When I was a child, I was afraid of the closet. It didn’t help watching movies like the first Poltergeist or that American Ninja movie, where another girl gets sucked into the closet and then gets possessed by a ninja. The Horror movie, House scared the ever living crap out of me, but the one scene that I will never forget is when that thing erupts out of the closet. And I was done, but I still watched the rest of it. And the closet continued to haunt me even with Cat’s Eye when James Woods peered inside, realizing that someone was indeed in there, watching him. It would take years to get over this phobia. Thank you, Hollywood, but the stuff of nightmares had yet to come.

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In June 2013, I received the news that Zero Books would publish a collection of my film theory essays. The book U.ESS.AY: Politics and Humanity in American Film is a slim tone of critical dissections of modern cinema and pop culture, featuring the likes of Schwarzenegger, Lynch,Shatner, Swayze, Hopper, and even Kim Jong-Il, who turns up a couple of times actually. The book is a phantasmagorical adventure in celluloid and digital film, to be, or not to be taken seriously, whatever your preference. When Zero offered me the publishing contract, I was thrilled to say the least. Not only was this publisher my first choice, they were my only choice; it was publish with them or publish with no one.

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When one peels away the onion layers of “the conspiracy” one does end up back in the Garden of Eden (and “The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” has a lot more to with concepts like numerology and “Ancient” architecture than eating apples and oranges). It astounds me how many well known “conspiracy theorists” (some of whom I do read for information) miss this base concept. Some may be familiar with the names including Jim Marrs, Webster Tarpley, Alex Jones and Infowars, David Icke and more.

There are a few important concepts that must be emphasized to help the reader find ultimate truth, the convergence of current events with Biblical predictions of “the last hour”. First, there is no specific “anti-Christ” mentioned anywhere in the Book of Revelation. It’s mentioned in I John but nowhere else in the entire Bible.

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I was trying not to panic. That is, I had no reason to panic. I had prepped days in advance. Well, weeks in advance. Well—really, years in advance. My first experience with American history had been in middle school and through an unfortunate set of circumstances which involved changing schools after my seventh grade year, I’d had a double dose of Revolutionary and Civil War battles back-to-back. I knew almost all the presidents. I knew more about America than I’d ever know about the country I came from.

But the real prep had started a couple weeks ago when I’d actually taken the initiative to start studying. Then it had officially hit its peak a couple of days ago when I’d suddenly awoken to find that I had forgotten everything. Who was Susan B. Anthony? How many Supreme Court justices were there? What the hell was a veto?

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These days, we’re all mad as hell at the world. There is too much going on, and we just can’t take it anymore. We’re about to explode, if someone doesn’t give us a chance to vent, but now there is a new spin roaring across The O’Reilly Factor called the “Mad as Hell” segment. And Mr. Bill O’Reilly is listening, and we’re venting, steamrolling away to release our angst. But can we find comfort afterward in a world still consumed by such chaos for chaos still reigns, and we still find ourselves victim to the idiocracy that goes on today…

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The recent government shutdown has brought to surface the fact that acidic internal divisions are rife in American politics.

In fighting and break away factions within political parties is nothing out of the ordinary but up on Capital Hill the Republican party of 2013 are demonstrating how extremists within their fold are trying to impose their views without thinking of any consequences.

Cracks in political parties usually begin with such ideological extremities taking it upon themselves to see their goals realised and we saw that with some tea party faithful in the GOP who succeeded in making a federal shut down a reality. Implications of this may see political allegiances switching for many Republicans.

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It took Rome, the mightiest of empires, 525 years to decline: from Julius Caesar’s coup d’etat in 49 B.C. until the deposition, in the year 476, by Odoacer, a German chieftain, of Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor. Rome’s history spans some 1230 years if 753 B.C. is taken to be the date of Rome’s founding. Rome’s rise accounted for 58% of its existence. Rome’s fall accounted for 42% of its existence, a length of rise before the fall that may be unparalled by any subsequent Western empire. If 1896 is the current mid-point of America’s post-colonial existence and if the final five years of the nineteenth century will have turned out, in history’s reckoning, to have been the transition from American rise to American fall, we’ll have reached the apex precisely at the halfway mark.

We never see when this world ends. We just dream about it. We dream of invasion, extinction, and oblivion. We fear to be the next Mayans or Aztecs with a great civilization lost, and all its people gone without a trace. Will it be Pestilence to ride her black horse across this land, bringing us down to the knees of Death? Man’s latest best friend, promising technology is the gift of future but a future that it will take, and we will be left struggling to hide from termination. No, we will never see when this world ends, but we do dream about it. We hope, we fear, and we pray. We pray that the day never comes, but in the darkest corners of our mind, we know that it will, which begs the question. Will we survive? READ MORE.

This November New Yorkers will go to the polls to vote for a replacement for incumbent mayor Michael Bloomberg. Scandals and controversy have blighted the mayoral race so far but for the normal person on the outside looking in, the most interesting candidate is Christine Quinn.

If elected, the 47 year old Irish American Democrat will be the first ever woman to become mayor of New York City. Quinn would also be the first openly gay mayor of the city bursting with a population of over 8 million.

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