Essayist David Rakoff kicks off his alternate history of the decade with Gore's narrow victory in Bush v. Gore, leaving Justice Anton Scalia fuming. Once Gore is sworn in, there's an unpopular preemptive strike in Afghanistan before September 11th has a chance to happen, and Hurricane Katrina has a less disastrous outcome, but it's not all smooth sailing for Gore. His credibility is undercut when he signs a quickly neutered Patriot Act, and then there's the conflict with his own vice president, which starts on Inauguration Day:

Don Hewitt, producer, 60 Minutes: "I was too cold to go down to the Mall, and everything seemed kind of sour, frankly. So, I'm watching the feeds and in comes Scalia with his wife, and that's when we see Joe Lieberman throw his arms around him, and Hadassah leans in and kisses Maureen. Suddenly I'm screaming, 'Cut to Gore, cut to Gore!' I don't think the president saw it at the time. He definitely saw it afterward. I do know that Tipper never spoke to Hadassah again, never even looked at her again. This was on the first day!"

Rackoff outlines the fictional history of Gore's presidency up until the 2008 election (which features a very different pair of tickets), along with imagined commentary from a familiar crew of pundits and talking heads.

If Gore Had Won: An Oral History of the Last Decade [Newsweek via reddit]

Marvel Comics' reaction to 9/11 was both heartfelt and far-reaching, understandable for a company not only based in New York but one so tied to the city in its demeanor and subject matter (Marvel's New York state is the setting for the majority of its line, being home for years to Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men and Daredevil, amongst many others): Not only did they publish the prerequisite memorial special editions (Heroes and A Moment Of Silence), they also created a short-lived line of emergency services comics (The Call), relaunched Captain America as a hero hunting terrorists (with patriotic covers announcing things like "Fight Terror" and "Never Give Up"), placed a memorial logo of the World Trade Center Towers on all of their comics published for more than a year afterwards, and published a very special issue of Amazing Spider-Man where the company's most well-known character visited Ground Zero to help with rescue efforts, and found that it wasn't only the heroes who realized how terrible the terrorist attacks were:
Yes, Doctor Doom crying may have been a little too much - writer J. Michael Straczynski later denied asking for that in the script to avoid a backlash - but the meaning of all of this was clear: As a company, Marvel Comics had been severely affected by the devastating attacks, and had not only faced up to the reality of such widescale destruction previously fantasized about in their books, but also felt that reality for themselves. This was a sobered company.

Cut to last week's Siege: The Cabal, the prelude to next month's Siege event running across their entire line. Following September 11th, an increasingly political subtext has crept into Marvel's superhero lines, whether it's the "Personal Liberty or Safety" question at the heart of Civil War, terrorist sleeper cell paranoia of the run up to 2008's Secret Invasion or "The People Running Our Country May Not Have Our Best Interests At Heart" theme of this year's Dark Reign, and it's been something that's worked very well for the company: A decade ago, they were coming out of bankruptcy and their future looked uncertain, and now they're being bought by Disney for $400 billion. Siege: The Cabal acts as prologue to the big Final Act of the uber-storyline that's been running throughout their titles since 2004's Avengers: Disassembled, and ends with Norman Osborn - onetime Green Goblin and now head of what is essentially Marvel's Homeland Security department - talking with Norse God Loki about how he can make a pre-emptive strike against the mythical realm of Iraq. Wait, I mean, Asgard:
This explains the opening of next month's Siege, which was released in previews last week:

That's Chicago's Soldier Field getting destroyed, by the way. While there's a game going on, and the stands are full of people. Considering Soldier Field's seating capacity is 61,500, it's probably safe to say that we're talking about upwards of 50,000 fictional deaths in the stadium alone, even going with a "Well, it wasn't sold out" defense, and that's ignoring any damage and deaths in surrounding areas.

I think I'm allowed a W. T. F. around now.

There are so many things that come to mind from seeing this preview, and this amount of devastation for the purposes of getting a plot about good guys teaming up to reform the Avengers going, and to prepare for a new, optimistic status quo called "The Heroic Age". Primarily, it's the thoughtlessness and/or bad taste of the whole thing, especially coming from the publisher who seemed so affected by - or, perhaps, just displayed more of an emotional response to - September 11th (Which resulted in almost 3,000 deaths) and seemed to have come to some level of understanding of what an event of that scale actually means (Hint: It's not four issues of Cap and Iron Man and Thor getting back together to kick some bad guy ass, True Believer!). Don't get me wrong, I understand the difference between fictional death and real death, but that doesn't excuse the strange insensitivity here.

