How so? Well, in addition to serving as the author of the Bush II regimes torture justification, the UC Berkeley law prof is deeply identified with the city that gave birth to the Free Speech Movement.
Just consider these prompts when folks Google his name [via Wonkette]:
From Berkeley, the city henceforth and forever linked with war crimes and torture.
Posted in Global Corporate U., GWOT, Law, Politics, Warfare
From Salon:
“1984” sales explode following NSA scandal
And 1984—The Video, from Bernie Sanders, America’s only socialist U.S. Senator, speaking to the Senate floor:
Posted in Culture, Governance, GWOT, Human behavior, Law, Politics, Secrecy, Spooks, Video, Warfare
University of Chicago Law School Professor Geoffrey Stone played a critical role in the creation of the legalistic covert neoliberal politician that is Barack Obama, for it was Stone who brought Obama to his campus as a constitutional law professor. Obama brought him onto his advisory team during his 2008 campaign.
In this Democracy Now! debate with former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief Cris Hedges, Stone makes a critically important point about Obama: Whatever he does is accomplished with a Con Law prof’s finesse, with all the requisite whereas-es and wherefores. Thus, what he does is — moral, immoral, or otherwise — certain to pass the scrutiny of legislatures and a Supreme Court which hews to the neoliberal line, a doctrine that arose from a cadre of scholars from — where else? — the University of Chicago.
Obama has bested Bush in his zeal to kill messengers, initiating more whistleblower prosecutions than all previous administrations combined, and Hedges makes the critical point that without whistleblowers, the press has no way of reporting on government’s darkest sides.
Relevant here, a quote from Jeff Bachhman, lecturer in Human Rights at the School of International Service at American University, writing for The Hill’s Congress Blog:
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has charged six whistle-blowers, a term apparently not in The New York Times’s or The Washington Post’s editorial vocabulary, under the Espionage Act. These six individuals have revealed government waste, fraud, and abuse, acts of aggression, torture and war crimes. Yet, it is those who have revealed the criminal activity that have suffered prosecution by the Obama administration while those who actually committed the crimes have gone unpunished.
>snip<
The Obama administration has sent a clear message. Government officials and journalists who wish to work together to create news stories through the leak of classified information that portray the president and his administration in a positive light should have no fear. And to the journalists and whistle-blowers thinking about publishing that other kind of classified information, be prepared to have your emails read, your phones tapped without your knowledge and your life and career turned upside down.
And now for the debate:
The program notes:
Edward Snowden’s decision to leak a trove of secret documents outlining the NSA’s surveillance program has elicited a range of reactions. Among his detractors, he’s been called “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison,” (Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker), who’s committed “an act of treason,” (Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee). To supporters, Snowden is a hero for showing that “our very humanity [is] being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of making us safe,” (author Douglas Rushkoff), one whom President Obama should “thank and offer him a job as a White House technology advisor,” (American Conservative editor Scott McConnell). We host a debate with two guests: Chris Hedges, a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times; and Geoffrey Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Stone served as an informal advisor to President Obama in 2008, years after hiring him to teach constitutional law.
The latest episode of the Max and Stacy show begins with a denunciation of the Obama administration’s spooky obsession and a discussion of a veritable bugger’s Bilderberg. The second half features an interview with Mark McGowan, whose epic rants are featured at The Artist Taxi Driver.
The program notes:
In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert ask, “What is Boundless Informant, PRISM, Trans-Pacific Partnership, SOPA, PIPA and ACTA if not copyright prostitutes colluding and beating up the competition? Max also informs President Barack Obama that a food stamp is NOT a job. In the second half, Max talks to artist, Mark McGowan (aka The Artist Taxi Driver), about his pushing the pig to Downing Street as an artistic response to the privatisation of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. They also discuss McGowan’s crowd-funded film currently in production, “This is Not a Recession, It’s a Robbery!”
Here’s a clip from NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel’s Today Show interview of Brandon Bryant, who was credited with more than 1,600 kills during his five years former Predator drone operator.
Bryant says his suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of his experiences:
Bryant recalled his first traumatic experience in a 14 December 2012 interview by Spiegel’s Nicola Abé, describing what happened after he laser-painted a target and a fellow operator fired a Hellfire missile at a mud house in Afghanistan half a world away from his New Mexico video screen:
“These moments are like in slow motion,” he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.
With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.
“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.
“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.
