Idiocracy – ILANA MERCER

Race And Sex Hegemons To Control The Skies

Ilana Mercer — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 07:05:48 +0000

The topic was “the end of the all-male, all-white cockpit.”

The context: A June 3, 2022 TV episode, in which Fox News personality Tucker Carlson beseeched viewers to look beyond the race and gender of pilots, to his or her competence. “What’s color to do with competence?” he demanded to know.

Mr. Carlson was appealing to the wrong audience.

In America, where woke is ruthlessly propelled by the private-sector, the commercial aviation industry has been itching to replace humble men like Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, III, with black women (the looks of whom indicate that a good weave, tattooed eyebrows and eyelash extensions are baseline requirements).

Using their employees’ opposition to forced vaccination as a proxy for backbone, moxie and rational thinking—the commercial aviation industry is increasingly shedding very many magnificent, military-trained pilots.

Just so there’s no confusion: Pilots with the right stuff are being selected out of their profession.
Granted, correlation is not causation, but if there is a statistically significant correlation between gender or race and the likelihood one survives a plane flight—well then, one might just want to consider these variables as proxies for safety and survival, however politically impolite it is.

Tucker might want to check the aggregate accident statistics to determine who are the best, safest pilots. By ScienceDirect’s telling, “… females employed by major airlines had significantly higher accident rates than their male counterparts overall.” [Emphasis added.]

To be expected, ScienceDirect then launches a fusillade of excuse-making weasel words to conceal with bafflegab that if you fly with a female, you’re a little less likely to reach your destination. It’s a ghost of a chance, but hey, life matters. Do you want to lose it?

Yes, female pilots have a higher error/accident rate, but never mind that say the Fake Science purveyors; this is only so because they are younger and less experienced. Airlines should make every effort to recruit and retain “experienced” females and manage diversity, they exhort.

Essentially—and while plummeting to his death—the passenger should search his bigoted soul. In addition to letting go of your life; you must release all bigotry. Those thoughts about how race and sex could well correlate with flight safety, and how you wish you had checked the pilot before you took the fatal flight: Let them go. Oh, and by the way, RIP, you sexist, you racist.

The desired outcome is that you fly with a less able pilot, ceteris paribus. This is astonishing, really, for impartial, scientific inquiry is meant to concern itself with facts, yet the authors of “Comparing pilot-error accident rates of male and female airline pilots” conflate and collapse what ought to be two separate categories: The reality of sex-based differences in pilot competence, and the confounding variables (age and experience) on the one hand, and how one might feel about these differences, on the other.

Or, as a rational reader put it:

The article “states in the beginning that females had a higher accident rate, then it states they are about the same as males. So, which is it???”

Pretty much.

I wonder. Does anyone grasp the difference between a veteran of the Air Force versus a “pilot” trained at an affirmative-action, feel-good girlie flight school? It’s life and death.

Remember Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger’s famed “Unable; we’ll be in the Hudson”? His was the very embodiment of “manliness (not a miracle) on the Hudson.” Nothing but cool hands and a mind to match at the controls.

Capt. Sullenberger’s airbus, carrying 155 passengers, had lost the thrust in both engines following a “double bird strike.”

Having been informed of the emergency, Ground Control radioed the captain: “Which runway would you like at Teterboro?”

Capt. Sullenberger to Ground Control: “Unable; we’re going to be in the Hudson.”

Those were the laconic, spare words of the iconic “Sully,” as he calmly prepared to crash land Cactus 1549 in the Hudson River.

With no engine power, flying at a low speed, at low altitude, “over one of the most densely populated areas on the planet,” Captain Sullenberger managed to glide the jet, using its “forward momentum to provide the air flow over the wings,” so as to enable “sufficient lift.”
The river was the only “viable” surface on which to land with a chance of survival. That, Sullenberger had determined after “two and a half minutes into the flight—and just one minute after the birds had hit.”

Who do you want in the cockpit during such an event? Sullenberger, a high- intelligence retired Air Force fighter pilot? Or dreamy Ms. Zakiya Percy and Ms. Cetrena Simmons, to be introduced shortly.