Secondly: Killing tens of thousands of people as an excuse to go to war? This is supervillainy on a ridiculous scale here, way beyond anything we've seen in a long time and not only completely removed from the intentional scale and bombast of old school supervillains, but (a) literally collateral damage given little thought on the road to Osborn's true plan, and (b) unlike other supervillain's genocidal plans, apparently completely successful (I hope that the next scene, not shown in previews, will reveal the Soldier Field destruction to be a fantasy sequence, but somehow I doubt it - And, if it were, it'd seem even more ghoulish to release these pages to get fans excited about reading Siege: "Look, kids! WIDESCALE DEATH TWENTY TIMES LARGER THAN 9/11! THIS IS THE BIG ONE YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR! EXCELSIOR!"). I'm all for demonizing bad guys, but this is just insane; even going on the "Well, he's mentally unbalanced" explanation Siege writer Brian Michael Bendis has been giving in interviews about the character and project, it makes mastermind Norman Osborn into a character that is impossible to sympathize with, and reduces him to almost cartoon proportions and ideas about evil. All he needs now is a moustache to twirl when explaining his plan to the heroes.

(Second-and-a-half-ly: Killing tens of thousands of people as an excuse to go to war? Is this some kind of veiled "The American Right Wing Were Behind 9/11 As A Way Of Motivating People To Back An Invasion Of Afghanistan and Iraq" thing? After all, Bendis has said about the plot, "much like we've seen in our own modern history, it's not beyond world leaders to fabricate incidents if it serves a purpose." Hmm.)

Thirdly: We've seen this before, in more than one sense. Not only is this a deliberate and literal call-out to the accidental explosion that launched Marvel's Civil War, but the idea of using the destruction of a sports stadium to launch a war is from Tom Clancy's 1991 novel The Sum Of All Fears (adapted into a movie in 1999, but not released until 2002). Of course, in that case, it's a neo-Nazi trying to convince the US and Russia to go to war by placing blame on the event on the Russians, but still, the tone-deaf quality of the plot device becomes even stranger when you realize that it's not even original.

So what to make of Siege's Destruction McGuffin? A sign that, even if the rest of the world hasn't gotten over 9/11, Marvel has managed to move on and enjoy fictional slaughter as a motivator for superheroes to team-up again? Proof that cynical shock tactics outweigh genuine emotional responses when it comes to upping the ante in the name of sales? A thoughtless plot that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth? Maybe I'm just too sensitive to these kinds of things; it's been eight years, after all. Perhaps I should shut up and hope that they blow up an entire continent next so that Doctor Doom can reveal that he really did only have something in his eye down at Ground Zero. After all, destroying Antarctica would be really bad-ass, wouldn't it?

Surprisingly, the issue was raised with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs earlier this week, as Mediaite's Tommy Christopher risked lizard attack by asking whether or not the President had a statement on the issue:

Tommy Christopher: Robert, I have one question and one clarification. First, the new TV series on ABC, "V," a lot of people are talking about how this show draws very strong –

Gibbs: I got to tell you - I'm going to start with this: I don't want to give anybody the impression I have time to watch anything other than what most of you all do each night. So I can't even tell you what that is or what it's about. If that makes me fairly un-cool, I tend to watch more "SpongeBob" than "V."

Tommy Christopher:There have been a lot of news stories about this –

Gibbs: Makes me a hit with one six-year-old, and that really is all that counts.

Tommy Christopher: You haven't seen the news stories about how this show compares your administration to the alien invaders? (Laughter.) Seriously, really, you haven't heard about it?

Q: He couldn't admit it if he had. (Laughter.)

Gibbs: Because there's a chip in the back of my head that requires me - (laughter) - I don't mean to - I honestly - I got to tell you, I spend - I watch a little football on Saturday, a little football on Sunday, and a lot of news every other time.

Q: Get a life. (Laughter.)

Q: (Inaudible).

Gibbs: Pardon me?

Tommy Christopher: Fourteen million people watch it, and the show –

Gibbs: And clearly, me not being one of them. Again, I –

[Cross-talk.] (Laughter.)