From EU Business:
EU ‘concerned’ by US surveillance revelations
From EUobserver:
Germany most snooped EU country by US
From New Europe:
Time for Europe to stop being complicit in NSA’s crimes
From a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial:
PRISM and BLARNEY mean it’s time to rein in the terrorcrats
From The Guardian, reporting the predictable responses:
Obama deflects criticism over NSA surveillance as Democrats sound alarm
Tech giants object to suggestions that they allowed government direct access to data while details of Prism program emerge
And equally predictable, this from the Electronic Frontier Foundatiuon’s Deeplinks:
Government Says Secret Court Opinion on Law Underlying PRISM Program Needs to Stay Secret
From ProPublica, matter of factly:
No Warrant, No Problem: How the Government Can Get Your Digital Data
From Forbes, a shoulder shrug:
Intelligence Chief Says Massive Data Collection Is No Big Deal, But Reporting It Is
From McClatchy Newspapers, another acknowledgement:
Phone record fury just one sign of how privacy is a thing of the past
And from the “strange bedfellows” department, this from Politico:
Glenn Beck, Michael Moore call Edward Snowden a hero
But another, more sinister take from the London Daily Mail:
Intelligence officials overheard joking about how NSA leaker should be ‘disappeared’ after handing classified documents to press
From the New York Times, no surprise:
Leaker’s Employer Became Wealthy by Maintaining Government Secrets
And from GlobalResearch, a reminder:
Spying on Americans before 9/11: NSA Built Back Door In All Windows Software by 1999
UPDATE: A final headline, from an announcement by Emisoft:
USA to legalize rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to combat piracy?
Posted in Corpocracy, Culture, Deep Politics, Europe, Geopolitics, Governance, GWOT, History, Law, Mideast, Politics, Secrecy, Spooks, Warfare
The Spanish Civil War, fought between 1936 and 1939, served as a dress rehearsal for the larger, global conflict that began five months after the bloody war in Spain ended.
The Popular Front government elected 16 February 1936 and headed by Prime Minister Manuel Azaña and promptly removed powerful army generals to distant outposts, including former Chief of Staff Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, banished to command of the Canary Islands garrison.
Franco and other disgruntled officers rose in revolt on 17 July. The fascist revolutionaries soon gained the support of fascist governments in Germany and Italy, while the democratic governments of Europe and North America remained neutral. That left the Soviet Union as the only major power supporting the Reublicans, though Mexico contributed cash.
And it also set the stage for a dress rehearsal for the greater war to come, with Spain used as a testing ground for tactics and weapons later deployed on a far grander basis. One such tactic was the first major aerial bombardment of a civilian population, the 26 April 1937 bombing of Guernica by planes from the Luftwaffe’s Legion Condor and Italy’s Aviazione Legionaria.
The attack on Guernica also served as inspiration for many artists, among them Pablo Picasso, his painting replicated here in ceramic in Guernica itself [via Wikipedia]. Click on the image to enlarge:
But the bulk of the war was on the ground, where a major role was played by volunteers from across the globe banded together as the International Brigades — including the famous Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the U.S.
The brigades fought and died in great numkbers, and were finally ordered out of the country in October, 1938, with the war ending in a victory for Franco’s Nationalists on 1 April 1939.
While Franco is gone and Spain is now a constitutional monarchy which has even had socialist governments, it took 72 years before a public monument rose in Spain to honor the Internationals.
The simple stele erected two years ago has been the target of hatred by a revived neofascist Right, but it took a court to order its elimination.
From The Guardian’s Giles Tremlett:
The monument to the volunteers from 53 countries, paid for by public subscription and placed in the gardens of the Complutense University, where many died defending Madrid and Spanish democracy against Franco’s rebels, has enraged some rightwingers.
A case brought by the lawyer Miguel García has now succeeded where political protest failed. Judges have decided the university broke planning laws and must remove the monument.
Topped by the brigades’ three-pointed star, the monument bears the words of Dolores Ibárruri, the communist firebrand better known as La Pasionaria: “You are history; you are legend; you are an heroic example of solidarity and of the universality of democracy.”
So the monument to volunteers who fought for a democratically elected government during a global economic crisis is now banished, using the rubric of land use law. Meanwhile, the Spanish government during a similar period of economic crisis is giving billions to an American necon casino mogul to build a massive gambling resort — while being exempted from whole sections of Spanish law.
