Wednesday, September 02, 2009

[66] mostra internazionale d'arte cinematografica comincia oggi

Una scena del film Baaria

Here are the entries in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival, the oldest in the world, which kicks off today:

- 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup - Jacques Rivette (France)
- Accident - Cheang Pou-Soi (China-Hong Kong)
- Baaria - Giuseppe Tornatore (Italy) Opening Film
- Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans - Werner Herzog (U.S.)
- Between Two Worlds - Vimukthi Jayasundara (Sri Lanka)
- Capitalism: A Love Story - Michael Moore (U.S.)
- La doppia ora - Giuseppe Capotondi (Italy)
- Il grande sogno - Michele Placido (Italy)
- Lebanon - Samuel Maoz (Israel)
- Life During Wartime - Todd Solondz (U.S.)
- Lo spazio bianco - Francesca Comencini (Italy)
- Lourdes - Jessica Hausner (Austria)
- Mr. Nobody - Jaco van Dormael (France)
- Persecution - Patrice Chereau (France)
- Prince of Tears - Yonfan (Hong Kong)
- The Road - John Hillcoat (U.S.)
- A Single Man - Tom Ford (U.S.)
- Soul Kitchen - Fatih Akin (Germany)
- Survival of the Dead - George Romero (U.S.)
- Tetsuo the Bullet Man - Shinya Tsukamoto (Japan)
- The Traveler - Ahmed Maher (Egypt)
- White Material - Claire Denis (France)
- Women Without Men - Shirin Neshat (Germany)

This page gives a run down on the entries.

Snippets:

During last year's festival, a founder of Sony Classic saw a man using a chronometer to measure the applause during the premiere of "Rachel Getting Married," which lasted nine or 10 minutes, Mueller said. The man was from a group of German film distributors, who widened the release of the film based on the applause from Venice's audience.

Likewise, Kathryn Bigelow's "Hurt Locker," received a 10-minute standing ovation, despite mixed critical reaction. "Still, the film traveled on the first impact, on the first response in Venice. It found a North American deal in Toronto and went on to become one of the box office hits of last season."

Closer to home, an Italian film opens the festival for the first time in 20 years. Giuseppe Tornatore, who won an Oscar in 1998 for "Cinema Paradiso," will premiere "Baaria," a film about life in a small town in his native Sicily.

"Baaria is really what the (Italian) industry needed at this time. A film which proves it makes a lot of sense for the industry to invest large sums in a creator's dream, because then the industry can go back to being the dream machine."

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

[day of the triffids] thud style

"The coach house shown has been suffering the ravages caused by a monstrous clematis whilst being defaced by a seventies excrescence that I have been eyeing with distaste every day since we arrived."

A noughties horror movie here.

[closed minds] ad hominem and 911


Harry Hook has this report on 911 which claims to establish that the attacks were the result of Black Ops. I've not gone down the 911 road much on this blog but this seems quite alarming, in fact.

One thing also quite interesting to me is the phenomenon in America where any questioning of the motives of authorities results in the rapid "-er" treatment - Birthers, Truthers - in lieu of full discussion of the allegations.

We saw this amazing phenomenon with JFK and the split into two camps - one called SBTists and the other Conspiracy Theorists. There was no actual attempt to look at the evidence dispassionately, which I tried to do a couple of weeks back. I would have been willing to accept either theory if it had panned out that way.

What is this mania over there to suddenly split into camps? They even did it with the Tribulation, with one group, for Heaven's sake, called the Pre-Tribbers. This is not the way to investigate anything - to take a stance before you've seriously got down to investigation and then to just call the other side names.

It's quite frankly puerile.

So I hope people will at least look at this 911 biz with an open mind.

[late evening listening] metal and that sort of thing

Rammstein [need we say more]:



Uriah Heep [this has to be one of the best metal tracks]:



Slipknot [intriguing stop frame vid]:



Deep Purple [well we had to, didn't we]:

[charon qc] law firms have vintage year

Charon QC writes of the dilemma law firms have explaining their takings to skint clients.

[tuesday quiz] see how you go



1. What did Salvador Dali wear to the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition at London's New Burlington Gallery in 1936?

2. Which came first - colour or sound films? Bonus point: At the same time, one of the most famous Russian films came out about a battleship. What was that film?

