What could motivate someone to try to kill 7 billion people? The new hit TV series 12 Monkeys has a possible answer to this question.
Mild spoiler alert
The original 1995 Bruce Willis film “12 Monkeys” was watchable, but in my opinion it was nothing special. Bruce Willis is the only memorable character. A film with a slightly deranged plot and a predictable ending – perhaps it tried to pack too much story into too short a time.
So I almost didn’t watch the first episode of the 12 Monkeys TV series.
What a mistake that would have been.
From the first episode I’ve been absolutely riveted. Set against a backdrop of a dying, broken world ravaged by a horrific virus, which is still mutating into dangerous new forms, the plot centres on a desperate attempt by the fanatical director of Project Splinter, to change history – to disrupt the chain of historical events which led to the deliberate release of the virus, which killed her only daughter.
Nobody is safe – even main characters sometimes die. In 2043, the starting point of the story, the Project Splinter base is regularly attacked by marauding gangs. The gangs don’t know about the time machine – they are simply intent on looting a small remaining outpost of civilisation. But after a time travel accident, in which a warlord almost seizes the complex, and sees the time machine in action, and realises what it is…
Then of course there are the frequent ultra dangerous trips into the past, to attack criminals who are intent on destroying the world, basing the attacks on incomplete scraps of information sifted from the ruins of the old world – attacking a group of well financed, competent criminals who are already paranoid about security, and who are fanatically determined to complete their mission – a mission which in the current version of history was a success.
The antagonists of course are greens – at least some of them are. But this isn’t my reason for watching the series.
I do find it interesting that Hollywood is prepared, however tentatively, to cast a group of greens in the role of the bad guys. Perhaps the green movement is finally reaping what they sowed. After all the outrageous green public relations disasters over the years, such as the 10:10 video, and their far too frequent public displays of over the top anti-humanist and anti-freedom authoritarianism, just maybe some people in Hollywood are waking up to the fact that greens might not always be the good guys.
The protagonists are also complex characters – people who grew up in the broken, collapsing world of the viral apocalypse, or people who survived, who witnessed the death of loved ones, who have seen with their own eyes the consequences of failure.
In summary, in my opinion Twelve Monkeys is a very watchable series, if you like gritty action adventure stories. Well worth watching a few episodes, on a quiet TV night.
i just saw Samuel L. Jackson riding a bike in downtown SF., 30 minutes ago.
Thanks, Eric, this series sounds neat! I don’t watch television, haven’t for a couple of decades now, but I’ll watch out for the DVDs. 🙂
And on the news the last couple of days…”U.S. Army sends live Anthrax to 65 various locations for no apparent reason. 5 samples to foreign countries, the rest to various places in the US. WTF? This country and it’s security are going to S**T. I already gave up on believing anything… Anything at all obama says, but this started in 2005.
Our government employees must be hired from the retarded list of people who couldn’t get a job anywhere else. TSA included. 95% fail rate in not finding bombs and whatnot in peoples baggage, etc…WTF?
China and every other country hacks all of our government info…DOD, IRS …WTF?
Anyone from Australia or NZ or anywhere western want to sponsor me for a work permit so I can move there? I’ll wash and clean for free and pay rent too. This place is going down the Sh*t hole fast. Please help.
You can apply for a 457 visa (Australia) via an employer. Or apply for a visa under the general skills category visa (Australia). I forget the equivalent New Zealand visas.
Unless you are have very specific skills, which can be found online at http://www.immi.gov.au/Pages/Welcome.aspx, you are out of luck. You could find an employer to sponsor you (856 – Australia), or marry an Australian (In Aus) or New Zealander (In NZ. NZer’s are temporary residents in Aus on a special category 444 visa and thus would not be able to sponsor you to Aus).
I never want to go through that process again.
Most developed and developing countries are just as bad, except maybe for the NSA.
I’m more inclined toward Latin American countries with ostensibly socialist regimes, but which in fact are so ineffective that in practice you can be left alone. Venezuela’s socialist regime has been effective enough to generate galloping inflation and to beat up or disappear dissenters, but not so Bolivia and Argentina.
Freedom still exists in the Amazonian part of Bolivia and Argentine Patagonia. There they don’t rely on fr@udulent ballots but faithful bullets to effect social change, like the American Founding Fathers.
@sturgishooper
Sounds like a barrel o’ laughs those places too. Ex wife from Nicaragua and spent some time there in ’91. SOS.
Thanks for the FYI. Just sayin’
China and every other country hacks all of our government info…DOD, IRS …WTF?
Why would a government allow internet connectivity to its office computers, exposing them to hacking?
If they [really] did contain confidential information, the designers of the system need to be fired.
