. If it finds nothing to love at home, it will find something abroad; and when affection, like a desert spot, has no legitimate possessors, it is usurped by bastard children or even servants, who when they have obtained our love, make us fear for them and be anxious about them. So that one may often see men, in a cynical temper, inveighing against marriage and children, who themselves shortly afterwards will be plunged into unmanly excesses of grief, at the loss of their child by some slave or concubine. Some have even shown terrible grief at the death of dogs and horses; whereas others, who have lost noble sons, made no unusual or unseemly exhibition of sorrow, but passed the remainder of their lives calmly and composedly. Indeed it is weakness, not affection, which produces such endless misery and dread to those who have not learned to take a rational view of the uncertainty of life, and who cannot enjoy the presence of their loved ones because of their constant agony for fear of losing them. We should not make ourselves poor for fear of losing our property, nor should we guard ourselves against a possible loss of friends by making none; still less ought we to avoid having children for fear that our child might die.” Plutarch’s Lives (Solon paragraph VII.)

So perhaps the campaigns for abortion and childlessness lead to our insane politics.

The way polls are going this may in a few election cycles be true even for normal black men and normal Hispanic men.

It’s not even just among heterosexual men. In Washington, D.C., the largest local gay group, with the biggest events and the biggest mailing and donor lists, is now the local Log Cabin Republican club.

Elected Democrats and Democrats running for office include: California’s Scott Weiner, a gay man who appears in public semi-nude in leather harnesses, and campaigns for men who pretend to be women to be allowed to lurk in women’s changing rooms and for allowing the age of consent to be lowered; Maine’s Graham Platner, who writes about how he enjoys masturbating in porto-potties and how he would rape - though not in a gay way - any man who broke into his home; and Texas’s James Talarico, who only recently acquired a girl friend for his campaign and who says there are 6 genders.

When questioned further, the Talarico campaign released videos on the biblical basis for Talarico’s “progressive” Christian belief in multigenderism:

The current kerfuffle is more fake news. The $1.8 billion, settlement money paid to Trump because he sued the federal government (for a much larger amount), is now in a fund with 5 trustees, available to pay compensation to anyone the government has used leaks, lawfare or other means to destroy. As it turns out, the first claim is not from a J6 vandal. It’s from Michael Caputo, an HHS appointee bankrupted by Democrats with Russia Hoax prosecutions while he was being treated for cancer. (Apparently the people promoting the fake news that this is a slush fund for those dangerous septuagenarian Jan. Sixers include Congresspeople currently voting themselves a $500,000 payout for each incident where the Obama-Biden administrations spied on them illegally.) Today I heard some Democrat Congressman on The Will Cain Show claim that this weaponizations fund for “criminals” makes us all unsafe. That was his whataboutist attempt at a tu quoque argument that the GOP is just as bad as Biden letting rapist and killers into the country with no vetting, or Soros-funded Attorneys General releasing illegal alien murderers, since it would be “unfair” to prosecute them as it would lead to the “unequal” punishment of also being deported, unlike native born killers.

Back to my coffee date. I was under surveillance by the feds, and in my “coffee date” meeting with one of their hotter employees he let slip the embarrassing information they had on me. I had tweaked some Facebook meme for my own purposes, when President Obama (and Senator Durbin) made it a priority to snatch away not only the milk cartons (“Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher”) but the school lunches and the educations of the DC kids (99% African American) who use the DC voucher system to go to a Moslem, Catholic, or other private school. The meme I revised depicted Michelle Obama as Marie Antoinette, she of if they have no bread “let them eat cake” infamy.

Apparently depicting First Lady Obama as a European royal who was sent to the guillotine is a threat to the First Family that requires investigation. Literally required - I think FBI and Secret Service protocols committed them to investigate every single instance that could be so construed. Though one suspects some instances are more equal than others.

So first I received a voicemail from someone in the Secret Service saying they needed to talk to me. They may have even said what it was about. I thought it was so lame to leave a voicemail for someone you imagine is violent that I ignored them.