3. What is the word used to describe a two humped camel?

4. What is the white of an egg called, apart from "white of an egg" or "egg white"?

5. The Vinson Massif is the highest mountain in which continent?

Answers

A diving suit; colour - 1922: 'Toll of the Sea' - the first sound film was 'The Jazz Singer' in 1927, Battleship Potemkin; bactrian; albumin; Antarctica

[trickling tuesday] one solution

[political compass] the lack of communication we have

The boat careers down a river, explains my mate, crashing first into the Left bank and then swinging wildly over to the Right bank, lurching like a drunk downstream, damaging itself as it goes. Why, oh why, can't the boat be steered down the Centre, availing itself of the Left and Right banks to give it its position?


The political compass, as Xlbrl mentioned, is heavily flawed in its illogical questions and assumptions behind them but more interesting is the spread of opinion. A couple of people have been surprised by their position but it's no surprise for me.

Every person who could be seen as Left-liberal whom I know, for example, Jams O'Donnell whom I'd imagine doesn't give himself any labels at all, is motivated by care and concern for other people, humanity, the iniquity of big corporations and what is seen as the ills of capitalism. People like Jams support good causes, e.g. supporting the protesters in Iran. Look at my sidebar - I'm with him in all of this.

Jams will be offended by the next word "political naivety". No fully functioning adult would accept such an epithet but look at his blog - it's hardly political. It's one of the best blogs in the sphere but it's not political, except in its concern for good. Many mothers would find themselves in this camp also. Good feminists would too, in the sense of those who saw inequalities and wanted them righted. The young would echo Jams' concerns - against discrimination against people on the basis of race, colour and creed - all good stuff which I support too.

Those of us on the Centre-right don't disagree with the human concerns - a glance through this blog shows what it's concerned with but in our insistence on "incentive" as the motivating force for all change, this is often interpreted as "self-serving greed".

However, what the Centre-right also sees is the political force lurking behind the do-good Left-liberalism and that force is Socialism, which aligns itself with all the "feelgood" causes in a bundle, in a package deal, like the Chinese bundle The Three Truths, The Six Evils and so on and yet it is anything but benign.

It was not for nothing that The International was composed.

This malignant force, which is no more nor less than the age old evil popping up in the French Revolution, in Theosophy, in the CFR [supposedly Right wing but not at all because Right wing is patriotic] in the Rothschilds and in places people would have thought were the exact opposite, in Brown's government with the international push for a new world currency - these things are so far away from the motivation of the Left-liberal. I've put many quotes on this blog which are direct admissions from this force as to what it is about. Read Quigley for a start.

Many who call themselves socialist [small s] would therefore be offended by the anti-socialist rhetoric of ours, thinking that they themselves are being attacked and maligned. No, not a bit of it - I know your motivation and though you don't mind the epithet socialist, meaning someone concerned with the social wellbeing of society and policies which ensure fair distriubtion of opportunity and compassionate concerns, this is not what I'm referring to.

I'm referring to the Socialist - different other animal.

This force promotes human misery and because it is so ancient, it knows full well what these policies produce. It is, by definition, malcontented, is hellbent on reducing the population of the world and reducing them to misery in the meantime, under the unsustainable banner of a New World Order. For goodness sake - Bush Snr actually had it written into the certificates soldiers received after the Gulf War.

The Left-liberal does not concern himself with these things because he is focussed on the social concerns, the social networking, the pleasant and worthy side. I know just how Jams and Calum would have answered those policial compass questions - compassionately, for fellow human beings. Hence the position on the chart.

If I was to say to Jams and Calum that they support totalitarianism, they'd catch their breath, narrow their eyes and click out of this blog for the last time. That's why I'm not saying that. But the Left-liberal cause IS a hijacked cause, just as conservative libertarianism has been hijacked by the forces of societal breakdown whose main target is the Christian model of the family and the forces of big business, which brings us round to the same forces which lurk behind the Left-liberals who voted in Obama and the Rightwing MIC who voted in Bush.

No one gets it - there is a third force in all of this, subtle but playing merry havoc with our understanding of one another - I call this force Them.

There are three political forces - Left, Right and Them.

Apolitical Left-liberal people who support compassionate causes are not sufficiently into the history of politics for to see who is actually aligned with the Left - the totalitarians themselves, people such as Brown and Blair who hijacked Labour. I'd ask the Left-liberal to stop for one moment and see where all the equality legislation, all the Health and Safety, all of it is actually leading, in reality. Look at the CCTVs and the restrictions on movement now, on the inability of anyone to defend himself in his own home, in the reduction of police and their change in role to that of the enemy, e.g. with a Brazilian electrician.

