Russian Apt 28 Behind Attack on French Elections

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So it was APT 28 that hacked the French, eh? The same group that attacked Hillary and the DNC. Of course the FBI does nothing to protect us, but perhaps French counterintelligence is more, shall we say, effective and less politically motivated to aid the right wing than our FBI.

See this article in DefenseOne here.

Expecting Trump Supporters to Renounce Trump Is a Bad Idea

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I challenge all my FB friends (and those who are not on FB but read my blog) to cite me one example of someone they personally know who was a Trump supporter but now have doubts. Disapproval is not necessary, mere doubts will do.

Do you know any such person? I do not. Therefore I submit to you that expecting Trump supporters to come to their senses and renounce their stupidity is not a realistic expectation.

You may say, but wait, we have not waited long enough. I disagree, there is plenty of reason to think that Trump is an incompetent, ignorant and dangerous maniac. They get it by now or, IMHO, they will never get it.

Cuyahoga Stupid and the Trump Supporters

Many of my so-called friends tell me that it is counterproductive to make fun of Trump supporters. You want to give people wiggle room, the argument goes, you dont want to back them into a corner and force them to admit that they were not merely wrong, but completely, unforgivably and stupidly wrong. Instead you want to give them the courtesy that they had reason to think that the Orange Turnip, the Moron King, might have been a good President, but gee, I guess that didnt work out.

I think that this argument is completely wrong. Trump supporters knew exactly what they were doing and they are getting exactly what they wanted. They wanted a moron who would attack liberals and they got it. They are happy with him destroying the American republic. No argument from reason is going to change their mind. That is my opinion. You may have a different opinion. Good for you. Lets see who is right.

The Guardian in the UK has done a very good job of covering the Trump disaster, and a recent article, whose link is below, surveys two communities in Ohio that are physically quite close to each other, but politically could not be further apart. They did this article on the occasion of the 100 days of the Trump accession.

The Trump supporters interviewed came from Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and they were very vocal about how happy they were with Trump cracking down on those nasty immigrants. They also expressed glee that he was eviscerating (they didnt use that word) the EPA and getting rid of all those unnecessary regulations.

You may find this article here.

I could not help but note two funny things about this. First, “Cuyahoga” is a Native American word, so who, exactly is the immigrant here? Second, Cuyahoga is a very distinctive word and it happens to be associated with a river, the Cuyahoga river. This river is notable for two things: first, Randy Newman wrote a song about it, and second, the Cuyahoga river is famous for being the location of one of the biggest environmental disasters in history, when it actually caught fire because of all the pollutants dumped into it.

For more information on the Cuyahoga River fire, please click here.

In other words, the stupid Trump supporters who live in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, are not aware that *they* are the immigrants and that they live in one of the most compelling arguments for environmental controls in this country.

Now that is what I call stupid.

Cuyahoga River Fire 1952

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This song by Randy Newman is one of my favorites, and you can hear it on Youtube here.

“Burn On”

Theres a red moon arising on the Cuyahoga River

Roling into Cleveland to the lake

Theres a red moon arising on the Cuyahoga River

Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

Theres an oil barge awinding down the Cuyahoga River

Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

Theres an oil barge awinding down the Cuyahoga River

Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

Cleveland city of light, city of magic

Cleveland city of light, you call to me

Cleveland, even now I can remember

The Cuyahoga River goes smoking through my dreams

Burn on, Big River, Burn on!

Burn on, Big River, Burn on

Now the Lord can make you tumble,

The Lord can make you turn

The Lord can make you overflow

But the Lord can't make you burn.

Burn on, Big River, Burn on!

Burn on, Big River, Burn on

Written by Randy Newman • Copyright © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc

FB Game of Musical Acts

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On Facebook, one of the viral themes that is going around is to name 10 musical acts you saw live, but only nine of them are real. The tenth is fake. Your friends have to pick the fake one. Yes, its stupid. But I did it anyway. Here is the list.

Randy Newman

Frank Sinatra

Jean Luc Ponty

Miles Davis

Neil Young / CSN / CSN&Y

Jefferson Airplane

Hot Tuna

Alicia de Larrocha

Red Bone

Leaves of Grass

Rolling Stones

Grateful Dead

The answer is Alicia de Larrocha who was playing at Carnegie Hall the week that I was moving from NYC to Los Angeles in 2001. The Leaves of Grass was my brother's garage band in High School in Richmond, Virginia.

By far the most entertaining of these acts (or the two most entertaining) was Randy Newman and Neil Young. 

Scott Pilgrim and the Perils of Judging a Film from its VFX Reel

The Academy Award (tm) for visual effects is not given for the film that has the splashiest visual effects, or the most innovative, or the most expensive, or even the one with the most visual effects in some quantitative sense. According to the rules of the game, the film that wins this prestigious award and confers on its recipients a competitive lustre, is the film where the visual effects best serves the film.

Sadly it is not the film with the most computer generated robots beating the heck out of other computer generated robots, but rather that film where the robots who are beating the heck out of each other appear to be doing so in a way that contributes to the film's higher purpose.