Then my neighbor (a former press person for Clinton administration Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown) said when she left her apartment two men were outside my door leaving a business card, around 11 am in the morning. They were Secret Service agents coming unannounced to interview me. I think at the time I was across the street swimming, with my cell phone in a locker, which one would think they could track. (Maybe both locations ping the same cell tower?) She said one of them asked what I looked like (can they not access driver’s license photos?) and she, thinking, as she told me later, that they seemed rather thick, said “Bruce actually looks a lot like you.”

I continued to ignore them.

But then a few months later I got a knock on a door at an apartment I was renting in Annapolis, Maryland. (It had a pool; I had rented it to register to vote somewhere where I could vote for Ron Paul in a real primary; I had gone door to door to distribute Paul campaign literature.) I opened it and a tall muscular man with cornflower blue eyes, porcelain skin, and delicate features that were almost girlish stood in the door. Wearing casual clothes. (Armani Exchange?) He was an FBI agent.

At first I thought he was the same agent who’d come to my door in DC and met my neighbor, and so one of the first things I said was that he doesn’t look anything like me. (So he may have thought I was a bit crazy.) As it turns out, the Baltimore FBI office covers Annapolis, so he was a different agent from a different FBI office. I declined to let him in my apartment so we went to a Starbucks a block away, and he unpacked his copious stack of photocopied forms with the questions he was supposed to ask me, akin to the rote questions bureaucracies give staff to interview prospective employees. He would suggest answers that were always wrong. “You’re 5’11” right?” I’m 5’9” on a good day. “No, you are 5’11” so it’s obvious I’m not.” All the other suggested answers he gave “inflated” my attractiveness in some way. It was perhaps a test for delusional grandiosity.

Eventually this honeypot (?) let slip that they knew all the email addresses I use, like “AnnapolisFun@comcast.net,” which I used to answer gay dating ads. Did they think I was a Bob Bauman or Larry Craig, who could be embarrassed or manipulated by imagined “secrets”? One assumes this meant that any email correspondence - from any address - I had, had been read by them.

Before our interview ended I expressed a little guilt. Chris (I think that was the agent’s name) seemed like a decent-ish guy, allegedly was mandated to check these leads, and was wasting tax dollars. Did I cause that waste?

Weeks later, James von Brunn, a loon from Annapolis, drove to DC to shoot people at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard. The FBI hadn’t noticed him, though I believe he had a social media footprint.

But then, he hadn’t made fun of Michelle Obama.

A shorter version of this was published last week at SpliceToday.

Stone is the abductee, a high fashion, Ivy educated, slick, female CEO, abducted by two low income, blue collar, uncredentialed, unschooled, unkempt, almost unemployed white male cousins, one of whom has a mom (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma due to faulty medical treatments sold by Stone’s corporation. Stone’s the girl boss from the longhouse so much debated recently by conservative lady writers like Helen Andrews and Peachy Keenan. The low income son, Teddy Gatz (Breaking Bad’s Jesse Plemons, Mr. Kirsten Dunst) is also a low wage worker in an Amazon style warehouse owned by Stone’s firm. Potentially a somewhat MAGA movie, with the white males (and probably the black males too) left behind in the new DEI economy.

The film begins with the position that the white males may be crazy. Teddy and his autistic cousin Don believe the world is controlled, not by the Jews, or George Soros and the Tides Foundation, or the Rockefellers, or (a human) Big Pharma, or communist infiltrators, but by aliens among us. The white men are uneducated, as Sandy Cortez from Westchester would say, getting all their (mis)information from the dark web, with no Nina Jankowicz in power to protect them from the worries of their pretty little heads.

Stone is abducted, her auburn locks shaved and then burnt (because these are alien antennae that would allow her to call her ship for help), her body rubbed with an anti-histamine cream to neutralize her powers, and chained up in a basement. Her lead captor, Teddy, who has Trump’s hair and skin coloring, wants her to organize a meeting with the leaders of her race (from Andromeda), to demand they withdraw from Earth and leave humanity alone. According to him the Andromedan ship will pass near Earth in 3 days, when it will be undetectable because of a lunar eclipse.

