President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad revealed in a speech just a few hours ago what is probably the ‘stunning punch’ he promised to land on the West. According to the Washington Post, the Iranian president announced his country was now a “nuclear state”. It is not quite true, but it is getting there. Ahmedinajad’s claim was based on his assertion that it had produced its first package of 20% enriched uranium. “We have the capability to enrich uranium more than 20 percent or 80 percent but we don’t enrich (to this level) because we don’t need it,” he said. What is the significance of the 20%?
Michael Adler, who has been following the development of Iran’s uranium enrichment capability, anticipated the Iran would soon announce the 20% enrichment level. This is not yet the finish line but it is on the homestretch towards reaching the 90% required for weapons grade material. The real menace in Ahmedinajad’s announcement is more subtle. By reaching the 20% mark Teheran is now signalling to anyone who wants to make trouble for America that it is open for business. Iran now has proven its centrifuge technology, at least up to a point. Adler described the calculus:
If this were poker, one would have to say Iran is calling Washington’s bluff. Or treating U.S. policy as if it were a bluff. One could read the Iranian answer as: Threaten sanctions, will you? Try to hardball us on a uranium deal we don’t really like? Think we’re down and out because there are anti-government riots in our streets? OK, we’ll not just not cut down on the uranium enrichment that has you so worried, we’ll increase it to make material closer to weapons grade than we ever did before….
Moving forward with enrichment would be a great learning experience for Iran in developing its nuclear capabilities. It has some 4,000 centrifuges enriching uranium at Natanz, with some 4,000 more turning in a vacuum or ready to go. There are reports that Iran has hit a bump in its program, as the centrifuges it is using are fragile. Upping enrichment, which would take months to get started, would give it a chance to expand its research into centrifuges and how they work.
The West reposed its hope in the strategy of limiting Iran’s raw material, offering to swap out some of Teheran’s uranium for fuel in an effort to reduce its feedstock. Why not take the fuel, the West asserted, if all you want is civilian nuclear power? The Washington Post article summarized what the West was unsuccessfully trying to achieve.
Western powers blame Iran for rejecting an internationally endorsed plan to export its enriched uranium and have it enriched further and returned to the country in the form of fuel rods for the Tehran reactor – and in broader terms for turning down other overtures meant to diminish concerns about its nuclear agenda.
Iran, in turn, asserts it had no choice but to start enriching to higher levels because its suggested changes to the international plan were rejected.
The uranium swap strategy has fallen flat and Iran as Adler anticipated, has upped the ante. Now international uranium suppliers who might have been hanging back uncertain that Teheran could solve the technical problems are now recalculating the their positions. With Iran on the homestretch the probabilities are that unless some unforeseen contingency stops them that they will gallop past the tape. Nobody wants to back a loser in a contest. Who is that loser? What Ahmedinjad is now signalling to all comers is that he will succeed in giving Iran a bomb and Barack Obama will not be able to stop him. After wasting time trying to engage it, and throwing the Lebanese and the Iranian protesters under the bus to improve its bona fides, Washington finds itself with a dwindling set of options, none of which are easy. Can Washington still stop Iran from getting the bomb without running huge risks? What odds would you give Teheran?
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We cannot lay sole responsibility for Iran’s nukes on Obama. He is just another cog in a long line of feckless politicians who have placed personal interest and Party above the national interests of the USA.
If there is one undeniable truth that has persevered since the start of the Industrial Revolution it is that cheap and abundant energy = economic power and better quality of life. The only Energy Policy that the US has experienced since at least the Nixon years is for the government to block the development and use of our vast stores of hydrocarbons and nuclear technology.
For whatever the reasons put forward, AGW being but the most recent, this Luddite policy has discouraged economic growth within the US and has gifted the Islamic thuggocracies of the ME with power and influence they use to harm us and the very idea of Western Civilization.
That a tiny medieval kingdom of misanthropes is in a position to affect our way of life and the manner in which we deal with other medieval kingdoms of misanthropes that threaten to treat us as the Great Satan is beyond belief.
Our best hope is that Obama is the denouement of 100 years of gargantuan stupidity and that the catastrophe to follow is sufficient to redeem a world of reason, logic and eternal values.
We cannot lay sole responsibility for Iran’s nukes on Obama.
The problem is not nuclear weapons; rather it is the character of the regime. The ultimate root of this situation may lie either with Jimmy Carter or with Dwight Eisenhowever, depending on your political views. Or it may simply arise from the fact that nuclear weapons were bound to proliferate to eventually create an explosive matchup between nukes and malice.
But that’s neither here nor there. However it happened, it’s worthwhile to remember that today marks the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, the start of Iran’s belligerence against the US. Whatever one’s view on the causes of that conflict, it is now an ongong thing and the way through must be found principally by the President.
And yes, it can still get worse. The backward look at the mis-steps of the recent past best serve the purpose, not of apportioning the blame for mistakes, but to avoid repeating them. If the President has been a fool the real significance of that is now the Iranians know him for one.
The problem is not nuclear weapons; rather it is the character of the regime.
There has not been an Easter liturgy in Hagia Sophia for 457 years. Acknowledged that Turkey is not Iran but the “character of the regime” has not changed since Muhammed’s armies swarmed out of the Arabian Peninsula.
The 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference differ in many things but they are unitary in their stated goal that sharia is the natural state of humanity and that each is obligated to do whatever can be done to bring it about.
The sheep should not concern itself with the character of the beast eager to consume it.
I’m sorry…but spending all this time looking behind us for the “source of blame” for what is happening today, at this moment…is simply the art of mooning the future.
This administration has whined its way through a whole year of excuse and alibi for every misstep, every blunder, every dunderheaded act being lain at the feet of someone else…for a problem they “inherited”.
What they “inherited” was the role of leaders of the free world. If they are not up to the challenge, then step aside and don’t try to dine at the adult’s table. Back to the kids table with them.
It is perhaps mildly constructive to know the entire history that came before today’s Iranian grand gesture, but basically, it’s the same gesture that candidate Obama gave to candidate Clinton during the debates. This administration ought to understand it. It’s not that subtle.
Since Iran has been the sugar daddy of Hamas and Hezbollah, it has shown no hesitation in state sponsoring global terrorism, or to passing off the necessities of carrying out mass murder.
They throw fists at us, we use our training in martial arts in return. They pick up a stick, because they can’t compete hand to hand, we pick up a rock. They then wield a knife, we bring out a gun. They then call their buddies, we call our bigger and stronger friends. They then grab women and children…and we stop.
There are lines they are willing to cross that we are not. We are bigger, stronger, tougher, …but if they are willing to sacrifice innocents…it will stop us in our tracks every time.
Here is the point and the only salient point in the equation…they are willing to cross any morality line, they are willing to sacrifice all of their humanity, their honor, their dignity, their code of behavior…every shred of human decency.
It leaves us with no good choices. There are no “talking points” with a man who is willing to do anything, to un-tether himself from the very rudiments of human interaction.
It is not the danger that they will weaponize warheads and launch them at Israel (or Europe, for that matter)…it is that they will pass them off to those will hand carry them here and elsewhere. We have passed the summit of the slippery slope. We are sledding on the backside of that slope.
And there are no good answers…only levels of tough decisions. Ones that adults have to make. Real world answers, not Utopian fantasy answers. They have grabbed the women and children and have cocked the hammer of the gun against their heads.
And they aren’t going to schedule a visit to “The View” to talk about their feelings and sort out their emotions.
Even more importantly, looking back years from now…and trying to assess blame on someone else, may be a luxury we won’t be afforded.
Can Washington still stop Iran from getting the bomb without running huge risks? What odds would you give Teheran?
“The hard fact is that nothing could have arrested what has actually happened [in Austria] unless this country and other countries had been prepared to use force.”
March 1938 — Neville Chamberlain
W
If the President has been a fool the real significance of that is now the Iranians know him for one.
Sadly no. The real significance is that Westerns will die.
ADE
Er, got booted out of the last comment.
Should be WesternERs.
But Iran is not about Obama.
Iran’s ambitions are about me, Wretchard, Doug, Whiskey, LotM, L3, Terista, Mary…
My next door neighbour dying, people/ideas that got me here, betrayal.
Never mind Obama, it’s down to us to confront Iran.
ADE
Nothing will be done until a mushroom cloud is over Tel Aviv. The United States will not act unilaterally, the Iraq war guaranteed that. Israel will not act until acted upon. It is Yom Kipper part II. I suspect President Obama hopes that it does not happen on his watch but knows it will happen eventually.
So, Obama – the man who knows nothing but doubling-down when it comes to domestic policy – is confronted with am opponent that is willing (nay, eager) to do the same on the international scene. My bet is that he will fold and leave the table, having lost everything. Others will get stuck covering his wagers.
“…If the President has been a fool the real significance of that is now the Iranians know him for one” Any decent poker player knows to buy dark sunglasses to stop the other at the table reading his eyes. Of course, any decent poker player actually knows HOW to play poker before he puts the money on the table. The Big O is still mastering “Go Fish”.
If our leaders won’t support the current uprising, does that mean that there is no way for us to do so? Is there enough organization to the Tea Parties to get something visible started?
I’d like to see a visible linking of what’s going on in both places, the fight against totalitarianism that is.
The OIS Organization of Islamic States, operatin g as a permanent mission to the United Nations with offices in Geneva, Vienna and Paris, does not itself uphold the charter of the United Nations, in either the promotion of Democracy or in the recognition of individual human rights.
What are they doing there?
What enforcement rights were given over in the rush to hear the Islamic voice?
Did the production of hydrocarbons trump the individual? What does the Green movement in Iran say about the values of individuals v. Sharia wielding oppressors?
Islam does not even believe in itself.
10. maineman
I’m not sure that a regime change will end Iran’s nuke program. It would almost certainly slow it down and place it in the hands of people substantially less crazy.
I do like the idea of direct support of the freedom movement in Iran, it does seem that any decent level of support from outside would bring down the current set of rulers. Perhaps through a third-party as even the most revolutionary Iranians seem to have little overt love of the US. Or perhaps at a personal level via Facebook/Twitter etc. I find that even in the most unlikely places there are a few people willing to be friendly and direct with outsiders.
Charlie Wilson, US politician who secretly funded CIA in Afghanistan, dies
“After the Soviets left, Charlie kept fighting for the Afghan people and warned against abandoning that traumatised country to its fate — a warning we should have heeded then, and should remember today.”
After the Soviet withdrawal, Mr Wilson expressed reservations about the American decisions to cut funds to Afghanistan, which he blamed for creating a void that led to the rising influence of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the Islamic militant group accused of the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001.
Mr Wilson was born in Trinity, Texas, in 1933, attended the US Naval Academy, and served in the US Navy. He was elected to the Texas legislature and went on to serve in the US House from 1973. He retired from Congress in 1997.
—
Released Today: Just In Case You Like to Forget
I must agree with you, qwerty1 – there is now a guarantee of at least a limited nuclear war in our feature. Gone with Tel Aviv should be Tehran and Damascus, at a minimum. But the final effect of our invasion of Iraq may be that a million lives are saved there, as there is no reason for either side to target Baghdad anymore.
In the other big story today, The EU, and most notably Germany, has agreed to bail out Greece. (as I and others had predicted) I believe the easiest way to explain why this was inevitable is to note that the short term cost of bailing Greece out was actually less than the short term cost of doing nothing. (collapse of the Euro, etc) Long term, who knows? I believe there’s a collective acceptance of the idea that the future has become so unpredictable, so unknowable, that there is no pressure for any government to consider the effects of their policies past about a 3 month window. After that, the outcome depends on too many other unknowables, and so assumptions can be made which justify any possible course of action.
Hence the pseudo-intellectual justification for always following the path of least resistance.
Of course this is now the achilles heel of not just the US, but of western civilisation in general. This is the fault line which will give birth to systemic failure. But what form will the final failure take? Perhaps we do indeed face the same challenge that Gozer gave to Venkman, Spengler, and Stantz – Choose the form of the Destructor. Many are possible, but one must be chosen.
And we’re not innocent enough to choose a Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man.
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” – “Freewill”, Rush.
I’m not so sure Israel won’t act unilaterally. As feckless as many of its politicians and citizens have become, it seems there still remains an Israeli core of hard, capable, and deadly men and women who have not forgotten Israel’s history. These men and women are the backbone of Israel, and I believe they will act to save it if necessary.
When is the bigger question. This spring and summer, perhaps. This spring and summer? But we have to ask if an Israeli strike would further destabilize the regime, or would it unify them against the hated Jews? You also have to wonder why Iran has given up trying to hide the fact they are seeking the bomb – they are openly declaring it now, no more games with the IAEA. Is it because they are fervently inviting a strike from Israel or the U.S. in hopes of an external distraction to quell the burgeoning civil war? It is certainly possible, and demands consideration.
Three more years of this suicidal behavior at best. The international threat level can only intensify during that time. Here at home too, with the Left doubling down for the 12th time, praying for the ghost of Marx to appear from a well and enslave US. Oh wait!
By the time we win majorities big enough to actually govern, we might have to declare war on Islam and marshall law simultaneously, just to stay afloat.
The candid rhetoric of those winning pols is gonna havta get pretty sharp, while keeping expectations in check.
Some 50% of the snowplows in the Nation’s Capitol are inoperable for lack of maintenance, and we’ve spent untold billions on Homeland Security and FEMA and Intel infrastructure, the managers of which cannot get to work. Might be the unintended consequence of total buy-in to AGW.
Charlie Wilson, perhaps more than anyone, put things in motion which resulted in the demise of the Soviet Union…he deserves memorializing for that. He was not just another Congressman…he was truly exceptional.
Obama inherited an Iran working toward nuclear weapons, just as G.W. Bush did.
But Obama also inherited a democratic Iraq and an Iran that had been literally surrounded by U.S. forces.
Obama inherited a Libya, Syria, and Iraq that had been disabused of developing WMD.
Obama inherited a U.S. Military that was savvy to war in the M.E., had new capabilities in place, and was deployed in exactly the right places to handle Iran in any conceivable contingency.
Obama inherited a functional anti-missile system that only required the expansion that was already underway.
Obama inherited a democratic opposition movement in Iran that was developing a full head of steam and only needed encouragement and some support to become an engine of real “Change.”
Obama inherited an ocean of hydrocarbons in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska and a nation that had just been though an oil shock and was ready to develop the resources.
In 1944 terms, Obama inherited a US Army that was sitting on the Rhine with a freed France behind it, a USAAF that controlled the skies over Europe, a US Army that had seized Leyte, a USN that filled the Pacific with warships and had all but wiped out the IJN, and a group of scientists in Oak Ridge that had something Very Interesting coming along very well. And his reaction to all this was to sue for peace with the Axis.
an image that’s come to me this morning, while pondering the events of the day;
We’re all at a nice table in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Obama is the crappy warm-up act we’ve got to sit through before the real show starts.
Might as well have another beer and enjoy the ambience.
I am printing out copies of the “The Three Conjectures” and passing them out to my friends.
Does anybody here know if the uranium refinement gets easier or harder as it goes along? Is the hard part getting to 20% or going from 20% to 90%?
Just thinking about time-tables.
18. RWE: Excellent point, this Administration goes beyond the classic “dropping the ball” scenario by not even showing up for the game.
All the physical tools are in hand, what are missing are the moral ones.
Can Washington stop Teheran without running huge risks?
No, but then the risks have been there since the beginning. Our politicians are so risk averse in foreign policy that they don’t seem to want to take action unless they know the outcome of said action in advance. If the outcome is unknown, better to just throw money at it and/or stall for time. They don’t want to confront the question, “Now what?’
What are the odds of Iran succeeding?
I will SWAG 80%. It is likely they will succeed because the problems they face are technical and problems of physics. Given time and smart people, they will solve the problems. However, there is always The Unexpected isn’t there? That may be what stops them, whatever it might be.
There’s enough blame to go around, but the only piece I can see that might be legally actionable was the bogus NIE finding released by somebody in intel with the intent of politically paralyzing Bush.
2 wretchard
“If the President has been a fool the real significance of that is now the Iranians know him for one.”
Not only the Iranians but the world now know him for a fool and for a blowhard con man. But is this enough for the train to go completely off the tracks?
If not it is a damn good start.
But, maybe not Quite Yet. But that point in world politics and events is fast approaching. I’m no guru or fortune teller but I know a problem when I see it approaching. It’s went well past a game of politics to a battle of individual wills.
Don’t forget that the Mullahs have Allah behind them and the 12th Iman in front of them and they fear no one or no nation state including the Great Satan.
In fact we are the driving factor behind their rancor and determination. Infidels can not be allowed to conquer or subdue Islam.
Period.
Now the ball is back in the court of the West. Where nobody has the guts or the resolve to do anything about Iran or it’s coming power to destroy or cower it’s enemies.
In the fact of the matter, people are running around looking for excuses to do nothing, while appearing to do something.
Idiots.
Papa Ray
cfbleachers,
They then grab women and children…and we stop
It is easy to say that the United States needs to “man up” but how can we do that? If the mindset needed to fight and win a war with totalitarians is that exhibited by FDR and most of the American people dring WW-II then we need to walk back from here to there.
The main difference between the positions is that 70 to 75 years ago the pacifists were largely to the right and outside of the administration’s party. The Republicans of the 1930s to ’40s, even though they rejected the philo-teutonism of the Bundists and America Firsters, perhaps because they were to obviously foreign influenced, did not become true internationalists until the conversion on this issue of Arthur Vandenberg in 1945. Today, with the exception of a small group of Paleocons like Pat Buchanan, the America Last movement is firmly lodged in the Left and is now at the heart of the Democratic Party.
Roosevelt was ruthless in marshaling public opinion, ridiculing and demonizing his enemies. Opposing FDR could get you held up to public contempt, like “Martin, Barton and Fish.” Herbert Hoover became a nonperson until Harry Truman graciously called upon his talents to again manage humanitarian relief efforts after the war. Charles Lindbergh’s offer to volunteer for active duty was rejected. The last decision at least was probably correct. Under FDR’s leadership, as I said yesterday, the United States did not “seek” to “prevail” over an “adversary” but “fought” for “victory” over its “enemies.” The public collected scrap and hung black-out curtains while the cartoons urged them to “Slap the Jap” because that was what was needed to win and winning was worth it.
What I propose is a full court campaign to steel America that begins by honoring not just the fact of winning but the means by which we achieved victory in WW-II and the Cold War. We need a relentless public campaign across all media honoring the following efforts;
1. our submarine blockade of Japan,
2. strategic bombing by the 8th Air Force,
3. the use of flamethrowers to clean out bunkers,
4. the Strategic Air Command and Counter Value targeting.
I would also sponsor exhibits and symposia honoring the efforts of US Grant during the siege of Vicksburg.
These points needs to be driven home relentlessly to both domestic and foreign audiences;
1. that we know how to win a war,
2. that we know are willing and able to do it,
3. that we are still a better and more civilized people after doing it.
