James S Saint wrote:You are discussing vampires and werewolves. You largely favor the vampires. I slightly favor the werewolves.
You become a vampire by becoming a part of the prophet making scheme (sharing in the blood of the vampires; Trump, Clinton, Bush,...). You become a werewolf by learning that there are vampires making unjust prophets (getting bitten by a werewolf; whistle-blowers, Snowden, Wier,..). The vampire doesn't want to give up his cash-cow made in and of the darkness and the werewolf doesn't want to have to live and suffer in the darkness. Shining a little pure light on it all kills one and calms the other.
You want to say that the vampire is innocent until proven guilty and the werewolf is guilty until proven innocent. I prefer saying that until you know, you don't know and every one is suspect, especially the wealthy and powerful. I am far more concerned about a dishonest policeman with a gun than a dishonest hobo with no place to live. I am far, far more concerned with the wealthy and powerful proving that they are innocent than I am concerned about the poor and impotent proving that they are innocent.
I have seen way, way, way too many confirmed lies to not accept the werewolves' stories as having conditional credibility. The vampires live on lies, but that doesn't mean they are lying every time.
The only point in attempting to go to the Moon was to fund orbital domination, the "Star Wars". Whether they ever really got to the Moon is a bit irrelevant. They managed to get 1000's of networked surveillance satellites up there and weaponize them. Their goal was to get that done before the Russians did. So it's all done now except for more funding for more control centers in orbit to house those who deserve better than to have to live on the surface of a dirty planet (up in the untouchable vampire's palace). For sake of that funding, "it is imperative that we get to Mars and establish a base" (again who cares if they actually do that as long as they get the funding to keep developing orbital control centers - endless vampire supremacy).
I was going to respond to him with something but then ended up responding with something else. But that first something I posted on my desktop and saved for a while. Why? Because in it I saved a summary of that I story I just mentioned. So in response to Jame's vampire vs. werewolf analogy, I said this:
Gib wrote:You know, I thought of an idea very similar to this once, except it didn't feature vampires and werewolves. It became an idea for a story I might one day write. It's set in a post-apocalyptic waste land that Earth has become. The rich and powerful have long since escaped this waste land by building and boarding a pristinely white space station that orbits the Earth. Meanwhile, down on Earth, our protagonist, a young girl of 9 named Rachael who is orphaned and lives on the streets, but with an incredible gift for snipering, spends her time trying to eek out her survival and just barely succeeds. She has only the most distant memories of once having a mom and a dad. She carries around a dirty, torn teddy bear with her--the only link she has to her memories of her mom and dad.
Horrible things happen to her--she gets beaten, mugged, and even raped several times throughout the story--a 9 year old girl! At one point in the story, she gets adopted by a gang that actually does a half assed decent job of taking care of her (though not everyone in the gang is friendly to her). At another point, she loses her teddy bear and it becomes one of the most devastating periods for her in the story (luckily, she finds it again).
But she is gifted with an ability without which she would have been dead by now. It's based on a genetic mutation. Somehow, she is able to calibrate her sense of sight and her sense of hearing to pick up and zone in on very distant stimuli. I imagine it like a sniper's rifle with a zoom lens installed on the scope--seen from the first person point of view, I'd imagine it like zooming in on a distant target, or in the case of hearing, filtering out all irrelevant noise in order to bring a distant and almost inaudible sound into focus. And if this were a movie, I'd have the camera zoom in on her eyes to see a bright, kind of neon or glowing red ring around her iris which dilates as she zooms in visually. This she uses to spot distant obstacles, threats, or even targets (and yes, she does learn to use weapons, particularly a cross bow).
I want to have a scene in which, weaken by thirst, she crawls across the muddy ground on a cold, dreary night, and off in the distance spots something shining or reflecting light. As she comes closer, she sees it's a bottle of water, unopened, just left there. Her eyes fill with lust, she hungers for it, and keeps crawling towards it. But before she gets there, a wild dog comes out of no where and snatches the bottle away. With her heart in her stomach, she is suddenly filled with a rush of adrenaline, and becomes unwaveringly focused on getting the dog. Out of no where, she musters the strength to pick herself up and starts running after the dog. At an incredible speed, she catches up and then lunges at the dog. She lands on top of it, and with her bare hands, digs right into his jugular and tears him open, bites him, smashes his head against the rock as hard she can. Pretty soon it's over, he's dead. She grabs the bottle of water, flips over onto her back, snaps it open and chugs it down. After she is quenched and has a moment to relax and settle down, she looks over at the poor beast, resting in a pool of his own blood, and begins to cry. She reaches over to it and says "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
...
Oh, and the girl does reunite with her parents in the end... up on the space station. I have this image of her hugging her mom and the film ends with a scene of her teddy bear being dropped in slow motion and hits the ground, symbolizing that she no longer needs it.