Gibbs: Hold on. I'm not entirely sure who I'd check on since I don't watch the show.

Tommy Christopher: Well, check with the President, see if he has a reaction –

Gibbs: I will assume that the President watches –

Tommy Christopher:– comparing him to a space alien.

Gibbs: What's the - which would probably, like, be one of the least worst things he's been called today.

The exchange ended with Gibbs being promised a tape of the show to review from ABC's Jake Tapper, which, if nothing else, should give ABC something new to promote the show with next week: "Officially screened at the White House at request of the President!"

Here's hoping that his often-discussed love for sci-fi will get him through the derivative hour without being too distracted by a cast that includes Firefly, Dollhouse, Lost, The 4400 and Smallville refugees.

White House Is Thus Far Unaware Of Comparisons To ABC's Hit Show ‘V' [Mediaite]

So last night was the long-awaited debut of V, the show about beautiful aliens who show up and claim to come in peace and offer us lots of goodies... but turn out to be rapacious lizards in disguise. The pilot moves along at a brisk pace, introducing the aliens in the first 10 minutes and setting up various characters as anti-alien and pro-alien. The younger priest is suspicious, but the older priest is an alien-sympathizer. Elizabeth Mitchell's FBI agent is suspicious too, but her teenage son guzzles the Kool-Aid. The nice-suited African American guy is conflicted and doesn't want to be "that guy" any more.

By the end of the first episode, it's already made crystal clear that these aliens are up to no good. They've had sleeper agents on Earth for years, including Alan Tudyk's FBI agent. And other aliens living secretly among us are part of an anti-alien resistance, which may look like terrorists to the uninitiated.

So now that you've had a chance to see the pilot for yourself, you can judge whether it's actually a broadside aimed at our president. The Chicago Tribune's Glenn Garvin seems absolutely certain it is:

Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

The news media swoons in admiration — one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: "Why don't you show some respect?!" The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader's origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: "Embracing change is never easy."

So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait — did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who's come here to eat us?

Welcome to ABC's "V," the most fascinating and bound to be the most controversial new show of the fall television season. Nominally a rousing sci-fi space opera about alien invaders bent on the conquest (and digestion) of all humanity, it's also a barbed commentary on Obamamania that will infuriate the president's supporters and delight his detractors.

The meme spread throughout the right-wing and left-wing blogospheres yesterday, with Ana-Marie Cox weighing in over at Huffington Post.

So now that you've had a chance to see the pilot for yourself, is it really all about how we would have been better off with McCain in the White House? Umm... Probably not. But it was definitely not a subtle episode. The aliens had "too good to be true" plastered on their faces from the beginning, and because the episode moves so fast, we're left wondering why anybody would have bought this dog-and-pony show in the first place.

And there are some little winks at the right-wing tea-partiers that may just be intentional, like when Anna (Morena Baccarin) talks about "change," and the sleazy journo guy asks her about universal health care. Mostly, though, the show seems designed so that you can project whatever ideology you want onto it — not unlike Anna's luminous screen, floating over the world's major cities.

The show isn't subtle, but that's part of the point — there are no hidden messages here at all. The messages are all right on the surface, and they're pretty basic science-fiction standbys, like "aliens who seem too good to be true usually are." Even the show's little jabs at the media and our dumb youth culture feel like they're just slapping a 21st century paint job on the show's 1980s fable. Media talking heads are blow-dried and dumb, young twerps enjoy tagging and Youtube — it's not exactly incisive social criticism.

I really doubt Obama is worried here.

The fast pace, though, is a good thing — that's one of the things that endeared me to this pilot in the first place. Anyone who remembers the original show is going to know these aliens are hucksters, so the faster that's revealed to the audience, the better. And compared to the pilot of FlashForward, which fixated on the crashy destruction and chaos attendant on the future vision/blackout in its pilot for several minutes, V got the disruption of the aliens' visit over fairly quickly, with one desultory plane crash.

Watching the pilot for a second time, the main problem that jumps out at me is that those two teenage kids are going to make me want to claw my face off. And it seems like Smallville's Laura Vandervoort is going to be somewhat painful to watch as well, with the woodenness. But getting to see Elizabeth Mitchell kick more ass and be less angsty than she was on Lost pretty much makes up for those drawbacks. And priest guy, who hails from The 4440, is still just as fun to watch as ever. Plus Baccarin can only get slyer and more engaging as the evil Anna, once her evil plans unfold.

