Featured Essays architecture The Future Is a City: Megalopolis and Why Architecture Matters to Sci-Fi Coppola’s new film features themes and concepts that have fueled sci-fi for the last century, so let’s take a deeper look at the futures we were promised… By Kristen Patterson | Published on September 23, 2024 Credit: Lionsgate Films Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Lionsgate Films Bear with me for just a minute—I swear this will wrap around to being about sci-fi: In July of 1925, the city of Paris hosted a world’s fair. The “International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts” (or Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes) was a celebration of new—fully new! Unencumbered by the constraining sensibilities of tradition—artistic styles. “Modern” art, rather than being simply contemporary and novel, sought to reflect two major, watershed changes in society: the urbanization of American and European populations, and the broadening societal accessibility of technology, both of which were fundamentally reshaping the forms of day-to-day life. For this new age of advancement, a new aesthetic. Among the pavilions erected by the different attending nations, showcasing their national modern architectural styles and cultural ethos, were also the entries of individual designers and studios. One entry among these, the pavilion of the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau, stood out at the time, and in posterity, as the most controversial and by the same token the most exceptional. Other pavilions were lavish in their forms and use of decoration. The pavilion of L’Esprit Nouveau was by contrast, or possibly even without contrast, spare. A double-height interior of white walls, hung with cubist paintings, and furnished with built-in cabinets and industrially mass-produced chairs and tables. The main flight of fancy was a terrace with a hole built into the roof, accommodating a tree growing through it. Expo officials were aghast, mainly by the display of industrially manufactured, commercially available furnishings inside, though also by the discordant austerity of the whole structure. They had the pavilion fenced off from view until the Ministère des Beaux Arts intervened to have the fence removed. The pavilion was the project of the Franco-Swiss architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, or simply “Corbu,” the pseudonym he adopted when her founded the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau with Adémée Ozenfant, with whom he advocated for a Purist style of architecture. The simple, accessible, and standardized, Corbu believed, would or ought to be the way of modern living, optimized after the modernist maxim of form following function. Or, as Corbu put it more poetically, “The house is a machine for living in.” Reflecting on the Paris Expo controversy, Corbu declared: 1925 marks the decisive turning point in the quarrel between old and new. After 1925 the antique lovers will have virtually ended their lives, and productive industrial effort will be based on the “New.” Progress is achieved through experimentation: the decision will be awarded on the field of battle of the “New”… Certainly, we must hold Corbu’s proclamation to have proven true, on balance. The appeal of novelty is so often coequal to, if not more important than, practical application in the advertisement of any new product. Yet the inertia (or call it momentum) of tradition still holds sway too. For such reasons, the most ambitious of Le Corbusier’s dreams were never realized. Too disruptive. Advancement happened, yes, and three cheers for penicillin and refrigerators! But mostly, infrastructure was built in service of the interests of already powerful and influential classes. Almost a century on later, in the first teaser trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s new sci-fi epic Megalopolis, an architect teeters on the lip of a skyscraper—the Chrysler Building, briefly the tallest building in the world in 1930 and masterpiece of the style that takes its name from that same 1925 Paris Expo, Art Deco—and yells at time to stop. It does. Having premiered at Cannes in May and set for a wide release in September, the themes and premise of Coppola’s new film appear to be rooted in something of an old sci-fi chestnut: the society hovering between stagnation and collapse, on the one hand, and precipitous transformation on the other. This one is set in an unnamed city—call it Schnew York—the fate of which pivots around the genius of a visionary architect, Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), whose ambitions to rebuild the city, following some destructive disaster (the trailer implies that to be the debris of a satellite falling to earth), are opposed by its corrupt mayor (Giancarlo Esposito). That common thread’s appearance here is no great mystery, since Coppola highlights, among a vast bricolage of influences listed in an interview with Vanity Fair, the strong impression left on him by the H.G. Wells-penned 1936 science fiction film Things to Come. Wells’ oeuvre, the most famous works in which were written just before the turn of the century, is suffused with anticipation, both hopeful and wary, over how social and technological development would reshape society. Also, strong socialist sentiments. We’ll get back to that. The anxiety that Wells tapped into, that Coppola emulates, is the same one that drove the proliferating popularity of science fiction—and is bound up with the same ambitious sense of possibility that inspired architects like Le Corbusier. 