In the Town of Phil Campbell, a Gathering of Phil Campbells – The New York Times
Posted on 20 June 2011 | No responses
By KIM SEVERSON
The New York Times Published: June 17, 2011
PHIL CAMPBELL, Ala. — Phil Campbell, a writer from Brooklyn, is in love with this little three-stoplight town. So is Phil Campbell from Wisconsin. And Phil Campbell from England.
There are 18 Phil Campbells here this weekend. No Phyllis Campbells, though, a frustration to the organizers who have been planning for months to descend on Phil Campbell as it celebrates its centennial.
The whole idea started as a joke, really — a weekend romp to rural northern Alabama for people who share a name and, clearly, a sense of humor.
Then, on April 27, one of the strongest tornadoes on record tore through town. It killed 26 people. That’s a lot of death to absorb, but even more so when a community had only 1,100 people to begin with.
Overnight, the Phil Campbell convention became a relief effort. Word went out to the 190 Phil and Phyllis Campbells on the Facebook page Brooklyn Phil started, in an age when the marriage between narcissism and technology has become everyday. Twitter accounts were established. Money was raised. The “I’m with Phil” campaign was born.
On Friday, the Phil Campbells gathered among the bottled water and diapers stacked at the community center here, waiting for the rain to let up so they could go out and help the town that shares their name with what is still a slow and difficult recovery.
“It’s an odd privilege,” said Alaska Phil, a pastor from Juneau. “Just because of the happenstance of my name, I have a chance to do some good.”
The Phil Campbells do not have much in common besides a name, but they point out some similarities. Like the man for whom the town is named, a 19th-century railroad engineer, every one is white. They also have receding hairlines and not much money. (Part of that theory was dashed when Texas Phil, an accountant with a full head of hair and a nice car, drove into town.)
People who live in Phil Campbell are moved, if not just a little perplexed.
“At first we were like, what?” said Sharon Baker, 28. “But then we thought, that’s pretty cool.”
The Phil Campbells are not entirely unknown in Phil Campbell. In 1995, when Brooklyn Phil was in college, he organized the first Phil Campbell convention here. The town tried to keep it up for a couple of years, but the novelty wore off. The convention morphed into an annual hoedown and street fair.
That is how it stayed until this year, when Brooklyn Phil and city leaders decided to get the Phil Campbell band back together to coincide with the hoedown. Then the tornado came, and the town thought about canceling. But the Phil Campbells were determined.
“I didn’t think anyone would come, but everyone still did,” said Rita Barton, the parks and recreation official who plans the city celebration each year. “The attitude of them wanting to come to Phil Campbell to help us just warms your heart. It just does.”
The town needs its Phil Campbells, said Jerry Mays, the mayor. Even two months after the tornado, relief crews continued to hand out free meals and household supplies. Residents, almost a third of whom lost homes, are still in shock.
“You close your eyes and you can still hear it,” said Vanessa Wilson, 49, who barely survived by cramming into a utility room with her family.
Of course, it is not always easy having so many Phil Campbells around. For one thing, a small town this battered cannot really host them. You cannot buy a hamburger here, let alone get a hotel room. So most of the Phil Campbells piled into the Best Western in nearby Russellville. The staff had so many Phil Campbells on the reservation system that they had to include middle initials and hometowns.
Still, the Phil Campbells offer comic relief, if not some real help. They have raised nearly $35,000 through corporate donations and people who click onto imwithphil.com. It should be enough to build a Habitat for Humanity house. Brooklyn Phil, who wrote a book about an ill-fated political campaign that became the Hollywood movie “Grassroots,” got permission from the director Stephen Gyllenhaal to screen a rough cut here on Thursday as a fund-raiser.
Residents seemed to like the movie. And they liked the joke, too. People in stores and restaurants call out “Phil” just to see men turn their heads. They keep asking Phil from Nottingham, England, to speak so they can hear an accent far removed from their own.
Merrell Potter, the police chief and a Baptist preacher, is not too worried about keeping the Phil Campbells in line. For one thing, the town prohibits the sale of liquor.
“We’re ready for them, but we haven’t called out the National Guard,” Chief Potter said.