Avoid flying United Airlines, which has started its own flight school, The Aviate Academy. At “least half of the new pilots will be women or people of color. Of the 121 students enrolled so far, about 78 percent are women or nonwhite.”

Republic Airways, likewise, stacks its flight school with pigmentally pleasing faces, who pay to pilot. “Two years and about $100,000” in tuition fees is what qualifies a pilot, protests Zakiya Percy, who is a pilot for UA, and also a psychology major.

By contrast, consider one of the pilots this writer has had the pleasure of “meeting” through this column:

Retired from the military some years back as a naval officer and pilot, my acquaintance had gone to test pilot school in 2005 and spent 9 of a storied 20-year career in the Navy, flight-testing the FA-18 aircraft. He did 4 total overseas deployments, twice in Iraq and twice in Afghanistan. He flew the EA-6B jet aircraft during 3 of these 4 deployments logging 397 carrier landings. His first deployment was in 2002 and last in 2013. The man has a BS in mechanical engineering and a masters in Systems Engineering and was a test pilot for Boeing.

Stack this pilot’s bewildering accomplishments and intelligence—the aircraft is an extension of his body and mind—against Ms. Percy’s, bless her, who is a graduate of a 2-year course run by a corrupt industry, has a degree in psychology and the perfect complexion. Or, against Ms. Cetrena Simmons, 29, who started her pilot training at Republic Airways’ flight school in 2018, and is now piloting planes for the airline.

As Idiocracy’s iconic Dr. Lexus (IQ around 60) would say, “Kickass.”

He’d add reassuringly: “My first wife was ‘tarded; she’s a pilot now. There are plenty tards out there living really kickass lives.”

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, October 20
Unz Review, October 20
The New American, October 21
American Renaissance, October 21
Townhall.com, October 22

*Screen pic credit

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‘Tarded’ Medical Idiocrat Won’t Treat ‘Unscannables’ Like Me

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 01:39:29 +0000

“Why come you don’t have your Covid tattoo,” he yelps, cowering in the corner, “where’s your bar code”

In Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s genius of a satire (really a documentary, if you think about it), Luke Wilson plays Joe Bowers, frozen by the military in 2005, “who accidentally wakes up in 2505 to find a broken-down, thuggish America, where language has become a patois of football chants, hip-hop slang and grunts denoting rage, pleasure and priapic longing, where citizens are obese, violent, ever-horny and narcotised by consumerism.” (As I said, a documentary. Citations here.)

The “dumb-a** dystopia” depicted in “Idiocracy” has evolved (devolved, rather) because low-IQ individuals, so robust, have out-bred the intelligent (yes, Judge openly references IQ as a measure of intelligence). Consequently, nothing gets fixed. There are garbage avalanches. A Gatorade-like drink has replaced water in irrigation. Because growers don’t know better, nothing grows.

The most watched show on the “Violence Channel” is “Ow, My B-lls!” The “highest grossing movie of all time is called ‘A**,’ and consists of 90 minutes of the same naked, hairy butt on screen.” Audiences are enraptured. All enterprises are sexualized; Starbucks offers a “full body latte.” Costco is an Ivy-League law school.

Or, a medical school, in my tale of woe. Idiocracy is the perfect metaphor for my own visit to a Washington State doctor’s office.

I had scheduled an appointment with this “medical professional,” in the Seattle area. When done right, these things consume time. There are elaborate forms to fill in, which I do meticulously online (especially given my allergies), in hopes of a better outcome in the office.

And the doctor’s office has become its own obstacle course. Combine endemic, Idiocracy-like institutional rot, with the control Covid has bestowed on some exceedingly mediocre and malevolent minds—and one can never be too prepared.

In the case of this grubby little shop, the pronoun slot alone on the attendant patient forms ought to have been a portend of what was to come. My choice of pronoun would have been “grammatical” had that option been offered. Otherwise, I never dignify the pronoun charade. See below:

Exhaustive though it was, the “ethnicity” slot didn’t offer the “Jewish” designation, which might have entitled me to a wee bit more grace from the graceless. Inappropriately prurient and medically unnecessary, in this context, information was solicited about the patient’s sex life. These inquiries remained unanswered, obviously.