From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
Trends in age-adjusted suicide rates among persons aged 35–64 years, by sex and mechanism — National Vital Statistics System, United States, 1999–2010
From the report:
Trends in suicide rates were examined by sex, age group, race/ethnicity, state and region of residence, and mechanism of suicide. The results of this analysis indicated that the annual, age-adjusted suicide rate among persons aged 35–64 years increased 28.4%, from 13.7 per 100,000 population in 1999 to 17.6 in 2010. Among racial/ethnic populations, the greatest increases were observed among American Indian/Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) (65.2%, from 11.2 to 18.5) and whites (40.4%, from 15.9 to 22.3). By mechanism, the greatest increase was observed for use of suffocation (81.3%, from 2.3 to 4.1), followed by poisoning (24.4%, from 3.0 to 3.8) and firearms (14.4%, from 7.2 to 8.3). The findings underscore the need for suicide preventive measures directed toward middle-aged populations.
Suicide rates were highest in the West [15.8/100,000], followed by the South, [14.8], Midwest [12.7], and Northeast[10.5], with the report noting that “Significant increases were observed across all regions in the United States.”
Washington Post scribe Tara Bahrampour notes that
As youths, boomers had higher suicide rates than earlier generations; the confluence of that with the fact that they are now beginning to grow old, when the risk traditionally goes up, has experts worried. The findings suggest that more suicide research and prevention should “address the needs of middle-aged persons,” a CDC statement said.
>snip<
Exacerbating boomers’ anxiety is a sense that the world is more treacherous than when they were young, he said. Then, the communist threat and the atom bomb loomed large, but they were distant and abstract; attacks like the ones on the World Trade Center and the Boston Marathon have changed this paradigm.
“These events used to happen 6,000 miles away; now they happen here,” Arbore said.
We suspect Bahrampour wasn’t around for the 1950’s and 1960’s, when the threat of nuclear war was anything but “distant and abstract.” Grade school kids had frequent “duck and cover” drills where they hid under their classroom desks, a move designed to shield young bodies from lethal shards of glass as the blast wave shattered their widows. There were ubiquitous fallout shelter signs, and at least once a month warning sirens sounded in every city and town, test of the nuclear attack warning system. And for single young men out of school, there was always the threat of the draft, forced conscription for bodies to throw against folks objecting to our presence in assorted Asian lands.
And now those same folk are watching neocon vultures and a turncoat President pondering the gutting of the social programs and protections they assumed would be theirs.
Suicides also spike among soldiers
By which we mean the young women currently in uniform, as Al Jazeera reports:
The program notes:
US army struggles against high suicide rate
Suicides among US army personnel are on the rise. In the first four months of this year, more than 160 soldiers have taken their own lives. The Pentagon has released a report detailing the depth of the problem. Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett reports.
The trial of soldier and alleged Wiki-leaker Bradley Manning began yesterday. Here’s telling part of a statement on the prosecution from Wikileaks co-founder and political refugee Julian Assange:
The alleged act in respect of which Bradley Manning is charged is an act of great conscience – the single most important disclosure of subjugated history, ever. There is not a political system anywhere on the earth that has not seen light as a result. In court, in February, Bradley Manning said that he wanted to expose injustice, and to provoke worldwide debate and reform. Bradley Manning is accused of being a whistleblower, a good man, who cared for others and who followed higher orders.
But this is not the language the prosecution uses. The most serious charge against Bradley Manning is that he “aided the enemy” – a capital offence that should require the greatest gravity, but here the US government laughs at the world, to breathe life into a phantom. The government argues that Bradley Manning communicated with a media organisation, WikiLeaks, who communicated to the public. It also argues that al-Qaeda (who else) is a member of the public. Hence, it argues that Bradley Manning communicated “indirectly” with al-Qaeda, a formally declared US “enemy”, and therefore that Bradley Manning communicated with “the enemy”.
But what about “aiding” in that most serious charge, “aiding the enemy”? Don’t forget that this is a show trial. The court has banned any evidence of intent. The court has banned any evidence of the outcome, the lack of harm, the lack of any victim. It has ruled that the government doesn’t need to show that any “aiding” occurred and the prosecution doesn’t claim it did. The judge has stated that it is enough for the prosecution to show that al-Qaeda, like the rest of the world, reads WikiLeaks.
In the end it is not Bradley Manning who is on trial. The trial of Bradley Manning ended long ago. The defendant now, and for the next 12 weeks, is the United States and the collapse of its institutions. The runaway military, the deferent courts, the hand-maiden press, and the rotten institutions of government. They sit in the docks. We are called to serve as jurists, during this, their lowest hour. We must not turn away.