In a nod to Buffy, Michelle actually beats up her two captors with some expensive self-defense training moves, once when they first capture her and again in their basement, in the latter scene telling Teddy she will always beat him because she is a Winner and he is a Loser. This is actually a theme in Stone’s career. Her second appearance on TV was on Medium, set in her real life hometown (Phoenix), where she played a young woman raped by her own politician father, who then faked her death to escape and leave him as the most likely culprit in her disappearance. In her 2023 Lanthimos film Poor Things she plays a girl killed and resurrected as a female Frankenstein, who then metes out revenge on those who have wronged or attempted to control her. In her best movie, Cruella, she plays a slightly psychopathic Estella/Cruella de Vil, who uncovers her origins and dispatches a homicidal Emma Thompson.

The audience is gradually moved to poise between the idea that CEO Michelle (Stone) is a human kidnapped by white trash kooks and Teddy Gatz’s belief that she really is an ET. After Michelle tries for a day, with some deliciously parodic vacuous corporate PR speak, to convince her captors that they will suffer least if they call the cops, confess, and let her go immediately, she then adopts a new strategy, agrees to their hypothesis and begins to explain how Andromedans are here to help, including with things like a cure for Gatz’s comatose mom. As Stone paints a picture of the Andromedan civilization, bits of The Man Who Fell to Earth are suggested, curiously another film starring a red haired, near albino, mega-talented actor as a corporate titan who could be an ET. Also the Alien franchise film Prometheus, and the myth of Atlantis are invoked, slightly higher cinematic and literary fodder than Gatz’s worldview, which resembles the 1988 cult classic They Live. According to CEO Michelle the Andromedans are here To Serve Man. But with or without some clarified butter?

We don’t know until the very end which view is closest to the truth. In promotional interviews some of the cast members almost suggest the movie is saying something about contemporary politics where people hold extreme views in which those who disagree are “alien,” and if there isn’t some moral equivalency of all factions who do this. If so, the skills and artistry of the cast, crew and director do not allow them to succeed at presenting that. Bugonia costs $45 million to make, but only earned $4 million in its opening week - though that is the most a Lanthimos movie has ever taken in its first week.

It’s a well made, well cast, attention gripping movie. But like some of the previous Stone-Lanthimos collaborations, it has a profoundly malignant sense of life. (Perhaps as the interstellar object 31/Atlas “rockets” past earth, thescientific debate on whether it is acting more like a spaceship or a comet will generate a whole genre of “alien or not” fictions.) It would be interesting to see what Stone and Lanthimos could do if they tried to make something edifying.

A shorter version of this was published earlier this week at SpliceToday.

Again, not only on the right, many of the remakes deliberately recast classic characters as people of another race, and when done just for the sake of DEI these are usually flops. Good Fortune, the new, third, version of 1978’s Heaven Can Wait (itself a remake of the 1941 Here Comes Mr. Jordan, a friend older than me has pointed out to me) is a mediocre B (B- ?) movie, maybe worth seeing if you get a senior discount or go to the afternoon matinee, and I suppose it counts as a DEI remake, with Azis Ansari in the Warren Beatty role of a man who is moved by celestial forces into the life of his wealthy boss (Seth Rogen). It’s a multicultural cast, with Keanu Reeves as the klutzy angel who messes up this assignment and Sandra Oh as the higher level angel who tries to guide him to clean up the mess. Seth Rogan plays the person of good fortune whose life Azis gets to take over. The movie had a $30 million budget and seems to have pulled in about $12 million in the first week, despite good (80%) ratings on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and movie goers. It’s just not very good - except when compared to everything else on screen this year.

None of the three main actors - Rogen, Azis, or Reeves - is particularly interesting to watch here. Rogen is a boring dough boy (physically and financially), with the movie incompetent to explain how he became wealthy as a “tech bro,” leaving us to believe it is just luck (“good fortune”). Azis is a whiny little shit who can’t figure out how to achieve anything or find a career he would at least enjoy, an envious little homunculus with whom we are supposed to identify. Reeves character is ripe for comedy but Reeves doesn’t know how to deliver it - an angel who’s a moron, assigned to nudge people to look up from their phones when they are about to crash their cars, who decides to switch the lives of Rogen and Ansari, in his angelic belief that when Ansari sees all the difficulties of Rogen’s life in a luxurious glass house atop a Hollywood hill, he will begin to appreciate his own precious life.