On Saturday, the Phil Campbells will march in the town parade. Glasgow Phil, from Scotland, will perform some music, along with a Phil from Birmingham.
And the town will celebrate its sons.
“We don’t know if there is any magic in the name,” Chief Potter said, “but we’re hoping there is.”
GE Sees Solar Cheaper Than Fossil Power in Five Years
Posted on 11 June 2011 | No responses
By Brian Wingfield, Bloomberg
Solar power may be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors within three to five years because of innovations, said Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric Co.
“If we can get solar at 15 cents a kilowatt-hour or lower, which I’m hopeful that we will do, you’re going to have a lot of people that are going to want to have solar at home,” Little said yesterday in an interview in Bloomberg’s Washington office. The 2009 average US retail rate per kilowatt-hour for electricity ranges from 6.1 cents in Wyoming to 18.1 cents in Connecticut, according to Energy Information Administration data released in April.
GE, based in Fairfield, Connecticut, announced in April that it had boosted the efficiency of thin-film solar panels to a record 12.8 percent. Improving efficiency, or the amount of sunlight converted to electricity, would help reduce the costs without relying on subsidies.
The thin-film panels will be manufactured at a plant that GE intends to open in 2013. The company said in April that the factory will have about 400 employees and make enough panels each year to power about 80,000 homes.
Solar-panel makers from Arizona to Shanghai are expanding factories to add more cost savings that analysts say will sustain the industry’s expansion. Installations may increase by as much as 50 percent in 2011, worth about $140 billion, as cheaper panels and thin film make developers less dependent on government subsidies, Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecast.
Solar Costs Dive
The cost of solar cells, the main component in standard panels, has fallen 21 percent so far this year, and the cost of solar power is now about the same as the rate utilities charge for conventional power in the sunniest parts of California, Italy and Turkey, the London-based research company said.
Most solar panels use silicon-based photovoltaic cells to transform sunlight into electricity. The thin-film versions, made of glass or other material coated with cadmium telluride or copper indium gallium selenide alloys, account for about 15 percent of the $28 billion in worldwide solar-panel sales.
First Solar Inc., based in Tempe, Arizona, is the world’s largest producer of thin-film panels, with $2.6 billion in yearly revenue.
Smart Grid
Little also said the US transition to a full smart grid will take “many, many years” to develop.
A complete smart grid would consist of millions of next-generation meters installed in businesses and homes, appliances that adjust their energy use when prices change, and advanced software to help utilities control electricity flows, he said.
“I think it’s going to be a long time before we can realize the full potential of the smart grid,” he said. “But it is coming.”
GE this year plans to introduce the “Nucleus,” a device that will let consumers track their household electricity use with personal computers and smart phones. The company also is investing in its appliance and lighting unit, including $432 million for U.S. refrigeration and design centers announced in October.
Utilities need to have incentives to put in place devices that save energy, and Congress needs to provide greater certainty on tax policy surrounding renewable energy, Little said.
Doublethink
Posted on 8 June 2011 | 4 responses
It’s difficult today not to be tripped up by little things like our President who received the Nobel Peace Prize as he swept into Afghanistan, then invaded Libya, promising to be out in a week or two. How long has it been now? Or the Patriot Act, having been mocked by this same President, then fully renewed; or Guantanamo Bay being closed, but not closed; or the vast bailouts for the very, very rich and nobody else, even as “the nobodies” put him into office so filled with hope.
It’s difficult today in particular given that it’s the day that in 1949 the book “1984” was published and one stumbles over the following lines…
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”
(Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part 1, Chapter 3)
It’s difficult and it’s very, very sad.
Reappearing…
Posted on 30 May 2011 | No responses
Just a quick note, popping one’s head out of the rabbit hole of just functioning one day after another. One can live without blogging, without being online…but here I am – maybe inexplicably, maybe unreasonably, maybe only temporarily – back. So much of what has pulled at me (and I know pulls at others as well) is articulated by Chris Hedges. The article below (go to Truthdig to read the whole article) is his latest example. It’s not good news, but it’s real news…hard news…hard…
The Sky Really is Falling by Chris Hedges
Posted on 30 May 2011 | 1 response
The Sky Really Is Falling
Global climate change has made for freak storms and more intense weather. The result is Hurricane Katrina, this month’s devastating tornadoes and floods, and routine forest fires in California. Here, a tornado touches down in Iowa in 2008.