1926, just a year after the Paris Expo, saw the launch of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories by Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo Awards are named), in whose pages the works of authors like Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, and Jules Verne, were republished and rediscovered by popular audiences. The unifying feature of modernism and science fiction as a genre, contemporary trends that they were, is the sense that Big Change is possible. It is fitting, then, that on the near-centennial of the Paris Expo and Amazing Stories, milestones of sci-fi and architecture reunite in Coppola’s latest offering. So too is it a timely opportunity to check in with the state of modernity and futurity. Our reactions to Megalopolis might serve as a barometer of our feelings on certain questions, namely: Do the ambitions of the early 1900s still resonate now—and if not, is it because we have outgrown some cultural naivete or because we have lost our taste for big change? Fundamentally, what is the status of the “progress” that Corbu and Wells so savored? Have we stopped time or forged ahead? If science fiction is still running on the fumes of modernism, perhaps it is because that period still feels the most freighted with potential for transformation. Part of Megalopolis’ sci-fi premise is the genius architect’s invention of a new building material, “Megalon,” that is advertised to grow organically with its inhabitants. The concept appears to be represented in the trailers by great whirling, spiraling structures, curving organically around the cityscape’s blocky skyscrapers. Somehow, they put me in mind of a big fungus. Or the Guggenheim. The whole concept sounds a bit unwieldy and rather calls into question the need for an architect’s design vision, but never mind that now. As a building technology with the potential to reshape civic space (and with it, it’s implied, civic life), Megalon parallels a real-world engineering innovation: reinforced concrete! Wait, no, girl, come back! I know I know, concrete…how riveting. But really: reinforced concrete and the cheapening cost of steel enabled the construction of bigger cities, at once more open, hosting more spacious interiors, and enabling greater population density given their increased verticality. It was a true possibility-expanding advancement as an innovation that sat poised to transform both private and public space. While the reinforced concrete technology had been in use since the turn of the century—the Ingalls Building, completed in 1903, was the first reinforced concrete-frame skyscraper—it was not until the 1920s and ’30s that skyscrapers began to shoot up and claw at the dome of heaven across American cities. The aforementioned Chrysler Building, steel frame, completed in 1930, remains a model of the Art Deco skyscraper par excellence, referenced across visual art such as Coppola’s film and the cover art for Meatloaf’s 1993 studio album Bat Out of Hell II. This architectural and stylistic development bled swiftly into the sci-fi imagination. In 1924, German filmmaker Fritz Lang made his fateful trip to New York City and witnessed the new vertical urban landscape that would inspire the design of his own futuristic city in 1927’s Metropolis, another film from which Coppola draws inspiration, with its depictions of bourgeois hedonism in a highly stratified society. The visual reference remains a staple of science fiction, though even when deployed in a future setting, it has begun to feel quaint. The adaptors of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series have actually, cleverly used this to their advantage, rendering the imperial capital world of Trantor steeped in lavish Art Deco design elements to communicate the sense of a society that is at once futuristic and backwards-gazing—a sort of retrofuturism, one could say. But back in the real world of the 1920s, architects were also busy planning for the non-fiction cities of the future. Inside his L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion, Le Corbusier also displayed his plan for the redesigned cityscape of Paris, the Plan Voisin pour Paris. Eighteen uniform glass skyscrapers grouped near the Seine, just north of the Île de la Cité, and webbed with roads for automobiles (the plan’s sponsor, Gabriel Voisin, was a car manufacturer). Corbu’s Plan Voisin was aimed at resolving issues of urban overcrowding and poor sanitation. Moving the population into tower apartments, spaced generously rather than tightly clustered, and fitted with modern amenities, ventilation, and plumbing, would permit more air and light to permeate the street level where more real estate could be committed to greenery, in order to create a more pleasant and salubrious pedestrian experience. Well, and also the motorways. Corbu’s plan was not to be, and perhaps that’s for the best when one considers how much of old Paris he would have destroyed to reshape it. Reflecting on Le Corbusier’s career in 1986, William J.R. Curtis criticizes the orderly Plan Voisin for having been probably incapable of rehoming the complex social and economic fabric of Paris that grew up organically on, and thrived on being squashed together in, those cramped and dirty streets. It is an inevitable and intractable problem of social engineering endeavors that, in making blanket provisions for large