Doing so will marginalize the domestic pacifists and empower efforts to drive them from their tax payer funded sanctuaries. It will also demonstrate to our foreign enemies that they have “awakened a sleeping giant and filled it with a terrible resolve.”
Anton,
According to this article 6 months:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100208/ap_on_re_eu/iran_nuclear
“Although material for the fissile core of a nuclear warhead must be enriched to a level of 90 percent or more, just getting its stockpile to the 20 percent mark would be a major step for Iran’s nuclear program. While enriching to 20 percent would take about one year, using up to 2,000 centrifuges at Tehran’s underground Natanz facility, any next step — moving from 20 to 90 percent — would take only half a year and between 500-1,000 centrifuges.”
I am reminded of the scene in Henry V, where Harry is contemplating all -the night before Agincourt. His lamentations on Kingly responsibilities vice ceremony. Me thinks the 0 has never had the inclination nor the intelligence to contemplate beyond his Wheaties or his image in the mirror.
Personal preparation is the order of the day, for time is running short; and the “lightworker” the bringer of “hope” and “change” is destroying hope and bringing change -the likes of which we can only comprehend in our nightmares.
Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls,
Our debts, our careful wives,
Our children and our sins lay on the king!
We must bear all. O hard condition,
Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath
Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel
But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s-ease
Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!
And what have kings, that privates have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?
And what art thou, thou idle ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer’st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents? what are thy comings in?
O ceremony, show me but thy worth!
What is thy soul of adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?
Wherein thou art less happy being fear’d
Than they in fearing.
What drink’st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,
But poison’d flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!
Think’st thou the fiery fever will go out
With titles blown from adulation?
Will it give place to flexure and low bending?
Canst thou, when thou command’st the beggar’s knee,
Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,
That play’st so subtly with a king’s repose;
I am a king that find thee, and I know
‘Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running ‘fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,
And follows so the ever-running year,
With profitable labour, to his grave:
And, but for ceremony, such a wretch,
Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep,
Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.
The slave, a member of the country’s peace,
Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wots
What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace,
Whose hours the peasant best advantages.
WWS, you haven’t read what I posted on the “Spain” topic, Germany or France aren’t bailing out Greece, but empeching that the american hedges founds achieve her, be it byin buying Greece debt tresor bons, because in the very law of Europe you can’t bail out and or finance directly another EU state, but you can buy their debt loans that are on the financial markets, and it is what will be the next EU agendas, empech that other attacks happens.
And in the last infos, Germany, nor France, will lend or buy anything Greec, but monitoring the greec government to bring the debt rate under 10, therefore 9
“Does anybody here know if the uranium refinement gets easier or harder as it goes along? Is the hard part getting to 20% or going from 20% to 90%?”
The hard part is behind them.
The real significance of the announcement is that Iran has dropped all pretense: There is no reason whatsoever to go to 20%, except to proceed to weapons-grade. Reactor fuel is enriched to less than 12%, typically, only 3-5%. There is no conceivable use for 20% (the threshold of HEU) except to make very, very big bangs.
Nor should we ignore the nearly-complete heavy-water reactor at Arak, which serves no purpose except making plutonium.
And of course there are the series of IRBMs the Iranians have tested, whose 300-kilo payload is far too small to be useful with any conventional warhead, but just right for a nuke.
Exsqueeze me, but so what?
We all knew they were doing this, and yet these words are just words, who knows if they are true? We’d like to think the CIA knew. So, are we shocked? Are we punched? Are we credulous?
And the context: is it a bad thing? yes. could we have prevented it? no. at least, if we were going to stop it, it was probably best done 31 years ago! and who knows, if the Pahlavis were still in power and still our buddies, they might be building nukes about now anyway. Why? Well, in those famous words from the movie Animal House: Why Not?
OK, more constructively, what next? I suggest a two-front plan. Try to get the UN to pass a plan to supply nuke reactors to any nation who wants them, at a bargain price. Call it a reduction of carbon footprint and a plan for the twenty-second century. AND, start planning the military strike that will be needed within the next eighteen months, in semi-public, as it will almost certainly disrupt the oil supplies of China, Japan, India (?), and Europe. That is, in secret, but with lots of rumors, about 10% of them accurate.
Excuse me for a dopey conjecture, but ADE might have stumbled on something talking about Westerns dying. Other generations of Americans were weaned on Westerns and Gangster movies which were morality plays in black and white. Jimmie Cagney pretending to be a coward on the walk to the chair at the request of the priest ,his childhood friend, in “Angels with Dirty Faces” might have been cornball melodrama, but at least viewers knew who the good guys and bad guys were.
Randolph Scott and Gary Cooper were fighting evil on the side of the powerless ranchers and townspeople. Cliche ridden? Sure, but whose side are amoral, metrosexual ,politically correct twits like Ben Affleck or Leonardo Dicrappio on?
You wonder why we have a generation that condemns nothing but their own heritage and the Judeo-Christian morality that gave their ancestors a land of blessing and freedom. I watched “Beau Geste” the other day and was inspired to continue to champion virtue.
LOTM
“Doing so will marginalize the domestic pacifists and empower efforts to drive them from their tax payer funded sanctuaries. It will also demonstrate to our foreign enemies that they have “awakened a sleeping giant and filled it with a terrible resolve.”
Well, that is a great “wish” but nowadays that is just all it is.
In the coming battle to push the Taliban out of a town and area that they have been in for years, the ROE are such that all they will accomplish is killing a few die hards and letting the reminder escape to fight another day. But the Taliban won’t let it be that easy, they plan on placing civilians everywhere they can to assure that they are killed by the advancing NATO forces, so that the media and the President of Afghanistan can scream, cry and get international shock and horror at what America and it’s lackeys have done while slaughtering the poor women, children and old people in their conquest of Afghanistan.
Perceptions and Propaganda is what it is all about.
Not Honor nor Righteousness.
Papa Ray
EDIT feature has disappeared again.
Papa Ray
Well, well…it is back again. Gremlins go home.
GyLar
“What is thy soul of adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,”
Pretty much describes the entirety of Teh One.
Betcha he has never bothered to read “Henry V”
29 Josh
“ND, start planning the military strike that will be needed within the next eighteen months, in semi-public, as it will almost certainly disrupt the oil supplies of China, Japan, India (?), and Europe. That is, in secret, but with lots of rumors, about 10% of them accurate.”
You forgot to include the rest of the world.
And you neglected to say that the price of crude would skyrocket to who knows what.
$ 150.00 a barrel?
No matter, the U.S. has 80% of it’s crude supplied by other sources than the ME But the price will remain the same.
Just go back a few years and pretend that JC is president and that long lines at the gas pump are normal.
And that you will spend almost as much for gas as you do for your mortgage each month.
Or get your rusty bike out of the garage.
Papa Ray
Anton #20:
For saving priceless pieces such as The Three Conjectures as well as some of LIII’s more tieworthy explanations and other such pearls of BC wisdom, I recommend y’all go over to Software995 and download a free PDF creator emulator that enables you to print to a PDF file which can then be saved and viewed or even printed at your leisure, such as at some place where you are not paying for the ink and paper.
I use the program a lot and it works very well except on some webpages that are a bit too wide.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Supreme Führer are blustering. I am neither stunned nor impressed nor deterred nor intimidated. What you’ve got are Bronze Age barbarians playing around with their nuclear toys seeing if they can make the gods tremble. If Mahmoud expects the rest of the world to worship his penis, he should get used to disappointment.
I don’t believe that it’s the case that the Iranian person in the street has little affection for the U.S. People who have traveled there recently have said that America is loved there, perhaps more than anywhere in the world these days.
We, those of us who still believe in American exceptionalism, could possibly do a lot to keep the ball rolling toward freedom if it were facilitated in some way. That may not stop or delay the march toward Armeggadon, but then again it might.
If you kick a can hard enough (down the road) it will hit you in the back of the head.
GyLar
I think you need to get your numbers up considerably and advance your timeline.
Iran has 6000 claimed Centrifuges as of 2008, no telling how many that they have now that are not publicized.
Plus they have thousands of the newer models: Iran plans to use new centrifuge at nuclear plant that can triple their capacity to enrich nuclear fuel.
They will not have any problem getting to the point of having fuel for nukes. In fact I would bet that they are mounting them on their missiles right at this moment, but I am just one of a very few that think this is true… because building smaller nukes that fit on a missile is a very difficult task.
Of course they would not want us to know at this stage just how far along they are, but they will soon enough.
Or not, the way we find out, may be the big surprise, one that we never expected, but that they really contemplate and relish.
Papa Ray
Here’s the core problem with the “solution” as you’ve outlined it, Marie: at it’s core, it’s a fraud. They are “buying” bonds that will never be redeemed, becasue there will never be enough money. And they will be making loans that will never be repaid – and they all know it. This is how you do a bailout when you desperately want to hide the fact you are doing a bailout from your own people.
What’s more, Greece is going to promise to reduce their deficits – and in the real world, they never will because it is too politically painful. What is the EU’s recourse to fraud by a member state? None at all, and in fact kicking them out becomes impossible because to do that would be to admit that all the loans that have been made and the bonds that have been bought will be worthless as soon as they are kicked out, hurting the lender (france, germany) even more than the debtor.
They are now stuck on a path of lending and lending to not just Greece, but to all of the PIIGS.
There’s one line in a story out this morning that lets me know beyond any other that they are descending into madness and self delusion:
“It takes away the one-way bet on Greek debt by creating the possibility of an announcement of a detailed plan at any time in the future,” Luigi Speranza, an economist at BNP Paribas, said.
“If this is successful in enhancing market confidence, ultimately the bailout could not even be needed.”
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/EU-leaders-reach-deal-to-rb-4068581329.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=1&asset=&ccode=
This supposedly highly placed economist is saying that he actually believes that preteending to be doing something might save them from ever having to do anything.
Seductive reasoning, yes, always. And the shining path to ruin? Yes, always.
Papa Ray,
No argument from me on the six thousand or the advanced timeline you propose.
I live at the cusp of their known missile capability -not an optimistic prospect I’m afraid. Much discussion with my office mates today, not much to do but spin and await the order which will never come and then determine which COAs exist on the table with what capability will be left. Then, of course, are the riots that will ensue after Israel does what it must.
I could not agree more with cfbleachers .
4. cfbleachers: I’m sorry…but spending all this time looking behind us for the “source of blame” for what is happening today, at this moment…is simply the art of mooning the future.
We have known for al long time that the Persians would get where they announced they are today. But folks, it’s about GOING FORWARD. Yes, cite Georges Santayana as much as you please for he was correct but it won’t do a thing about tomorrow, unless we take action . Soon thuggish factions worldwide will have some sort of dirty bomb. The bet is that they will be islamic, and whether it is Jack and Jill children Muslims or whatever latest iteration of Osama BL comes out of the caves we will have to actually DO something. And by that I mean militarily and nuclear.
We have attempted to infiltrate Iran and over throw the current powers with a revolution that time and again has failed.
That there has been and continues to be an aversion to our nuclear preemptive option aimed at Iran is daily becoming more ludicrous as they develop nuclear muscle to spread throughout islam. islam likes the strong horse and we are acting like the circus Shetland pony.
We must preempt and destroy the Iranian facilities at minimum. The other part of the equation can wait but this part is clearly a mortal threat to the United States and the free world. While our enemies grow more powerful we are allowing our arsenal to fall into a state of fatigue.
We are not going to walk them back from their aim of world domination so continued jawboning is futile and simply allows them more time to prepare.
If we continue to hesitate and dissemble we will become under attack by more, rather than fewer enemies , embolden by our lack of national will to protect our own national interests. That will force some in this country into a Seven Days in May scenario which will save us only to lose us.
PapaRay, One of my favorite movie quotes from MIB: “A person is smart but people are dumb, panicky and dangerous.” I always equate that with violence. With the right combination of circumstances, no one will care how many civilians are killed along with your targeted enemy. Ask those who fought or lived through WWII. Japanese Americans were interned partly to protect them from attack- attacks DID occurred shortly after December 7 on innocent Americans of Japanese origin. The only thing keeping Americans from slaughtering Muslims who rally in the US, spewing hatred and seditious messages, is the tipping point. When it comes, say a dirty bomb attack or an American Beslan, it will be bloody and vicious and long overdue, IMO. People, American people rather, will only take so much.
It is easy to say that the United States needs to “man up” but how can we do that? If the mindset needed to fight and win a war with totalitarians is that exhibited by FDR and most of the American people dring WW-II then we need to walk back from here to there.
I don’t disagree LOTM…at all.
And, please don’t misread me when I say “we stop”. I think that says volumes about us as a people. But, I believe it to be true. We don’t stop out of fear of them, we stop because we won’t cross the moral moat they throw up.
Today, with the exception of a small group of Paleocons like Pat Buchanan, the America Last movement is firmly lodged in the Left and is now at the heart of the Democratic Party.
Well, I believe that the left is slouching toward America Never, but I concede the point.
Buchanan and possibly Lindbergh have problems with Jews/Israel that seeped into their worldview, I believe.
What I propose is a full court campaign to steel America that begins by honoring not just the fact of winning but the means by which we achieved victory in WW-II and the Cold War.
These points needs to be driven home relentlessly to both domestic and foreign audiences;
1. that we know how to win a war,
2. that we know are willing and able to do it,
3. that we are still a better and more civilized people after doing it.
All well and good, LOTM…but, again…we are dealing with a different brand of enemy…abroad…and at home. We need to examine those differences, in detail, to see what strategy and tactics might work best.
Seven Days in May
“Seven Days in May” was a so-so book that John Frankenheimer turned into an absolutely brilliant movie. It’s an excellent cold-war drama, made at a time when tension between this country and the Soviet Union was at boiling point. At the center of the story is President Jordan Lyman, a well-meaning, somewhat naive chief executive who has pushed through a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviets, which most of the country, and all of the military, fear the Soviets have no intention of honoring. The stage is set for a political confrontation between the president’s supporters, who feel they must back him whatever their private apprehensions, and his opponents, who fear he is selling the country out. Enter at this point a career soldier with political ambitions, General James Scott, who plans to put his enormous popularity to work in devising a scheme that he thinks will save his country, which is nothing less than a military plot to overthrow the government. However, loose lips can sink a ship, and a few chance words reach the ears of Colonel Jiggs Casey, a Marine torn between his loyalty to his general, General Scott, and his commander in chief, president Lyman. What makes a good soldier, and what makes a true patriot? That is the dilemma Casey has to come to grips with as he realizes that the clock is ticking, the plot is underway, and there are less than seven days left before something very big goes down.
The movie has minimal action and a lot of dialogue, but the tension is maintained nicely throughout, and the acting is uniformly excellent. Among the excellent cast, the standouts are Frederic March as the president, Burt Lancaster as General Scott, Kirk Douglas in one of his finest roles as Colonel Casey, and Ava Gardner, still drop-dead gorgeous, as Scott’s cast-off mistress, drowning herself in booze, self-pity and resentment. The final verbal confrontation between Casey and Scott near the movie’s end is one of the best I’ve ever witnessed on film. The movie grabs hold of you from the opening frames and keeps you riveted right to the end, all the while making you wonder, could it really happen here? Let’s hope we never find out…
Habu, What is missing re: Iranian revolution from within is galvanizing them to action. Either you fix it or we will- and if we do it, many of you will get caught in the crossfire. You may die in the revolution attempt but the odds are greater if we have to it from outside, firing in. I believe this has a lot to do with the unrest in Iran today- except the threat is coming from Isreal. With Iran vowing to destroy isreal IF/WHEN they get the bomb, and Isreal already having the bomb…. the math seems pretty simple. Only, our sitting president is a known weak horse. This does not embolden the willing.
Back in September 2008, the journal “Physics Today” ran a very good article, detailing in an in-depth technical manner, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and capabilities. I don’t know how to get the link into this comment, but for you techies here, who are into the engineering details behind Iran’s enrichment efforts, you can go the Physics Today website and search on keywords like Iran and centrifuge.
anton,
My expectation is that Obama read Henry V, admired the oratory on a technical level, was pleased with himself for doing so, and probably fixated on evidence that the beastly English had prejudices about the Scots, Irish and Welsh.
cfbleachers,
what strategy and tactics might work best
Everything I said was in the expectation that we are in agreement on the big points here and extending each others remarks. My focus was merely on proposing one way to change the narrative so that we can use those strategies and tactics that work best. We see the problem that has paralyzed our ability to effectively fight our enemies. My idea is one way to change that by publicly remembering how we did it before and then explicitly identifying the enemy in the same terms today. Other suggestions to attain the same goals are welcome.
Habu,
You have been in good form this week. Let us hope that in the worst case there will be a bi-partisan consensus among senior members of Congress that will preserve constitutional government and forestall any rash actions like those in Seven Days in May. That would mean wiring things around Pelosi and probably Reid but if need be I still think that there are enough sane people in Washington to do it and carry us safe to the other side. If any of the current SCOTUS majority are replaced by Obama then things may get much worse.
If the Syrian plains had been awash in Muslim blood in 636 perhaps there would still be a Library of Alexandria. Perhaps the Enlightenment would have occurred 900 years earlier, and perhaps the jurisdicial, philosophical and technological advances of the Greco-Roman era would have blossomed unabated.
Maybe counter factual history is a game only for fools but I cannot but see that Islam, which crushes the human spirit, makes all women slaves of men, and all men slaves of Allah is the greatest institutionalized tragedy to befall humanity. The West lost 700 years of development because of the drain it took to keep the Saracen and the Turk at bay.
The common wisdom is that the other Islamic states in the region, particularly the Sunni majority, would view a nuclear Iran as an enemy and build or buy a counterstrike deterrent. History says that is more likely that the Islamic states in the region would glom on Iranian intransigence to push harder against the Europeans for more sharia.
The Ottomans conscripted from Iran without regard to their Shia distinction. The prospect of riches and booty from the West trumped any internecine disagreements they might have had. Why would it be any different now?
Will a nuclear Iran cow or embolden the Islamist elements in Turkey? The Iraqi constitution is sharia based (as are the constitutions of the other 56 members of the OIC). Does anybody believe that Iraq’s Muslims would present any obstacle to their brothers’ push against the West?
I am often criticized for pointing to the history of blood and tears between Islam and the West as a viable model of future behavior. History is all they have. There is no glory to Islamic culture except as it existed in the past. The urge to return to that past is encapsulated into their world view in ways that Westerners can never understand.
This is an announcement that Iran has crossed the Rubicon.
As noted by others, 20% is the internationally accepted boundary between non-military “low enriched uranium” (LEU) and militarily significant “highly enriched uranium” (HEU).
It is a big “Screw You!” to the West, Israel, and the other Gulf states.
Also, most of the SWUs (separative work units) are required to take natural uranium at 0.711% U-235 to 20%. The SWUs required from 20% to the 90+% one would like for a weapon are relatively minor. A gas centrifuge facility can do either, depending on how it is piped.
I don’t understand the Iranians. The mullahs and Amiadinnerjacket are walking around with bullseyes painted on their chests. The Iranian leadership is practically begging the Israelis to launch a preemptive attack. Is this posturing purely for internal political consumption or is it 12th Iman stupidity?
