The black box society is real, and this case and inevitable future iterations of the same battle have every indication of making it worse.
For Kouchner, all this is part of the same battle he's been waging with the left since he started picking up boat people in Vietnam: "Are they concerned about victims?
But both sides -- and their free-spending, unregulated surrogates -- cannot keep from fighting and refighting some version of the same battle between cool and square, tuned in and turned off that divided them in their youth.
Every time Cage dies in combat against a malevolent alien race, he wakes up again at the beginning of the same battle – a situation he exploits to train up and work towards defeating the enemy for good.
A second image of the same battle features two neatly dressed women, tea mugs in hand, on the way to dole out mid-riot refreshments: a British commonplace made alien by its unconventional setting.
With hindsight, it may be asked whether she did not have a point – as something of the same battle over the balance of local taxation bubbles up again today – but the hostility she provoked was at once the harbinger and proof of her decline.