populations, they try to arrange for the way the people ought to live (in theory) rather than accommodating a branching variety of needs. Le Corbusier, for his part, was apparently undeterred by the authoritarian measures it would have taken to see his plan enacted; in 1940 he spent a period of several months attempting to join the Vichy regime that was organized around the principle of collaboration with Nazi Germany, seemingly hoping that the government would discover him like an ingenue and gladly throw their institutional backing behind his plans. Even so, Curtis acknowledges that Corbu’s plans possessed merit, namely communitarian touches not realized in the cities that were actually built up at the beginning of the twentieth century: He prophesied with uncanny precision the building types and transport systems that would dominate in the industrial cityscapes of the future and tried to give them order and the enrichments of nature. However, it would be a little too easy to blame him for every banal modern downtown full of crude high rises surrounded by wildernesses of parking lots. Centralization, real estate profiteering by means of tall buildings, dumb urban renewal, massive traffic scheme cutting through old fabric—surely these would have happened without him. Even in cases where Le Corbusier’s influence has been certain, crucial areas of original theorems—such as private terraces, communal facilities, and parks—have often been left out.1 The urban planning ills Curtis diagnoses here of course recall the scheme of another of Coppola’s major points of inspiration, the New York urban planner Robert Moses. Moses in the early and mid-twentieth century successfully achieved the level of bureaucratic power that would have made Corbu swoon. Similar to Corbu’s vision for Paris’s “rue corridor,” Moses razed lower- and middle-class neighborhoods to clear room for expressways, connecting suburbanites to the city at the expense of actual, by and large poorer, city-dwellers. It can be a little dispiriting to look back and recognize that even the humbler utopian aspirations for the machine age mostly never panned out. So, for all that it evokes the Roaring Twenties, the themes Coppola appears to be grasping at in Megalopolis do still feel relevant. How indeed might we design—physically design—a better environment for ourselves when the massive scale of development that would require has in the past proven bureaucratically infeasible on the one hand, or requiring massive overreach on the other? All at the same time, however, early reviews give the impression that Megalopolis may not be bold or articulate enough about its utopian dreams. As we’ve noted, the futuristic city, of either the utopic or dystopic flavor, is a well-trodden concept, as is the figure of the genius doomed by his own hubris. It is unclear what novelty or revitalizing insight this latest entry will contribute. What do those swirly, apparently self-sustaining Megalon structures represent? Some sort of democratic participation in the urban planning process? The trailers strongly suggest the film is concerned with civil discourse. “When we ask these questions,” Driver’s Cesar states, “when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” That’s a nice if rather vague and anemic sentiment, though to be fair, it’s only a trailer. The movie itself could, and hopefully will, put forward more interesting, assertive ideas. But let us prognosticate a little, based on what we do know. Of all its cinematic and literary precedents, Megalopolis appears most to resemble Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the tale of an intransigent modernist architect, Howard Roark, whose vision is constantly stifled by traditionalists. (In creating Roark, Rand was evidently inspired by Frank Llyod Wright, though Martin Filler opines that the character’s “suffocating megalomania” renders Roark more akin to our Swiss-French urbanist, Le Corbusier.) Also in the mix is the foxy daughter of our protagonist’s rival, played in the 1949 adaptation by Patricia Neal showing a lot of decolletage. Not so much from leading man Gary Cooper. Shame. But her character, Dominique Francon, finds a parallel in Megalopolis’ Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), daughter of Cesar’s political opponent, Cicero. Again, we who haven’t yet seen the film are in speculative territory—dicey!—but like Dominique, it appears as though Julia plays a mostly metaphorical role in the story, with the fact that she is won over by Cesar, thereby lending him and his ideas a symbolic cachet. If so, it’s a pity. This of course would not any kind of narrative crime; characters behave and function symbolically in storyworld all the time. But observed through the lens of my current fixation, which—thanks for being here, by the way, and coming along on this journey—which this week is modern architecture, it’s a choice that looks like a missed opportunity. Because feminist social reformers of the turn of the century had some radical and specific hopes for the mechanized, urbanized, utopic future society of their own. They even wrote some science fiction about it. For women, the new material realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century offered the opportunity to argue for a change in the divisions of household and professional labor. The place of the kitchen in the modern/future home was often central to these debates, with some proposals for “apartment hotel” complexes eliminating the kitchen