DAILY CALL SHEET: OCTOBER 2, 2025

Gas-s-s-s, or if you prefer the onscreen title, Gas! -Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970) After a hastily scribbled military unleashes a lab-created gas that kills everyone on the planet over the age of 25, hippies, bikers, and football players inherit the Earth. Looking for something more groovy than post-apocalyptic Dallas, flower children Coel and Cilla hit the road for a series of perplexing psychedelic adventures. As the pair cross America, they meet a motorcycle-riding Edgar Allan Poe, giant papier-mâché heads of JFK and MLK, and God, but even the Almighty isn't able to help the film make any sense at all.

TIL: No, the hippie peace symbol is not a broken inverted cross as some have suggested. It's actually the letters N and D superimposed on each other and was created in 1958 by British artist and designer Gerald Holtom as a symbol for the nuclear disarmament movement. As a symbol, the cross obviously has its own meanings. It started showing up prominently in Christian art around the 3rd Century as the religion began to move out of the shadows. At that time, it was seen as a sign of victory over death and evil, a meaning it still carries to this day. However, by the medieval period, its superimposed lines became to be seen as a representation of the intersection of divinity (the vertical line) and the world (horizontal line).

Invasion U.S.A. (1985) A force of Latin American guerrillas led by Soviet agent Richard Lynch start making noise along the Florida coast. Unable to handle the situation themselves, the government asks retired CIA operative Chuck Norris to look into the matter, but he's not interested, at least not until the bad guys kill his best friend. He's barely had time to get involved, though, before hundreds of guerrillas descend on the suburbs of Miami where they wreck a subdivision and shopping mall. This really upsets Chuck, which, as we all know, doesn't bode well for the guerillas. Objectively bad by any critical standard, but that's irrelevant as this flick, more than any other, is the likely birthplace of all those Chuck Norris memes.

TIL: When it comes to evaluating any form of warfare, including guerrilla tactics, the Church's framework, as always, rests on Just War principles. Guerrilla warfare often risks violating the principles of proportionality (the harm caused must not outweigh the good achieved) and discrimination (combatants must distinguish between military targets and civilians, avoiding indiscriminate violence). Guerrilla campaigns that employ such methods, especially of the type seen in Invasion U.S.A. where there is the intentional targeting of civilians in populated areas, are deemed immoral. Resistance movements such as those employed against the Nazis in WWII, however, might be defensible as long as they meet Just War criteria.