This was a consultation, nothing more. But this was also Washington State! On the Pacific Coast, kindness, congeniality and rationality don’t come naturally. Neither does an adherence, it would appear, to the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath:

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

State-of-Washington-statists are generally aloof, opprobrious, insular, dour and, it would appear, deeply and studiously dumb. Unkind cuts are an everyday occurrence around here, where the busybody mentality prevails, and where difference is deviance.

Stand still long enough, and they’ll tell you how to live. They’ll even give chase to deliver a “corrective” sermon. A helmeted cyclist once chased me down along a suburban running trail. My sin? I had fed the poor juncos in the dead of winter. (Still do. Bite me, you bully.) This, as the first homeless person just ensconced himself (or herself or its non-binary selves), with the accouterments of homelessness, on one of our little city’s main streets, a thing no one, but no one, will protest.

Washington woke would sooner flout the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath than speak ill of the grotesquerie that is unfolding on our streets. Since the term “virtue signaling” has become a cliché—a term insufficient to the task—let me offer an improvement. The progressive’s preening aims to emphasize his or her own providential purpose in the universe. To that end, progressives like to discredit the rest of us. That’s more like it.

When the appointment was scheduled, not a word of warning was forthcoming about the inquisition, the third degree, that would ensue at the front desk on the day of the visit. I’m healthy, masked and without fever. That ought to have been the end of it.

It was not. Shoved in my face on a stark sheet of paper, bereft of the office’s masthead, was the demand for my vaccination status. Well, of course. Doctor Lexus (diploma via Costco) wasn’t owning this disgrace. This was nothing to boast about.

I refused to divulge my vaccination status.

A commotion ensued, as the front-desk collective drew closer, bristling with hostility. The scene was straight out of Idiocracy. An unscannable, a person without a barcode, was loose among the human herd and it was desperate to recover the safety and security that comes with the warm smell of the herd.

Substitute “Covid” in the dialogue conducted between Joe Bowers, the Idiocracy’s protagonist, and the “tarded” Doctor Lexus, who discovers Bowers doesn’t have the identifying, state-mandated tattoo—and you get an idea of the exchange I had with representatives of one of the Evergreen State’s “tarded” doctors (language a bit salty):

Dr. Lexus (IQ around 60), whose speech embodies the best of Beavis and Butthead’s repartee—his affect even better—first “listens” to his patient, Joe Bowers (who, with an IQ of 100, is the smartest person in America circa 2505). Bowers tells doctor he doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s seeing things. It could be because of the drugs the Army put him on. Could the good doctor just get him well enough to get back to base (America circa 2005)?

Dr. Lexus (critical faculties dulled, grinning dementedly but affably):

“Right, kick-a**. Don’t wanna sound like a d-ck or nothing, but it says here in your chart that you f-cked up. You talk like a f-g, and your sh-t’s all retarded. What I do is like (stops for a Beavis and Butthead interluding chuckle as he loses train of “thought”), err, like you know what I mean, like ah ah ah.”

AND: “Don’t worry scro,” Doctor Lexus assures his panicked patient. “There are plenty tards out there living really kicka** lives. My first wife was ‘tarded; she’s a pilot now.”

Time to pay:

Doctor (borderline retarded): “Ok. It will be this many dollars. And if you could just go ahead and, like, put your [Covid] tattoo in that s-it.”
Joe (realizing the date on the bill is 2505): “That’s weird. This thing has the same misprint as that magazine. What are the odds of–”
Doctor (trembling with fear, panic rising; he has encountered an unregistered individual): “Where’s your [Covid] tattoo? Tattoo? Why don’t you have this?”
Joe: “Oh, God!”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo?”
Joe: “Oh, my God.”
Doctor (squealing): “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”
Doctor (on the verge of hysteria): “Why come you don’t have a tattoo? You’re not an unscannable, are you?

Yes, the office of the Washington doctor had encountered an unscannable: me. The process of rejection took time. First, greedy mitts reached for my medical insurance card, but were told (slowly), “No service rendered; no payment.”

An exceedingly pleasant office manager then appeared. She presented the Covid Protocol on a plain sheet of paper, again without any identifying office markers but pock-marked with contradiction and medical disinformation. We talked through the contradictions to which the poor girl copped and for which she apologized, ashamed.

