Have you seen the movie Network lately? It's so prescient - it makes you wonder if Sybil the Soothsayer was able to show the future to Paddy Chayefsky.

The film was made in 1976 (30 years ago) yet baked into the film are an endless number of referances to oil, the Saudi's, the the media's culpability in lulling us to sleep with a numbing stream of pointless headlines, violence, and out of context warnings of danger. Fearmongering has certainly come into its own in 30 years.

I couldn't help but think of Growing Up Gotti as i watched the William Morris agents and the Network business affairs lawyers negotiating ancelary rights. I wonder if anyone has pulled a gun a any of the reality show negotiations that are currently under way?

But perhaps most poignent - Howard Beale's varies rants about the state of the world.

for your reading pleasure (remember, 1976!)

"Yesterday I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide. Admittedly an act of madness. Well, I'll tell you what happened. I just ran out of bullshit."

"Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park!"

"We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell."

"You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here, you're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal! You do! Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, we are the illusion."

"Right now, there is a whole generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube! This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people, and that's why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communications Corporation of America; there's a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy's office on the twentieth floor. And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?"

"All human beings are becoming humanoids. All over the world, not just in America. We're just getting there faster since we're the most advanced country."

"I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

"All I know is, you've got to get mad! You've got to say: I'm a human being, goddamn it! My life has value!"