Who does the Left-liberal blame?

Being apolitical, he accepts the conventional wisdom that it is financial elite capitalism's global recession and the policies of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan which are to blame, without allocating any discredit to how the government itself has actually used this recession to further its agenda. He'll accept that Blair told porkies about going into Iraq but won't go to the next step - that Blair not only told porkies but is aligned with the international totalitarians, the Bilderbergers being one arm of that.

Even the Rightwinger switches out at this word and communication is lost.

It's impossible to reason with the Left-liberal because he has a picture in his/her mind's eye of a soft panacea and does not want to see the evil lurking behind and utilizing that panacea - that third force, Them, which I keep rabbiting on about. It's impossible to reason with the Centre-right in its City gent form, its economist form, whose focus is what the markets are up to. He can't see it either.

It's the oldest trick in the book - to erode a civil liberty, get the population to support a popular cause, e.g. equality and tolerance and bring in the legislation on the back of that. If the government were to promise to free up the markets, with a couple of other minor little bits of legislation attached, many on the right would go along with it, not overly concerned with the couple of other minor bits of legislation. It's the oldest trick in the book.

The Left liberal looks across at the Right and judges by the "niceness" of the person. So someone like Mark Wadsworth, for example, is pretty forthrigh; so am I when I get a head of steam up. We seem unpleasant when we're angry and it's true we are angry about the state of things. The Left liberal sees the corruption in Westminster and joins us in decrying that but in general, sees us as lacking compassion, even subscribing to a cold, dog-eat-dog philosophy of free market economics which would leave the poor and disadvantaged destitute.

I know this because I was of the Left and have these feelings inside too. That's why Jams and I get on so well, except for aspects of political philosophy. If you zoom round the Rightwing blogs, they do write in a pretty gruff manner, which immediately excludes many women who judge by a person's manner and we are our own worst enemies that way if we hope to get the Left-liberal to see the light. We concern ourselves with truths which don't concern the Left - that you must have a strong productive sector in the economy first before there's any talk of redistributing wealth, that the economic structure of the country must be functioning properly before anything else is addressed.

Mark would see himself as just as compassionate as anyone though and if you look through his countless proposals for getting things right for the country, you can see it behind the words. But we get p---ed off by things and we say them on the blogs, which moves the blog away from being "feelgood" and thus we create two camps of bloggers.

We are into small government and reduced bureaucracy but the Left sees this as wanting to take away jobs in the public sector, taking away people's bread and butter. We don't have good PR on the Right, whereas the Left has a slick PR campaign behind them - Them.

Why does government money find its way into the most ridiculous areas, completely unproductive and ideological, e.g. anti-discrimination watchdogs? Even by their own standards, the Left should concede that that money would be better spent on education and health.

Look at the NHS and how much of the people's resources go into bureaucracy and executive salaries. Jobs, jobs, jobs, say the the Left - there must be jobs. Yes, says the Centre-right, we must have jobs but not by borrowing ourselves into penury and supporting everyone on the tax-payer, when we should be getting production going, reducing the ridiculous tick-box, NVQ mentality which marginalizes much of the talent in the country and actually getting people back to work which actually exists.

At the moment the work simply does not exist.

Why can't the Left-liberal see that?

We obviously have a communication problem and the Centre-right's intensity, even in this post, is unpleasant to the Left-liberal. The trouble is, "easy-going" in this current situation is closing the eyes to what needs to be done. We all want that fully-employed society where everyone feels valued and we are tolerant and caring - both sides want that - but the third force which is working to prevent that and to destabilize society for a global political agenda - Them - is not being recognized for what they are doing to both sides of party politics.

The Left and Right need to combine against that third force and reject totalitarian/authoritarian positions on both their parts. Let's be of the Centre, not of the Left or Right.

Look, how can I put it? My mate has a model, an analogy:

The boat careers down a river, crashing first into the Left bank and then swinging wildly over to the Right bank, lurching like a drunk downstream, damaging itself as it goes. Why, oh why, can't the boat be steered down the Centre, availing itself of the Left and Right banks to give it its position?


Further reading: Pro-Liberi: Root Cause of our Ills for the governmental cause of the ills.

[september 1st] school's back and beslan is remembered





Photo top: They usually find the youngest school starter [always seven] and she is given a short little speech to make. Sometimes the oldest students make a speech but usually the Director of the School and senior staff make the speeches.