The first sentence declares that, “Patients who will not answer the question regarding their vaccination status will be seen, but the healthcare provider needs to know your vaccination status as part of your total care.” A medical lie. My general practitioner doesn’t ask this question. Neither does the optometrist. Contradictory bureaucratese then follows, stating that, “Patients refusing to disclose their vaccination status will be asked to reschedule their appointment for when they are prepared to disclose their vaccine status.”

Me to Office Manager: You are aware that I could shed as much virus whether vaccinated or not?

OM: I know. I’m sorry.

Me: So, if I don’t divulge my vaccination status?

She: You may come back when you are ready to.

Me: So, if I confess to being unvaccinated, will the doctor examine me?

OM: Yes, but he will leave the door open and the fan on.

Me: Having stripped me of my dignity, will he at least remove my mask, for that is surely necessary for a complete examination?

Office Manager: No.

Me: That’s not medicine. It also implies that I will be receiving inferior treatment and possibly an inferior outcome to a vaccinated individual.

She: I’m sorry. You are being very nice and polite about this. I just work here.

Unlike this medical Idiocracy, the wily little RNA strand that is Covid acts rationally.

The COVID index that matters is mortality; not the number of infected, with which we must learn to live. Covid is morphing in ways evolutionarily conducive to its long-term survival. It is, for the most—and just like the flu—living with its hosts, not killing them off.

The trajectory of a pandemic is such that it sees the infectious agent powering it become less lethal, not more lethal. COVID is thus now endemic. While the current BA.2 variant du jour is more transmissible, it is also much more benign than previous variants. It is as it should be. This, independent, honest epidemiologists will confirm. For their part, human beings have been acquiring natural immunity; and communities herd immunity.

The only deviants in this sad saga are those who’ve empowered themselves to deploy Covid as a cudgel against their betters.

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND , April 21
Unz Review, April 21
The New American, April 21
Free Life, For Life, Liberty And Property, April 23

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Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 09:24:00 +0000

The fraught relationship between state and society carries over into classroom and town hall. Something of a commonplace in police state U.S.A. is the scene in which a citizen is arrested for speaking his mind to a public official, pedagogue or politician.

Our story begins with a dad, William Baer, a lawyer, I believe, who resides in New Hampshire, the state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.” For speaking out of turn at a school board meeting, Baer was cuffed and carted out of a forum of educrats and obedient parents, herded together at the Gilford high school. An arrest and a charge of disorderly conduct followed—Baer, after all, had exceeded the talk time allotted to him.

“It was basically, you make a statement, say what you want and sit down,” the dad told a local television station. “‘Sit down and shut up’ … not how you interact with adults.” In the background to the online YouTube clip of the event one can hear the dulcet voice of a female emcee, delighting in the petty abuse of power over a powerless parent.

Mr. Baer was protesting a novel which was required reading in his 14-year-old daughter’s English class: “Nineteen Minutes” by home girl Jodi Picoult. (One of Australia’s finest writers, also the copy editor of this writer’s last book, relates that every time he gets on a train or a bus, there seems to be some female or three reading a Jodi P. “masterpiece.”) Easily more offensive than the salacious sex scene on page 313 of Picoult’s novel is the rotten writing throughout:

“‘Relax,’ Matt murmured, and then he sank his teeth into her shoulder. He pinned her hands over her head and ground his hips against hers. She could feel his erection, hot against her stomach. ” … She couldn’t remember ever feeling so heavy, as if her heart were beating between her legs. She clawed at Matt’s back to bring him closer. “‘Yeah,’ he groaned, and he pushed her thighs apart. And then suddenly Matt was inside her, pumping so hard that she scooted backward on the carpet, burning the backs of her legs. … (H)e clamped his hand over her mouth and drove harder and harder until Josie felt him come. “Semen, sticky and hot, pooled on the carpet beneath her.”

The book’s titillating topics—bullying, school shootings, teen sex and pregnancy—verge on the political. Inculcating kids early on with these cumbersome, constricted constructs serves to stunt young minds. The young reader is intellectually disemboweled, as he is steered into thinking along certain narrow, politically pleasing lines.