Posted in Crime, Culture, Deep Politics, Governance, GWOT, Law, Military, Secrecy, Spooks, Warfare, WikiLeaks diplomatic cables
Though it’s a decade old, Carlin’s rant is as timely as ever, now that the Usual Suspects are pushing for war on Syria:
First, a video report from RT featuring an interview of Dr. Ruth Blakely, a co-creator of The Rendition Project and a member of the faculty of the University of Kent by RT’s Aleksey Yaroshevsky:
From The Rendtion Project website:
Our Rendition Flights Database has been compiled in collaboration with Reprieve, and represents the world’s largest set of public flight data relating to those aircraft suspected of involvement in the global network of renditions, secret detention and torture. The interactive here has been produced in collaboration with Craig Bloodworth from The Information Lab, and allows users to search for, and visualise, renditions flights from the underlying database.
Posted in Deep Politics, Governance, GWOT, History, Secrecy, Spooks, Video, Warfare
From the British documentarians at Journeyman Pictures [YoutTube channel here], a stunning look at the extent of the powers and abilities of the modern surveillance state:
From Journeyman Pictures
Increasing numbers of ‘terror suspects’ are being arrested on the basis of online and CCTV surveillance data. Authorities claim they act in the public interest, but does this intense surveillance keep us safer?
“I woke up to pounding on my door”, says Andrej Holm, a sociologist from the Humboldt University. In what felt like a scene from a movie, he was taken from his Berlin home by armed men after a systematic monitoring of his academic research deemed him the probable leader of a militant group. After 30 days in solitary confinement, he was released without charges. Across Western Europe and the USA, surveillance of civilians has become a major business. With one camera for every 14 people in London and drones being used by police to track individuals, the threat of living in a Big Brother state is becoming a reality. At an annual conference of hackers, keynote speaker Jacob Appelbaum asserts, “to be free of suspicion is the most important right to be truly free”. But with most people having a limited understanding of this world of cyber surveillance and how to protect ourselves, are our basic freedoms already being lost?
Posted in Crime, Culture, Deep Politics, Europe, Governance, History, Human behavior, Law, Media, Politics, Privacy, Secrecy, Spooks, Video, Warfare
From The Independent:
BP and Shell price-fixing inquiry: Oil giants raided over allegations of collusion
From Australia’s News.com:
Charity calls to ban cancer-causing chemicals used by women
Breast Cancer UK calls for total ban on BPA chemical
BPA is “contributing to rapid increase in breast cancer”
Chemical commonly used in food and beverage packaging
From a BBC story on the sex slavery comments of Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto, who also calls for a “restoration” of dictatorship:
Japan WWII ‘comfort women’ were ‘necessary’ — Hashimoto
From a BBC story about those “freedom fighters” the Obama administration supports in Syria:
Outrage at Syrian rebel shown ‘eating soldier’s heart’
Finally, from Mother Jones, a story about the folks who are smiling whilst the blood flows:
Contractors Raked in $385 Billion on Overseas Bases in 12 Years
Every year, US taxpayers send billions of dollars abroad to build and maintain our military presence.
Posted in Asia, Class, Corpocracy, Culture, Deep Politics, Food, Governance, GWOT, Health, Military, Resources, Warfare
From Paul Jay of The Real News Network, an interview with retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell, about the disturbing rise of aggressive fundamentalist Christianity in the American military:
A transcript is posted here.
Posted in Culture, Governance, GWOT, Human behavior, Intolerance, Military, Politics, Video, Warfare
From The Independent:
‘Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ closer to number one spot as it reaches midweek top ten following Margaret Thatcher’s death
From RT America:
‘Irreparable’ safety issues: All US nuclear reactors should be replaced, ‘Band-Aids’ won’t help
From ENENews:
TV: Gas release from U.S. nuclear site covered up? — Continued for several days — “Spontaneous, not controlled”
From McClatchy Newspapers:
Obama’s drone war kills ‘others,’ not just al Qaida leaders
From CNN:
Syria rebel group’s dangerous tie to al Qaeda
From Greek Reporter:
Labor Cost in Greece Drops Dramatically
From Spiegel:
Brain Drain: 120,000 Professionals Leave Greece Amid Crisis
Posted in Corpocracy, Culture, Deep Politics, Economy, Environment, Europe, Health, Idiocy, Mideast, Military, Politics, Warfare
Hosted by actor Woody Harrelson and written and directed by Pete Gain, Ethos is a 2011 documentary that explores the relationship between banking, power, politics, personal freedom, and environmental destruction. Among those featured are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Chalmers Johnson.
It’s well worth 68 minutes of your time.
From economist Michael Hudson:
Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.
Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.
Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts. For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.
By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.
This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.
One, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, nominally a fisher of men, and the other, Argentina military junta jefe Jorge Rafael Videla, a baby-stealing, “Dirty War-making, feeder of men to the fishes, snapped back when Jorge II ruled the political roost and Jorge I, now reincarnated as Pope Frankie the First, was the country’s top Catholic.