Off topic but hilarious: The New York Times is pushing the new narrative that extreme cold weather is due to global warming (they’re desperate), refer to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/science/earth/11climate.html
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH and HOT IS COLD
LifeoftheMind #25:
I found it interesting that immediately after 9/11/01, as the cable news and dinosaur networks ran material on the terrorist attacks, the Discovery and History channels ran almost nonstop war documentaries. They were existing canned stuff, but it made me wonder if it was based on an evaluation of what people would want to see or a desire on someone’s part to get the country riled up.
I recall back on Thanksgiving Day 1979 I heard on my car radio that the station would start playing patriotic music. I thought “On Thanksgiving?” and tuned in when I got home. And indeed that station in LA played patriotic music for the rest of the day, interspiced with things like John Wayne’s narration “The Americans” and angry comments about the Iranians taking the Embassy staff as hostages. The DJ was even heard to say “And if you don’t like what we are playing we don’t want you listening to our station anyway!” It was a remarkable thing to hear for me, someone who had been threatened with being splattered with red paint only 5 years before. And in 1979 Jimmy Carter was in the White House.
As girl says in the song “He ain’t seen me crazy yet.”
History apparently teaches mankind nothing. Peace, as Patrick Henry said so eloquently,” Gentlemen may cry, “Peace, Peace — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun!”
It is in vain to extenuate the matter.
Peace is the interstitial hiatus between the history of man at war, and make no mistake, Afghanistan may be called a war, but it isn’t close to what we are facing in what, five, ten years? Yet even at this hour of great national peril we lack in abundance the fortitude and courage to face a nuclear war on a small scale today when tomorrow it will surely involve many more adversaries.
Those who give reason to the folly of postponing or hoping a wholesale change will occur within islam are fools. Islam has been and continues to be a killing philosophy for every culture it challenges and succeeds in dominating, and the whole of islam will coalesce around the first notable victory over the West . There will be no Islamic faction that will not feed on the carcass of a fallen, prostrate, West.
wws, so far your article is right, the EU will not buy greec debt, because each state is responsable of its gestion, and besides, no german nor french taxes payors want tosuffer for that the gGreecs still carry on “la belle vie”
Othewise the BCE (central bank of EU in frankfort)could do it, but isn’t allowed because of the EU statute, EU isn’t a federation of states, and so far it hadn’t a common economical policy, actually if such a governation had existed, the greec problem wouldn’t have occured, a “very” federal bank would have monitored the states finances, and Greece would have never bought credit out side the eurozone, which is the cause of its problems.
an excellent analyse of “Charles Wyplosz, professeur d’économie à l’Institut de hautes Études internationales et du développement de Genève” explains the stakes here
http://tinyurl.com/create.php
the solution would be an intervention of the FMI, which is still regarded as a degrading image, but hopefully that the realist persons that are concerned by this crisis will overpass their repulsion.
Now the Greec debt isn’t that awful for a global recession, each state suffers of the same illness, besides UK and or the US are very near of the same level of debt
you should try to translate this article, as it expains why suddenly it was a panic among the markets, it is just a question of confidence and of rumors
Also this expert doesn’t believe that that will affect the EU, just that the euro rating will lower, and that this is good for our exportations
sorry the link is emty, here again
http://tinyurl.com/yzbpe9b
Everything I said was in the expectation that we are in agreement on the big points here and extending each others remarks.
We are in agreement on the big points,LOTM…and I don’t have much, if any disagreement on the little ones either.
My focus is on the rules of engagement with this particular enemy. If they have sleeper cells here, and they have the ability to weaponize nuclear material…then we have a problem that requires a sea change in our mentality.
35. RWE: That is a great program, I have been using it for some years now, very handy. I will also confess that I’m at work right now, although I only read BC when waiting for a system to boot up or a call to go through, and I have printed an article or two in the past.
LOTM, I would have thought that Obama would have been drawn to Othello first.
W: What is the significance of the 20%?
20% is the maximum enrichment level allowed by the NPT. Hence, there is no violation of the NPT at this time.
anton@20. Does anybody here know if the uranium refinement gets easier or harder as it goes along? Is the hard part getting to 20% or going from 20% to 90%?
The much harder part is getting to 20%. Consider that natural uranium is 0.71% U235. The product assay has to be increased by a factor of (roughly) 30 to get to 20%, compared with an additional factor of only 4 to get from 20% to the grade of 80% used in the Hiroshima bomb.
It’s more complicated than merely a ratio of product assays. Production depends of the capacity of the enrichment cascade, measured in separative work units (SWUs), and the assays of the feed, product and waste streams. A calculator for comparing reactor SWU requirements with weapons SWU requirements is available at:
http://fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearcalculators/nuclear_cal.html
Westerns are gone because women detest them. Any movie made now has to be minimum acceptable to the female audience, and women movie-goers do not like, black and white heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, stories about duty, honor, and patriotism.
Women like: stories about sexy bad guys, dominant men “tamed” by hot women, social climbing, and the like. This is why you get stuff like “Dexter” (a “hot, sexy serial killer who enjoys killing but only kills bad guys”) and vampires and that stuff instead of Westerns.
Culturally, the hard-shift left by women is a function of women no longer wanting/needing the messy compromises of traditional marriage and family, and being single for much longer, with much greater hard-left social climbing and consumerism.
John Wayne (and Humphrey Bogart) belong to a “dinosaur generation” of guys that women find icky anyway. Better a tortured, angst driven semi-bad guy they can “tame” than a guy who is for better or worse, fully formed forever, and they can merely accompany.
For reasons of pure intuiton (and possibly wishful thinking) I still think that a happy ending to all this is possible. History throws up these fleeting opportunities — the miracle moments. But these windows are open only to those who are waiting and ready to take the chance. Would the Berlin Wall have fallen with a Jimmy Carter-type in the White House?
President Obama must judge the tide. Can he do it?
@ #61.
Going out on a short stout limb: NO.
President Obama must judge the tide. Can he do it?
Unfortunately Wretchard, I fear that he will do this on the day after I get my perpetual motion machine working. And to tell you the truth, progress on my energy for nothing machine seems to have stalled.
Let’s just keep hoping because surely change will come.
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures
So on the hope of a miracle ostensibly whose predicate involves islam becoming something it has never shown the slightest inclination to be we rest our hope?
Lord, what fools these mortals be !
A Midsummer Nights Dream Act 3, scene 2
Personally I don’t want to see President Obama face a full blown crisis. Within a world crisis there are enough landmines to blow up a lot of things. Even the most sagacious statesmen are apt to misstep and the consequences are staggering. Kennedy screwed up in Vienna and the result was the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which JFK acquitted himself fairly well. Back in 1973, Israel was nearly annihilated by a series of mistakes both Israeli and American. They ignored warnings of the Yom Kippur offensive because it might have meant doing things which would irk Washington. But later, with Israel on the verge of defeat, Washington sent them ECM packages and logistical support which may have averted an Israeli “Samson” type nuclear strike on Arab capitals. There’s one story that an Israeli strike package was being readied for Moscow.
We owe much more to chance and miracle than we are willing to admit.
The best predictor of how a person will act in a crisis is how they’ve acted so far. Even were a new Henry Kissinger and a new JFK suddenly to materialize and take up abode in the White House; even if a latter day Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan to show up, still there would be mistakes. Nimitiz ordered Peleliu. Even the legends can make mistakes.
So if things get really hairy and that 3 o’clock in the morning call actually comes, remember that there will be no teleprompter at the President’s bedside. Every crisis has dangers. The only preparation is to have thought things through before hand so as to be ready to take advantage of every opportunity to bring your strategy forward under the principle of calculated risk.
Let’s see what happens.
Not to play semantic games, wretchard…can he do it? Or will he do it?
I would answer no to both questions.
Let’s address the first question. Can he take bold action and seize the moment? If we are to look at opportunities for him to take bold, corrective action in the past year or even during the campaign…(Georgia, Gates, Christmas in Detroit, Ft. Hood), is there anything that suggests a pattern?
If yes, what has the pattern been? Even the silly Gates affair.
Campaign instincts and “rigging” outcomes with a complicit and compliant media are one thing. Dealing with shrewd and vicious real world adversaries is different. Campaigning against feckless Republicans is playing checkers.
Dealing with a nuclear Iran, is chess at the master level.
Will he do it?
Not in a million years.
I still believe the first nuclear strike is more likely to be an EMP weapon. First, some of the effect depends less on yield than on position at detonation. The Iranians don’t have citybuster fission-fusion-fission weapons, figuring that they are duplicating the Pakistani system to the bolt selection the most they are likely to have is a boosted fission weapon, which limits their yield. Second, they have the capability to get a relatively crude device (assuming they haven’t mastered two-point implosion and created enough plutonium) into position with their missile capability. Third, the after-effects of high-altitude EMPs degrade satellite operations, which hurts Iran less than Israel or the United States. Fourth, it’s the most passive-aggressive use of a nuclear device. It breaks stuff, not people, so the question becomes how to respond. You can respond in-kind, which will peeve all the iPod owners in Iran, but probably not kill the government’s shielded systems. Or, you can go for the airburst at 1500 AGL and kill hundreds of thousands at which point you are the bad guy.
The Israelis are as, if not more, capable of the same thing. They have satellite launch capability and boosted fission weapons. If they have intel about the power supply to the nuclear processing facilities, an EMP may be able to shut those down for a protracted period of time, not to mention the damage to the civilian economy.
It’s nuking, and it’s not. It’s highly-disruptive but not immediately lethal, and does not irradiate the population. A ground or low-altitude detonation clearly marks one side as the Bad Guy and one as the Good Guy. An EMP can be very effective at messing with an enemy, but Iran will always be outnumbered by the rest of the world if it comes to nuclear exchange. An EMP is a way to demonstrate nuclear power and attack an enemy without necessarily inducing the nuclear exchange that Iran is going to lose.
JMO
“Personally I don’t want to see President Obama face a full blown crisis.”
But he will. That is inevitable.
And he will fail miserably. That is also inevitable.
If there are any plans or preparations to be made, make them on that basis.
The scope of the failure is all that remains to be seen.
Whiskey #60: “Any movie made now has to be minimum acceptable to the female audience…”
And not just women. Even TV series now derive significant income from overseas sales and that is a factor in most of their production decisions.
Going back to 1944, the rest of the world could look at both our military and our movies and could hardly escape thinking “Don’t want to mess with them people…” I doubt they think that about the chick flicks of today or those that show the US military as the real threat.
Anton #58: Yes, I was at work too. And I’m the guy who buys most of the printer cartridges and paper for the office. Not that the fact implies anything….
If there is such a thing as the truth
and the Sultan of Swat was Babe Ruth
then on whether Iran
will cause shit to hit fan
I’ll be looking to Walt to say sooth.
The situating of Good Guys and Bad Guys has already occurred. We could trace it back several millennia but let’s start with something more current, say 9-11. If one needs to go further there are sites that list totally unprovoked attacks on civilian populations by islam in the thousands .
But let’s not pick nits. The USA knows that most of the world harbors a totally irrational hatred for our freedoms, culture, and policies, yet we are, and have been, the greatest giving nation to the world that has ever existed. That makes no difference to tribal countries. We wear the white hats, we have protected the freedom of mankind for the past century, so no mistaking who the good guys are.
Using a nuclear device is not a world ending event as we will find out soon enough at our expense should we not preempt. I fail to comprehend those who chose to ignore the aggression aimed directly at us via proxy wars or attacks on our NATO allies, or more to the point the now gone World Trade Center Towers. And never forget they were attacked TWICE in attempts to bring them down.
How much validation do we need from an organization such as the UN? None, it is as horrendously dysfunctional organization that is simply a platform for anti-American hatred.
We have nuclear devices that can handle the situation and at some point we will be forced to use them. Waiting until after we absorb punishment from a nuclear device isn’t going to change the truth of what this country is …. Mankind’s greatest hope for freedom and liberty.
A mellow love story of thermonuclear war
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90SIuISIVB8
Wretchard #61: Fabulous lines. Shakespeare is an inexhaustible source of wisdom.
Of course we should remember the context. In “Julius Caesar” (Act IV, Scene iii) these were the words of Brutus to Cassius before the battle at Philippi. Which they lost.
One more irony for the TOTUS to ponder.
@46 Habu
Funny you should mention “Seven Days in May” – I just watched it again the other day. Without a doubt, it’s an under-rated classic, a perfect movie really, for all the reasons you mention, as well as the fact its excellent script was written by the one and only Rod Serling.
@52 Eggplant
The Iranians ARE crazy, but if you think about it, they’re just following the path they charted 30 years ago.
Obama will NOT directly use US military force to prevent Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which is the only way we have to stop them.
Israel can’t use its nukes to stop Iran, which is the only way they have to stop Iran.
Russia and China will not stop blocking effective International sanctions against rogue nations. Their actions are intentional and part of a long-tern geo-political strategy against the US.
The only thing that’s going to change is that Iran will get the bomb.
Once that happens, it will change everything, though not immediately, rather it will set in motion a predictable chain of actions, reactions and events.
Once Iran gets the bomb, nuclear proliferation will spread across the M.E.
Iran will not directly hit the US with nuclear missile attacks.
It’s 50/50 as to whether Iran will directly attack Israel with nukes, as they’re not rational when it comes to the Jews, but if they do, Israel will not “go quietly into the night”.
When Iran goes nuclear, it’s 50/50 whether it will “go to their head” and lead them to seize the Strait of Hormuz.
That would instantly become another Cuban Missile Crisis. If Obama is President the mullahs may calculate that he will do nothing beyond bluster. They might even be right in that calculation but the West cannot economically survive the strain such an event would place upon the Global economy. $150-$300 a barrel oil prices will collapse the West’s economies. Whether immediately or later, that level of economic disruption leads to nuclear confrontation.
If Iran uses its nuclear capabilities solely to intimidate and raise its status within Islam, the increased nuclear proliferation among unstable third world nations will result in Islamic terrorist groups getting their hands on nukes, either by buying nukes, be given them or stealing them from corrupt regimes.
Strategically and tactically, the US is completely vulnerable to a covert nuclear terrorist attack upon any one of our port cities.
That means that the following major cities are exceptionally vulnerable: Boston, NYC, Washington DC, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, San Diego, L.A., San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, St Louis, and Chicago.
We’ll lose at least one, possibly more and face economic collapse and near-permanent martial law.
Given the circumstances, the mind-set of Obama, the mullahs and radical Islam and the rampant denial within the West… the predictability of these ‘conjectures’ is as logically inevitable as Wretchard’s “Three Conjectures”.
It’s no longer a matter of if but of when and the specifics of how.
Seems to me the implied threat is that “we” (Iran) have copius quantitiies of nuclear material and maybe it aint ready for prime time but it is ready to dispense world-wide using creative cloud seeding in a city near you.
That would be shocking if it weren’t true.
On the bright side, it seems that fears of a Nuclear Winter are probably irrational, as we now know there was no science behind those ideas whatsoever, just some random conjecture by scientists who didn’t like nukes anyway.
the late Michael Crichton spoke about this here:
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
The whole thing is worth reading, but the Nuclear Winter portion I excerpt:
———————–
In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences reported on “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations” but the report estimated the effect of dust from nuclear blasts to be relatively minor. In 1979, the Office of Technology Assessment issued a report on “The Effects of Nuclear War” and stated that nuclear war could perhaps produce irreversible adverse consequences on the environment. However, because the scientific processes involved were poorly understood, the report stated it was not possible to estimate the probable magnitude of such damage.
Three years later, in 1982, the Swedish Academy of Sciences commissioned a report entitled “The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon,” which attempted to quantify the effect of smoke from burning forests and cities. The authors speculated that there would be so much smoke that a large cloud over the northern hemisphere would reduce incoming sunlight below the level required for photosynthesis, and that this would last for weeks or even longer.
The following year, five scientists including Richard Turco and Carl Sagan published a paper in Science called “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions.” This was the so-called TTAPS report, which attempted to quantify more rigorously the atmospheric effects, with the added credibility to be gained from an actual computer model of climate.
At the heart of the TTAPS undertaking was another equation, never specifically expressed, but one that could be paraphrased as follows:
Ds = Wn Ws Wh Tf Tb Pt Pr Pe… etc
(The amount of tropospheric dust=# warheads x size warheads x warhead detonation height x flammability of targets x Target burn duration x Particles entering the Troposphere x Particle reflectivity x Particle endurance…and so on.)
The similarity to the Drake equation is striking. As with the Drake equation, none of the variables can be determined. None at all. The TTAPS study addressed this problem in part by mapping out different wartime scenarios and assigning numbers to some of the variables, but even so, the remaining variables were-and are-simply unknowable. Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn, creating particles of what kind, and for how long. No one knows the effect of local weather conditions on the amount of particles that will be injected into the troposphere. No one knows how long the particles will remain in the troposphere. And so on.
And remember, this is only four years after the OTA study concluded that the underlying scientific processes were so poorly known that no estimates could be reliably made. Nevertheless, the TTAPS study not only made those estimates, but concluded they were catastrophic.
According to Sagan and his co-workers, even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months. The greatest volcanic eruptions that we know of changed world temperatures somewhere between .5 and 2 degrees Centigrade. Ice ages changed global temperatures by 10 degrees. Here we have an estimated change three times greater than any ice age. One might expect it to be the subject of some dispute.
But Sagan and his co-workers were prepared, for nuclear winter was from the outset the subject of a well-orchestrated media campaign. The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.
This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold.
Obama percieves FOX News, Sarah Palin, and Scott Brown as the real enemies of this country. A nuclear Iran….not so much!
The game’s afoot, cried Sherlock Holmes
Percentage they’re at twenty
Dear Watson now you will recall
When seven percent was plenty
I wager Moriarty is
Behind this foul adventure
What once was thought a toothless land
Has now a nuclear denture
Calm down old fellow, Watson sighed
LeStrade is on the caper
According to this morning’s Times
And every other paper
Ah, Mrs. Hudson, come right in
Our lunch, we thank you madam
Now Holmes we mustn’t rush right in
And think they have the atom
Quite right, old fellow, this I know
They haven’t reached conduction
Whereby the atoms transfer heat
A crude but sage deduction
But one day Holmes, they’ll have the bomb
And then what will we do
First lunch, old boy, is that the door
Ah, Bibi, right on cue
Greifer – 77
Overhyped to be sure but let’s not diminish the potentially harmful effects to life on a short term basis. I have no interest in being a tourist in downtown Chernobyl nor do I care to pick out zoomies from my cornflakes.
I would also point out that our collective (formal) intelligence organizations since their inception haven’t EVER come close to predicting when a country will acquire an atomic and now nuclear device.
They all make assessments but can anyone tell me a case where they’ve come within say, five years of being accurate?
If obama fails to move then he’d better quit sending his attack dogs to Israel threatening them from preempting simply because he is totally unqualified to run any aspect of this country or be a “world leader” Contrary to one contributors evaluation Israel cannot absorb more than a nuke or two at the most, and few would argue that it is a moral imperative that the first responsibility of a government is to protect its citizens and their culture. Certainly the USA would not, and is not (according to the latest polling) going to brook a puling domestic or foreign policy.