By Chris Hedges
The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with two kinds of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation—the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry—is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted pied pipers and fools.
Those who concede that the planet is warming but insist we can learn to live with it are perhaps more dangerous than the buffoons who decide to shut their eyes. It is horrifying enough that the House of Representatives voted 240-184 this spring to defeat a resolution that said that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” But it is not much of an alternative to trust those who insist we can cope with the effects while continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Horticulturalists are busy planting swamp oaks and sweet gum trees all over Chicago to prepare for weather that will soon resemble that of Baton Rouge. That would be fine if there was a limit to global warming in sight. But without plans to rapidly dismantle the fossil fuel industry, something no one in our corporate state is contemplating, the heat waves of Baton Rouge will be a starting point for a descent that will ultimately make cities like Chicago unlivable. The false promise of human adaptability to global warming is peddled by the polluters’ major front group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which informed the Environmental Protection Agency that “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” This bizarre theory of adaptability has been embraced by the Obama administration as it prepares to exploit the natural resources in the Arctic. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced recently that melting of sea ice “will result in more shipping, fishing and tourism, and the possibility to develop newly accessible oil and gas reserves.” Now that’s something to look forward to.
“It is good that at least those guys are taking it seriously, far more seriously than the federal government is taking it,” said the author and environmental activist Bill McKibben of the efforts in cities such as Chicago to begin to adapt to warmer temperatures. “At least they understand that they have some kind of problem coming at them. But they are working off the science of five or six years ago, which is still kind of the official science that the International Climate Change negotiations are working off of. They haven’t begun to internalize the idea that the science has shifted sharply. We are no longer talking about a long, slow, gradual, linear warming, but something that is coming much more quickly and violently. Seven or eight years ago it made sense to talk about putting permeable concrete on the streets. Now what we are coming to realize is that the most important adaptation we can do is to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere. If we don’t, we are going to produce temperature rises so high that there is no adapting to them.”
The Earth has already begun to react to our hubris. Freak weather unleashed deadly tornados in Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. It has triggered wildfires that have engulfed large tracts in California, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. It has brought severe droughts to the Southwest, parts of China and the Amazon. It has caused massive flooding along the Mississippi as well as in Australia, New Zealand, China and Pakistan. It is killing off the fish stocks in the oceans and obliterating the polar ice caps. Steadily rising sea levels will eventually submerge coastal cities, islands and some countries. These disturbing weather patterns presage a world where it will be harder and harder to sustain human life. Massive human migrations, which have already begun, will create chaos and violence. India is building a 4,000-kilometer fence along its border with Bangladesh to, in part, hold back the refugees who will flee if Bangladesh is submerged. There are mounting food shortages and sharp price increases in basic staples such as wheat as weather patterns disrupt crop production. The failed grain harvests in Russia, China and Australia, along with the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, have, as McKibben points out, been exacerbated by the inability of Midwestern farmers to plant corn in water-logged fields. These portents of an angry Gaia are nothing compared to what will follow if we do not swiftly act.
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“We are going to have to adapt a good deal,” said McKibben, with whom I spoke by phone from his home in Vermont. “It is going to be a century that calls for being resilient and durable. Most of that adaptation is going to take the form of economies getting smaller and lower to the ground, local food, local energy, things like that. But that alone won’t do it, because the scale of change we are now talking about is so great that no one can adapt to it. Temperatures have gone up one degree so far and that has been enough to melt the Arctic. If we let it go up three or four degrees, the rule of thumb the agronomists go by is every degree Celsius of temperature rise represents about a 10 percent reduction in grain yields. If we let it go up three or four degrees we are really not talking about a planet that can support a civilization anything like the one we’ve got.
(for the rest of the article go to…http://www.truthdig.com/report/page3/the_sky_really_is_falling_20110530/
Chernobyl Cleanup Survivor’s Message for Japan: ‘Run Away as Quickly as Possible’
Posted on 22 March 2011 | 3 responses
Natalia Manzurova, one of the few survivors among those directly involved in the long cleanup of Chernobyl, was a 35-year-old engineer at a nuclear plant in Ozersk, Russia, in April 1986 when she and 13 other scientists were told to report to the wrecked, burning plant in the northern Ukraine.