as an asset of private apartments entirely, making it instead a communal asset. The upshot of this design choice was both symbolic and directly practical. Food and the labor of cooking would be a community asset, no longer performed privately and without acknowledgment, with women acting as the de facto domestic servants of their atomized family unit. In the same spirit of efficiency and optimization that generated excitement for modernity more broadly, engineers and scientists such as Ellen Swallow Richards and Mary Hinman Abel, founders of the New England Kitchen, folded proper nutrition into the matter of relieving women of a disproportionate burden of domestic labor. Domestic labor, performed as a career by trained experts, would see not only that communities were fed, but that they ate correctly, though this goal was a little less punctilious than it may sound. Access to cheap, hygienic, and nutritious meals wasn’t something that could be taken for granted at the time. And while H.G. Wells envisioned the grand spectacle of Martians invading earth, or perhaps genetically modifying humanity, a contemporary futurist novelist, Henry Olerich, wrote in A Cityless and Countryless World about a society of feminist “Marsians” descending to Earth to share with us their enlightened ways. In Marsian communities, gender distinctions were abolished, and Marsians lived in “big-houses” of 1000 occupants wherein childcare was socialized, meals were vegetarian, and cleaning and cooking was attended to by a mixed-gender corps of professionals. Urban historian Dolores Hayden praises Olerich as a standout among male utopian novelists for conceiving of a world in which men split domestic labor with women rather than fictitiously imagining the need for traditional “women’s work” away entirely. But Olerich’s book is yet to be optioned for a major motion picture adaptation. It is no great wonder that The War of the Worlds has persisted longer in the cultural consciousness than A Cityless and Countryless World. Urban planning and social organization are so prosaic on their own, let alone when held up in comparison to a rip-roaring alien invasion story. Still, as I look ahead to this evening, when I will none-too-efficiently cook a meal for one of dubious nutritional balance, I do feel a genuine kindling of enthusiasm for the futurisms of Ellen Richards and Henry Olerich. (It is mostly localized in the stomach region, but even so.) It is no great wonder either, and let’s not pretend to be surprised or scandalized, that Coppola draws inspiration more from Wells and Fritz Lang and Ayn Rand and Sallust than the philosophical and speculative writings of material feminism or the filmography of Lizzie Borden. His catalog shows solidly the credentials of a man qualified to make great movies about the foibles of powerful men. As they say, write what you know. And if you would prefer feminist socialist science fiction to a Coppola bacchanalia, you can still watch Born in Flames. In 1958, in the same spirit as prior World’s Fairs, the United States and USSR arranged for a diplomatic cultural exchange in which Russia would exhibit its technology and art in New York City and the US would do likewise in Moscow, held in June and July of 1959. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon guided Nikita Khrushchev through the American National Exhibition, “dedicated to showcasing the high standard of life in our country,” and the pair fell into an argument over the practicality of newfangled American kitchen devices, an exchange dubbed by history “the Kitchen Debate.” In the shadow of the Soviet success with the Sputnik rocket, Nixon proclaimed the virtues of an American dishwasher to “make life easier for women.” Khrushchev retorted that his capitalist attitude towards women was anathema to communism. Nixon insisted in return that, no, the attitude was universal. Sarah Archer, reflecting on the incident in her book The Midcentury Kitchen, notes how the exchange demonstrates what was and was not included in American notions of progress: “‘The future’ held robots, automation, style, and ease, but it didn’t promise any changes in domestic gender roles—quite the contrary.” The conversation around progress today has mostly turned to information infrastructure rather than physical space, revolving around tech monopolies that control the flow of data and speculations about the labor-saving possibilities of “A.I.” The private kitchen is an unquestioned standard, and gendered disparity in who performs housework persists. The matters of urban planning and kitchen politics don’t feel as urgent to us now as they did to Le Corbusier or Ellen Swallow Richards a century ago. A lot of speculative science fiction, naturally, imagines a future born of circumstances contemporary to its time of composition. That is, it imagines the future of now. As such, retrofuturistic or period piece science fiction stories have a real role to play in expanding our imagination by reinvigorating branches of possibility that were thought dead, the bygone futures we’ve forgotten. Whether Coppola’s own retro vision of the future city will do so remains to be seen, but hope and aspiration—in progress, in Big Change, in the possibilities of storytelling—remains, always, the sci-fi writer and reader’s project.[end-mark] Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, pg. 66 ︎The post The Future Is a City: <i>Megalopolis</i> and Why Architecture Matters to Sci-Fi appeared first on Reactor.