I'm pretty sure this version of the pilot was significantly different from the version we saw at Comic Con. We knew the final sequence was going to be different — that laser shooting robot drone (in the clip above) was not there before, and the last few minutes were generally zippier. But also, my favorite scene is missing from the televised version. In the original version, when we meet Chad Decker, he's just had sex with the vice president's cougar-ish assistant, who promises to get him an interview with the Veep in return for the booty call. It lets us know right away that Decker is a man-whore, and is sort of hilariously trashy besides. In the televised version, that's replaced with a bland scene of him wanting to interview the Veep, but being told that he's just the talking head who reads the news. I have a feeling there were other weird, funny touches removed before the show aired, but I can't remember the others off the top of my head. This definitely felt a bit blander than the original pilot, although how much of that was editing and how much was just seeing it a second time, I'm not sure.

But despite some quibbles, this was a pretty fun outing, and a nice start to the series. It got us to the "OMG the aliens are evil lizards" part quickly and zippily, and set us up for three more episodes of alien intrigue and human gullibility, with an anti-alien resistance simmering under the surface. Now if those two teenagers can just get blown up in a tragic shuttlecraft accident, preferably next week...

According to Mental Floss Magazine, Kennedy managed to work all of the Ku Klux Klan's most secret recruiting and organizational practices into his 1940s radio serial, "Clan Of The Fiery Cross." And as a result, the Man Of Steel dealt a crushing blow to the racist organization:

As the storyline progressed, the shows exposed many of the KKK's most guarded secrets. By revealing everything from code words to rituals, the program completely stripped the Klan of its mystique. Within two weeks of the broadcast, KKK recruitment was down to zero. And by 1948, people were showing up to Klan rallies just to mock them.

Hey Smallville, what powerful real-life racist secret societies have you demystified and weakened lately?
[Mental Floss]

We've seen many fictional American Presidents fight off all manner of alien and/or monster invasions - Who could forget Independence Day's President Thomas J. Whitmore, who suited up and flew a fighter jet himself just to show how much he loved his country? - but the addition of the very real William Jefferson Clinton to Resurrection still seems a surprise, something that writer Marc Guggenheim seems to be enjoying:

I believe we're charting new territory here... For me, the challenge is remembering to write him the same way I would write any of the other characters in the book and not shy away from moments that make him seem real, human and/or vulnerable. The whole point in bringing Clinton into the book as a regular cast member is to treat him like a regular cast member. It's tempting to put him on some kind of presidential pedestal, but even the 'real life' Clinton is, after all, just a man. I'm not making it a story point or anything, but he puts his pants on one leg at a time, y'know?

But we can't help but wonder: Would Clinton be the best President to rely on in an alien invasion? Aren't there better Presidential choices to be made when selecting someone to lead us in out ongoing battle with an extra-terrestial army?

Click Here To Start Our Countdown Of The Presidents We Think Would Manage To Keep Humanity Alive.

Grant understood topography, the importance of supply lines, the instant judgment of the balance between his own strengths and the enemy's weaknesses, and above all the need to keep his armies moving forward, despite casualties, even when things had gone wrong-that and the simple importance of inflicting greater losses on the enemy than he can sustain, day after day, until he breaks. Grant the boy never retraced his steps. Grant the man did not retreat-he advanced.

Plus, he's called US Grant. For symbolic purposes alone, that can't be beaten.

Click To Find Our Choice For Final Presidential Protector!

Click To Continue Our List Of Leaders Trying To Keep It A Free World - From Aliens!

Click To Discover What Other White House Residents Could Keep Us Safe From Death From Above!

Click For More Presidential Hopefuls Ready To Face Down Any House Of Intergalactic Congress!

According to the New Yorker, Nader includes several real people in the novel, including Warren Buffett, Barry Diller, and Ted Turner, and he telephoned them up to let them know that they were in the book. Nader felt sensitized to this issue, because he's been featured as a character in other people's novels, including Greg Bear's Eon, which the New Yorker says

portrays Nader as "a saintly figure, a hero in a wasteland," whose followers win landslide elections in North America and Western Europe (in 2011) and bring down the Soviet Union (in 2012). "You see, that's science-fiction utopia," Nader said. "Nobody can give that any credibility."

