President Trump says Democrats and environmental wackos are waging a war on beef. But corporations, not politicians or activists, are leading the post-meat revolution.

Told you so. This is what is going to happen: Moral and utilitarian objections of environmentalists and vegetarians will be co-opted by corporations to sell you an inferior product at a higher price, meanwhile claiming erroneously that you getting gouged for a worse product is helping to save the earth. This will not be the case, of course, because these meatless burgers and such rely on destructive, fertilizer- and pesticide-intensive industrial agriculture.

Meanwhile, a shaming campaign will develop that gradually but successfully pushes people away from meat to these much higher-margin pseudo-earth-friendly products that offer no benefit to anyone except the corporations peddling them (and are actively harmful to people like me attempting to stay fit).

This was as predictable as the sun rising in the east and water having two hydrogen atoms. I cannot believe so many people are falling for it.

Every piece of art is embedded in a cultural and social context. The more extreme versions of postmodernist attempt to sever art completely from this context only serves to heighten the need for that context by embedding it in a moment and time so completely that outside of that moment and that known context, it cannot be understood at all. In other words, both the contemporaneity and the novelty are the point — the object or artefact is an afterthought. Thus, I’d argue that all postmodern art should be destroyed like a mandala soon after its creation, not because it is meaningless or loathsome as some would argue, but because its animus evaporates outside of the occasion of its immediate context and comprehension.

It wasn’t the one I was looking for, but the scene in True Lies where Schwarzenegger arrives in a Harrier and then uses the plane’s 30mm cannon to pan across the floor of the skyscraper is really well-done, especially considering how clunky a lot of the other setups in the movie are.

If you ignore the terrible 90s cinema score, it’s a short, tight bit that realistically shows how absolutely devastating a 30mm cannon is (that is a totally different beast than a rifle or even a “normal” machine gun), and is also dramatic and effective.

In reality, though, a Harrier can only hover for about 90 seconds before its reserve of cooling water is depleted and then the engine basically melts down. In the movie, it hovers for multiple minutes. So not very realistic in that sense, if you know a lot about Harriers.

I could not find a definitive answer, but I am not sure the Harrier can actually fire that big fucking gun while hovering. The 30mm cannon produces so much thrust (more than the engine, I think) that I suspect it’d destabilize the plane while hovering or at least push it back quite a lot.

But still, the scene really works and watching parts of True Lies, you can see where the Wachowskis picked up ideas for a little movie that came out five years later called The Matrix.