For those who would willingly sacrifice NYC or Wash, D.C., or any US city from an enemy who has continually threatened to wipe us out once they acquire the means isn’t rational. An I would say they need to review some Alexandr Solzhenitsyn or Viktor Frankl.
Absorbing a first strike is a needless act simply to secure the high moral ground we already occupy is insane.
…but let’s not diminish the potentially harmful effects to life on a short term basis. I have no interest in being a tourist in downtown Chernobyl nor do I care to pick out zoomies from my cornflakes
First off that is perhaps in view of the scope of this thread one of the best solipsistic statements I have read. Secondly life is a very short term proposition.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come
from Julius Ceasar
…later..
82 Habu “solipsistic”
Perhaps Habu. I don’t think “nuclear winter” is proven theory but can’t quite get over the idea that it is a good thing to start lobbing nuclear devices around for effect. Perhaps we disagree but to paint me as an isolated loon doesn’t quite add up either, there is plenty of that to go around as it is, less we all start crappin in the sandbox.
Chavez has plans En video: Revela que “vamos a hacer nuestra energía nuclear” y se solidariza con Ahmadineyad
Geoffrey Britain: Once Iran gets the bomb, nuclear proliferation will spread across the M.E.
That assumes that Iran will stand pat like Israel is standing pat now. But it would be in Iran’s interest to have a monopoly on a Middle East Muslim Bomb (leaving Pakistan out of the equation for now). All the options involving air strikes and commandos that Israel has now are open to Iran as well, plus the additional option of Hezbollah/Hamas operatives willing to die on future raids on behalf of their Iranian handlers.
$150-$300 a barrel oil prices will collapse the West’s economies.
It would also collapse China and Japan’s economy. Demand would fall off a cliff, and prices would be right back where they are now, except that none of the Gulf States nor Iran would sell their oil. Even if Iran held the Strait of Hormuz, they have to get their tankers through the North Arabian Sea, and that’s our carrier’s playground, supplied through al-Masirah, Oman. And that would lead to a collapse of their regimes. The only ones who would benefit are Russia and Venezuela with increased market share as they fill the gap (presuming that all OPEC curtailment would be off the table).
If Iran uses its nuclear capabilities solely to intimidate and raise its status within Islam, the increased nuclear proliferation among unstable third world nations will result in Islamic terrorist groups getting their hands on nukes, either by buying nukes, be given them or stealing them from corrupt regimes.
With great power comes great responsibility. The West must make clear that Iran and/or Saudi Arabia and/or Syria would be held accountable for any rogue nucdet, on a shoot-first-ask-questions-later basis. Terrorists light off one of those babies in Tel Aviv, who doubts that Tehran and Riyadh would not be flattened minutes later?
Why would Iran seize the Straits of Hormuz, to charge tolls? I can’t see that working for them.
I think the threat to the Straits is that they would be completely closed to all, by sinking wrecks in the channels or whatnot, but that would block most Iranian oil shipments as well as Saudi, Kuwaiti, Iraqi, etc. Some would still go out over pipelines and trucks – at $300/barrel and more.
Iran might do that if attacked, or WE might close the Straits to them, as painful as that would be to China et al, except insofar as Arab oil still flowed.
My preferred solution is a combined US/Chinese force to control the Straits, if we can’t get the UN to endorse it. Until and unless Iran gives up their enrichment programs, etc.
@84 Annoy Mouse
Welcome to the dark side…solipsistic, risible, repulsive, we’re all here
I think a crisis is a foregone conclusion.
Consider the objective of the Iranian leadership: STAY IN POWER. Now, various rhetoric aside, the Iranian leadership MUST HAVE MONEY. To pay the urban poor and the basij and the IRGC. This is not optional. This is mandatory for their very survival (they will be shot if they give up power and know it — things have gone too far).
So how do they get money? Increased sales of caviar, rugs, and almonds? Unlikely? Increased production of oil? Not likely, given their unfavorable climate for foreign direct investment which in any case takes a decade to improve production. Besides, Iraq has increased production that promises to lower the world price of oil, absent demand.
No, what the regime needs is to sell their oil, NOW, at massively inflated prices. Around $200 a barrel should do it. For that, they need to STOP Saudi production, and new Iraqi production, dead in their tracks. While being able to sell theirs.
This means no sinking ships in the straight of Hormuz, or general war, but rather overt nuclear intimidation and pressure to make the Saudis come to bear without an active hot war zone making sale of Iranian oil impossible.
Nukes are perfect for this. It is why Iran wants them in the first place.
A new oil crisis is thus almost guaranteed, short of China marching through Central Asia with cannon fodder to simply seize Iran (and its valuable … women along with oil for its own use). Persian women were known for their beauty, and China has 24 million eternal bachelors. This in and of itself of course would be a huge crisis.
But Obama is guaranteed to face an oil shock crisis. Spare capacity in Venezuela, Nigeria, Mexico, and Russia are non-existent and many of these nations hostile to the West, and desiring high oil prices. It would take decades for oil shale and tar sands to provide any appreciable replacement for Saudi Arabia.
So what would the response of Obama be to oil suddenly zooming up to $200 a barrel and gas at $15 a gallon? Inflate your tires, walk and bike more, recycle, be “green” and the rest of that stuff. Jimmy Carter squared, with a “you are racist if you don’t like me” serving on the side, full on with Rev. Wright. A Republican House would certainly impeach Obama, there’s bound to be one scandal or another that could be made to fit. Making conviction an issue for the Senate, and choices of public life or “principle” for Dems. Biden could be found medically unfit, and a suitable caretaker.
I don’t think America will tolerate Jimmy Carter redux with 22% real unemployment followed by oil shocks pushing that number to 45%. We are talking about half the nation out of work — revenues crashing. America would be forced to remove Obama (and Biden) and whack Iran to get oil moving again at $100 a barrel.
Obama would have moves too. His only willingness to fight is White guys in America. His own move would be to suspend elections and part of the constitution as a national emergency. Threatening the Supreme Court to go along. It would be an open question how well that would work with 45% of the people out of work, but it would be sure to break down along predictable racial lines.
Obama is underwater now, principally because about 22% of America is out of work. Meanwhile Iran’s leadership MUST HAVE oil at $200 a barrel or so to pay its goon squads and urban poor rent-a-mobs. Someone’s going to have go.
I’d say a crisis is all but guaranteed.
Little Boy worked in-efficiently — but effectively — with enrichment of 80%.
The easiest enrichment zone is bringing 20% up to 80% as the mass transfer headache is minimal and you are not yet really climbing the wall of 90% enrichment.
In the public domain there is an endless effort to mislead — only the American public that is — since the Iranians already have the critical information. Hence the deception only fools the American citizenry. Faking them out permits the powers that be to get themselves into even deeper trouble since the only thing that’s going to get politicians off the dime is public outrage.
It is far more expensive to enrich natural ore up to 3% than to take it up to 20% from 3%. Going from 20% to 80% is a walk in the park. The essential cost element is the mass-transfer problem. At the beginning of the cascade the flow is choked with inerts — ie U238 as hexa-fluoride gas at over 100 degrees Centigrade. Because the separation is so feeble it is economically imperative to process the gas stream until its U235 component drops below 0.4%. This depleted Uranium is then available for anti-tank penetrators and such. Only the difference: 0.3% of the starting hexa-fluoride is actually extracted from the blend and available to flow up the cascade. There will be more centrifuges working on slightly depleted gas than on the natural concentration. Just how far down the chain one goes is based on many, many factors; but processing concentrations below 0.4% is brutally expensive.
There is a delay time as the bottom cascade echelon has to ramp up enough material at a stable rate so as to permit the next echelon to feed properly.
Mildly concentrated Uranium makes for easy conversion towards Pu 239 in either a Hanford style graphite converter or a Candu style converter. In either case, the simplest design just dumps the heat — no attempt is made to generate power. So, there’s no need to tie into the power grid, nor size alternators towards energy output, nor maintain any attempt at steady-state power production. Iran’s ‘research’ reactors fit this model perfectly.
There are tales of Russian experts assisting the Mullahs — so it’s likely that simple designs such as Fat Man and Little Boy are absolutely NOT what the regime is building towards. Instead, one must assume that they are targeting late 50′s to mid 60′s weapon designs. If so, it is reasonable to expect Tehran to move directly to thermo-nuclear warheads. The passage of a half century means that computer-controlled machining superior to the best we had under Kennedy is now an off-the-shelf item. It is crazy to think that HEU is intended for Little Boy. Instead, it’s to be used in W-89 style warheads.
This is what the world is facing. HEU is the preferred booster in W-88/W-89 designs. So that’s what they’re going for.
All of the other trick isotopes are in pilot production and have been for years.
The true use of heavy water is to play with tritium. Consider that a done deal.
Hence this announcement is a perfect storm of crisis — and the media and the government can’t level with us.
With great power comes great responsibility. The West must make clear that Iran and/or Saudi Arabia and/or Syria would be held accountable for any rogue nucdet, on a shoot-first-ask-questions-later basis. Terrorists light off one of those babies in Tel Aviv, who doubts that Tehran and Riyadh would not be flattened minutes later?
I agree, T. For a while now I’ve thought that this approach is probably the best we can make of a bad situation. Announce, from as loud and public a megaphone as possible, exactly what cities and facilities in the ME will be pulverized if X or Y is done to us. No one could then claim that the consequences were not spelled out with pristine clarity beforehand, or that the reaction after X or Y should they come to pass is some kind of kneejerk reaction.
The problem, and the reason why this won’t work under current circumstances, is that the U.S. would have to mean it, and everyone would have to understand that we mean it. Unfortunately “meaning it” currently depends on which party is in power in Washington. Both our allies and our enemies realize that the political winds in the US can shift every 4 or even 2 years. America does not project a united front abroad, or a consistent foreign policy that can be counted on to be “thus” 5 or 10 years down the road. The disunity and the wavering have and will continue to cost us (and others) dearly.
Obama’s National Defence Review ignores Iran and Islam in favour of… climate change!
BW/91; –they forgot to tell us that the more tolerant we are, the more we are certain to have to tolerate.
***
Walt/79; to compliment your work is to repeat many repeatings –but i have a new one for ye –re how good you’re getting –not just in the mechanics but the atmosphere –it’s called the ”cold open” in case you didn’t know. I know, because i just read the Ambrose Bierce wiki –
blert @ 90: Mildly concentrated Uranium makes for easy conversion towards Pu 239 in either a Hanford style graphite converter or a Candu style converter. In either case, the simplest design just dumps the heat — no attempt is made to generate power. So, there’s no need to tie into the power grid, nor size alternators towards energy output, nor maintain any attempt at steady-state power production. Iran’s ‘research’ reactors fit this model perfectly.
Did not know that. Ugh. And Pu is bad enough in unexploded forms.
whiskey @ 89: Obama is underwater now, principally because about 22% of America is out of work
And with the unemployment, social security is now operating in the red, years ahead of schedule. Good news from all over.
–
Y’know, I hate to dump this on the tail of an OT thread, but I wonder if we’re already seeing the shape of the economy for the next twenty years. That is, the fed prints money, feeds it into capital structures and into bottom-up payments, and – nothing bad happens. This would require tearing up most of the economics books and theory from the last three hundred years, but hey, hope and change! Or, there might be some convoluted reasons within orthodox theory about why that works, as far as it works, which is going on at least twelve months now, if not since the last US trade surplus in 1977, or whenever it was I looked up and posted a few days ago. Sort of a super-jumbo ponzi scheme, no doubt, works as long as nobody notices the emperor is naked – but no, I think, just maybe, it’s not quite that. Then again, maybe it is.
Blert,
How hard is it to make the rest of the bomb — the xray implosion part — without testing it? The Paks haven’t tested anything above a few kilotons, which suggests to me that they’re testing their initiators rather than the whole package. In theory, they could fly a three-stage weapon to Saudi Arabia, and even if it’s not a megaton-class explosion a well-aimed kiloton bomb at Abqaiq or Ras Tammun is still enough. But if you’re going to put a three-stage weapon on a missile and fire it at another nuclear power, you’d think you’d want to full-power test something like that first.
That’s why I think a boosted fission is about the most they’ll do without a big underground test. That seems relatively simple — inject tritium & deuterium into the pit, getting you from tens of kilotons to hundreds. I am by no means an engineer, but this seems to have fewer moving parts and design requirements than a three-stage weapon. We worked on that with unlimited budget and it took us 8 years to go from Trinity to Mike. I guess it’s easier to do something knowing it’s been done, and there’s no reason for them to reinvent the wheel the same way we did, but with all the headaches we’re having just maintaining our stockpile (the “Fogbank” issue with the W88 springs to mind) of high-yield deliverables, it does beg the question of whether they have the infrastructure to pull it off.
Some of these comments make say Hum? This well published statement by Ahmedinajad, and published by the WaPo, that Iran is only at the 20% enrichment level is very curious.
If I were a practitioner of Taqiyya and I just happen to have 40 kilos of weapons grade uranium I would loudly announce to the world that I have only 20% pure uranium and I had no intention of purify it further…Then as my opponents relaxed I would nuke Israel.
Josh/95 part 2; with wage-and-price controls, and some sort of cumpulsory labor and production laws to keep goods and services rolling, sure it could work. In fact, that’s what Obam is counting on –but we haven’t had a test yet –the test will be inflation, which itself can’t ignite in this deflationary unemployment + weak demand lull –the new dollars have to leave the banking system and enter the M2 money supply before they can push/pull prices. But i have the same reverie time to time –”what if experience and information create a social compact to agree on the value of a paper greenback?”
Westerns are gone because women detest them. Any movie made now has to be minimum acceptable to the female audience, and women movie-goers do not like, black and white heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, stories about duty, honor, and patriotism.
Women like: stories about sexy bad guys, dominant men “tamed” by hot women, social climbing, and the like. This is why you get stuff like “Dexter” (a “hot, sexy serial killer who enjoys killing but only kills bad guys”) and vampires and that stuff instead of Westerns.
John Wayne (and Humphrey Bogart) belong to a “dinosaur generation” of guys that women find icky anyway. Better a tortured, angst driven semi-bad guy they can “tame” than a guy who is for better or worse, fully formed forever, and they can merely accompany.
Westerns are not an automatic hit with large numbers of guys, either, whiskey. They are a rarified genre, like musicals, and like musicals, they are an acquired taste for most people. I happen to love Westerns but even I, a classic film buff since I was a teenager, did not “get” Westerns until about 12 years ago, when I watched “The Searchers” for about the fourth time and it finally clicked what exactly it was I was watching (something along the lines of, “holy cr#p, this is an *awesome* film!!!”).
I am currently teaching an Intro to Film class for the fifth time at a Catholic university (my PT 2nd job). At the end of each semester, I hand out a survey asking the students to rate the required films, so that I can adjust both the film list and how I teach the films accordingly.
Last fall, I had 23 students in my class — 14 guys and 9 girls. (60% guys IOW)
Without explaining my exact scoring method, because it is not relevant for this post, here are the rankings of the films that everyone watched for my class last semester. Each film was discussed and analyzed to some degree. The higher the score, the more popular the film. The actual scores will give you some idea as to the range of popularity (ie how the films stack up against one another). This particular semester, the highest possible score a film could get would have been 46; the lowest possible score, a -46. I did not have any films score in the negative this time around (an improvement over past semesters … I made the big mistake of teaching “Cabaret” two semesters ago and it was so thoroughly hated by so many of the students that it became a running joke for the rest of the semester).
Anyway here are the scores. Remember, 46 would represent a “perfect” film:
The Shawshank Redemption – 42
Schindler’s List – 41
The Godfather, 1 and 2 – 39
Rocky – 35
Casablanca – 32
Groundhog Day – 32
Jaws – 31
Some Like It Hot – 31
When Harry Met Sally – 30
Psycho – 30
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – 28
It’s a Wonderful Life – 27
On the Waterfront – 27
Tootsie – 25
To Kill a Mockingbird – 24
Hotel Rwanda – 23
Chinatown – 21
Roman Holiday – 21
Unforgiven – 15
The Apartment – 12
High Noon – 6
The individual ratings on both “High Noon” and “Unforgiven” were not polarized, which one would expect if the theory of stark gender differences in reaction to the genre were true — i.e. guys rating it very high and girls rating it very low. Instead these films just didn’t receive nearly as many of the “liked it a lot” responses that the top-ranked films did … ie they tended to get more lukewarm responses.
My personal take on how younger people react to Westerns, based on what I’ve seen in teaching this film course, is that the genre tends to be alien to them — the setting, the characters, the conflicts all seem somehow to be a sort of frozen, distant past, and thus irrelevant to the kids’ lives today. This, in spite of the genre introduction I give explaining what Westerns are about and what they have to say about the American identity.
I’m wondering if an updated Western like “Gran Torino” would seem more relevant and break out of the mummified museum-like casing that the historically set Westerns seem to be trapped in.
Also note that “Butch Cassidy” does tend to rate pretty high, and from the responses I can say does appeal to both genders (the surveys are anonymous, but the handwriting is always a giveaway to the gender, and if I really needed to I could match the survey handwriting to handwriting on the final exam and thus identify the author of each survey … I’ve just never needed to). I’ve had female students rank “Butch Cassidy” as one of their top 2 favorite films of the entire semester. Attribute the chick appeal to what you will. All I can say is that it differs from the other Westerns I teach in at least three obvious ways: It is a very non-bloody Western as Westerns go … it has a lot of humor … and it has great eye candy in Newman and Redford.
The biggest lesson I get from teaching this class it that these students will respond to quality films when such films are presented to them. I have had a student “discover” Billy Wilder in my course, go gonzo and start watching every film of Wilder he could get his hands on. Another saw “Shawshank” for the first time in my course and told me she loved it so much she watched it four more times during the semester, and got her family to watch it. Another came up to me after we just watched “Jaws” a couple weeks ago and said (her eyebrows still in arch mode) how intense it was … she’d never seen it before. This semester, one of the guys told me he watched “Casablanca” with his dad (his dad’s favorite film, so his dad was pretty excited to share it with him), and he (the student) did not know until watching that so many famous quotes he’d always heard came from THIS film. (“Now you know why it’s rated by the WGA as the #1 screenplay of all time,” I replied.)
The potential power of storytelling in films, and their ability to impact & influence & stir emotions (which is why young people love movies, I think … films push the button of buttons for youth) is unmatched by almost any other artistic medium today. When I see how *hungry* these kids get in response to good films (and I mean good in terms of content and morality, not just technique), and how these films allow the students to connect with their parents when they sit down to watch them together, it really hacks me off that so much sludge and nihilism is being pumped out of Hollywood these days. The waste, the sheer disgusting waste of it all … so much power for good, being used for such low and filthy ends.