Look, the value each one of us places on consumer goods and cultural products in the marketplace is subjective. This Subjective Theory of Value, so central to the excellent Austrian School of Economics (my own school of thought), however, should not be confused with the objective standards that determine the quality of a cultural product.

You might prefer to purchase one of Toni Morrison’s God-awful tomes, but the objective fact is that she’s no match for Shakespeare. Never will be. Likewise, based on complexity, skill, mastery and intricacy—it is immutably true that B.B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach. Irrespective of popular preference, there are objective, universal criteria that make some cultural products superior to others.

The ignoramuses present at the school board meeting are beyond help. Not so the fine Mr. Baer’s daughter. Schools will puff their reading lists with substandard titles of mass appeal. Parents need not do the same. This list is for William Baer—and all parents who wish to feed young minds with richly textured, inspiring, gripping, superbly-written works that will forever after remain unmatched:

• “Ivanhoe” by Sir Walter Scott
• “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas
• “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe
• “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson
• “Arabian Nights” by many Arabic geniuses
• “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens
• “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens
• “Oliver Twist” by the same genius
• “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain
• “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain
• “Tom’s Midnight Garden” by Philippa Pearce
• “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” by C. S. Lewis
• “The Last of the Mohicans” by James Fenimore Cooper
• “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo
• “Around the World in Eighty Days” by Jules Verne
• “The Black Stallion” by Walter Farley
• “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë
• “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë
• “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen
• “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen
• “Mansfield Park” (ditto)
• “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• “Middlemarch” by George Eliot
• “Silas Marner” by George Eliot
• “Daniel Deronda” by George Eliot
• “How Green Was My Valley” by Richard Llewellyn
• “The Good Earth” by Pearl Buck
• “1984,” by George Orwell
• “Animal Farm” by George Orwell

To spice things up for the precocious young reader, do add Edgar Allan Poe, Roald Dahl’s “Kiss Kiss” and “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole,” Shakespeare, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, Don Quixote by Cervantes, Kafka, Albert Camus, Rudyard Kipling. And Molière, “one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature.”

Without the literary canon, young minds are doomed to become as dim and sclerotic as those of the educators who assign them the piss-poor reading material aforementioned. The literary canon is the best antidote to the educational Idiocracy.

©2014 ILANA Mercer
WND , Junge Freiheit, Target Liberty,
Quarterly Review, Praag.org & LewRockwell.com
December 5

* Screen pic credit

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America, Your Benefactor Is Never The State

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 08:17:08 +0000

The market place brings plenty; the state does the opposite. Yet not a day goes by when consumers, ignorant of the forces that feed, clothe, cure, employ, entertain them and innovate for them, don’t demand that those who’ve done nothing of the kind—the McCains, Obamas, Bushes, Clintons, Keith Alexanders, Lois Lerners, Eric Holders of the world—proceed with force against those who do nothing but.

Expect the anti-Wal Mart jousting to begin, because Wal Mart has done it again. To fill the need created by the Obamacare wrecking ball, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is venturing into the business of providing primary health care. For $40, the price of a copay (in an Obama-mandated, subpar, healthcare plan), “you can walk into a Wal-Mart clinic and see a doctor.” It’s “just $4 for Walmart U.S. employees and family members.”

Rejoice, Sandra Fluke! You can have a pregnancy test at Wal-Mart for … $3.00. Via Market Watch:

On Friday, a Walmart Care Clinic opened in Dalton, Ga., six months after Walmart U.S., the retailer’s biggest unit, entered the business of providing primary health care. It now operates a dozen of clinics in rural Texas, South Carolina and Georgia and has increased its target for openings this year to 17. … A typical retail clinic offers acute care only. But a Walmart Care Clinic also treats chronic conditions such as diabetes. (Walmart U.S. also leases space in its stores to 94 clinics owned by others that set their own pricing.) “It was very important to us that we establish a retail price in the health-care industry because price leadership matters to us,” said Jennifer LaPerre, a Walmart U.S. senior director responsible for health and wellness, in an interview.

Hear, hear!