Of course no award process is perfect and compromises need to be made. One of those compromises is that only films that make use of visual effects are considered for the award in visual effects. Who knew? This is a logical limitation that can have the most unfortunate effect, so to speak, depending on how dreadful the year's visual effects films are. Another issue that must be faced is that the side-by-screening of the different films in competition must necessarily restrict that screening to an edited compilation of the visual effects for each film. Whether that “effects reel” is 10 minutes long, or 12 minutes, or 15 it is by definition an abbreviated version of the larger creative project.

Trust me, when seeing these effects reels back to back, even 10 minutes per film can seem like forever.

It happens though that an effects reel for a creative project may not actually communicate the real value of those effects in context. This is why it is often the case that the selected films (those films that go past the bakeoff and are actually nominated for an award) may seem to go to those films with the largest budget, or the greatest number of giant robots exploding, or even, heaven forbid, the films that generated the most money at the box office.

So, years ago I attended the bakeoff and one of the films in competition was Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010). Although it was nice to see a film that did not depend on explosions or giant robots per se to communicate its higher vision, I was bored with it. Many of my friends thought it was very original, but I didnt. To me it seemed nothing more than a rip off of the classic genre of the 1 or 2 person fighter games from the world of coinop video games.

What the VFX reel did not communicate, and which I only discovered later, was that this film was actually a pretty good low budget film with visual effects. It wasnt totally successful, it fell apart near the end but the first 2/3rds or so of the film is actually very, very funny. The premise is that a very young man, maybe 23 or so, falls in love with a woman who has moved to Toronto from NYC to escape her previous life. But if our hero wants to date her, he must first defeat in battle her evil former lovers.

It is also a good example of regional filmmaking, being based in Toronto as Toronto, not as Toronto as a film location trying to be some other city.

So if you get a chance to see this film, or the first 2/3rds or so, and if you appreciate regional, low-budget filmmaking, this is a pretty entertaining example.

And I never would have guessed this from just seeing its VFX reel out of context.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446029/

The Central Dilemma Theorem

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I am so upset by the recent events in America (Trump, Gorsuch, Russian intelligence operations, the Republican congress that betrays us every day) that I cant even write my blog. Because what I want to write about I am not particularly qualified to write about excepting of course that I am an American citizen. Nevertheless, it is all I want to write about today.

 Never before has my powerlessness in life, my inability to influence my environment,  my complete non-existence to those in power ever been a problem.  But in this current situation here seems to be nothing anyone can do, and the system has clearly failed.

The good news is that it makes it much easier to relate to periods of history that I study (I mean why not, what else do I have to do) and how people must have felt when their nations (and the predecessors to nations) seemed to be coming apart before their eyes.

Like someone in Britain in WW 1, like a Jew in Nazi Germany, or a Russian in 1917, don't people understand what is going on? Why dont they see the terrible cost that their inaction is imposing on us. Some of them are idiots, some of them are selfish, some are self-deluded. They think they can do whatever they want and do not realize that some mistakes can not be recovered from.

Do they think we are just not going to insist on the tax returns being released?  Do they think they can stall us from making them appoint a special prosecutor?  Do they think we will not be able to impeach Gorsuch the way they destroyed the system to "approve" him?  Do they think we will not get to the bottom of the Russian Information Operation?  

Who are these people who call themselves Americans?  

A Story About the Civilian Use of Force in International Conflict

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On the occasion of Donald Trump, the moron king, attacking Syria and blaming Obama for Syria using chemical weapons, I have an anecdote from my days at the RAND Corporation.

There is a story from RAND that would have happened years before my time if it happened at all.

For many years, RAND managed for the US Government a lot of the original strategic simulations, what are popularly called wargames but which are more properly described as simulations of international conflict. They may not be primarily about war. Basically you had teams (red team, blue team, etc) and you had referees who managed the game, but what made the games interesting (and classified) was that the teams were made up of real people from the Dept of Defense, the US Military, the NSC, possibly members of Congress and so forth.

The goal would be to evaluate some different scenarios where nations might come into conflict and evaluate different policies, approaches, and so forth in advance. Anyone who has ever been through any of these types of simulations, even on a more informal basis, will tell you how involving and compelling they can be.

So you had civilians and military personnel mixed together in tension filled situations and you might expect, if you watched stupid Hollywood movies that it would be the military personnel who would first call for war and that it would be the civilians who would beg for peace. Give peace a chance, they might say. But the story I was told was pretty much the reverse of that. That it was the military personnel who knew damn well what war involved who were for diplomatic solutions but it was the civilians, the politicians, who were freaked out and "pushed the button" so to speak. 

Take that for what you will.

Moron Trump pushing the button

Has Trump Conspired Against Blogs?

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The so-called POTUS has been accused today of conspiring against such world-leading blogs as Global Wahrman by providing so much material that the poor non-professional blog writer can not keep up.

“Its just no damn fair” said blog artiste Michael Wahrman. “The son-of-a-bitch just keeps throwing outrage after outrage at the American people, all the while exposing the gross hypocrisy of the Republican Party that I can't keep up. I barely start writing one essay and some new disaster occurs!”