One of the guys on last semester’s survey suggested that I show a war film. Now THAT is a conundrum … finding a war film that (A) will connect with them and not come across like a museum piece (as the Westerns tend to, alas), and (B) is not an unfortunately typical Hollywood bash-the-military fest.
If we want to reclaim our culture, and especially bring young people into that project, it is going to have to involve storytelling. That will necessarily involve film & video. Which is why I don’t consider teaching film (the way I approach it, at any rate) a pointless activity. Keep the old stories alive, retell them in new settings if necessary, but for God’s sake don’t let these kids forget who we are and where we came from.
Movie, TV and computer screens are our modern camp fires. And it is around these camp fires that our cultural memories will either be passed on or lost forever. (*shudder*)
P.S.
The supposedly icky-to-girls Bogart/Casablanca got only 1 mildly negative response (one student rated it “didn’t care for it” … everyone else had positive responses). So at least 8 of the 9 girls in last semester’s class (and possibly 9 of 9) liked it. I found it interesting that of all the “classic-classic” films we watched (ie from 1960 on back) that this one not only rated the highest of that type but was #5 overall. Not bad at all for a B&W, which they tend to have a sort of bias against. Looks like “Casablanca” can still hold its own IOW, even with today’s college kids in a 200-level course.
Go Bogie.
Weapons testing by Iran is occurring in
Korea; that’s missiles and nukes.
The design of a layered-cake is very simple IF someone has given you the answers. That’s where technology transfers from China and Russia change the calculus. If even a SINGLE individual from Russia or China gave up the critical design elements… Enough said.
BTW, we’ve already presented intel from a wayward laptop to our NATO partners sometime back. It contained a very workmanlike design for a two-point implosion weapon quite suitable for a nose-cone. Eventually, even the media let that story out.
Everything about the Mullah’s madness is being soft-pedaled.
“finding a war film that (A) will connect with them and not come across like a museum piece (as the Westerns tend to, alas), and (B) is not an unfortunately typical Hollywood bash-the-military fest.”
Black Hawk Down.
Lawrence of Arabia.
The Bridge on the River Kwai.
I would add Apocalypse Now, but I realize some people hate it as much as I love it. Then there’s Zulu, but it’s prob. waaay too un-PC.
Blert @ 90 “This is what the world is facing. HEU is the preferred booster in W-88/W-89 designs. So that’s what they’re going for.”
Thanks for the information in your post, Blert. Very enlightening.
But puzzling too.
If Iran is planning to build a thermonuclear weapon, won’t they have to test it? As someone once said, every nuclear explosion is a giant physics experiment.
After all, it would be a true disaster for Iran if they shot off a nuclear weapon at Israel and it failed to explode. Iran would have demonstrated hostile intent (using up the “one free shot” that Western sensibilities give them) but achieved nothing except guaranteeing a similar (but working) response from the Israelis — and perhaps the French too; sometimes the world surprises us.
In contrast, the Little Boy design was perceived to be so reliable that it was deployed against the Japanese in WWII without any prior test.
However, if Iran actually tested a thermonuclear weapon, the test would be detected — and the responses would be very unpredictable from Iran’s perspective. Those French again! And even though the world (quite rightly) sees Obama as an empty suit, his is the kind of vain personality which might react violently to such an obvious public dissing.
Bottom line – if the Iranian intent is actually to use nuclear weapons in a first strike, there would be definite advantages to their sticking with an ultra-reliable Little Boy type of design — and delivering it by shipping container instead of by missile.
Bogie,
War Movie: “Platoon”, manipulative to beat the band but wonderful in ambiance. I’m prejudiced. It’s my war and my division.
Western:”The Magnificent Seven” See how morality plays play. If you want to go
post modern, “The Wild Bunch” or just plain strange, “Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”
Gangster: “White Heat”- Cody Jarrett might be the first cinematic anti-hero.
Bohemond:
Thanks for the suggestions. I am in fact trying out “Black Hawk Down” this semester, for the first time, so I’ll see how it goes.
The film as a film is exceptionally well made (as you would expect with Ridley Scott) but I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the content since it leaves itself open to interpretation as a soldiers-as-tragic (if heroic) figures, war-is-bad-and-futile movie. Which if you watch the special features, *WAS* definitely what the filmmakers, from Scott on down to the entire cast, wanted the audience to carry away as a message, but was definitely *NOT* what the military personnel who were involved with the film (as either technical consultants [some of whom were involved in The Mog], or as on-camera participants (the fast-roping was done by real Army personnel, not actors) wanted the audience to take away from the movie.
It is mind-boggling, and enormously frustrating, how utterly dense the Hollywood types are on this. They absolutely will not or cannot take the military on the military’s own terms, but must ever go imposing their own interpretation on the military … all the while spouting “we have to honor those who died” and “I have to portray this man for the hero that he was.” The actors pay lip service to supporting the troops, but they (supposed professionals as to processing, absorbing & inhabiting the minds & emotions of other humans) don’t understand the warrior mentality even at this close a distance. (IOW the very attitude that has set many conservatives’ teeth grinding for years now: “We support the troops, just not the mission.”)
The closest any of the actors shown in the documentary came to getting it was Eric Bana, who said, upon reflection, “War is futility … but sometimes it’s necessary.” Bana scores 50 percent. A flunking grade in any decent school, but he was still head of the class on this film.
I’m interested in what the students take away from it. That will indicate to me whether Scott successfully sold it as an anti-war film.
About the only war movies I can think of that *might* fit what I am looking for (a film that doesn’t play to a 20-yr-old like a museum piece and one that respects the warrior mentality) are “Rules of Engagement” and “300.”
BTW the focus of my course is American movies (ie, those released by American studios; director does not have to be American), with an emphasis on classic American films. So while I personally like “Lawrence” and “Zulu” and “Bridge/Kwai” a lot, they are outside the boundaries of my particular course.
bogie @ 99: One of the guys on last semester’s survey suggested that I show a war film. Now THAT is a conundrum … finding a war film that (A) will connect with them and not come across like a museum piece (as the Westerns tend to, alas), and (B) is not an unfortunately typical Hollywood bash-the-military fest.
Patton
The Longest Day
300
Dr. Strangelove
Magnificent Seven
I’m a little bothered that The Shawshank Redemption and Schindler’s List rate so high. Ich. But I pretty much detest anything Spielberg, for starters. And you want redemption, see any of the above war movies.
“Wild Bunch” was great –it and “Unforgiven” both top envelope-pushing Westerns. Tip for Wild Bunch” fans –catch the old Bogart “Treasure of Sierra Madre”. Peckinpah almost did an ‘homage’ there’s so many shared motifs. Esp the Mexicans’ behavior, and the laughter, and the loyalty. One of the best lines in moviedom, the three prospectors have found gold, and are starting to sweat each other (they’re so far out in the monte any one could kill the other two and get away clean). The old man of the three, as the rancor rises and the other two argue, mentions (and is ignored) “I think it would be wise not to put things strictly on a money basis.”
I got a double dose of nostalgia Super Bowl week –few days before teh Who TCM showed “Bonnie & Clyde”. How embarrassing, to remember sheeply following everyone else worshiping that movie at the time it came out –what was i thinking? All the heros did was shoot squares who were trying to protect their property and town, and then muse in the getaway car about how crazy those people were over ”stuff”. If it’d been a documentary about psychopaths maybe it’d have been worthwhile. And since the ones in front of the camera were acting, the true psychos were the jerks behind the camera. And it even sucked technically –too pat and too stoopid –and those Texas accents –jeeeez.
@99 bogie wheel
I think the fantasy genre (Chris Nolan’s Batman films, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Pan’s Labyrinth – all of which drew huge audiences) is where the age-old conflicts of good and evil, fate and freedom are being presented today. Quite apart from the question of style – it’s almost as if that’s the only place where such matters can be openly addressed, given the biases and posturing of Hollywood today. But in another sense it’s a good vehicle for it, because the genre’s “other-worldliness”, if you will, provides the freedom and the distance necessary to confront things that are too close to the bone to be examined in a contemporary, “realistic” setting.
That said, I’m not at all surprised they liked Casablanca – as for war movies, why not try “The Great Escape”? It’s entertaining without being superficial, it has action, drama, tension, humor, interesting characters and a good story with a basis in real events. And it’s in color!
@101 Bohemond
“Zulu” is the best war movie ever made IMO – probably too much for openers though. We were just talking about it awhile back – remember, buddy? – heartstopping action (once it gets going, the tension beforehand is almost painful) not to mention that extraordinary sequence where the defenders answer the Zulu war chant with “Men of Harlech”
btw bogie- though it’s not a war movie or a western (an eastern, maybe?), John Huston’s “Moby Dick” is a great piece of storytelling on film – might even inspire some of them to read the book!
Buddy/93
Never heard of Cold Open, did not realize I was committing literature. Even a blind squirrel can find his nuts.
—-
Bogie Wheel/99
Terrific post. Talk about memorable lines from Casablanca, your line “Movies, Tv and computer screens are today’s campfires” is sheer brilliance.
OH yes –i do remember, mary –i was surprised to see so many people appear who’d not only seen that 40 some odd year old relic, but that got off on it too. the way it built up that sense of foreboding –that grand outdoor big sky and mountain vista playing against type and encroaching to loom over the doughty little group of proper British subjects –yeah, that was moviemaking alright –
and that extended look at the Zulu –and recording the war chants –if you add up the years, that was no doubt the real thing up there on the screen. There were still Jubilation T Cornpones wandering around small towns in the deep south as late as the time of that film –so no wonder the era was still so alive in the Traansvaal –or however many extra a’s are needed to spell that–.
***
walt, i second that ‘campfire’ comment to BW. And yes, i’m afraid you’re accidentally skirting close to outright committing litertoor sometimes –
As Blert #100 pointed out: the testing has been done, in North Korea.
So, let’s theorize based on the current situation.
Like any complex game, the real question has to be “what do they want”? In the case of Iran, I find the idea of a nuclear attack in any form on the US to be far-fetched. The reaction from the US and world is far too predictable, and though the apocalyptic spiritualist side in Tehran *say* they would gladly trade all of Iran for the rise of the 12th Imam, their more human actions indicate they’d rather summon the Imam up while still being alive–thank you much!
No, like the actions of reactionary Islam, Iran is more likely targeting the rest of the Muslim world for its game, plus economic concerns as others have pointed out. This means Israel, as the boogie-man of the Middle-East. But, at the same time, Iran does not want to make the first-strike against Tel-Aviv: that voids sympathy around the world and makes massive US involvement much more likely (I’d say certain, but with the current administration… yeah). Plus there are practical concerns regarding certainty of strike penetration, due to Israeli anti-missile hardening over past years.
Israel, for its part, doesn’t want to make a first strike, but if it suffers even one nuke the public will (perhaps literally) lynch the political class. Despite Iranian claims to the contrary, Israel is not a “one-nuke” country–a bomb would be destructive, but not even to the scale of the Haiti quake, and in the case of Israel, “easily” recovered from and not deadly. Political self-interest however ensures that a first-strike is highly likely once it becomes certain that A) Iran will get the bomb in short order, and B) no-one else can/will do anything about it.
Russia wants the US and Western Europe to remain fixed on Iran while it gets its own house in order and slowly reclaims (in fact or influence) the Russian empire. In a similar manner, it wants Iran inescapably under its influence, as Persia has been a target of Russian expansion since Tsarist days (see The Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk, for some holistic discussion of this), along with other avenues for unrestricted sea access. Despite the benefits to Russia of enormous oil price increases, the knock-on effects to its own economy would be severe enough to bring its own stability into question, and I very, very much doubt Russia wants the world to “go there”. Close to there, but not to that point.
China has an interest in Iranian resources, and wants things cheap so it can keep the factories running. It’s played along with Iran and Russia for a while now because that seemed prudent to its immediate business interests, but if things start to go over the cliff God knows how they’ll react.
Iran’s calculus is complicated by a brewing, real insurrection backed by an intransigent regular military. The absolute best way to end protests quickly and in the regime’s favor would be for Iran to get attacked, at which point even the protesters said (last year), that they’d back Iran versus whomever. Clock is ticking.
So then the ideal goal of Iran would be to play brinksmanship games with the west, while separating Israel from its guarantors (US) and goading it into a first-strike on itself that rallies the Ummah into a final, apocalyptic cleansing of the Jews from the Middle-East.
Israel, for its part, has been desperately hoping someone will man-up and deal with things, while positioning assets just in case. Some weeks ago I read an article (sadly I cannot link it now) that points out the probable path of an Israeli strike would now be up trough or from Georgia, where there are thousands of IDF “support”, and then across to the Caspian and down into Iran. This would be to bypass US air assets in Iraq. Problems with this idea include Turkey and either Armenia or Azerbaijan–the later two of whom the Israeli would probably not even bother asking. Turkey could be bypassed by slowly staging assets or deploying them by ship.
(Note: The idea of an EMP burst by one party or another seems to me to be sufficiently untested that it would be a risky first move, and still elicit every negative response. This, despite the most serious potential long-term social damage.)
—
Now we get into things that border on prophecy.
Assuming that the Georgian route is used (because the chance of US overflight permission is zero), what would be the likely response? I postulate that such an action would draw not only the surrounding Muslim countries, but also Russia down on Israel. If–as is likely–Israel doesn’t bother to tell Turkey ahead of time, then there’s no stretch to see it being drawn in as well from the resulting populist outrage. Of course, Russia would use the opportunity to finish off Georgia, which is the single question mark as to why the Georgians might be willing to host or resupply an IDF strike.
As a sobering note, the above scenario looks uncannily like that described in Ezekiel 38-39.
–JC
bogie wheel,
What American war films would teach the both the nature of the event and deal with fundamental dramatic truths so that students could follow the links? If possible I would try to get the students to appreciate Black and White films by pointing out how a tighter medium well handled can convey more powerfully than a less disciplined one. For proof show them how a good silent film, such as “The Thief of Baghdad” or “Wings,” was a better made and more exciting movie than the early talkies with their static cameras and microphones. Consider how people were swept up by the story of a martian invasion by Orson Wells’ production on radio. The more that the theater is in your mind the more convincing it is. That lesson on the value of artistic discipline can have powerful implications throughout life. It certainly can inform their ability to appreciate the warrior ethos in many cultures, whether American, Arab or Japanese.
The need to be overtly American restricts consideration of fine films like Petersen’s “Das Boot” Coward’s “In Which We Serve” and Kurosawa’s “Kagemusha.” In fact the students should be told that “The Magnificent Seven” is a remake of his “Seven Samurai” and his “Ran” is a remake of King Lear. Great art deal with great issues that changes when translated but still has power to reach us. Also, since the death of the studio system in the 1950s the distinction between American and Foreign films has become arbitrary. When the actors, directors, locations and distribution company owners can come from a dozen different countries, who gets the nationality credit?
My spur of the moment list, for what it worth.
Korean War Navy - The Bridges at Toko Ri,
Europe WW-II Army - Battleground, A Walk in the Sun,
Wurope WW-II Air - Twelve O’Clock High,
Pacific WW-II Navy - They Were Expendable, Run Silent Run Deep.
The Great War - All Quiet On the Western Front
marymcl,
solipsistic, risible, repulsive
Is that your law firm or a list of minor characters from J.K. Rowling?
To be blogged under the title “War Films.”
My personal take on how younger people react to Westerns, based on what I’ve seen in teaching this film course, is that the genre tends to be alien to them — the setting, the characters, the conflicts all seem somehow to be a sort of frozen, distant past, and thus irrelevant to the kids’ lives today. This, in spite of the genre introduction I give explaining what Westerns are about and what they have to say about the American identity.
Believe it or not Westerns are much bigger in Europe than North America. They are still shown prominently on major TV channels and at urban movie houses. (I saw several John Ford/John Wayne films advertised outside a fashionable theatre in the Latin Quarter of Paris a couple of years ago). UK newspapers still have articles on some of the old classics as well as regular references to them they assume readers will understand. Yet outside of TCM they are absent from major North American media.
When I first spent time in North America (Canada and California) as a child in the early 80s one of the first differences I noticed between children my age there and in the UK was the former’s lack of interest in all things Western from action figures and holsters to the old TV shows and movies. I recall once a teacher mentioned John Wayne (a household name in the UK) and asked if anyone had heard of him. I was flabbergasted when only about half a dozen out of about 30 Canadian students put their hands up.
Is this just another example of Europeans looking backwards while Americans look forward and forget the past? It’s difficult to understand.
For an American war film that is both well made, heroic and accurate: The Bridge at Remagen with George Segal, Ben Gazzara and Robert Vaughn.
I consider Casablanca a war film, too.
#86,
Geoffrey Britain: “Once Iran gets the bomb, nuclear proliferation will spread across the M.E.”
That assumes that Iran will stand pat like Israel is standing pat now. But it would be in Iran’s interest to have a monopoly on a Middle East Muslim Bomb (leaving Pakistan out of the equation for now).
Iran is NOT going to threaten Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab nations with nuclear attack. And Sunni – Shia animosity guarantees that Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey will pursue nuclear weapons capability. That will result in Iran encouraging Lybia and Syria to join it in the nuclear club, so as to balance the power ratio between Islamic nations. Resulting in greatly increased nuclear proliferation as the result of Iran getting the bomb… Q.E.D.
Iran seeks nuclear capability out of paranoia that the Great Satan will awaken and attack Iran and to gain the capability to eventually destroy Israel…and, most of all, out of a desire to be the “first among equals” within Islam.
It would gain that status within Islam by demonstrating that the US is a paper tiger, which its ‘acceptance’ of Iran gaining the bomb would confirm, given the mind-set of Islamic culture.
All the options involving air strikes and commandos that Israel has now are open to Iran as well, plus the additional option of Hezbollah/Hamas operatives willing to die on future raids on behalf of their Iranian handlers.
Islamic nations do not attack one another. And the Iran-Iraq war does not disprove this assertion, as it was a primarily a conflict between Islam and Saddam, a dictator supporting Arab communism.
“$150-$300 a barrel oil prices will collapse the West’s economies.”
It would also collapse China and Japan’s economy. Demand would fall off a cliff, and prices would be right back where they are now, except that none of the Gulf States nor Iran would sell their oil.
What makes you think that Iran cares whether their actions hurt China and Japan? Prices would NOT fall back to their normal prices, as a great part of the world’s oil production passes through the Strait. Iranian control of the Strait guarantees greatly increased oil prices.
Even if Iran held the Strait of Hormuz, they have to get their tankers through the North Arabian Sea, and that’s our carrier’s playground, supplied through al-Masirah, Oman.
Religious fanatics are NOT motivated by economic considerations.
“If Iran uses its nuclear capabilities solely to intimidate and raise its status within Islam, the increased nuclear proliferation among unstable third world nations will result in Islamic terrorist groups getting their hands on nukes, either by buying nukes, be given them or stealing them from corrupt regimes.”
With great power comes great responsibility. The West must make clear that Iran and/or Saudi Arabia and/or Syria would be held accountable for any rogue nucdet, on a shoot-first-ask-questions-later basis.
