ekathimerini.com | On taxes, Australian emigration, artifacts, education, economics, politics

Whoaa! I did not know that the present state of Greece was all due to us again! The reason why Greece falters now, according to the gentleman below, is due to the fact that Greece has been run like an Ottoman eyalet.  I knew that someone would develop the genius to put the blame on us again...

Quoted from http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite3_1_03/10/2011_409206:

ekathimerini.com | On taxes, Australian emigration, artifacts, education, economics, politics

Dream on

Papandreou says the mistakes of the past should not preclude trust in the future. This banker says return to the drachma would take Greece back decades.

The Greek system has been mired in the Ottoman past for almost 600 years. Independent Greece was still run like an Ottoman state. Greece went into Europe by cheating Ottoman-style. Do Greeks have the collective will to extricate themselves from that system (you know “rousfeti,” “paketa,” patronage, the black economy) that they have been running for 600 years? It may take not one or two elections but one or two generations, at least.

Have the Greeks got it in them? Even in 1940 and 41 they bravely and heroically fought the Italians and then the Germans for eight months. Then they fought each other for eight years.

Papandreou asks the Germans to trust the Greeks to come together on this and forget history. The precedents however are not promising.

Philip Andrews

Babylon A.D. (2008)

Meets: The 5th Element, Children of Men and a little bit of Matrix and Fringe science

A soldier named Toorop (aw come on...) is assigned by a corrupt Russian oligarch/arms dealer/mafioso the duty of "delivering" a Milla Jovovich look-alike pregnant teenager escorted by an Asian nun-martial arts expert to some place in NY so that she can give a virgin-birth to twin messiahs long expected by a new-age corporate cult.

He takes the girl Aurora (aw come on again...) from her Mongolia or Kyrgyzstan-based convent (why do these girls have to be so pious? Oh for the otherwise unexplainable bursts of love/sex to come in the rest of the movie, one guesses) and protects her from various assaults and (as you can guess) decides not to deliver her seeing that she has been carrying twins from an artificial insemination process (there is no father! Can you imagine the originality of the idea???) and the babies are supposedly going to be the messiah(s)(?) expected by a future corporate cult/religion called Neolites (hi there Neo) dwelling in (if I'm not wrong)an ex-WTC spot quadruplex skyscraper.

The rest is what any high schooler can come up with as a weekend SF project: Aurora dies in chilbirth and the babies turn out to be girls, one blond the other brunette (with a touch of Afro). Well, other than this nothing happens. Absolutely nothing happens in this movie. Of course there is action but as far as meaning is concerned nothing happens. We seen Vin Diesel beating people and doing stunts and coming closer with a pregnant teenager who seems to represent mother Mary (??? so much for the piety of the convent) with psychic powers (remains unexplaind but anyway these are ripped off from 5th Element) and some dated techno gimmicks.

Questions are useless: What is the meaning of the closing scene in which the girls are kept by Toorop? What is the meaning of the title anyway? The classical Babylon connotations have to do with "loss of meaning and communication among human beings and the ensuing chaos" and the only part relevant to this movie is the movie's apparent lack of meaning. OK there is a female prophet/holy mother/indestructible razor girl (she survives guided missiles hitting her), the expected messiah(s) and the unevitable theme of sacrifice, which means there is nothing.

Stay away or go watch the meets.

AKE450 - Module 8 - Fantasy

AKE 450 Module 7 - Cyberpunk

AKE 450 Module 5 - Apocalypse

AKE 450 Module 4 - Alien and Gender

AKE 450 Module 3 - SF&F and the City Image