It was just four days after the world’s biggest nuclear disaster spewed enormous amounts of radiation into the atmosphere and forced the evacuation of 100,000 people.
Manzurova and her colleagues were among the roughly 800,000 “cleaners” or “liquidators” in charge of the removal and burial of all the contamination in what’s still called the dead zone.
Natalia Manzurova
Courtesy of Natalia Manzurova
Natalia Manzurova, shown here in 1988 in the “dead zone” of the Pripyat, is one of the relatively few survivors among those directly involved in the cleanup of Chernobyl.
She spent 4 1/2 years helping clean the abandoned town of Pripyat, which was less than two miles from the Chernobyl reactors. The plant workers lived there before they were abruptly evacuated.
Manzurova, now 59 and an advocate for radiation victims worldwide, has the “Chernobyl necklace” — a scar on her throat from the removal of her thyroid — and myriad health problems. But unlike the rest of her team members, who she said have all died from the results of radiation poisoning, and many other liquidators, she’s alive.
AOL News spoke with Manzurova about the nuclear disaster in Japan with the help of a translator on the telephone Monday from Vermont. Manzurova, who still lives in Ozersk, was beginning a one-week informational tour of the U.S. organized by the Beyond Nuclear watchdog group.
AOL News: What was your first reaction when you heard about Fukushima?
Manzurova: It felt like déjà vu. I felt so worried for the people of Japan and the children especially. I know the experience that awaits them.
But experts say Fukushima is not as bad as Chernobyl.
Every nuclear accident is different, and the impact cannot be truly measured for years. The government does not always tell the truth. Many will never return to their homes. Their lives will be divided into two parts: before and after Fukushima. They’ll worry about their health and their children’s health. The government will probably say there was not that much radiation and that it didn’t harm them. And the government will probably not compensate them for all that they’ve lost. What they lost can’t be calculated.
What message do you have for Japan?
Run away as quickly as possible. Don’t wait. Save yourself and don’t rely on the government because the government lies. They don’t want you to know the truth because the nuclear industry is so powerful.
Natalia Manzurova
Courtesy of Natalia Manzurova
Natalia Manzurova, now 59, has suffered a variety of ailments since she worked at Chernobyl, but she says she is the only member of her team still alive.
When you were called to go to Chernobyl, did you know how bad it was there?
I had no idea and never knew the true scope until much later. It was all covered in secrecy. I went there as a professional because I was told to — but if I was asked to liquidate such an accident today, I’d never agree. The sacrifices the Fukushima workers are making are too high because the nuclear industry was developed in such a way that the executives don’t hold themselves accountable to the human beings who have to clean up a disaster. It’s like nuclear slavery.
What was your first impression of Chernobyl?
It was like a war zone where a neutron bomb had gone off. I always felt I was in the middle of a war where the enemy was invisible. All the houses and buildings were intact with all the furniture, but there wasn’t a single person left. Just deep silence everywhere. Sometimes I felt I was the only person alive on a strange planet. There are really no words to describe it.
What did your work as a liquidator entail?
First, we measured radiation levels and got vegetation samples to see how high the contamination was. Then bulldozers dug holes in the ground and we buried everything — houses, animals, everything. There were some wild animals that were still alive, and we had to kill them and put them in the holes.
Were any pets left in the houses?
The people had only a few hours to leave, and they weren’t allowed to take their dogs or cats with them. The radiation stays in animals’ fur and they can’t be cleaned, so they had to be abandoned. That’s why people were crying when they left. All the animals left behind in the houses were like dried-out mummies. But we found one dog that was still alive.
Where did you find the dog and how did he survive?
We moved into a former kindergarten to use as a laboratory and we found her lying in one of the children’s cots there. Her legs were all burned from the radiation and she was half blind. Her eyes were all clouded from the radiation. She was slowly dying.
Were you able to rescue her?