Craving soft and fluffy cinnamon rolls? These 15 delicious recipes for homemade cinnamon rolls are gloriously delicious and should be on your holiday baking list. These homemade cinnamon rolls are so easy to make and even easier to love – you could get the kids to help you make them too. It’s perfect for breakfast, snacks, or even dessert. Learn more here. Hey Good Lookin' Whatcha Got Cookin? | Homemade Cinnamon Rolls Recipes Homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast? You don't need a better reason to get out of bed than that, especially when it's in the guise of a cinnamon roll. This crowd-pleasing recipe is soft and fluffy – making these rolls perfect for breakfast or any other time of day. But, why doesn’t anyone make cinnamon rolls? Simply because they are difficult and it's taking a lot of time. But if you love this baked pastry like I do, you wouldn't mind the long preparation. In the end, all the labor is worth it. So, today, I have gathered some of the best recipes to prepare Homemade Cinnamon Rolls. These recipes only need a few ingredients and no complicated steps. Learn and enjoy!   1. Cinnamon Rolls From Scratch | You will definitely want to make homemade cinnamon rolls all the time once you make these and see how easy they are to make, as well as how incredibly delicious they are. This recipe is a great dish for dessert or breakfast. See how you can make it here.   2. Slow Cooker Cinnamon Roll Pull Apart Bread | It's very surprising how five simple ingredients can combine to make a delightful breakfast pull-apart. This recipe is so simple – tastes so good it will surprise you! Get the recipe here. You may or may not start drooling over these #pumpkinrecipes…???? https://t.co/d5Bz1fEe1f pic.twitter.com/Ef4OVYU9kR — Homesteading (@HomesteadingUSA) October 13, 2016   3. Apple Pie Cinnamon Rolls Image via thehopelesshousewife If you already love apple pie and cinnamon rolls, then you have to try this homemade recipe… and if you have never tried apple pie cinnamon rolls, then you have to try this recipe! See how you can make it here.   4. Dulce De Leche Cinnamon Rolls Image via livingsweetmoments The combination of caramel, cinnamon, and bread is just perfect. No need for extra toppings or glaze are needed as these dulce de leche cinnamon rolls are so flavorful. Get the recipe here.   5. Einkorn Cinnamon Rolls Recipe Image via everydaydishes Sweet, gooey cinnamon rolls are even more fun to eat when you make one of these easy einkorn cinnamon rolls recipes. Einkorn is a little different than regular all-purpose flour because it is said to be more nutritious. You can have these for breakfast, brunch or dessert. See how you can make it here.   6. Pumpkin Spice Cinnamon Rolls Image via selfproclaimedfoodie The combination of pumpkin and spice is just so incredibly delicious and definitely autumnal. If you are obsessed with pumpkin spice then you are going to love these! See how you can make it here.   7. Homemade Orange Sweet Rolls Image via sallysbakingaddiction Such a fruity little spin-off of our standard cinnamon bun. It tastes so divine, plus it is surprisingly easy to make. Try them this weekend! See how you can make it here.   8. Vegan Cinnamon Rolls With Maple Icing (Sugar-free) Image via whereyougetyourprotein These light and airy cinnamon rolls are not only vegan, but they are made in just an hour. You need to make these beauties right away! Get the recipe here.   9. Cherry Cinnamon Rolls Image via redefinedmom It's definitely a magnificent morning when you're waking up to these heavenly rolls. Get the instructions here.   10. Skinny Cinnamon Roll Baked Oatmeal Image via mostlyhomemademom This recipe is egg-free, sugar-free, and absolutely delicious. That’s right! This recipe may taste sinful, but it's definitely a guiltless pleasure. It’s high in fiber and you can punch up the protein, too.  You really have to try it! See how you can make it here.   11. Amish Cinnamon Rolls with Caramel Frosting Image via tastykitchen These melt-in-your-mouth cinnamon rolls are a family favorite – they’re full of flavor! These are great for a family picnic, as a gift to welcome new neighbors, or for your next office potluck. See how you can make it here.   12. Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls with Salted Caramel Frosting Image via mostlyhomemademom These Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls topped with stove top salted caramel frosting are the perfect way to ring in the fall season. It's simply amazing! Make it with this tutorial.   