Photo from Indignados Lisboa via (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography:
Posted in Class, Crime, Culture, Deep Politics, Governance, History, Latin America, Photography, Politics, Secrecy, Spooks, Warfare
Via Orwellwasright, a dramatic Al Jazeera visualization of the real budget battle’s driving engine, that military/industrial/academic complex Ike warned us about 52 years ago.
We suspect the real number’s larger. Nor were real impacts on, for example, academia made clear. Berkeley, with it’s bandolier of National Laboratories spawned by the search for The Bomb and expanded into engines of imperialism, as in the genetically engineered cops designed to conquer land rights and demolish peasant sovereignty on behalf of private profit and the interests of the U.S. military and their CIA drone-firing gunslingers now busily setting up shop in Africa, along with AFRICOM, the new military command launched by an Air Force general who lead the air war of Afghanistan.
And it was that same general who devixsed the strategy for converting the air force in agrofueled fleet.
Africa was also the first destination of crews from Berkeley’s BP-funded, national lab participating $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute, who launched searches for suitable crops to be turned into fuels using genetically engineered microbial refineries. If all those oil countries rebelled, at least there’d be fuel plantations, operating under the watchful missile-armed eyes droning overhead.
And that’s just one on many avenues in which the single largest burner of money shapes the landscape of possibilities. . .
Posted in Africa, Agriculture, Class, Corpocracy, Deep Politics, Economy, Finance, Geopolitics, Global Corporate U., Governance, GWOT, Mideast, Military, Politics, Resources, Science, Video, Warfare, Wealth
From the Anti-Banality Union [ABU]:
UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST (2011)
Detourned by The Anti-Banality Union. 65 mins. U.SS.A.
Amerikan with some Arabic.Unclear Holocaust is a feature-length autopsy of Hollywood’s New York-destruction fantasy, gleaned from over fifty major studio event-movies and detourned into one relentless orgy of representational genocide. It is the unrivaled assembly of the greatest amount of capital and private property heretofore captured in one frame, that, with unfathomable narrative efficacy, suicides itself in an annihilatory flux of fire, water, and aeronautics.
“A Terrorist film collective hijacks the U.S. propaganda apparatus and detonates it over New York. Everything is obliterated and the world celebrates. Through fifty studio event-movies abstracted of all demokratic variation, we see the Cinema as it really is; an unequivocal annihilation, the auto-genocidal mass fantasy of a megalomaniacally depressed First World. Every screen is lifted and bares the obscene underside of all these images. Movements of character and narrative burst into pure and mechanically perfect propulsions of a psychotic camera from which all this violence emanates. The Mise-En-Scene becomes an inventory of the dominant visual-auditory arsenal, enumerating and measuring the power of every weapon available to the Spectacle. Utilizing them all with paradigmatic rigor, the Hollywood-Military complex launches an endless pre-emptive attack on its own shadow, the Terrorist. And, as in all encounters between doubles, the former ends up joyously suiciding itself.” -A.B.U. Communique #1
“When I first heard of Unclear Holocaust, the debut project of nebulous situationist art collective The Anti-Banality Union, my initial impression was that these impious troublemakers would fully deserve the inevitable fatwa that will be vexed upon them. However, after viewing part of the work, which reconstitutes scenes from over 50 Hollywood New York City disaster porn films into a more or less coherent narrative, I am pleased to report it is a rather damning yet thoughtful–and dare I say hilarious and enjoyable?–reminder of how bad Hollywood had pushed this scenario. (In cinematic terms, what is 9/11, after all, other than all three* Die Hard movies–exploding tower, exploding airplane, exploding New York City–rolled into one?) “The Spectacle of Terrorism forces the Terrorism of Spectacle upon us…” the ABU wrote me in this mysterious, Frankfurt School-inspired communique. I’m reminded of the remarks Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw shared on 9/11 the other day:
‘Perhaps the whole point of 9/11 was that it could never be represented on the cinema screen. The diabolic, situationist genius of the kamikaze attacks was that they were themselves a kind of counter-cinema, a spectacle very possibly inspired by the art-form, but rendering obsolete any comparable fictions it had to offer. The 9/11 attacks smashed Hollywood’s monopoly on myth-making and image production, and inspiring as they did only horror and revenge, aimed a devastating blow at imagination, and maybe for a while enfeebled the reputation of cinema and all the arts.’
Thankfully for the ABU, Hollywood pulled its shit together and made Nicolas Cage apocalypse thriller Knowing, providing Unclear Holocaust about half its runtime.” -ScreenSlate.com
-?!
p.s. Expect ‘Police Mortality’.
