Basically a tribute to the apocalypticish movies of the Eighties like the Mad Maxes and Escape from New York. There are some nice touches, like the vector graphics showing Hadrian's Wall like the New York fortifications in Escape From New York; and a couple of completely gratuitous boob shots.

Pretty fun and entertaining. It's gory in a cartoonishly over-the-top Kill Bill way: not too hard to watch.

Has a couple of weaknesses. Not at all original, slightly lacking in tension, and some of the action scenes go on a bit too long: in the originals low budgets kept things tighter.

Overall though, pretty decent and worth a look. I'm unconvinced that futuristic punks of the year 2039 will be listening to Adam and the Ants and Frankie Goes To Hollywood though.

What I'm Reading
Simulacra and Simulation (1981): influential collection of essays by postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Was somewhat interesting at first: I've read about him second-hand but not read anything actually by him.

Had a few problems with it. One is that the essays together are pretty repetitive. You only really need to be told so many times that the real world has now been replaced by a media-generated melange of the Simulacrum and the Hyperreal.

Presumably it's the translation, but the prose is a bit glutinous, with some paragraphs over a page long. Also I know that it's kind of the point and it's hopelessly reactionary of me, but I find outright factual errors a little annoying. For instance, he repeats the myth that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen, and claims that American scientists had cloned human beings.

Another problem is that I've read Human Knowledge (1948) a while ago, and found his arguments in favour of an empiricist epistemology that we should just assume corresponds to reality to be very persuasive.

Russell acknowledges that the epistemological problems of knowledge are too severe for us to ever be able to prove the existence of a real, consistent world. However, neither can we disprove it. Russell argues that since denying the existence of the real world doesn't really lead us anywhere useful or interesting; we may as well just assume that reality exists.

Despite being written thirty years later, Baudrillard's essays seem to me to confirm this rather than rebut it. Having come up with these concepts of simulacra and hyperreality, he doesn't seem to actually do anything with them. He writes articles and reviews of things: the movie "Apocalypse Now", the "Beaubourg" (Pompidou Centre). But the analyses don't seem to yield any interesting insights. Everything seems to boil down to "so this is an example of hyperreality".

One thing I noticed is that he seems to regard hyperreality as a bad thing, rather than something to be celebrated. In the Beaubourg section, he describes the visitors in degraded terms.

The misunderstanding is therefore complete when one denounces Beaubourg as a cultural mystification of the masses. The masses, themselves, rush there to enjoy this execution, this dismemberment, this operational prostitution of a culture finally truly liquidated, including all counterculture that is nothing but its apotheosis. The masses rush toward Beaubourg as they rush toward disaster sites, with the same irresistible elan. Better: they are the disaster of Beaubourg. Their number, their stampede, their fascination, their itch to see everything is objectively a deadly and catastrophic behavior for the whole undertaking. Not only does their weight put the building in danger, but their adhesion, their curiosity annihilates the very contents of this culture of animation. This rush can no longer be measured against what was proposed as the cultural objective, it is its radical negation, in both its excess and success. It is thus the masses who assume the role of catastrophic agent in this structure of catastrophe, it is the masses themselves who put an end to mass culture.

The students' distress at having diplomas conferred on them for no work complements and is equal to that of the teachers. It is more secret and more insidious than the traditional anguish of failure or of receiving worthless diplomas. No-risk insurance on the diploma - which empties the vicissitudes of knowledge and selection of content - is hard to bear. Also it must be complicated by either a benefit - alibi, a simulacrum of work exchanged against a simulacrum of a diploma, or by a form of aggression (the teacher called on to give the course, or treated as the automatic distributor) or by rancor, so that at least something will still take place that resembles a "real" relation. But nothing works. Even the domestic squabbles between teachers and students, which today make up a great part of their exchanges, are nothing but the recollection of, and a kind of nostalgia for a violence or a complicity that heretofore made them enemies or united them around a stake of knowledge or a political stake.

But from the arguments in these essays that it would seem that Christian conservatives are actually on the same page as Baudrillard himself on the problems of the post-modern condition. The difference is that he seems to regard it as inevitable, whereas they optimistically hope to march back to the 1950s.

Baudrillard doesn't really seem to understand how some things work: the modern (Alfred Marshall's marginalist) economics of the theory of value for instance. Despite being ostentatiously post-modern, he still talks in curiously quaint old socialist terms of Power exploiting the Masses. He creates postmodernist explanations for why scientist perform animal experiments and why prices change rapidly. But it seems to me that rather than the world having moved into a post-rational state, it's just that he can't really be bothered finding out the reasons things happen.

Web
History of the Pink Floyd inflatable pig.

US army Combat Leader's Guide. Whether you want to know how to withdraw under enemy pressure, organize an ambush, or just prepare for an electromagentic pulse; it's all in here.

Dare Obasanjo has unresigned as a blogger, talks about Twitter's availability problems.

Premature geekulation. Joss Whedon fans plan save-the-show campaign 8 months before the first episode airs. Apple store sees queue for no reason.

Economics. Yay, it's back! The lump-of-labour libel against unions.

Kaletsky on commodity prices.

Protectionism in action wire hangers.

Development economics: macro stats vs micro experiments, full.

Study via Johan Norberg: revised China stats show more lifted out of poverty.