Some people, including one famous billionaire, were a bit "snippy" about being included in Nader's book. But Yoko Ono and Warren Beatty were thrilled:

Yoko Ono, who in the book invents a logo called Seventh-Generation Eye that causes millions of people suddenly to shed their political apathy, sent Nader a brief reply. ("I think it is so sweet of you to write a book about somebody who resembles me. I don't mind at all, of course. Does she look like a tiny dragon?") Warren Beatty, whom Nader envisions running for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger, and winning, with sixty-three per cent of the vote, blurbed the book. Nader, he wrote, was showing the world "how good he thinks things could be."

So just how weird is this novel? Here's how the San Francisco Chronicle describes the plot:

The story begins in 2005, not long after Hurricane Katrina. A secret gathering is convened by Buffett at a Maui mountain retreat, where 17 very wealthy people agree to take back the country they think has been betrayed.

They give speeches, write books, organize community action groups. They infiltrate corporate boards of directors, stage demonstrations for the environment and better wages. They start a People's Chamber of Commerce, advocate changing the national anthem to "America the Beautiful" and dream up a politicized parrot, "Patriotic Polly," that becomes a media folk hero.

"Fiction is a way to liberate the imagination," Nader says, "to see what could happen if 17 billionaires and super-rich people really put their minds to it, along with a parrot, and took on the existing business power bloc and the politicians in Washington who serve (it)."

The super-rich name themselves "Meliorists," believers that people can make the world better. They persuade the elusive Warren Beatty to run against Arnold Schwarzenegger for California governor. They conspire to force Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to allow its workers to unionize. They push for universal health care. They start a new political party, dedicated to publicly financed elections. They are so quick, and clever, their foes can't catch up.

Hatoyama, wife of the soon-to-be-prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, made her claim in a book published last year called, fittingly, Very Strange Things I've Encountered:

While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus... It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.

And can we expect Miyuki's experience to influence Yukio's support (or lack thereor) for a Japanese space program? Potentially, because as she continued after explaining that her former husband told her that her experience was just a dream, her current husband is much more understanding:

My current husband has a different way of thinking. He would surely say 'Oh, that's great'.

That's it. The bar's been raised way past Barack reading Conan comics. Michelle, we're now waiting to hear about your alien kidnap experiences.

Japan's new first lady says rode UFO to Venus [Reuters]

Friedman is an intelligence officer with Strategic Forecasting, a private intelligence agency, as well as author of The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. In a recent essay for New Statesman, Friedman offers a sample of his geopolitical forecasts for the next hundred years.

Friedman's predictions focus on the interactions between nations over the next several decades, including which countries are likely to emerge as the next great powers. He sees the US continuing to grow as a superpower, only to be unbalanced by another emerging power — perhaps Turkey, Japan, or some combination thereof. One possible venue for conflict: space, where he predicts the US will have many of its military assets. But it will be a very different kind of war from those fought on the ground:

The enemy will be trying to deny the US what it already has, space power, without being able to replace it. The US will win in a war where the stakes will be the world, but the cost will be much less than the bloody slaughters of Europe's world wars. Space does not contain millions of soldiers in trenches. War becomes more humane.

Another possible threat to America's dominance, Friedman claims, could be Mexico, which stands to emerge as a growing power as the drug profiteers currently destabilizing the country give way to their more legitimate heirs. That, combined with an growing population of Americans living just north of the border who immigrated from Mexico, could put Mexico in a position to reclaim territory it lost to the US over 150 years ago and arise as one of the world's key players:

One can imagine scenarios in which the US fragments, in which Mexico becomes an equal power, or in which the US retains primacy for centuries, or an outside power makes a play. North America is the prize.

The next 100 years [New Statesman]

According to indie publisher Moonstone Comics, the fifth issue of toy hero revival Captain Action will feature "President Obama and Captain Action as they battle a space alien death panel and the insidious Red Crawl." Whether or not the space alien death panel will be arguing the ins and outs of healthcare reform and how it relates to the nationality of Dr. Stephen Hawking remains unclear, but the publisher is ready to bring other national figures into the medium while we puzzle it out, according to Captain Action Enterprises' Ed Catto:

Since [we first announced the issue], practically every comic publisher has featured President Obama... As a result, we repositioned our story, and it now serves as a kind of tongue-in-cheek commentary on all the other comics featuring the President. We might be the first comic to feature Vice President Joe Biden and certainly are the first to feature the VP's Deputy National Security Advisor, Brian McKeon.