It doesn’t work of course. Reeves is stripped of his wings and powers by his angelic manager, Sandra Oh (the only actor who does anything with her part in this film). While human, Reeves, unskilled and homeless, is taken in by the now wealthy Ansari (who also takes in Rogen, now employed as his personal assistant). All the women - not particularly attractive actresses (I guess the budget was too low for that) - want to sleep with Keanu Reeve’s character, which given how haggard he looks, requires a suspension of disbelief that isn’t humanly possible. This is not the Keanu of The Matrix or The Day the Earth Stood Still.

It’s interesting that this mediocre flop is the second remake of Heaven Can Wait. Chris Rock’s Down to Earth (2001) was far superior. Rock’s mainly black cast remake of the black comedy Death at a Funeral was also at least as good as the British original. Some creatives have realized that you can have all the characters you want who aren’t straight or white or male AS LONG AS YOU ARE FUNNY. Max Mutchnik, the co-creator of Will and Grace, drew a distinction between his show and the previous gay sitcom, Ellen, by saying that one difference was that his show was funny, telling the LA Times: “Ellen’s problem was not its gay quotient but its political agenda. And Kohan and Mutchnick plan to steer clear of an agenda, saying the show’s primary raison d’etre is to entertain.” Good Fortune is written by, directed by, and stars Aziz Ansari, who has never been that funny. Heaven Can Wait was written by Elaine May, directed by Buck Henry, and starred Warren Beatty. This is plagiarism, a cheap copy sold out of the trunk of a car.

Good Fortune’s bad fortune is that it grinds a political ax, with particularly ignorant politics, at least as much as it tries to be funny. In the Rock and Beatty versions of this tale the poor but virtuous soul dies too early because heaven makes a mistake (Eugene Levi is the far funnier incompetent angel in the Rock version) and that soul is transplanted into the body of an old wealthy white man after the latter is murdered by a wife or paramour (Dyan Cannon for Beatty and Jennifer Coolidge for Rock) looking to inherit an estate. Rogen is still alive when he switches places with Ansari (eliminating one role for an actress, as there is no murderess). So instead of the protagonist seeking to do good with his new found money, perhaps find a new host body, and get the girl he was interested in before he died, Good Fortune devolves into a debate about who deserves the “good fortune” of the wealth, with an envy-based plea that the wealthy get their money by exploiting Amazon and Door Dash style workers. There is one scene where newly-human Angel Reeves gets his first paycheck, sees all the deductions for state and federal taxes and FICA, and complains that he can’t live on this. But at various points Rogen, Ansari and Reeves end up in Latino discos and musing on how the simple things like tacos are the best things in life. At no point in the rant does anyone have the thought that unlimited immigration of unskilled laborers might be depressing the wages of low skilled Americans, or might generate conditions where a Bezos could have Amazon drivers pissing in bottles as they drive in order to make deliveries on time.

An industry that gives a mediocre midwit comic $30 million to make an uninformed political rant deserves to die.

A shorter version of this review was published earlier this week at SpliceToday.

British actor Samuel Benjamin Blenkin is a jolie laide Timothee Chalamet, scrawny and intense, sexier than Chalamet at points in the story, though not as conventionally good looking. Blenkin plays Boy Kavalier, the trillionaire head of one of the 5 mega corporations that seem to rule the future earth in place of governments, his corporation being focused on AI, robots (“synths” as the synthetic humanoid robots he produces are called), and a new venture, robot bodies into which the minds of live human beings can be uploaded, giving them an approach to terrestrial immortality. The uploading - which he hopes to sell as a service at a high price to wealthy paying clients - is as yet a prototype: he can only upload the minds of children. So he offers free uploads to a handful of families whose children have terminal illnesses. And it works.