The West has not yet “made clear” what will happen if rogue nations truly ‘get out of line’, even though the “handwriting on the wall” has been clear for quite some time. What makes you think the West will suddenly grow a spine? In fact, the West has “made clear” that it will only offer appeasement in response to Islamic aggression.
Terrorists light off one of those babies in Tel Aviv, who doubts that Tehran and Riyadh would not be flattened minutes later?
Once many unstable third world nations have nukes, terrorists will steal them or buy them from corrupt elements. In retaliation, would you kill millions of innocents who had nothing to do with terrorists getting nukes?
Thanks for the comments, all — marymcl, buddy, walt, Josh, blert.
George Lucas, years back in an interview with Bill Moyers IIRC, called movie theaters the churches of contemporary America. Somewhat sacrilegous IMO (although if you are a Hollywood person, where the average weekly religious attendance is less than 2%, I guess it *would* seem that way), which is why I prefer the “campfires” analogy. But I just might have stolen that line from somebody else I read way back. Or maybe it is mine after all. Ah can’t remember.
LOTM, since you have been in the teaching trenches I really respect your input. I actually did use to have a foreign-film requirement to the course the first 2 times I taught it. And one of the students did watch “Seven Samurai” and really enjoyed it, though he said it was looooong.
Neither the university nor the English Department tells me what approach I must or must not take with this course. I joked to the students last year that I could be teaching “Insurrection 101″ and the uni would likely never know the difference until the admin building went boom one day. More than a little scary, that. Good thing for the university I am not that type (and the place is my alma mater, rather dear to my heart, so I would never make anything go boom there, just for the record).
So I can take pretty much any approach to the course I deem fit. And there are no doubt many “right” approaches that would work pretty well. I eventually settled on classic American films as the core because that happens to be the core of my own film knowledge, so I felt that’s what I would teach the best — what I know & what I love. Even with that focus fairly defined it is very difficult choosing the films because you can do only a fraction of the ones you *want* to teach. And then there are the instances where an objectively great film and one that you think is the cat’s pajamas goes over more like a cat’s fart (A Streetcar Named Desire, alas).
And I always, always have to keep in mind that it is a 200-level course. It’s not a blow-off course by any means (being of German ancestry, I’m something of a whip-cracker, I guess) but I also don’t want to kill anyone’s enthusiasm for film at this stage of the game by becoming too esoteric. “No ‘Battleship Potemkin,’” I promise my students.
Teaching is a delicate balancing act, among other things.
Coisty – to your point about Westerns being so popular in Europe:
http://tiny.cc/LdaDi
I don’t think it’s necessarily Americans’ future-obsession that is behind the slump… we have always been a kind of “tomorrow” country and yet Westerns were hugely popular here for decades.
Remember that scene in “The Apartment” where Jack Lemmon is flipping through the channels on TV (all four of ‘em), and 3 are playing Westerns ….
Actually, and now that I think about it this is something we did discuss a while back, Westerns by theme and character just morphed into urban crime dramas. Cowboys & Indians become cops & robbers. The urbanization of America after WWII, and the attendant loss of many Americans’ personal experience with and connection to the land itself, would help make traditional frontier John Ford-ish Westerns alien and old-fashioned to Americans, whereas an urban setting (the lawless frontier of the dangerous city) would be a much more immediately understandable frame of reference.
Westerns haven’t gone away. They’ve just changed hats.
Josh @95: When people cannot pay their debts, deflation occurs. The de facto money supply shrinks.
When the new money being printed goes into creating new debts that cannot be paid, the de facto money supply shrinks even more.
Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt never figured this out. Barack Obama follows suit.
BTW, in the movie: The Bridge at Remagen at one point Segal asks Gassara why it is so important to take this bridge right NOW.
The response is: the lives to be saved by shortening the war…
My uncle was in Dora…
The capture of the Remagen bridge saved his life…
He was a captured USAAF gunner — wearing native French clothing only 25 miles from the front when he was exposed by a collaborating bitch. She received a fur coat ( stolen from murdered Jews ) for her betrayal. Weeks later, she was hanged. As for my uncle, he was Gestapo’d and sent to Buchenwald…. Subsequently he was remanded to Dora….
Dora is a hell camp like few others — it was in the Hartz mountains — dedicated to the V2/A4…
It was owned by all of the top Nazis…
For every victim of the V2 SIX inmates at Dora died.
Dora can be Googled…
But is strangely missing from the normal list of concentration camps. That’s because Dora means Kamp D of Buchenwald in SS parlance.
Not withstanding its subsidiarity — Dora was a completely separate hell-hole.
Because it was liberated by the Soviet Army and remained behind the Iron Curtain the hell-hole known as Dora is not known in the West.
It has been preserved, though, and can be viewed by a Google search.
—–
Until the 9th Armored captured the Remagen railroad bridge — a bridge that DID NOT show up on road maps — my uncle was beaten worse than a Jew: he wore PINK. That is he was a spy/agent/political prisoner.
I will spare you the harrowing details of his hell there. The reality of the Kamp system is beyond polite discussion.
But Remagen DID save his life…
Upon discovering — through the SS grapevine — that the American First Army was accross the Rhine, his SS tormentor flipped 180 and decided that my uncle was his new very best buddy — and didn’t need to dig anymore. In fact, the entire crew went on ‘holiday.’
The capture of the bridge at Remagen saved thousands upon thousands of lives.
Judge the tides? A tsunami of electoral defeat is rising out of the ocean and Obama’s only reaction is to build his sandcastle faster. The domestic agenda he brought into the White House has nine months to live, if Obama doesn’t kill it first. Whatever he accomplishes between now and then will be wiped out by a Congress elected to reign him in and undo his agenda. And he shows zero comprehension. He thinks he needs to talk more.
Now the biggest (though most predictable) foreign policy monkeywrench short of an actual shooting war between major league powers has happened. Another tidal wave is looming to wipe out his foreign policy (such as it is). That he will prove unable to fully comprehend or competently react to the situation in Iran seems almost a given. Even if he were to judge correctly, what could he do? His own party would oppose any action forcefull enough to matter, and anything less will do no good. Iran isn’t going to walk away from The Bomb as a favor to Talkalot Barack. Tne only option with much chance of working would be to joing the Republicans after the November bloodbath, but… that’s likely to cause as much turmoil as the Ayatolla’s waving their plutonium around. Between the True Believers in the White House quitting en mass, and the GOP (rightly) distrusting Obama himself and jockeying for his job two years later, D.C. would be a circus. It’s likely to be anyway, maybe it couldn’t hurt. But I doubt it would work.
If Obama can judge the tide, I think he would realize he’s scuppered. A Churchill (Winston, not Ward) might be able to find a way out. Obama’s no Winston. I don’t want him to face a crisis either – but if wishes were horses…
…I’d ride one off into a Western.
I think Bogie is right about Westerns morphing into Urban Crime Dramas. Think of how many such shows end up with gunfights in abandoned warehouses or other strangely desolate urban locations. A dead-end alley, just another box canyon.
Marymcl at #108: if you listen carefully during the opening battle scene in the movie Gladiator, you can hear the Zulu war chant. I don’t know why the producers of Gladiator felt compelled to swipe that particular chant, but it is there.
re: “finding a war film that (A) will connect with them and not come across like a museum piece (as the Westerns tend to, alas), and (B) is not an unfortunately typical Hollywood bash-the-military fest.”
Check out The Hurt Locker. An excellent war movie with no ‘message’.
Two films that I was moved by (which probably means today’s college students would be bored to tears):
“How Green was my Valley”- Weepy, but the death of that coal mine town could be the death of Detroit (minus the race hustlers) or Buffalo
“Mrs. Miniver”- obsolete because nations don’t rally behind war efforts any more
I saw “Dirty Harry” in a film course at SUNY New Paltz. It was timely (1970′s) and well received by the students.
84. Annoy Mouse:
“solipsistic
88. marymcl:
@84 Annoy Mouse
Welcome to the dark side…solipsistic, risible, repulsive…
Perfectly chosen words for the comments they addressed.
Just re-read Annoy Mouses’ comment and tell me it isn’t about the predicament he would be in ,not mankind.
The other also fit the comments, and you would have me do what? Sacrifice accuracy for comity? Truth for PC?
Ya got the wrong guy.
101. Bohemond:
I am one who hates Apocalypse Now. When I watched it (I only watched it once), it was like a flashback for me.
Does Smoke Bomb Hill mean any thing to you?
116 bogie wheel:
Westerns haven’t gone away. They’ve just changed hats.
I would propose Serenity [and the show Firefly] as the current version of ‘westerns’ projected into the future. So many of hero facing the bad guys and rescuing the unfortunate, etc.
I would be interested to see the reaction of your students to the film & show. I would bet that more than a few had seen Serenity or Firefly.
tom
“it [Black Hawk Down] leaves itself open to interpretation as a soldiers-as-victims, war-is-bad-and-futile movie.”
Exactly. Like all really good movies, it’s open to interpretation; it doesn’t beat you over the head like the shamefully polemical Platoon. Does the Godfather glorify or condemn the Mafia? Does Alex DeLarge deserve our pity? Whether Scott intended it that way, BHD can easily be seen as the dogged courage and non-heroic heroism of 200 young- often very young- American GIs fighting their way through an impossible situation because “someone had blundered.” It’s in effect no more antiwar than Charge of the Light Brigade.
———–
Scott included the Zulu war chant in Gladiator as a tribute: Zulu is one of his favorite movies.
————-
I think Westerns faded in the USA largely due to oversaturation. In the late 50s/early 60s something like 3/4 of TV dramas were Westerns, and Hollywood continued to churn big-screeners out.
————
Bridge at Remagen is an OK choice- but what about The Longest Day? There’s also, among recent flicks, We Were Soldiers (perhaps the only non-didactic Vietnam movie ever made).
well seems that in America you can only teach and show american movies
I have attended a cursus “videos and images composites” in a “Beaux-Arts” school for 2 years, where we studied movies from different european countries and or from hollywood productions.
My preferrences are still for the european schools, that show less action but more psychological interactions between the different characters, and or for the movies that are constructed like a tale, which could be some humoristical critics with an inherent moral, BTW, Georgia has quite a lot with that string, Italy too, ie the Taviani brothers, those works are very poetical and aesthetic too.
one of the last decade, of this type
http://www.amazon.com/Original-Russian-Version-English-Subtitles/dp/B000CDNH8W
Habu – I tend to live and speak for myself. Not like you you selfless doer of good deeds for the world. While the discussion as far as I can tell has focused on nuclear devices and their intricate technology, my first comment addressed, however cryptic, my concerns that the Mullahs could now open a dirty bomb superstore and offer enriched uranium to any splodey dope who could hump it west while seeking those jobs that Americans don’t want. Tehran doesn’t need to build a device, though they certainly will, meantime they’ll dispense enough material to put their evil plans into play. How about loading a vintage Ilyushin 76 with a ton of low grade uranium and detonating it with enough explosives to get a nice dispersal pattern, on a windy day, over, let’s say Paris? That’s the kind of “pissing in the soup” I am talking about. It’s not what you see that will kill you. The anticipation wont kill you, it is the long and uncertain process of digesting radio isotopes that will collect in your liver that will. I worked with isotopes before and had a nickel 63 foil in a device I co-designed for an Ion Mobility spectrometer in my office. It seems a temperature control circuit malfunctioned and burnt up the unit. The problem is that I took it apart in my office and later the health/safety officer took swabs in my office and got some hits on the meter so they basically had to de-con my desk, where I occasioned to eat a sandwich. I also worked in proximity to barium, californium, uranium and some less common isotopes. My friend, Dr. Charlie had his office down the hall from me over the plutonium range. Charlie worked with Alpha particle gases and was very careful. None the less ,he and several other close friends died suddenly from liver cancer in a short period of time. Maybe it was just their time but maybe not. It is an interesting feeling to wonder if you too have some beta particles collecting in your gizzards. So if I make ingesting isotopes sound personal, it is. F-off.
Habu, you’re so predictable. The only thing I’d like to see you “sacrifice” is that boring sense of self-importance. Take a tip from LotM @112 and lighten up. But then, as you say, you’re the wrong guy. So break out the adjectives and toss me a new partner for that law firm
boghie wheel,
One of my oldest friend’s sons is the Keni Thomas of Blackhawk Down, exploits portrayed in both book and movie, and now the lead singer in C&W band.
He recalled that during the first lull in the action, he flashed on the movie Zulu.
He notes the Zulu warriors did not shield themselves with women and children, as did the Mogs.
Keni relates:
“It’s daylight
Outnumbered 500 to 1
Two choppers down
Wounded needing evac
Relief ETA unknown
Limited ammo
It’s unreasonable to expect any actor to get it. The first impulse of 99% of the population suddenly finding themselves in this situation is to sh*t one’s pants. That messes up the set.”
AM @ 129: Yah, I worked for a month or three on a prototype radiation imaging medical probe, with some bigtime nuclear medicine types, but in a garage setup. We had a couple of tiny radiation sources (I don’t remember the isotopes) in little plastic cases, that were supposed to be so feeble they were safe to carry in your pocket for hours or leave on the table top. Nonetheless I managed to keep them behind the lead brick, as often as possible. Yeah, sure background radiation including from cement blocks, but even so, made my ignorant mind nervous. And my scientists buddies were sloppy enough about some other technical procedures, I wasn’t encouraged by their nonchalance about even these tiny samples. So, do we need a couple of zillion of those let loose on the wind, much less something 10,000x worse? No sir.
bogie –
I fell asleep last night and woke up thinking about your film class – buddy mentioned Treasure of Sierra Madre, I’d also recommend High Sierra (you can tell I like Bogart a lot!) In fact, The Maltese Falcon would probably go over well with younger people.
Picking up on one of LotM’s points – Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth. Zefferelli’s Shakespeare films are some of my favorites – his Hamlet is quite pared down but wonderfully atmospheric. If your students are amazed at how many common phrases derive from Casablanca, their heads will explode when they hear the “to be or not to be” soliloquy.
Regarding the cluelessness of actors and filmmakers – it’s truly amazing that some of the most liberal people can turn out these movies that appeal to conservatives. On the DVD extras to one of the LOTR movies, one of the screenwriters is responding to a comment that Sam’s relationship to Frodo is very like that of a batman to an officer in the British army circa WWI. She said it was an OK comparison as far as it went, but objected to the idea of Sam as someone who might run around “shining the shoes for one of those pampered officers”. Which was an astounding thing to for her to say, since Tolkien himself was one of those “pampered officers” at the Somme, not to mention their rate of attrition was extraordinarily high (I forget the numbers but LotM could probably tell us) Anyway it’s one of the great mysteries of modern film-making.
“I think Bogie is right about Westerns morphing into Urban Crime Dramas.”
One of the lesser known Paul Newman films, “Fort Apache – The Bronx” (1981) made that connection explicitly.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082402/
#102 Kinuachdrach,
“and perhaps the French too; sometimes the world surprises us”
Chirac’s lapsus in january 2006 doesn’t say other : as soon as Iran would launch its bomb, it would “sofort” be reducted into a vitrificated land, but also that Iran will get its bomb soon or later, the problem is that its neighbours, such as Egypt and Saudi arabia would want it too, thus the escalation of this kind of arms race, and that that is the most dangerous, because of the inherent traffics
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/world/europe/01france.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1170392400&en=41a193031cb1461e&ei=5094&partner=homepage
128. Marie Claude:
well seems that in America you can only teach and show american movies
…….
Not quite true. I recall from my NYC days taking film courses with Andrew Sarris. His courses included the great WWI movie Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion as well as Renoir’s the socially complicated and funny “The Rules of the Game” and not to my taste slow unhappy movies like Josef von Sternberg’s Blue Angel or Fellini’s La Strada or Fellini’s crazy 60′s movies like La Dolce Vita.
I’m sure these films are still available to college level students of film.
Bogie – I was pleased to see “Groundhog Day” on your list, and it was on my mind since I was able to rewatch it again just last week. (on groundhog day, of course)
It’s easy to see it as just a romantic comedy with a lot of opportunities for Murray to showcase his riffs. It is that, of course, but there’s more – just about every sci-fi franchise plus scores of other writers have grappled with using the time loop paradox as a plot element. It’s quite difficult to do well, as evidenced by the fact that so few have managed it. (But Heinlein’s story “Up by his Bootstraps” is an absolute masterpiece of the genre)
Groundhog Day not only made a good, funny story out of this plotline but it also managed to fully explore the moral and personal aspects of it, something I don’t think any other piece had done before or done since. And at the end, you find out that the film’s really about what it means to live a well-lived life.
For that and for the groundhog driving lessons (Don’t Drive Angry!) that’s one of my faves.
Wonder if you were familiar with a not so well known movie named “Gattaca” Was’t high budget, and didn’t get a lot of recognition. Sci-fi that’s mostly talk never seems to go over so well. Still, I thought this was one of the best examinations of the morals of genetic science and personal responsibility that I have even seen on the screen. The society they live in is basically the society we have today with one slight scientific change.
Is a mans destiny fixed, or does he choose his own? That’s the central question of Gattaca, and it is masterfully explored.
bogie wheel;
don’t forget “A Bridge Too Far”
True story, lots of heroes, pathos, bravery, brings a tear to this old fart’s eye.
Everybody; I was talking with some friends over lunch about how to nuke a city and leave as little evidence as possible as to the source. Someone put forth the idea of a shallow-water detonation just upwind. His theory was that the bomb would make loads of radioactive steam that would then track downwind over the target city (good for hitting San Fran or Tel Aviv, probably not for East Coast stuff). Immeadiate physical damage minimal, longer term effects significant, particularly if it blocked an important port due to background radiation issues.
Does anybody have the know-how to say if this is a risk? Should we be worried about more than cocaine being smuggled up our West Coast?
boggie wheel,
It probably says more about me than your students but I do not get considering “Battleship Potemkin” as to esoteric for undergraduates. It is no “Andalusian Dog.” Good propaganda, and BP was the best, is simple and lucid.
Potemkin is probably more accessible than period piece musicals like “On The Town” or “An American In Paris.” Those should be good for looking at how we viewed ourselves and others after the war.
For discussing American society before the war I would consider screwball comedies such as “Bringing Up Baby.” If I used “The Great McGinty” I would ask: What if anything has changed? The best character study, political study, or movie ever made IMHO remains “Citizen Kane.” For extra credit a student could use “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Another great pre-war look at what then were considered the good old days was “The Late George Apply.”
For America after the war I would add a film noir to the mix. This could lead to some good questioning. Why were comedies so popular during the Depression and why did films turn dark when we had in fact won the war?
Did I miss something or did anybody mention “Gone With The Wind?”
(Sorry I am out of snch with the thread on BBerr)
Is a mans destiny fixed, or does he choose his own? That’s the central question of Gattaca, and it is masterfully explored.
A review of Gattaca by Neven Sesardic may change your view of the film.
Link
Imagine that you are on an intercontinental flight and that immediately after take‐off
the pilot makes the following announcement: ‘Dear passengers, I hope you will join me in
celebrating a wonderful achievement of one of our navigators. His name is Vincent.