No. Right after we moved in, she disappeared. And this is the amazing part. A month later we found her in the children’s ward of the (abandoned) hospital. She was dead. She was lying in a child’s bed, the same size bed we found her in the kindergarten. Later we found out that she loved children very much and was always around them.
How did working in the dead zone begin to affect your health?
I started to feel as if I had the flu. I would get a high temperature and start to shiver. What happens during first contact with radiation is that your good flora is depleted and the bad flora starts to flourish. I suddenly wanted to sleep all the time and eat a lot. It was the organism getting all the energy out.
How much radiation were you subjected to?
We were never told. We wore dosimeters which measured radiation and we submitted them to the bosses, but they never gave us the results.
But didn’t you realize the danger and want to leave?
Yes, I knew the danger. All sorts of things happened. One colleague stepped into a rainwater pool and the soles of his feet burned off inside his boots. But I felt it was my duty to stay. I was like a firefighter. Imagine if your house was burning and the firemen came and then left because they thought it was too dangerous.
When did you discover the thyroid tumor?
They found it during a routine medical inspection after I had worked there several years. It turned out to be benign. I don’t know when it started to develop. I had an operation to remove half the thyroid gland. The tumor grew back, and last year I had the other half removed. I live on (thyroid) hormones now.
As Regimes Fall in Arab World, Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By
Posted on 28 February 2011 | No responses
By SCOTT SHANE of the New York Times
Published: February 27, 2011
For nearly two decades, the leaders of Al Qaeda have denounced the Arab world’s dictators as heretics and puppets of the West and called for their downfall. Now, people in country after country have risen to topple their leaders — and Al Qaeda has played absolutely no role.
In fact, the motley opposition movements that have appeared so suddenly and proved so powerful have shunned the two central tenets of the Qaeda credo: murderous violence and religious fanaticism. The demonstrators have used force defensively, treated Islam as an afterthought and embraced democracy, which is anathema to Osama bin Laden and his followers.
So for Al Qaeda — and perhaps no less for the American policies that have been built around the threat it poses — the democratic revolutions that have gripped the world’s attention present a crossroads. Will the terrorist network shrivel slowly to irrelevance? Or will it find a way to exploit the chaos produced by political upheaval and the disappointment that will inevitably follow hopes now raised so high?
For many specialists on terrorism and the Middle East, though not all, the past few weeks have the makings of an epochal disaster for Al Qaeda, making the jihadists look like ineffectual bystanders to history while offering young Muslims an appealing alternative to terrorism.
“So far — and I emphasize so far — the score card looks pretty terrible for Al Qaeda,” said Paul R. Pillar, who studied terrorism and the Middle East for nearly three decades at the C.I.A. and is now at Georgetown University. “Democracy is bad news for terrorists. The more peaceful channels people have to express grievances and pursue their goals, the less likely they are to turn to violence.”
If the terrorists network’s leaders hope to seize the moment, they have been slow off the mark. Mr. bin Laden has been silent. His Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, has issued three rambling statements from his presumed hide-out in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region that seemed oddly out of sync with the news, not noting the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose government detained and tortured Mr. Zawahri in the 1980s.
“Knocking off Mubarak has been Zawahri’s goal for more than 20 years, and he was unable to achieve it,” said Brian Fishman, a terrorism expert at the New America Foundation. “Now a nonviolent, nonreligious, pro-democracy movement got rid of him in a matter of weeks. It’s a major problem for Al Qaeda.”
The Arab revolutions, of course, remain very much a work in progress, as the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, orders a bloody defense of Tripoli, and Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, negotiates to cling to power. The breakdown of order could create havens for terrorist cells, at least for a time — a hazard both Colonel Qaddafi and Mr. Saleh have prevented, winning the gratitude of the American government.
“There’s an operational advantage for militants in any place where law enforcement and domestic security are weak and distracted,” said Steven Simon, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of “The Age of Sacred Terror.” But over all, he said, developments in the Arab countries are a strategic defeat for violent jihadism.
“These uprisings have shown that the new generation is not terribly interested in Al Qaeda’s ideology,” Mr. Simon said. He called the Zawahri statements “forlorn, if not pathetic.”