The argument against Wal-Mart presses its case with an impressive array of economic fallacies. Typically, the critic—an example is “The High Cost of Low Prices,” in The American Conservative—does nothing to trace the mysterious mechanism by which Wal-Mart is said to impoverish. By offering “the lowest possible prices all the time, not just during sales”? What precisely is the economic process that accounts for Wal-Mart’s ability to “expel jobs and technology from our own country”? Competition? Offering a product people choose to buy?

“Protecting the home market,” which is what The American Conservative’s writer advocates, is to the detriment of consumers. It forces them to subsidize less efficient local industries, making them the poorer for it. To keep inefficient industries in the lap of luxury, hundreds of others are doomed to shrink or go under.

The writer also froths at the mouth over “the teenage girl in Bangladesh … forced to sew pocket flaps onto 120 pairs of pants per hour for 13 cents per hour.” It sounds dreadful. However, the economic reality is this: Wal-Mart is either offering higher, the same or lower wages than the wages workers were earning before its arrival in Bangladesh. The company would find it hard to attract workers if it was paying less, or the same as other companies. Ergo, Wal-Mart is a benefactor that pays the kind of wage unavailable prior to its arrival. More materially, if the entrepreneur were forced to pay workers in excess of their productivity, he would eventually have to disinvest. What will the Bangladeshi teenage girl do once Wal-Mart departs?

Even the Hollywood “Idiocracy” is hip to the spontaneously synchronized order that is the free market. Just for a change, the menstruation lobby is moaning about the movies and its members’ representation therein. By Variety Magazine’s telling, “[Female] characters are still significantly under-represented on the big screen. … The numbers for minority females are even lower. African-American female representation on screen [has] climbed to 14 percent, from 8 percent in 2011, but down from 15 percent in 2012.”

The presence of minorities in movies often signals a two-hour long, oppressive racial lecture. Most movie-goers are no more inclined to turn to “12 Years A Slave” for fun, than they are to subject themselves to Oprah Winfrey and her M.O.P.E. (Most Oppressed Person Ever) “Butler.”

Anti-man moaning notwithstanding, the general public must be onto this, because it is quite clear that Hollywood is giving viewers what they want to see: men in lead roles. If film executives listened to the loathsome Lena Dunham, rather than to the demands of consumers—the industry would go under.

Alas, most liberals (and that includes “conservatives” aplenty) are foolish enough to lump business with government as an eternal source of disappointment to Americans. Noodles Ron Fournier of National Journal:

“Steadily, over the past four decades, the nation has lost faith in virtually every American institution: banks, schools, colleges, charities, unions, police departments, organized religion, big businesses, small businesses and, of course, politics and government.”

As I type, I consume a plate of seven different fruits topped with nuts. Many of the ingredients on my plate are organic. These used to be exorbitantly priced; out of reach. But as demand for organic produce has grown, production has increased and prices have dropped dramatically.

Each day I give thanks to the businessmen who, against all odds, bring such abundance to market and provide such plenty. There is nothing in my home that comes courtesy of the blessings of bureaucrats. I guarantee that it’s the same in your home.

If you, like Fournier, fail to distinguish the blessings of the private economy from the blight of government—you deserve none of the former and all of the latter.

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2 Movie Gems Amid A Lot Of Hollywood Hooey

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn. To fully appreciate what afflicts Hollywood—and the presidency, the academy, and the media—watch “Idiocracy.” The film is a product of Mike Judge’s genius (Beavis and Butthead, anyone?), and was backed and then spiked by the idiots at 20th Century Fox. It is easily one of the smartest and darkest satires.

Luke Wilson plays Joe Bowers, frozen by the military in 2005, “who accidentally wakes up in 2505 to find a broken-down, thuggish America where language has become a patois of football chants, hip-hop slang and grunts denoting rage, pleasure and priapic longing, where citizens are obese, violent, ever-horny and narcotised by consumerism,” to quote the Guardian.

The “dumb-ass dystopia” depicted in “Idiocracy” has evolved because the robust retarded have out-bred the intelligent (yes, Judge openly references IQ as a measure of intelligence). Consequently, nothing gets fixed. There are garbage avalanches. A Gatorade-like drink has replaced water for irrigation, so nothing grows. The most watched show on the “Violence Channel” is “Ow, My Balls!” The “highest grossing movie of all time is called ‘Ass,’ and consists of 90 minutes of the same naked, hairy butt on screen.” All enterprises are sexualized; Starbucks offers a “full body latte.” Costco is an Ivy-League law school. If you’ve watched Ann Coulter trying to explain to Bill O’Reilly what a syllogism is, you’ll appreciate “Idiocracy” for the cultural barometer it is.