Things have gotten so bad that Mr. Wahrman has even threatened to get a Twitter account.

Sicario, Films about the Intelligence Community, Sergio Leone

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Spoilers for the movie Sicario (2015) follows.

Most, but not all, of the movies which purport to be about the intelligence community (IC) of this or other countries are clearly fantasies with little basis in reality.  But there are some exceptions which show that the filmmakers cared enough to incorporate elements of the reality of this arcane and overly glamourized world into their creative work.  This is not to say that the more fantastic and unrealistic of these films, say for example the Bond or Bourne films, are not entertaining, they may be more entertaining in fact. But they are not based at all on the realities.

If we were to have an "Intelligence Film Festival" I would nominate Sicario (2015) by Denis Villeneuve to be on the list.  It seems as though the writer and director did know something about this world and used their knowledge to inform the script, at least some of the time.  I am not saying the film is totally realistic but it does have some excellent things going for it.

So what criteria might we use to denote a film that is more realistic than the pure entertainment product in this genre?

1. The different agencies of the US Government have different corporate cultures. We do not know much about the Josh Brolin character, but we do know that he is not FBI by his choice of clothes. It is the first thing that the Emily Blunt character notices about him.

2. When Kate is selected, we discover that the Brolin character does not want someone who is from FBI Narcotics, nor who is a lawyer, nor who has worked cases. We are told that Kate is selected for her "tactical skills" but this is revealed later to be not true. See next point where the real reason becomes clear.

3. The Brolin character never actually admits to being CIA, presumably because if you are covert in the CIA (and only a small number of CIA people are), it is not something you readily admit. But we are left near the end believing that he is CIA because he admits that the real reason he wants Kate around is that the CIA (and presumably Delta Force) are not permitted to operate in the continental United States unless there is someone from a domestic agency attached.

4. Ultimately Kate (and the audience) are told that the reason that the team led by Brolin is doing what it is doing is because they have been authorized by much higher authority. By elected representatives in fact, which presumably means either the POTUS or various parties in Congress or both. This is a key point for those of you who have been fed a diet of intelligence movie conspiracy theories. Generally speaking, the intelligence community is not breaking our law (even if they break some other country's law all the time) and they are acting under orders from a legitimate authority. Generally people blame the CIA when they should be blaming their elected representatives, and/or the National Security Council, and/or the POTUS. Generally speaking.

5. At one point Kate pretty much loses her mind and attacks both Alejandro and Matt but we are never really told why.  My speculation is because these two are killing a lot of foreign nationals without due process and this would be anathema to a law enforcement official.  

6. Why all the mystery about Alejandro? Because Alejandro works for the "competition", e.g. the Columbian drug cartel.  Yes the CIA is well-known for dining with sinners.

Now onto some stylistic issues involving the Benicio del Toro character and this film.  I wondered just why I found this character so appealing when, after all, without going into any detail here, he does some mighty nasty things. In thinking about this, it occurred to me that he fit a model that was not entirely expected and which may not have been intentional on the part of the filmmakers.

These characteristics include having a mysterious and tragic past, of being very good in a gunfight, of speaking very seldom and then cryptically.  He is very secretive about his motivations and his intents. He manages to convince us that while he is cruel, that he may have some worthwhile reasons for his cruelty. Although I am not an expert in such things, he seems very handsome. And of course this all takes place on the border between the US and Mexico and arguably during a time of war.

And while he is successful in some sense of the word, when the film is over he is walking away alone.

Of course the way I have described this, the answer is obvious.  He resembles, at least superficially, the Clint Eastwood character in Sergio Leone films.  Even if this analogy works for you, and it may not, as I have said before, it is not clear that this was the filmmaker's intent.

“Listen. Nothing will make sense to your American ears. And you will doubt everything that we do. But in the end, you will understand.”

Sicario (2015) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3397884/

Military Rules of Engagement on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_engagement

Bird Dog on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_dog

Feminism and the Wonder Woman Armpit Issue

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A great moment in cinematic history and criticism is taking place. This moment demonstrates the stupidity and the shallowness of the American civilization in all its glory.

In the middle of our little consitutional crisis, when the lives of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, of people in the world is at stake, with the end of the American republic all but certain, the failure of our elected representatives and governmental insitutions there for all to see, what do these shallow children worry about? What is at the very top of their list of things to complain about? What could motivate them to outrage?

Is it the destruction of the National Endowment for the Arts? No. Is it that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency has disavowed science? No. Is it the defunding of Planned Parenthood that is likely to result in the death of or the destruction of the life of thousands of poor women? No.

What then?

It is the burning question about whether or not Wonder Woman shaves her armpits in the third trailer for the Wonder Woman movie coming out in a few months. Were her armpits shaved in Photoshop, they wonder.

Perhaps the right is correct and we are raising a generation of stupid and shallow snowflakes after all. No one who lived through the 70s Feminist movement could help but shudder at this throwback to an earlier period of American radicalism.

I only hope that Wonder Woman's girdle squeezes these children until their heads pop with shame.

You may see this trailer here.

For a previous discussion of the Feminist issue of shaving, please see here.