The first of these uploaded kids “Wendy” (Kavalier thinks of himself as Peter Pan), played by Sydney Chandler, a sort of Audrey Hepburn type who isn’t blond or bosomy (as other Alien heroines from Sigourney Weaver to Winona Ryder have also not been), develops a number of special talents over time, but she also has the soul of a pre-teen, and in particular a pre-teen girl.

An interstellar ship belonging to one of the rival mega corporations, an Asian owned one, that has been collecting specimens in deep space for 65 years that its corporate owners hope to sell to whatever remains of government militaries (or corporate militaries) as weapons, crashes in a terrestrial city, after a cyborg (human with mechanical upgrades) in the pay of the corporation kills the crew to override safety protocols against bringing dangerous species to earth. Among these specimens are of course the “Aliens” Ripley had to fight in the first film back in 1979, being sought again by corporate arms merchants. (And additional lethal species, including one that will eat robots instead of carbon based life forms, are brought along.) But the crash is in Boy Kavalier’s territory, not that controlled by the Asian corporation, so he seizes the specimens and takes them to a secluded island where his corporation conducts research, even though being an arms merchants has not previously been in his portfolio.

Kavalier’s self-understanding is that he is seeking someone as intelligent as he, so that he can finally have a decent conversation. Uploading a human mind into a robot body that is AI empowered to have superhuman processing speeds is his plan for finding this perfect friend. Wendy and the other uploaded children throw a wrench into all this. Wendy doesn’t like the idea of anyone hurting an animal, even an Alien, and when she learns to communicate with them, a kind of pre-teen girl suicidal altruism leads her to rank them equally with or morally above human beings, because both humans and Aliens are carnivorous predators, but at least the Aliens are honest. At the end of the season finale Wendy and her human brother (whom she has rescued from his own rescue mission as a medic searching for victims in the crashed ship) and her uploaded friends have domesticated (for now) the Alien as a guard dog, and subdued the humans (and synths and cyborgs) of both corporations. Standing together in almost the exact same tableau as the series finale of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer - where a member of Buffy’s Scooby Gang asks her what they will now do (having eliminated Sunnydale’s Hellmouth), and Buffy says “Live!” - Wendy’s uploaded friends ask her what they will now do and Wendy says “Rule!”

A lot of this has already been in our television and streaming zeitgeist. Amazon’s Upload already has humans paying for digital immortality; NBC’s great but cancelled Debris already showed us bits of advanced and dangerous extraterrestrial tech crashing to earth; and FOX’s Next (and dozens of other fictions) have shown us the problems of robots and androids living among us.

The mega corporations in Alien Earth are one suspects supposed to represent a critique of people like Elon Musk. But what if our current near trillionaire, who are interested in AI and immortality and space exploration, adopted more popular and ameliorative goals, along with whatever other goals they have. What if instead of immortality (perhaps only for a few - a few who hope that what is uploaded is actually “them,” their “souls,” and not just a mimicry in an expensive and very advanced CPU), the technology they sought was to restore to wholeness the severely disabled who currently will never live a full and independent life. What if the neural implant being developed now could not only allow a disabled person to move a mechanical limb, but would allow someone with Down or Angelman or other syndromes to approach average normal intellectual functioning?

I am cheered by Trump’s and RFK Jr.’s actually doing research into acetaminophen and other environmental insults that may be behind the explosion in autism. Disabilities impose huge costs on the families of the disabled and on society at large, besides reducing radically the human flourishing and quality of life of the disabled. But if someone actually produced technological restorations of the missing or shrunken abilities, including cognitive abilities, they should be acclaimed as such heroes that the usual Hollywood depictions of the evils of technology and its corporate purveyors might be laughed out of court.

Just get out, you went too low

Bye bye, blackface

Where somebody waits for you

Lies are deep, you're just poo

Bye bye, blackface

No one here will love or understand you

Oh, what silly excuses the flaks make for you

Make my bed, light my light, I'll watch others from now on at night

Blackface, bye bye