13. Better-Than-Pillsbury Homemade Cinnamon Rolls Image via popsugar Nothing really compares to homemade cinnamon rolls. These cinnamon rolls are excellent — so easy to make and absolutely delicious! See how you can make it here.   14. Caramel Apple Cinnamon Rolls Image via gimmesomeoven Fall and caramel apple season have officially arrived – and so have these Caramel Apple Cinnamon Rolls. This recipe can be made in just an hour and will send you to caramel apple paradise. Get the recipe here.   15. Blueberry Cinnamon Rolls Image via afewshortcuts This recipe is a sweet twist on a classic breakfast treat. These yummy blueberry cinnamon rolls are a must try – just so irresistibly good! See how you can make it here. These muffin recipes will complete your morning <3 https://t.co/PsqeFfPspa pic.twitter.com/ZFMivyFBkb — Homemade Recipes (@BestHomeRecipes) October 26, 2016   16. Cinnamon Roll Icing Image via anawins These look absolutely divine! Add icing to your cinnamon rolls and you have the perfect dessert. This is so easy to make. It takes only ingredients which you probably have in your kitchen. Get the recipe here.   In the mood for one more homemade cinnamon rolls recipe? Check this video and let's make some pillowy soft, fluffy cinnamon rolls with Divas Can Cook: So easy right? These recipes of homemade cinnamon rolls are extremely tasty. Plus, so easy and so good – that is the only way to describe these recipes. And these are sure to please the entire family.   Which of these homemade cinnamon rolls will you make this weekend? Let me know in the comments below. Follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook! Like this? Then, you’ll also LOVE to know 23 House Favorite Pumpkin Recipes for Fall  

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A documentary about the Royal Family and their secret passion for UFOs and the paranormal is out now on Amazon Prime – free to watch for Prime members.   The film is called The King Of UFOs and it explores the Royal family’s interest in UFOs and the paranormal.   Writer and director Mark Christopher Lee recounts a story that in the late 1980’s the late Queen would dispatch here own scientific advisors in the middle of the night to investigate the latest crop circle formation. At one such occurrence the crop circle researcher Colin Andrews was with a Japanese film crew in Wiltshire and got word that the Queen was interested in what was happening. A couple of hours later he saw a Rolls Royce turn up and half expected her majesty to get out of the car, only to find out it was her chief scientific advisor!   Also in the film retired CID detective John Hanson recounts how the Queen and Prince Philip both had a passionate  interest in the Rendelsham Ufo case from 1980 – which has been dubbed the British Roswell. Allegedly a UFO landed in the forest at Rendelsham over Christmas weekend in 1980. Airforce personnel from nearby RAF Bentwaters, which was a US NATO base at the time, went to investigate and saw strange orbs and beams of light shining through the forest.    Hanson tells in the film how he corresponded with them regarding this case and they particularly liked his books that he’d written on Rendelsham with Colonel Halt who was Deputy  Commander of the base at the time of the incident. Halt had taken his dictaphone with him when investigating the lights and recorded what he saw. He is still convinced that something out  of the ordinary happened that weekend. The letters from the Queen and Prince Philip to Hanson are featured in the film and show that they had their own library of UFO and paranormal books!   Mark Christopher Lee the director of the film states:   “What I wanted to show in this film is how passionate and serious the senior royals were on the subject of UFOs. They had to keep this mostly a secret because of possible ridicule but if such high standing, balanced people, took them seriously why can’t we? There is something that pilots and police officers are seeing in the skies that can’t be explained so why can’t the British government take them seriously?” The film also looks at the testimony an evidence  from former Naval diver Dan Costello who claims in 1975 to have seen Prince Charles fly a UFO craft in Nova Scotia! Costello claims in the film that Charles was one of 3 pilots in a dome shaped craft that had a strange electro magnetic propulsion powering it and had a trailing blue ionic flame. Film-maker Mark Christopher Lee: “Costello’s testimony is fantastical but we have verified a lot of the information and evidence that he provided and I have also written to King Charles to verify the version of events. If they are true then we have to question what sort of technology was this and why was Charles flying it?” Former Ministry Of Defence officer Nick Pope looks at the role that King Charles would play if we had first contact. “He would have an important role to play as head of state and head of the Anglican Church. People will look to him to provide a lead in how we react and deal with being visited by extra terrestrials.” The film can be streamed here:   https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B0DH7CZXTC/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r The post The Queen Sent Advisors To Report On Latest Crop Circles And Was Fascinated By The British Roswell! appeared first on Anomalien.com.