Vincent’s childhood dream was to become an airplane navigator but unfortunately he was declared unfit for the job because of his serious heart condition. True, he does occasionally have symptoms of heart disease like shortness of breath and chest pain, yet he is certainly not the kind of person to be deterred from pursuing his dream so easily. Being quite convinced that he is up to the task and that everything would be fine Vincent decided to falsify his medical records. And indeed, with the clean bill of health readily forged and attached to his application, he smoothly managed to get the plum job and is very proud to take care of your safety today. Can we please get some applause for Vincent’s accomplishment and perseverance in the face of adversity? And, by the way, keep your seat belts tightly fastened during the entire flight.’
Blert-118 Thanks for relating that anecdote. Thank g-d and just “wow”
#116 bogie wheel
“No ‘Battleship Potemkin,’” I promise my students.
Pity that. Not because it is not primarily of interest to historian types [and is outside the scope of your course], but Eisenstein was first and foremost a propagandist and his techniques were fairly obvious and unsophisticated by modern standards, because that is what worked for his intended audience. One or two lectures during the semester using it to point out how audiences can be manipulated by film/tv makers would possibly turn the lights on for one or two of your students. It would be the most effective “Insurrection 101″ course possible in your field.
#112 LotM
solipsistic, risible, repulsive- Attorneys at Law. That does have a certain ring of truth to it. A friend once designed a coat of arms for me with the motto; “Pedantic, Verbose, and Irrascible”, which could be their local competition.
——-
A number of us have postulated alternate employment and results for the apparently inevitable Iranian nuclear weapons, some as bombs, some as contamination and the likely reactions of the other players. And to be honest, any and all of the attack modalities are in play. The tactical discussion is well worthwhile, but it all boils down to this:
In one form or another, it means that we will be attacked by those weapons. We lack the will to defend ourselves. Our enemy(ies) has/have the initiative and in fact are well inside our OODA loop. One can make a case for our being in this position based on the ideology, deliberate incomprehension of reality, or deliberate actions of those who govern the West. Any and all of these may be true to differing degrees in differing parts of the West; singly or in combination. But the most powerful weapons in the world are useless if there is not the will and skill to use them. Plenty of recent historical examples.
We have the ability to seize the initiative back at any time. But we [as a culture and polity] refuse to, because we fear hurting our enemies more than we fear our own destruction.
The time for words at almost all levels of politics is about over. The storm is upon us.
We have discussed movie scenes here, and we have a choice of what role to play.
Are we the Trojans in the Movie “Troy” [and the enemy is nothing like Brad Pitt] who lost all?
Are we the majority of the 24th Foot at Isandlwana from the movie “Zulu Dawn”, who were wiped out, but whose side ultimately won?
Are we the 101st Airborne at Bastogne from “The Battle of the Bulge” who held and whose side ultimately destroyed the enemy?
It is our choice as a culture. But the odds don’t look at all hopeful absent a total change of leadership throughout the West.
# 115 Geoffrey Britain
In retaliation, would you kill millions of innocents who had nothing to do with terrorists getting nukes?
If we are to survive, eventually yes if need be. Just as we [Britain and the US] bombed and killed hundreds of thousands [or millions] in firebomb raids on German cities. Most of those killed were neither NSDAP members or part of the Wehrmacht; but their lives enabled and supported the regime. Similarly we [the US] did the same thing to similar numbers of Japanese civilians, even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki; because their lives enabled and supported the Japanese Empire that had attacked us.
We survived. The “Thousand Year Reich” and the Japanese Empire that sought “Hakko Ichiu” did not. That was sufficient justification in the end for what we did in WW-II, even before you consider the evils that they committed as deliberate policy.
The same justification will serve, if in the end we do what is necessary to survive, now and in the future. And the way things are set, we will be retaliating for the deaths of millions of our innocents who will die at the hands of the Ummah before we ever consider bestirring ourselves to do anything.
#128 Marie Claude
well seems that in America you can only teach and show american movies
I believe BW noted in # 104 that the particular course he teaches involves American films with emphasis on the classics, although he designs his own curriculum within those strictures. Believe me [or not, your choice], from what I have seen from graduates of American film schools and colleges; his course is probably a relative rarity. Mostly they study and worship anything not American and are taught contempt for their own country and culture.
This matches the economics of the American movie business today. It is the norm for a film to be made today in Hollywood where the villians are the evil Americans or mainstream American culture in one form or another, and for it to make a small profit or even lose money here while garnering numerous awards and rave reviews. That does not bother the studios; because the foreign rights and demand for anti-American movies is such that they will rake in several times the money spent making it from there. They do not care if the tickets are bought in dollars or Euros. Europeans will eat up anything that puts this country in a bad light, true or false. It is a self-reinforcing loop that in part explains the growing gulf between “the Beautiful People” and the rest of the country; a combination of ideology and financial self-interest.
I do admit that we pay limited attention to foreign films, mostly because of the language barriers. We have one primary language in this country, a form of English [American English and Brit English sometimes being mutually incomprehensible]. Even the second largest commonly spoken language here, Spanish, is not real Castilian Spanish. Various regions of the American continents developed their own Spanish dialects, and the one used around here is a variant of what we call Tex-Mex that incorporates fractured English and Northern Mexican idioms. It is very different from the versions spoken in say Cuba or Puerto Rico.
People prefer movies in their own colloquial language and without subtitles or dubbing. Even fewer Americans speak French or German, let alone Swedish; so fewer Americans watch movies in those languages. I think it is fair to assume that the majority of movies shown in France are filmed in French, although please correct me if I am wrong.
A similar phenomenon occurs both in Europe and the US. “Bollywood”, the Indian film industry, puts out as many or more movies every year as the US and Europe combined. No doubt, they release some very good movies each year. Are they hits in Europe or the US? No, because they are in Hindi.
And I rather suspect that just as our schools tend to overlook them, European film schools do too. It is not a matter in either case of “only being allowed to teach and show” certain movies. Unlike some countries, we do not have any official or semi-official government department regulating our film industry.
YMMV
Subotai Bahadur
188 Blert.
Remagen was one of those opportunities that Sun Tzu said you should shake loose and grab by moving forces around to see what happens. Hitler became obsessed with the bridgehead and even ordered V-2s to saturate the area, civilians and German soldiers be damned. These orders were never carried out, and it did incalculable damage to morale on his side. Also a number of generals were executed, and the Nazis poured a lot of effort into wiping out the bridgehead that would have better been used elsewhere, because the terrain on the east side of the river was very poor and the bridgehead never developed into anything that would seriously contribute to the main Allied drive by Monty in the north and Patton in the south. It became a footnote.
80. Annoy Mouse:
Greifer – 77
Overhyped to be sure but let’s not diminish the potentially harmful effects to life on a short term basis. I have no interest in being a tourist in downtown Chernobyl nor do I care to pick out zoomies from my cornflakes.
Annoy Mouse… I labeled you solipsistic due to your very notable “I’,I,I” in your litany of cornflakes and Chernobylesque cry of “please don’t let it happen to me.” What do you think? The rest of us want glow in the dark rice krispies?
130. marymcl:
Habu, you’re so predictable. The only thing I’d like to see you “sacrifice” is that boring sense of self-importance.
marymcl,
It’s called self confidence born of experience and the need for NO validation of what I believe. Through my education , world travel, fighting on three continents, meeting and being decorated by the DCI and a President of the US and being a millionaire by becoming a shrewd and cunning stockbroker, all before I was fifty one gains a certain degree of self confidence.
Now I did have a friend years ago, now deceased, who worked for Mudge, Rose, Nixon ,Mitchell ,Guthrie, and Alexander Law firm in NYC. The top of the pyramid so fear not, I have spare adjectives piled high in another room. Yes, the Nixon was Richard and the Mitchell was John.
I do honestly appreciate you finally acknowledging that I am who I am. I know that may annoy people from time to time but that too is life. I can tell you that as the great Notre Dame player George Gipp said on his deathbed:
I’ve got to go, Rock. It’s all right. I’m not afraid Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock. But I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy
At those times, when the breaks are beating the boys you’ll want me on your side.
BW/116; –Remember that scene in “The Apartment” where Jack Lemmon is flipping through the channels on TV (all four of ‘em), and 3 are playing Westerns ….
you may’ve put your finger on one of the culture’s pivot points:
1) first, it’s stuck in your memory, and you’re a film (film as a culture-antenna) expert, so there’s that.
2) the film is from 1960, a major decade flip re ‘the culture’.
3) Billy Wilder’s movies are said to’ve been always a step ahead of where the culture was heading, and being not art-house but ‘big release’ –as such he sort of nudged –if not enabled –a middle American’s attitudinal step into embracing –not fearing –the ‘avant garde’ (looking back from 2010, that nudge is not an unalloyed positive by any means, but he was ‘in the times’ too, and may not’ve equated ‘anti-repression’ with ‘pro-dissolution’ –LOL).
4) re #3, “The Apartment” completely accepted that it was at least an open question whether or not it was morally okay for a low-level manager at a big corporation to scheme his way to a promotion by loaning out his apartment for his bosses in the exec suites to carry on secret adulterous affairs. The anti-hero got to do that and still be an innocent nice feller the audience had to root for.
5) the scene with the Westerns on every channel –that was probably the nail in coffin for the old-style Western –tho a John Ford and Duke Wayne could keep going. For the genre, irony and spoof and self-reference were not far behind.
On the heels of the 20% enrichment announcement, it appears that the Iranian resistance was fairly muted yesterday during the anniversary celebrations. If this is an indicator that the resistance is folding, then the likelihood of conflict between Israel and Iran greatly increases. If there is not going to be another Iranian revolution any time soon, the Israelis will have one less reason to hold their fire. Nor will other western powers need to include concerns about undercutting the resistance in their calculations, if the resistance is already fading.
142Subotai Bahadur
“A number of us have postulated alternate employment and results for the apparently inevitable Iranian nuclear weapons, some as bombs, some as contamination and the likely reactions of the other players. And to be honest, any and all of the attack modalities are in play. The tactical discussion is well worthwhile, but it all boils down to this:
In one form or another, it means that we will be attacked by those weapons. We lack the will to defend ourselves. Our enemy(ies) has/have the initiative and in fact are well inside our OODA loop. One can make a case for our being in this position based on the ideology, deliberate incomprehension of reality, or deliberate actions of those who govern the West. Any and all of these may be true to differing degrees in differing parts of the West; singly or in combination. But the most powerful weapons in the world are useless if there is not the will and skill to use them. Plenty of recent historical examples.
We have the ability to seize the initiative back at any time. But we [as a culture and polity] refuse to, because we fear hurting our enemies more than we fear our own destruction.
The time for words at almost all levels of politics is about over. The storm is upon us.”
I would bet that 99.9 percent of people here at BC agree, but that a lot of Americans don’t see any threat except from us gun toting, bible clinging, right wing radicals.
Example. If I asked you if the Homeland Security of this great Republic was in good hands, I’m pretty damn sure you would say NO.
You would be right but in case you want to explain it to your neighbor or your radical left progressive acquaintances…just reference this:
Homeland Security Assessment makes no mention of Islam
Obama picked his team carefully and has given them marching orders and let it be known that the team has been told to look at Islam only as a great religion and nothing else.
The system is working perfectly.
Papa Ray
Interesting review of Gattaca with some good points, Coisty. But I think Mr. Sesardic has missed (or ignored) a plot point which is crucial. My interpretation of the film is quite different than his, and the measure of a great film is how we receive it personally, after all.
That point was the revelation that the Director, played by Gore Vidal, is the actual killer with regard to the Maguffin in the movie. (the detective story)
Why so crucial? Becase the genetics say it was impossible for him to do this, and yet he did it anyway. He was never suspected because his genetic profile said this was impossible. Conclusion: the science they have based their society on is flawed, and cannot be trusted. And it’s worse than that – since the Director is one of the leaders of that society, he knows absolutely that the science is flawed, and rather than revealing that he uses it to further his own power and hide his own crimes. This is the crucial point that Sesardic misses – he assumes that the society is moral and just, when in fact it is shown to be not just amoral but immoral, cruel, and corrupt. And worst of all, based on lies.
The society of Gattaca is thus revealed as one in which a privileged class uses false science in a successful scheme to oppress and enslave the mass of ordinary people into narrowly prescribed paths dictated by the heirarchy. In truth, it is all a lie that they pay lip service to because resistance is seen to be futile. (Uma Thurman makes that point repeatedly)
And in the case where nothing official can be trusted, then subverting those directives by any means possible becomes not only a social good but a moral imperative. And this leads to the ending chosen by the two main characters, Vincent(Ethan Hawke) and Jerome (Jude Law)- who become the symbolic twins represented by the swimming medal last seen in Jerome’s hands as he immolates himself. What is the only moral response to a society which one has finally realized is corrupt to the core and which cannot be changed? The only moral response is to leave. Vincent and Jerome both make that choice – Vincent through a rocketship, and Jerome through the incinerator. But both, having finally seen the truth behind the lies, can no longer remain in that world. They both choose death before a life of dishonor in a society that has no use for either of them.
The viewer, reflecting on this, is left with the observation that this world we’ve been shown will not survive much longer before collapsing in on itself. In that, it has much in common with Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” another point that I think Sesardic missed completely.
(VIncent’s death is not assured, maybe he will survive and do well – he is more than willing to take that chance)
Anyway, that’s how I saw it.
Or how about this:
Embrace Islam, Or Lose Your Job
Wonder when this will be coming to a town near you. It is already that way under the rule of Obama.
Papa Ray
P.S. Any retaliation in that region has to include The Kingdom, and one little rock has to be the first target.
P.P.S. I meant to leave this much earlier but here is a good write up about a good man. I can tell you my Dad knew him and had much respect and admiration for him.
His life made a difference…
wws,
Very interesting. I watched the film once, about 5 years ago. I’m going to make an effort to view it again.
Remember that scene in “The Apartment” where Jack Lemmon is flipping through the channels on TV (all four of ‘em), and 3 are playing Westerns ….
Buddy; you may’ve put your finger on one of the culture’s pivot points
It may or may not be relevant that neither of the two writers of the movie was an American.
This link is off topic. But in a way it is not.
We as the People of these United States have many enemies. Those discussed on this and other threads that we are very aware of and in the fight against.
But we also have But we also have a new (old) Enemy, one that most Americans don’t know about.
I encourage all of you to consider what we have talked about here (very little) but what is a very important aspect of you and your families lives.
YOU MUST prepare for emergencys, you must have the things you need for the survival of your family. YOU MUST have a plan and backups to that plan. YOU MUST discuss this with your family and friends.
Your families and your friends lives depend on you being ready and prepared.
Remember the six Ps. Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
And if you believe in a higher power, pray to him (or her) for guidance, strength and wisdom.
Papa Ray
Subotai
“It is the norm for a film to be made today in Hollywood where the villians are the evil Americans or mainstream American culture in one form or another”
Hmm, in last decade the hollywood bad guis were Arabs, the funny thing is that they hired french actors for acting t’em, (a correlation with bad guis, cuz Hispanics could have done the job too) cuz I suppose that “true” Arabs didn’t want to make t’em
otherwise here we can watch american movie in original version with subtitle, like any other foreign movie
SB – “Even the second largest commonly spoken language here, Spanish, is not real Castilian Spanish.”
I recently got a subscription to NetFlix and have consciously gone out to see all of those classic movies that you nod your head up and down when you hear the name but in actuality, in my case, never fully watched.
To name a few I recently viewed -
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Key Largo
Casa Blanca
I have Lawrence of Arabia on the shelf ready to watch this weekend. There is a trend that I like Bogart and anything by Hemingway.
I also seek out and enjoy foreign films. I watched Sin Nombre last week and it was stunning. I put it in the pantheon of my favorite foreign films below;
Men with Guns
Seven Samurai
Armor es Perros
City of God
El Norte
Das Bot
Life is Beautiful
Europa
Monsoon Wedding
and others
Men with Guns (Hombres armadas) may be one of the most powerful movies I have ever seen,
Speaking of Sweden I really liked – The original “Insomnia” made in Norway. (well close) It was ripped off to be the big Hollywood Pacino, Williams and Swank with a smulzy ending that lost all of the edge of the original.
I don’t think the subtitles bother me at all. In fact, I refuse to watch Das Bot again unless it is in the original German. The translation loses the edge of the original actors in my estimate.
So many more…
Habu – “I labeled you solipsistic due to your very notable “I’,I,I””
I relize that I have a poor writing style. Oh, there I go again with I, and again infinitum. I use I when I am expressing my thoughts. I am not a learned scholar like you so it is difficult for me to expouse uncontestable knowledge without having to draw on my opinion. Since you are a millionaire, maybe you’d like to take me on as a project and send me to University to learn literature and writing. I’d be happy to pass my information along if you can arrange it. Til, then, maybe you could rewrite some of my sentences so I can learn to be a really accomplished writer like you. Thank you in advance for your kind generosity.
AM
C/150; re Hollywood and the ‘black list’ –has anybody ever heard anything but ridicule for the HUAC ? I haven’t. Wonder if ‘the narrative’ is the whole truth? Or not?
154. Annoy Mouse
AM… ..well there is also the side my wife often expresses to me with an edgy voice and her karate black belt.
It goes like this.
“God honey, you are such an asshole ”
And ya know AM a good deal of the time she’s right on the money. So going forward just write it off to the asshole in me.
Best,
Habu
Marie Claude:
That’s actually not true. When I took cinema in college we got Renoir, Eisenstein, Bunuel, Murnau, Lang, Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini and Herzog in addition to the Americans.
We don’t have to worry about no stinkin’ Iranian nukes and ballistic missiles, now that the Obama Administration has given us the successful tests of the Airborne Laser!
The ABL will go down in history as one of the great accomplishments of this Administration.
heh
To Annoy Mouse: Good stuff. It would be even better, as in easier to read, if it had some paragraphs. Just sayin’.
re: 136. Charles
Did you take Sarris’s course at Columbia?
I did. It was mocked as Wednesday Night at the Movies, but was actually quite good.
Habu – Fair enough. When I hear the word a–hole, I perk up and assume they are talking about me.
jW – Thanks. I’ll make a note of it. I have always had a problem deciding when to best start a new paragraph and sometimes am justplain lazy.
AM161justsolongasyouremembertoleavespacesbetweenthewords!
Bohemond, (and Charles)
glad you had this opportunity, but it looks like that isn’t BW’s teaching
I think the whole notion that Iran’s nuclear effort is dispersed in hardened sites and so is too hard to destroy is gratuitously defeatist.
Iran’s economy is a mess, it’s society is instable, it’s mullahs hated by an intelligent, well educated younger generation.
In other words it is very vulnerable to external or internal disruption.
If we do nothing soon the nuclear genie will escape the bottle for sure.
If we take out Iran’s only significant oil refinery, it’s few crucial power plants and the nuke plants we know about, game’s over.
And make it known we will help rebuild the refinery and power plants when Iran rejoins the civilized world.