So we are doing movie/series reviews now ?
This couldn’t have been handled with a comment on a dying thread ?, it needs a post of its own ?
I’m totally lost about monkeys, no matter how many there are.
you could have just not clicked on the title…
Yep, “discretion is the better part of valor”.
Here, you can login with your cable or sat account and watch it.
Same goes for History Channel and H2 and a others. Have it on your cable system? Log in with your cable or Sat account info and watch on the net though the channel website or app. No kidding.
Gotta know that login info though, but you probably already have it 🙂
http://www.syfy.com/12monkeys/videos/101-splinter
12 Monkeys is a variation on the theme of the earlier novel “Millennium” by John Varley.
Louise Baltimore travels back in time to stop the events that led to future impending total destruction of the population due to “paraleprosy”, a result of many wars, nuclear and presumably biological.
From there, the plots differ a lot. But it’s still a variation on a theme. And if you like 12 Monkeys, I suggest you read Varley’s novel. I think you’d enjoy it.
Yes people are losing interest in climate. The pointers are everywhere a very good thing indeed
“just maybe some people in Hollywood are waking up to the fact that greens might not always be the good guys”. A bit late, that.
When in the early 70-ties the German Greens party started to make inroads into politics there was a scandal that almost brought it down. It became known that some of the big player had been high-ranking members of Hitler’s Waffen SS. They got away with it because too many naive admirers thought that this was very good, that these people had seen the error of their earlier ways and had turned around and now did something noble for the good of humanity.
A much simpler explanation, of course, was that they in fact had recognized the green program for what it is: one that ultimately required a vile totalitarian state, a concept in which they had believed all their life.
AT LEAST 1,000 ex-Nazis were hired by the U.S. as spies during the Cold War… and the CIA even helped them move to America
Newly disclosed government records indicate the CIA and FBI ignored potential war crimes when they hired these ex-Nazis in the 1950s and 1960s
Turned Nazis performed a variety of spy tasks from training for a possible invasion of USSR to laying communication cables in East Germany
By Ashley Collman for MailOnline
Published: 20:46 EST, 27 October 2014 | Updated: 08:27 EST, 28 October 2014
“While death camp wardens and Gestapo officers were being tried at Nuremberg in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. was putting other former Nazis on the payroll.
It has been revealed through recently disclosed government documents and interviews that at least 1,000 ex-Nazis were recruited by the American military, FBI and CIA to become Cold War spies and informants, the New York Times reports.
Not only did they hire former Third Reich members suspected of carrying out war crimes, they went so far as to help their spies immigrate to the U.S. and cover up their involvement in the war in an attempt to protect them from the U.S. Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters.
And that estimate is considered conservative by the historians who were tasked by the government to declassify the war-crime records.”
Comment: A lot of them escaped to Argentina.
Von Braun and Apollo?
Slightly off topic, but related to eco-bunnies, excuse the coming pun & apologies if I have said this before, senior moment @ur momisugly 57, but many years ago, the eco-animal-rights brigade started a hate campaign against laboratory buildings holding lab-rabbits, i.e. those specially bread for testing. There was a spate of breakins & “releases” of these rabbits into the wild, about which the eco-animal-rights brigade were delighted about sticking ti to the man/woman, but mostly the man. They failed to realise that these “white” rabbits, had no way of reverting to the wild, & would have been killed by a buck rabbit within 24/48 hours, as interlopers & intruders, into the warren’s territory! Their ignorance knew no limits!
I find it sad to see reasonable, putting aside the time travel bit, movies like this turned in to a multi-season TV show. It’s like “The Simpsons” been on air for over 25 years. Getting tired now. John Cleese and Connie Booth only wrote 12 episodes of “Fawlty Towers” because they realised that making season after season would ruin it. It remains the classic that it was still to this day.
That was my concern when I started watching the first episode. I was pleasantly surprised.
The TV series has by far and away broken away from the movie. The season finale leaves us with our protagonist left in the past and his female cohort thrust into the future.
As most post-apocalyptic movies go. i.e: Omega Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the original 12 Monkeys, the heroine is left to deal with the future alone, while our male protagonist dies trying to save them.
The TV series should be a fun romp through a barrage of time-travel theories.
Can’t wait !
And a thread about monkeys…this is a must!
Thank you! I can’t tell you how much I needed that at this moment….
Looks like all out psychological warfare…
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-countering-science-denial.html
007 also had to stop powerful Eco-Villains from attacking humanity. Quantum of Solace had Maurice Green, later name changed into Dominuiqe Green, an eco-villain loosely based on Maurice Strong/IMF. Maybe Karl Stromberg was influenced by Prince Behrnard etc. WWF have a history of advocating population control and reduction, eg advocating sterilising humans via infertillity vaccinations bourne by mosquitos etc. Eco loonies are real and serve as inspiration for fiction writers in many genres.