The latest Washington Week with The Atlantic, the journalistic political roundtable airing every Friday evening on tax-funded PBS, featured Atlantic magazine journalist Caitlin Dickerson accusing Donald Trump of not just racism, but using the rhetoric of “fascist neo-Nazi groups,” for his insistence on enforcing the borders and lowering immigration levels from certain world regions. This is PBS in fall campaign mode, as in "don't vote for the neo-Nazi!"  Host Jeffrey Goldberg: So, Caitlin, you have tracked more than anyone I know Trump policies, the Trump record during his term in office, and the ideological leanings, or the language used to talk about immigration and immigrants, starting with Donald Trump, but Stephen Miller, and, of course, the whole coterie of people around them who focused on immigration. I`m wondering if that language that you heard strikes you as harsher than what we’ve heard before…. Caitlin Dickerson, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Harsh, I want to say, isn’t even strong enough. It`s not -- this isn`t a spectrum of escalation about becoming harsher against immigration in a punitive way. I think, really, it`s a transformation toward very bald expressions of racism and xenophobia. I mean, I think that tape was Trump all but saying, when he points to people from the Congo, the Middle East and Asia, and then says they`re destroying the fabric of our country, what is that? What is the fabric meant to, refer to? It refers to whiteness, right? And not only that, he's obviously said on the campaign trail, as you know, immigrants are poisoning the blood of America, that they’re animals, that they’re not human. I mean this is the territory of fascist neo-Nazi groups…. Trump was referring to the bloodthirsty MS-13 gang as animals, as Dickerson surely knows and even liberal fact-checkers admitted. Is Dickerson really opposed to harsh language being applied to MS-13? Goldberg: ….I think you’re suggesting that Trump, in these last weeks of the election, is moving closer to articulating the Great Replacement Theory, the so-called Great Replacement Theory, that there’s a plot, and, obviously, sometimes it’s considered a Jewish plot, sometimes it`s just sort of a general plot, to literally replace the whites of America with brown and black people. Dickerson: That’s exactly right. Goldberg: I mean, do you -- is that what you’re hearing, like we’re moving toward, which is of course, not a right-wing position, it’s kind of an authoritarian? Dickerson: That`s exactly what I`m saying, and why I think harsh is not a strong enough word to describe the language that Trump is using. I mean, so the Great Replacement Theory has always been on the scene in Trump’s political career…. Politico certainly took the idea of immigrants voting Democrat seriously in a 2013 article, “Immigration reform could be bonanza for Democrats.” Is Politico also right-wing? Goldberg then asked the Washington Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell, “what is the utility of going more racist in the weeks leading up to the election?” After Caldwell answered, Dickerson again piped up by throwing up an old accusation. "To basically scare them off of the couch, right? I mean in that sense, it's a Willie Horton type" of attack. Back in 1988, the Left thought it was somehow racist for Republicans to talk about a black man convicted of a vicious gas-station murder getting a weekend furlough from Gov. Michael Dukakis. Horton traveled to Maryland and kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend.