Year 9s or 10s often dance and put on a performance of some kind. It's also the done thing for the children to give flowers to the favourite teachers but at older year levels, this is seen as uncool and rarely done. After school, older kids often go into town and there's a sea of balck and white.

Russian boys dress up in suits and girls wear the traditional white blouse and black skirt, with hair in ribbons.

Photo 2: This is Georgia and though the colours differ, the cermonies are the same. See the children in the large U in the background? The teachers will all be up on the steps at the top of the U and the parents will be standing back behind the children. It's usually outdoors and the weather is often good. One of the reasons for being outdoors is that the assembly hall often can't contain the whole school and even then, they do the welcome in three shifts, with different year levels in each.

Photo 3: The universities go back too and though this shot is not of September 1st, they do celebrate it. Strangely, though I was at that university for 10 years, I never attended a September 1st, mainly because I was at the school one instead. These were my students of 501 and 502 groups.

Photo 4: September 1st is also the commemoration of Beslan, covered at the end of this link, with pics of two of the murderers who have a cell in London, one alleged connection being Berezovsky, protected by the British government. The Russians managed to get one of them - Litvinenko and another, Politkovskaya, also quite complicit, they got too but the others remain free to roam around London. Please spend time to watch this video too.

To the left are photos of all the teachers and children murdered in the name of Chechyen "independence" and in the name of Allah [blessed be His name]. I wonder what Allah [blessed be His name] actually thought of this slaughter of the innocents. Would He have been well pleased or would He have consigned the murderers who abused His name to the hell they deserved ?

Click the pic to see the faces of the victims.

[the collapse] who are the main beneficiaries

Banks commit mass foreclosure fraud

There must be a lot of it if it is news that a judge actually bothers to check that the paperwork is correct:

He has tossed out 46 of the 102 foreclosure motions that have come before him in the last two years. And his often scathing decisions, peppered with allusions to the Croesus-like wealth of bank presidents, have attracted the respectful attention of judges and lawyers from Florida to Ohio to California. At recent judicial conferences in Chicago and Arizona, several panelists praised his rulings as a possible national model.

I fear even Vox may have missed something in his conclusion. Why has this been allowed to become so publicly the focus of the people's ire? Vox concludes:

The point, of course, is that there is no longer even much of a pretense at the rule of law in the United States. That has been replaced with rule by bureaucratic dictate.

... but his own WND were the ones to target the real enemy of the U.S.A., the CFR with their conniving SPPNA which effectively handed the powers to an overseeing body called the NAAC, controlled largely by the CFR. And it is hardly precedent that a small Jekyllian group has done such things before or that the Sherman Anti-Trust Acts were passed as a sop for the general populace.

Why is Westminster so spectacularly corrupt this time round or rather, why is it allowed to be seen to be so, on a scale never before revealed? Given that the people's ire is always directed by the powers which control, e.g. against Jerry in the last war, aginst the Jews in Germany and against Iran at this time - then why the bankers, the dodgy hedge funds and the JPMs?

Is it the maturing political minds of the population which are finally seeing the light or is there a reason for these targets becoming so open?

I can only think that one of two things has happened. Either they have already the fait accompli and it is scarcely necessary to consider the populace any more in the new Post-Democratic era or else one needs to follow the process. If the people clamour for the the banks to be curbed, who will curb them? The government. And who will do the nuts and bolts of this? The Fed who are the JPMs and GSes themselves.

Similarly, if Westminster is reconstituted, who assumes power? The EU, of course and the CBs. Why are ecopundits of note now conceding that the big one might be right around the corner - total collapse of the western system?

We seem to be three or four steps behind in this process and too late to halt it. I don't mean the collapse itself but to identify those for whom the collapse is of ultimate benefit. The mist is gradually clearing but is it too late?

Look at this piece of out and out deception in the U.S., courtesy of Karl Denninger:

From that interview (specifically, at 3:20 in):

  1. Paulson told this person (who is writing a biography, apparently) that he intended to use the TARP money to inject into the banks and not buy toxic assets a full ten days before he testified before Congress.
  2. He then testified before Congress to exactly the opposite.

This is about as clear an allegation of perjury (which, by the way, we've heard before - remember Kashkari making essentially the same allegation in his Congressional testimony?) as I've seen.

People like Paulson are well aware that pundits are watching. On our side of the pond, everyone has seen the Hannan youtube on Brown and many others about his outright deception and self-deception.

The bottom line is that they don't even seem to care if they lie any more. Only overconfident incompetents can do that.