#152 Marie Claude
Hmm, in last decade the hollywood bad guis were Arabs, the funny thing is that they hired french actors for acting t’em, (a correlation with bad guis, cuz Hispanics could have done the job too) cuz I suppose that “true” Arabs didn’t want to make t’em
I find that interesting. Maybe you don’t get all of our movies over there, because especially since 9-11 using Arabs or Muslims as the villians has been a PC no-no. Similarly, we are not allowed to pay attention to Muslim males between 20 and 40 when screening for terrorists, for fear of stereotyping. Even though they have committed almost all of the terrorist acts that have happened in this country since 9-11 [not all Muslims are terrorists, but pretty much all terrorists are Muslim males between 20-40]; on our TV and the movies here if you have a Muslim villian you will be both in court and in the news being very effectively threatened by CAIR, the ACLU, and the usual panoply of Leftists.
Our stock villians in our contemporary movies for the last decade or more have been:
Crazy, bigoted, or corrupt American military officers/troops
Crazy, bigoted, or corrupt American businessmen
Crazy, bigoted, or corrupt American Clergy
Crazy, bigoted, or corrupt American scientists
Crazy, bigoted, or corrupt American Conservative politicians
Crazy, bigoted, corrupt, or basically clueless American males
I will note the movie “Blackhawk Down” [released December 18, 2001], but I will further note that the movie was completed and scheduled for release before 9-11.
When you move out of contemporary movies and into the realm of historical fiction, fantasy, or science fiction; the villians are obvious analogs to the above.
It is interesting that frequently these movies [especially those most blatantly pushing a Leftist political agenda] are financial disasters in this country. But they keep making them, and recoup their losses on foreign releases. And in the rare movies where this country, its values, and its people are celebrated, the money pours in.
I admit that I do not watch that many movies nowadays, largely because those I see advertised fall largely into the catagories above. So I may have missed some. I will gladly yield to bogie wheel and LoTM if they would please weigh in and if they disagree with me.
As far as TV is concerned, since 9-11 I have only seen one case where the villians were Muslim, and that was on one season of the series “24″. And after the complaints by the usual suspects came in the plot was changed and the “real” villians turned out to be a powerful cabal of Nazis. Lacrimae Jesus, the Nazis were crushed by the combined armies of the Allies a lifetime ago. Any children they might have had are on Medicare or the equivalent.
But the “entertainment media” would rather haul out the ghosts of those who died halfway through the last century by either military force or by being hanged; rather than take a look at those who have been currently committing terrorist acts around the world in the name of their religion [*]. A certain religion, mostly a certain ethnic group. Who must not be offended.
[*] Y’all may be offended by some of the sayings of this web page. I do not necessarily endorse everything on the page, however it has lists of the 14,819 Muslim terrorist attacks worldwide since 9-11-2001 that have involved deaths and/or personal injuries. Property damage is not included.
Visit the site at your own risk of being offended.
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks
Subotai Bahadur
It seems a good moment to remind folks Daniel Del Castillo’s article “The Arab World’s Scientific Desert” published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com Section: International, Volume 50, Issue 26.
This link is to a site requiring a subscription. I have the full text, evidently from a link I followed some years ago, probably to links of Egyptian-American scientist Farouk el-Baz, who is quoted several times in the Del Castillo article.
Here are some helpful statistics quoted in the article, from a report by the United Nations:
“Last October the United Nations’ Development Program and the Kuwait-based Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development released a study showing how dire the situation is. Among the findings:
• No Arab country spends more than 0.2 percent of its gross national product on scientific research, and most of that money goes toward salaries. By contrast, the United States spends more than 10 times that amount.
• Fewer than one in 20 Arab university students pursue scientific disciplines.
• There are only 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab world. The global average is 78 per 1,000.
• Only 370 industrial patents were issued to people in Arab countries between 1980 and 2000. In South Korea during that same period, 16,000 industrial patents were issued.[my bolding]
• No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium, equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year.”
The UN report mentioned seems to frame the problem as arising from traditions and attitudes of the ARAB community, rather than from Islam. And to an extent, it’s worth contrasting the present condition of the Arab community of Mid-eastern nations to, say, Indonesia. But if you extend the frame to include Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Islamic Republics of the FORMER SOVIET UNION, it’s difficult to avoid concluding that there’s a direct infelicitous consequence from placing a supreme honor on simply committing their sacred book to memory, over all other intellectual honors.
well seems that in America you can only teach and show american movies
Oh come, now, MC, that is a monumentally silly remark and you know it. The US is a large country with thousands of colleges and universities. My university alone offers several film courses each semester, of which mine is only one. If you want to study international films at a college in my city you have only to spit from a hilltop and you will hit an institution offering such a course.
I have only 14 sessions with the students, and the course is called “Intro to Film.” I-N-T-R-O. The course needs a focus, and the lessons need to build on each other. “Classic American films” is one cohesive theme on which to build a course like this. Are there other, different unifying themes? Sure. But any teacher who’s not a crazy masochist is going to teach to his or her strengths, not jump into areas where they don’t know that much. My strength is classic American movies … ergo …
That the premier French chauvinist on this site gets into a dudgeon at the American chauvinism of an American college instructor teaching American films to American students at an American university … oh, the irony.
geoffgo @ 131:
Keni Thomas is one of the Rangers interviewed for a History Channel documentary that was included on Disc 3 of my copy of BHD. I was just watching him (and Mike Durant, and Jeff Struecker, and several others) today. Small world.
Bohemond @ 126:
Exactly. Like all really good movies, it’s open to interpretation; it doesn’t beat you over the head like the shamefully polemical Platoon. Does the Godfather glorify or condemn the Mafia? Does Alex DeLarge deserve our pity? Whether Scott intended it that way, BHD can easily be seen as the dogged courage and non-heroic heroism of 200 young- often very young- American GIs fighting their way through an impossible situation because “someone had blundered.” It’s in effect no more antiwar than Charge of the Light Brigade.
It isn’t that BHD is open to different interpretations that is my concern. It’s that at least one of those interpretations runs expressly against what the military personnel portrayed in the film and who consulted on the film declared their wish as to what audiences would take away from the film.
You really do have to see the documentary feature I was referring to. The interviews of the military personnel and the actors & Ridley Scott are paired as a set. They are responding to the same (off-camera) question. The military men all answered in some variation of: “I hope people see that this country’s military is filled with men who are true professionals, who are brave and who fight hard, and that Americans can be proud of these men.” What came out of the actors’ mouths in response to the same question was: “War is bad. War is futile. There are two sides to everything. We hope people come away from this movie seeing how terrible war is.” And the actors said this, in the same interviews in which they also said, in effect, “We want to represent these men [the Americans who fought in the battle] in a way that honors them, in a way that makes them and their families proud.”
So on the one hand the filmmakers dis the mission, but still insist that they support the soldiers.
When I said the actors didn’t “get it” I didn’t mean that they did not understand war itself (who does, until you find yourself in it, and even then …), I meant that they don’t get the warriors. After having opportunity after opportunity, during extended weeks of training and shooting and being exposed to the military men … the actors, whose very profession is supposed to be based on a special ability to understand and empathize with people, demonstrated so little understanding of these warriors.
I’m glad you’re so confident that BHD can “be easily seen” as a movie that treats the soldiers on the soldiers’ terms. Me, I’m not so sure, esp. regarding that adverb “easily.”
I’m spending some of this weekend working on a lesson plan to draw out the students’ opinions on the film in a completely open-ended fashion, i.e. to find out what *they* think it is saying before I show them any of the documentary material. Then I’m considering showing them the two sets of interviews I referenced above and asking whether, in their opinion, either the soldiers’ wishes or Scott’s and the actors’ wishes about what they wanted the audience to glean from the film were realized. If nothing else it will be an interesting exercise in authorial intent.
buddy @ 155 -
April 20. As an intro to “On the Waterfront,” I’m covering Elia Kazan’s and Budd Schulberg’s HUAC testimonies, “the war for Warner Bros.,” the Hollywood Ten, Ronald Reagan and SAG, Herb Sorrell and CSU, and loads more funfunfun stuff. You are welcome to come sit in on the class if you want.
Subotai,
I’m not offended by your above link, I’m in use to visit a few blogs that expose the jihadists facts, one guy, “Creeping sharia” is my net friend, we exchange informations. Also yu’re right, on the reason why no Arab is acting, same by us, except when they have the same sort of character as a national french would have
an interesting site on cinema, made by a student in film studies
http://tativille.blogspot.com/2009/11/decade-in-film-2000s.html
In the top ten movies of the last decade, there isn’t any movie that will stay in the history of this Art, they were all created to become big commercial successes, no european one in there, but all from Hollywood
http://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice2.html#2000s
What you describe, is rather TV movies, that are floading in the world wide TV channels, we get some of these too, I don’t watch t’em anymore, all their scenaries have the same cheap construction.
Sure if we ought to get an idea how the americans are like, it’s not encouraging, though you should keep in mind that the “bad” feelings generate more stories than the opposite, what to say about happy and nice people ? it the same for papers, you’ll never see normal good people stories in them, but the scums’ make good salings.
MF/166; –and right smack dab in the middle of those folks, there’s these folks.
Note: in the interest of practicality, Mr Therapy the Utopian should consult ”behaviorism” –the school of psychotherapy –before he even bothers with starting a movement for a fairness doctrine in biology.
***
BW/168; You are welcome to come sit in on the class if you want
Sit in class? You don’t understand. I coulda HAD class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.
Re: 166. Mad Fiddler.
No one would care at all about the Middle East if it did not have cheap oil. So let’s nuke the oil and let them continue their centuries old squabbling.
Perhaps that way we can avoid killing millions of innocents in the scenarios laid out by Habu and Whiskey. But, I doubt it. The West never gets -really- mad until late. One of these days, it might be too late. Thank God for our nuke boats.
jW/171; Thank God for our nuke boats –i read somewhere –oh i know where, it as a book review –that the launch protocol sometime back was changed, and that the CiC now has more control –even the final code. I don’t pretend to know jacksh*t but i do know that LORAN is being phased out as we speak. Wasn’t a form of LORAN –long-range low frequency morse code sorta thing –the way for a Boomer cap’n to know his country had just been decapped?
Another war film worth consideration in Otto Preminger’s In Harms Way. You have action, romance, tragedy and politics. It is also my favorite John Wayne movie.
BW
“That the premier French chauvinist on this site gets into a dudgeon at the American chauvinism of an American college instructor teaching American films to American students at an American university … oh, the irony.”
uh, I wasn’t aware of your specific “speciality”, I thought it was a general course on Films, so this is where it appeared (to me) to be “insular”, and reducting
But still no many foreign films find a promoter in your county, because public isn’t interested in them, nor not many foreign books are translated or sold in your country, again because they would not bring enough money for the editors, while here, cinema and litterature are promoted
buddy larsen/172. It was some large underground antenna in Minnesota or somewhere that would transmit something like 2 characters per minute at 50 Hz. There was some enviro wacko objection to it, and I don’t know if it ever got built.
172 buddy larsen
Wasn’t a form of LORAN –long-range low frequency morse code sorta thing –the way for a Boomer cap’n to know his country had just been decapped?
…
LORAN LOng Range Aid to Navigation.
Imagine multiple low frequency radio beacons transmitting at the same time all over the world. The intersection of the radio waves is detectable, and thus you can figure out where you are.{from memory decades ago)
Wait until someone decides that GPS satellites are too much of a luxury for the military and lets their orbits decay… or some nation decides they don’t want others to be able to navigate. All the cruise missiles and the AQ remote aircraft will be useless.
The boomers used low frequency radio with VERY long wavelengths. From what I remember, they trailed floating antenna that were 1000′s of feet, if not yards, in length while remaining submerged. The low frequency made message traffic extremely slow, on the order of characters per second, not tens or hundreds or thousands… like a 300 baud modem on a bad line.
tom
TACAMO
http://www.tacamo.navy.mil/
These planes fly the Looking Glass mission, to maintain comms with nuclear subs during nuclear war.
Wiki has a decent overview of sub comms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines
All of the options for dealing with Iran are bad.
They run from really bad to horrific, in fact.
I do, however, like the Syria option, where the Israelis take out the specified facilities and then no one, including the Syrians, ever talks about it. Not the Israelis, not the U.S., not the Russians, and, again for emphasis, not the Syrians.
What sort of war diplomacy was involved is no doubt in the temporal vault on the long time lock.
I think that with Iran, that will not go as smoothly as it did with Syria, but it’s the model to shoot for, if you’ll pardon the expression.
Perhaps it could still be successful if everyone but the Iranians refused to talk about it.
Some might prefer another revolution in Iran, but I’ve never been partial to chaos around a nuclear question. You just don’t know how those winds will blow.
buddy @ 170:
Clever dolphin! Here’s your fish.
*splash*
subotai:
One of the most (in)famous examples of H’wood PCing is the film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s novel “The Sum of All Fears.” In the novel, the villains were Arab nationalists who set off a nuke during a big NFL game (was it a SB? it has been a while). In the movie, the villains were changed to neo-Nazis with, again IIRC, South African ties.
Talk about reaching.
FWIW, my last job in Los Angeles was working on a TV drama about the FBI. The series had a recurring villain, a crime boss (American), but each episode had its own unique bad guy/girl, ranging from school shooter to deranged sniper. We did do one episode involving Islamic terrorism and we did in fact work with local CAIR representatives when the episode was being written. The CAIR people (one man, one woman) came to the production offices & met with us & discussed plot and characterization points after they had read through a prelim draft of the episode. They suggested some alterations which turned out to be minor. They were both pretty polite, and not in a veiled intimidation sort of way either. Then again the script was not very offensive to begin with, IMO, which admittedly is not the same POV a radical Islamist would have.
That CAIR was consulted to begin with, as a sort of SOP on this type of episode, is indicative in and of itself. Institutionally there is a dhimmi mindset in Hollywood, generally speaking.
But it’s like I find in so many things … it frequently boils down to individuals and context. Relationships and interactions between humans rarely run a completely straight course.
To go back to an example from the HUAC days, Carl Foreman (CPA member and screenwriter of “High Noon”) said that Gary Cooper (committed conservative and friendly HUAC witness) was “the only one who stood up for me” after Foreman had the professional screws put on him. And Ronald Reagan was on a first-name basis with Herb Sorrell.
People can have amicable and respectful working relationships and stark ideological differences at the same time. And they can also have bitter working relationships because they have stark ideological differences. It depends. Humans are predictable … until they aren’t. And when they aren’t … whoa, katie bar the door. That’s what makes life interesting … and dangerous.
Thanks fellers, for the sub comms info — one hopes there’s a launch work-around for the event of a renegade circuit-breaker say at the top. very dicey stuff, very very dicey.
Wretchard: “The problem is not nuclear weapons; rather it is the character of the regime.”
Exactly. Which is why I believe the ultimate solution to this problem – when taken – will focus on eliminating the regime’s leadership rather than destroying the nuclear sites themselves (though they will be hit). One would hope the Israelis know the key nodes at which the Iranian leadership will be located during an attack and then telegraph their intentions sufficiently to allow key Iranian figures time to get to their predetermined locations. One would expect significant involvement of pre-placed operators and a strategy that provides an opening for Iranian opposition leaders to quickly take advantage of the leadership vacuum.
Or perhaps the Obama Administration will successfully prevail upon the Israelis to simply up their covert attacks on the human capital of the Iranian nuclear effort. Being an Iranian nuclear scientist seems to be more hazardous these days than managing a convenience store at night in a bad neighborhood.
Though given that we’ve allowed the Norks to gain a nuclear capability gives me no great hope we’ll successfully keep the Iranians from doing so as well. We’ve done well at drawing lines in the sand, not so well at enforcing them.
I was in a bar years ago when a large, drunk stranger insulted my (equally drunk) friend. The friend, as expected, said something along the lines of “If you say one more thing to me, I’ll break your nose.” The stranger replied “F— you!” Only he never got to “you.” By the time the first word had left his mouth my friend had broken his nose. The bar went silent. Not because of the violence (which was not unusual in this place) but because my friend and the stranger had not engaged in the usual protracted exchange of empty threats before someone worked up the nerve to throw a punch. In my experience fights are often won not by the strongest or best -trained but by those who are simply most willing (by temperament or circumstance) to embrace violence as a solution.
There is much wisdom in these precincts.
One remarkable thing is after months or years reading the learned comments and insights of some Belmont regular, you fetch up against the casual revelation by that person of their employment that buys their daily porridge. What chiefly impresses me is how folks in this forum take it as a sacred responsibility to resist being put into little boxes.
These days, authorities and the “shapers of culture” are hell-bent on intimidating the masses into accepting the shackles and the yoke. “You? You’re nothing but a brick-maker… You? You’re just an electrician …You’re just a CPA…You’re just a teacher…You’re just a retired dispatcher… You’re just a housewife! None of you have any RIGHT to tell US how to run things.
What’s wonderful about Belmont is that people here take very seriously the idea that they are far more than just their present circumstance; they take seriously the responsibility to educate themselves, to dig for information, to consider and weigh and test ideas, and compare them with what they’ve seen and experienced.
In one of his essays,neurologist Oliver Sacks (author of “Awakenings” and “The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”) tells of a young musician who’s entire life had been dominated by his struggle with Tourette’s Syndrome. The condition caused severe facial and postural tics as well as random and frequent outbursts of obscenities (coprolalia.)
By his early twenties this highly-intelligent young man had learned to manage and compensate for the condition primarily with music, humor, and by developing a winning personality.
Still, he wanted to be rid of the tics and shouting.
He sought out Dr. Sacks and started therapy. In time, the therapy began to work and his tics and outbursts became progressively less frequent. He was gradually being cured.
About this point, the patient started panicking, and if I recall correctly, demanded that Doctor Sacks stop the treatment.
Sacks concluded later, presumably after much review and soul-searching, that the young man had gone to such extreme efforts to accommodate his condition – eventually managing to gather a group of faithful friends and admirers who seemingly accepted him as a fellow and friend – that he couldn’t conceive of life without Tourette’s.
In essence, he was more comfortable continuing with the situation he’d learned to live with, than to face the prospect of re-constructing his life in uncharted territories.
Hmmm.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere, if only I could put my finger on it…
@144 Habu
~ “I do honestly appreciate you finally acknowledging that I am who I am” ~
My point exactly. Don’t forget to rest on the seventh day.
MF/182; Hmmm. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, if only I could put my finger on it…
“you can pick your friends; you can pick your nose; you can’t pick your friend’s nose”
(izzat it?)
Mad Fiddler, I agree, your Tourette’s guy just happened to come to the same conclusion that a lot of us Belmont Clubbers do, that we are factually correct after decades of constant observation and honest analysis.
Heh.
And if one would like to disagree in depth and detail, we are more than eager to meet one on the field of smiling, civilized argument in the nicest possible mood, just make sure your facts and logic are squared away before you march into the phalanx of our love of Truth, Justice and the American Way.
Bring it on, is one way of putting it. Or announcing the certain conquest of Marja is another way. Or announcing KSM’s certain guilt in no matter which fair legal show trial we put him in.