Just 11 days ago, we caught David Frum on CNN virtually stamping his feet in frustration at the prospect that Donald Trump had a good chance of winning the election. Frum fumed over the "probably stupid" American system under which a candidate can lose the popular vote but still win the presidency in the Electoral College.  Frum, who in addition to being a CNN regular writes for The Atlantic, was in a much more sanguine mood on today's CNN This Morning. Citing one new poll that shows Kamala Harris with a five-point lead over Trump. Frum analogized the race to that of 1980, in which it was "close, close, close" until Reagan pulled away from Carter in the last month-and-a-half. Frum sees Harris as the candidate now pulling away. Frum was, in essence, predicting a Kamala victory. And he wondered what lesson the Trump campaign, and by extension Republicans at large, would learn from the loss. Would they conclude that Trump lost because he was older and didn't work hard enough, and that the party simply needs to find a younger, harder-working version of Trump? Or will they realize that, according to Frum: "[Trump's] kind of authoritarian, racist, corrupt style of politics doesn't work. It doesn't work in North Carolina. It doesn't work for Donald Trump. And it doesn't work when you give it a law degree and a better haircut and J.D. Vance." Nasty stuff. Frum reached back 44 years for his Reagan-Carter analogy. It wouldn't have suited his argument to look to a much more recent election, that of 2016. There, the poll consensus was that Hillary Clinton would win rather easily. FiveThirtyEight's final prediction gave her a 71.4% chance of winning, Trump a meager 28.6%.  And speaking of pulling away, FiveThirtyEight's polling of the popular vote showed Hillary getting a notable bump in the final days, and an Electoral College mini-landslide of 302-235. So confident of a Clinton win were the pollsters and Hillary that she chose for her anticipated Election Night victory speech a venue that literally had . . . a glass ceiling.  We all know how that turned out.  Here's the transcript. CNN This Morning  9/23/24 6:05 am EDT DAVID FRUM: We opened this segment by saying there there are new polling this weekend that show Kamala Harris probably five percentage points ahead of Donald Trump in the polling, but it's closer in the battleground states.  Now what if we rephrase that? Kamala Harris is five points ahead in national polling, which translates to an advantage of probably seven or eight million votes. But in the states where it's close, it's close. Because the way you get to be a battleground state is the state where it's close. But this election is widening. And it's very much what happened, I think, this year, what happened in 1980 with Ronald Reagan, where between Reagan and Carter, it was close, close, close until suddenly, it wasn't close in the last month-and-a-half of the election, when the leader pulled away. What we're watching is the leader pulling away.  And I think one of the questions I am contemplating is, when it's all said and done, will the Trump campaign say the problem was that the president was kind of older and he didn't, he got lazy. He didn't work very hard, and we need to find a harder working, younger Trump? Or do they learn some real lessons here? About what the country is like, and that this kind of authoritarian, racist, corrupt style of politics doesn't work. It doesn't work in North Carolina. It doesn't work for Donald Trump. And it doesn't work when you give it a law degree and a at a better haircut and J.D. Vance.

Meta may finally permit free speech on social issues on its platforms after years of suppressing Facebook and Instagram users who push back against gender ideology. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta opened up two free speech cases on Facebook and Instagram to public comment on Aug. 29. Meta explained that the platform had chosen not to censor two popular videos shared on both social media platforms, despite a flurry of users demanding the two separate videos be censored. Both of these cases were repeatedly reported to Meta as “Hate Speech” or “Bullying and Harassment,” to no avail. Whether the Meta Oversight Board will also allow free speech remains to be seen. This decision is pending.  The Facebook video shows a woman challenging a “transgender” woman—also known as a man—as he tries to enter a women’s restroom. The Instagram post contains footage of spectators booing a “transgender girl”—also known as a boy—as he wins a track race. In its description of these events, Meta made the cowardly choice to refer to the boy as “they” rather than he and called the man “them” rather than him.  Previously, Meta would censor similar posts on transgenderism across its platforms. MRC Free Speech America's exclusive CensorTrack recorded 57 cases from September 2020 through August 2024.  Related: Meta Oversight Board Greenlights Anti-Semitic, Genocidal Phrase, But Misgendering…Not So Much For example, in 2022 Facebook censored an article by the satirical website The Babylon Bee headlined, “Trans Woman Breaks Jeopardy Record, Proving Once And For All That Men Are Smarter Than Women,” calling the post “hate speech.” Notably, this censorship occurred seven weeks after the content was posted.  Later that year, Facebook removed a post by Libs of TikTok, an account created by Chaya Raichik to expose radical gender activists, for merely alluding to the absurdity of gender theory. "So, what did I miss? Were any new genders invented while I was away?" Raichik wrote on Facebook. Facebook also engaged in election interference, refusing to allow a paid political advertisement against Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and President Joe Biden. The conservative PAC American Principles Project’s (APP PAC) was blocked from placing a $4 million ad exposing the absurdity of allowing boys in girls’ sports. Instagram even silenced famous detransitioner Chloe Cole, suspending her account in August  2024 before later restoring it. Facebook acted against another detransitioner, Kellie King, a woman who underwent a transition surgery and now calls herself Scott Newgent, removing posts she made exposing the horror of “transing” kids.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact Meta here and tell them to that they did the right thing leaving these posts up on their platforms, but that they must continue to allow free speech on this issue rather than reverting to their old habits. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.