“…just maybe some people in Hollywood are waking up to the fact that greens might not always be the good guys.”
I’d say there’s an even simpler explanation. Hollywood has discovered that a huge population of environmental skeptics exists, who like to watch TV.
Viewing humans as the parasite to be exterminated is a mainstream view in the misanthropic environmentalist community:
•”My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.” -Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
•”Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.” - Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society
•”Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.” - Sir James Lovelock, “Healing Gaia
•”The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” - Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
•”A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” - Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor
•”… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.” - Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind
•”One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.” - Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier
•”If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” - Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund
•”Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” – David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club
•“The only way of saving the world may be for industrial civilization to collapse, deliberately seek poverty, and set levels of mortality.” – Maurice Strong quoted in The National Review Magazine, 9/1/1997
•”The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” - Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
•”We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.” - David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
•…here’s what Maurice Strong actually said, in his autobiography, in a section described as a report to the shareholders, Earth Inc, dated 2031: “And experts have predicted that the reduction of the human population may well continue to the point that those who survive may not number more than the 1.61 billion people who inhabited the Earth at the beginning of the 20th century. A consequence, yes, of death and destruction — but in the end a glimmer of hope for the future of our species and its potential for regeneration.” – Maurice Strong, guiding force behind the I.P.C.C.’s formation
•The NYTs Thomas J. Friedman in 2011 while visiting Taiwan said. “I’m gonna tell you a secret. Don’t let anybody else know,” he said. “There are too many Americans in the world today.” It is a blessing that so many people in the world can live like Americans, Friedman said, but “the good Lord did not design our planet for this many Americans.”
•Viewing capitalism as an economic system that is inherently harmful to the natural environment, John Holdren (Pres. Obama’s chosen chief science advisor) and Paul Ehrlich in 1973 called for “a massive campaign … to de-develop the United States” and other Western nations in order to conserve energy and facilitate growth in underdeveloped countries. “De-development,” they said, “means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” “By de-development,” they elaborated, “we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.”
“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society. Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.” – John Holdren & Paul Ehrlich in their co-authored 1977 book, entitled Ecoscience
• “Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”- Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
• “The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”- Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
• “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
• “We have been so drunk with this desire to produce and consume more and more whatever the cost to the environment that we’re on a totally unsustainable path. I am not going to rest easy until I have articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development.” Rajendra Pachauri, Head of IPCC
•“My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” – Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome
•“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
•“Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
•“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” — Economist editorial
•“We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.” — David Foreman, Earth First!
•“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” — Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!
•“If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.” — Earth First! Newsletter
•“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” — David Graber, biologist, National Park Service
•“The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.” — Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project
•“If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” — Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund
•Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.” — Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995
•”The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.” - Christopher Manes, Earth First!
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•”Environmentalists, who have long espoused a version of humankind as an energy-powered cancer on the Earth, see greenhouse-gas controls as a way to starve out the tumor of humanity…. Temperance fiends of all stripes — who’ve hated fossil fuels, cars, large houses, urban sprawl, highways, rich people, fat people, industrial economies, airplanes, meat consumption, non-recycled paper, and just about everything else that might make someone smile — see energy rationing via greenhouse-gas controls as the answer to their prayers.” ~~ Kenneth Green
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•“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.” – Eric Hoffer
“The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
– Club of Rome
Yay, an Eric Hoffer quote! My copy of The True Believer has a lot of highlighting and that’s one.
12 Monkeys is on of my favourite shows. The only thing I didn’t like were a couple cases of self circular time loop causalities. IOW, a loop in time that is caused by nothing external. Who is the cause of this event in the past? OHHH, it’s you because you went back to investigate it. Uhhh… no. Cut out the crap. Other than a few instances of that, the show is great.
I have enjoyed reading John Barnes. His recently completed series “Directive 51”, “Daybreak Zero”, and “The Last President”, detailed the end of the world as we know it to fit the meme of the greens.
“In the near future, a variety of groups with diverse aims, but an overlapping desire to end modern technological society (the “Big System”), create a nanotech plague (“Daybreak”) which both destroys petroleum-based fuels, rubber and plastics and eats away any metal conductors carrying electricity. An open question in the book is whether these groups, and their shared motivations, are coordinated by some conscious actor, or whether they are an emergent property / meme that attained a critical mass.”
The usual results, 10% of the global population may survive with 18th century technology.
You might also like Helix, luddite bad behavior in season2
Even the 1962 original 28 minute, black and white short, “La Jetée”, which is constructed from still photographs, is miles above the TV series.