Audiences are beginning to avoid Angelina Jolie. Ever since she began to believe she was on earth to die for everyone else’s sins against the poor “brown babies” of the world (Ingrid Bergman’s coinage in “Murder on the Orient Express”), Angelina has lost whatever meager acting abilities she possessed. Instead of emoting, Jolie should take lessons from Jon Voight, her estranged father. Thus not even Matt Damon was able to rescue “The Good Sheppard.” Don’t touch it with a barge pole; it’s tedious and pretentious.

The prospect of a pregnant Angelina with an afro and an accent playing a self-styled saint is no fun either. So spare yourself too from Angelina’s “A Mighty Heart.” The film is Mariane Pearl’s attempts at self-beatification. Her husband, journalist Daniel Pearl, was beheaded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who accused Pearl of being a spy and agent of the Mossad and made him recite a humiliating confession to that effect, before lopping his head off. The jihadis released a video of Pearl’s butchering titled, “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.”

Don’t expect the deeply silly Mariane, upon whose memoir the film is based, to have comprehended the role vintage, Islamic Jew hatred played in her husband’s “slaughtering.” At the time, she responded to the barbarism by declaring superciliously that “revenge would be easy, but it is far more valuable … to address this problem of terrorism with enough honesty to question our own responsibility as nations and as individuals for the rise of terrorism.”

So as to aggrandize themselves, Angelina and Mariane have diminished Daniel in the film. The dashing Daniel is played by the unknown Dan Futterman, whom Salon.com’s no-doubt feminist reviewer described approvingly as “grave and elfin.” That’s a good thing only if you are a garden gnome. Mariane does, however, have the mark of a member of the media: she celebrates both herself and the Islamic hajj.

Speaking of facing Mecca, keister to the sky, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has prohibited the mention of “Muslim” in tandem with “terrorism.” As this dhimmi prepared to move into Downing Street, the British people were celebrating the life of another dodo, Diana. The nation’s darling even in death was a manipulative neurotic, given to histrionics. But in “Cool Britannia,” and in Hollywood, is it the queen that is maligned.

“The Queen,” with Helen Mirren in the lead, is not about the monarch, but about Elizabeth II vis-à-vis Diana. It is shot through with smarmy contempt for tradition, duty, and the stiffer upper lip, embodied by the queen, and once identified with the British character. As for the incessant prattle about Diana’s very public charity work, the queen has been working quietly (and apparently thanklessly) for the English people for over half a century. According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Windsor was 13 when World War II broke out, which is when she gave her first radio broadcast to console the children who had been evacuated. Still in her teens, Elizabeth II joined the military, “where she … trained as a driver, and drove a military truck while she served.” I could go on and on. In any event, if the Brits cared for substance, they’d stop slobbering over Diana.

From Australia comes a simply superb western, “The Proposition,” written by John Cave and directed by John Hillcoat. Arthur Burns and his feral family are murderers run amok in the Australian Outback, circa 1880. Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) is out to get them. He captures two of the brothers, Charlie and Mike. The arch-evil, and exquisitely educated, Arthur (Danny Huston) remains at large. Captain Stanley then makes a proposition to Charlie: he will spare his life and that of his young brother if he tracks down and terminates Arthur.

Pay attention to the achingly beautiful relationship between Captain Stanley and his wife Martha (Emily Watson). The two depend on one another for dear life. The civilizing English afternoon tea and the rose bushes in the desert cocoon the couple from the savagery of their surroundings. The legendary John Hurt of Midnight Express fame is marvelous, but he does not outperform Winstone or Huston. This is a remarkable film. Had it been a Hollywood production, you’d have been saddled with one of the industry’s androgynous “men” in the lead role. Picture Ryan Phillippe, puffy pout and soft doe eyes, struggling to break a few heads. You’d have also been treated to a plodding and preachy account of the crimes the colonists committed against the Australian aborigines.

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