Speculators, look out: McKeon's first appearance is sure to rise in value in years to come.

Captain Action #5 is due in stores August 26th.

We all know that Barack Obama has become one of comics' hottest properties, what with his smash-hit team-up with Spider-Man, or his fighting aliens and becoming a politican barbarian, or even just grappling with a much-too-large gun. But, despite the surprising amount of appearances he makes in comics, comic appearances from US Presidents are nothing special; it was George W. Bush that watched Iron Man and Captain America start a superhero Civil War, after all.

But what is unusual is the attention now being given to the Obama family. If you don't want to read about "Tasha Tasker" in Keenspot's First Daughter, you'll soon be able to read Liquid Comics' First Family, about "the teen children of a newly elected American president who try to survive in a most ruthless political arena — high school," pick up Michelle Obama's comic-book biography or even stand by, amazed, as the Obama's dog, Bo, saves the world in Marvel's Pet Avengers. Turning Presidents into comic book heroes is one thing, but we never read Caroline Kennedy Vs. The Martians back in the '60s. So what's changed?
There's probably an argument to be made for cultural shift. I'm not just talking about the cultural shift of Obama's presidency and the wave of euphoric (and somewhat hysterical) optimism that followed his win, although that's certainly part of it - If Obama became the figurehead of a new era for America, it stands to reason that his family would be caught up in that and share in the adoration in some sense, after all - nor am I really referring to the cultural implications of the Obamas being the first black family in the White House (As hard as it is to separate that from the excitement and furor surrounding them, I think the... "novelty value," for want of a better way of putting it, is not what motivates people to look at them as such figureheads and icons). Instead, the Obamas enter the White House in a culture not only of reality shows but superhero stories, where we deify regular people and their problems and watch them overcome the odds at the same time as bringing irregular people overcoming massive odds - and saving the day - down to "our level," all the while working through our issues about whether we're Jon and Kate with less kids or Tony Stark without the armor or somewhere in between. With that mindset at work, who wouldn't want to know as much about the Leader Of The Free World And Those Whom He Loves The Most? It's perfect synergy!

(And, because of that, too, it's not enough for Obama's family to be normal - they have to be flawed icons striving to save the day as well that we can sympathize with and dream of being, hence First Daughter and Bo Obama fighting alongside Lockheed, Lockjaw and Frog Thor. Otherwise, then where's the glamor? What's the point?)

Also, let's face it: Obama sells. Who knows if it's the "First Black President" historical aspect, the "He's Not George Bush" aspect, or genuine appreciation and belief in the message he was selling, but people want Obama, and with comics feeding into the pop cultural zeitgeist properly for the first time in years, it's no surprise that they've joined in the feeding frenzy, or been so successful doing so (All credit to Marvel and their Amazing Spider-Man cover for breaking into the mainstream and facilitating it in the way that they did; without that media coverage and that high-profile character match, Obama's comic presence would've been much more minor). For an industry that knows how to exploit success until it's dead, and how to turn everything into a franchise (More than one Hulk series? More than one Hulk? Really?), it shouldn't come as a surprise that someone realized that there was potential in exploiting more than one Obama at a time.

The question, perhaps, is whether this is all too much. The new comics have all been announced, but none have been released (Save the Michelle bio, which was a moderate success); no-one knows if there is genuine consumer interest to match the headlines, and - to be honest - I doubt that there is. We've had years of The West Wing to give us more mundane (but, arguably, better written) versions of behind the scenes at the White House storylines, after all, and Ex Machina has pretty successfully taken the role of Fictional Superpowered Political Book for a few years now. For someone to really work hard to exploit Sasha and Malia, they'd have to actually feature Sasha and Malia themselves, not Tasha and another fictionsuit analog; otherwise, we're being sold another Chasing Liberty.

I wonder if I can convince DC to let Sasha join the Teen Titans and start up a romance with Static...?

Battlestar Galactica, writes MetisRebel, is about a group of people who've lost their homes and are cut off from everything:

Battlestar Galactica is about a group of humans who, due to their arrogance of playing God with artificial intelligence technology, find themselves on the wrong side of a genocide rained upon them by their own robotic creations, the Cylons. Humanity's planets are bombed out of existence.

Meanwhile, Farscape is about one particular human who loses his home, and it resonates a great deal with the real experiences of homeless people:

a scientist/astronaut who is accidentally shot through a wormhole alone in his experimental pod then finds himself, through no fault of his own, in another galaxy during a shoot out between escaping prisoners and their lawful captors.

"Homeless" is truly an apt description. John Crichton of Farscape is both physically and metaphorically, lost – light years from all he knows and the civilizations he encounters are far beyond his technological comprehension. It's a violent, dangerous universe. He has no idea where he is, how to get home, or how to improve his situation. He is confounded by who is allied with whom, who is reliable–or not, and the political/social/cultural realities of his new situation.

Early on, Crichton's so out of his depth, he doesn't even know how to open a door. MetisRebel can identify with his feelings of insecurity and tentativeness:

He's just a nice guy, who accidentally bounced through a wormhole into the wrong place, at the wrong time. Others alternately bully and con the new guy. Not much different than popping into the local homeless drop in, the first time... Crichton, who starts out as reasonable, compassionate and sensible is then relentlessly driven by the violence committed against him and the violence he must in turn, commit to survive, over the line of sanity... Crichton just wants what every ‘homeless' person wants. He wants to go home.

But eventually Crichton becomes so adept at surviving in his new circumstances, he can't even relate to Earth when he finally does get home. He's an inspirational figure because he does learn to master his bewildering situation.

In the end, MetisRebel finds Farscape a more helpful narrative than BSG, because Crichton and his friends band together to improve their situation. BSG's "hand of God," meanwhile, feels too much like waiting for governments or large corporations to do something to improve your circumstance, when you're out on the streets.

[Homeless Tales]

Yes, the price may be high, but admit it: If you saw one of those tanks coming towards you, you'd want to surrender.

Obama Axes Pentagon Plan To Build Billion Dollar Tank In Shape Of Dragon [The Onion]

The NZ Herald has an interview with Jackson, and the article also explains a bit more of this movie's plot, which revolves around

a multinational corporation, MNU, charged with policing the aliens while trying to find out their technological secrets. When an MNU agent is accidentally exposed to a mysterious alien substance, he finds himself a hunted man.

And Jackson explains how heart-breaking it was when the Halo movie that he and director Neill Blomkamp were going to make fell through, and how they decided to turn Blomkamp's short film Alive In Joburg into a low-budget feature film instead. And then Jackson adds:

It's difficult for a young film-maker to do anything that is based on life experience to some degree because if you are in your 20s you haven't had much life experience. You sometimes feel that there is some kid making a film and it is just based on some other movies that he has seen.

But Neill grew up in the dying days of apartheid in South Africa and he saw all the ugliness and all the brutality and how it affects people in different ways and all that is in the movie.

You just totally understand how he was approaching it from an authentic place - from a real South African perspective. He really loves Africa and he's tried to put a lot of it into the movie.

As for Blomkamp, he says he has a love/hate relationship with Johannesburg, and that the city's insane crime level gives it a feeling of living on the edge. And it turns out the filming of District 9 coincided with real-life massacres of Zimbabwean refugees living in nearby shanty towns:

It was completely barbaric what happened and that was the same day we started rolling cameras on a film that was about the residents of Joburg wanting a foreign race out. So all of a sudden I am making a film which within South African has this massive political point of view but really that isn't what we set out to do. So I hope that the residents of Joburg don't take it the wrong way.

And the article describes District 9 as RoboCop-meets-fake-documentary. Which doesn't sound like a bad thing at all. [NZ Herald]

In his opening statement to the Committee, Bolden described a NASA that had lost its way and needed to reassert its purpose:

Today we have to choose. Either we can invest in building up our hard-earned world technological leadership or we can abandon this commitment, ceding it to other nations who are working vigilantly to push the frontiers of space... The nation has to decide where it wants to go. I think it's beyond low-Earth orbit.

Apparently, President Obama likes to surround himself with those with a similar gift to inspirational speaking as himself. During the meeting, Bolden talked about wanting to improve the efficiency and safety of the space agency, as well as increasing its level of both corporate interests and "the kids":

[In 1980,] I could ask, 'How many of you want to be an astronaut?', and every hand went up... When I go to a school today and ask that question, I may see three hands, and all of them want to go into business.

If approved by the Committee, Bolden's nomination will need final approval by full Senate vote.

NASA nominee says agency has lost its lustre [New Scientist]