There is evidence that the uprisings have enthralled some jihadists. One Algerian man associated with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the network’s North African affiliate, welcomed the uprisings in a weekend interview and said militants were returning from exile to join the battle in Libya, arming themselves from government weapons caches.
“Since the land is in chaos and Qaddafi is helping through his reactions and actions to increase the hatred of the population against him, it will be easier for us to recruit new members,” said the Algerian man, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Salman. He said that Libyans and Tunisians who had fought in Iraq or Afghanistan were now considering a return home.
“There is lots of work to do,” he said. “We have to help the people fighting and then build an Islamic state.”
Abu Khaled, a Jordanian jihadist who fought in Iraq with the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggested that Al Qaeda would benefit in the long run from dashed hopes.
“At the end of the day, how much change will there really be in Egypt and other countries?” he asked. “There will be many disappointed demonstrators, and that’s when they will realize what the only alternative is. We are certain that this will all play into our hands.”
Michael Scheuer, author of a new biography of Mr. bin Laden and head of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit in the late 1990s, thinks such enthusiasm is more than wishful thinking.
Mr. Scheuer says he believes that Americans, including many experts, have wildly misjudged the uprisings by focusing on the secular, English-speaking, Westernized protesters who are a natural draw for television. Thousands of Islamists have been released from prisons in Egypt alone, and the ouster of Al Qaeda’s enemy, Mr. Mubarak, will help revitalize every stripe of Islamism, including that of Al Qaeda and its allies, he said.
“The talent of an organization is not just leadership, but taking advantage of opportunities,” Mr. Scheuer said. In Al Qaeda and its allies, he said, “We’re looking over all at a more geographically widespread, probably numerically bigger and certainly more influential movement than in 2001.”
If Al Qaeda faces an uncertain moment, so does the Obama administration. For a decade, the United States has been preoccupied with the Muslim world as a source of terrorist violence — one reason both the Bush and Obama administrations had friendly relations with the authoritarian governments now under fire.
It was such a dominant theme of American policy that even Colonel Qaddafi, the quixotic and brutal Libyan leader who President Obama said Saturday should step down, had drawn American praise as a bulwark against jihadists. A cable from the American Embassy in Tripoli briefing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before a 2008 visit called Libya “a strong partner in the war against terrorism,” noting “excellent” intelligence cooperation and specifically lauding Colonel Qaddafi’s efforts to block the return of Libyan militants from Afghanistan and Iraq and to “blunt the ideological appeal of radical Islam.”
Such perceived dividends of cooperation with the likes of Colonel Qaddafi are now history, and that is a point not lost on the C.I.A., the State Department and the White House. As during the United States’ halting adjustment to the fall of Communist governments from 1989 to 1991, officials are scrambling to balance day-to-day crisis management with consideration of how American policy must adjust for the long term.
“There has to be a major rethinking of how the U.S. engages with that part of the world,” said Christopher Boucek, who studies the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We have to make clear that our security no longer comes at the expense of poor governance and no rights for the people in those countries.
“All of the givens,” Mr. Boucek said, “are gone.”
An Update From Inside the Editing Room
Posted on 23 February 2011 | 4 responses
The process of shooting a movie is so sexy – actors, cameras, locations, so many people working together in this strange but beautiful process of essentially fighting reality to create a reality.
But editing is not so sexy, except that it’s in a dark room. To edit means to cut out anything that isn’t helpful to telling your story and…any mistakes.
It’s the mistakes I kind of want to talk about today. A big part of what we’ve been trying to do with our “behind the scenes” videos and discussions is to share with anyone interested the almost “uncool” part of the process (which – in truth – is most of it). I find myself more and more discouraged by all the “hip” media stuff – the dazzling, sizzling, sexy journey that the networks, studios, etc want most people out there to believe is going on.
So many geniuses in Hollywood!
Then why do so many of the movies and TV shows suck? Why are so many of them the same? The answer is simple – no matter how smart you think you are (or you want other people to imagine you are) making a movie is really, really hard for any of us that try to do it. So many moving parts – you think you know what you want the movie to be when you start out, but then you bring in actors and weather and stomach aches and joy and the whole thing you’re making shifts and becomes something very different – very different.
And then, of course, there are all those mistakes that are made (that I made, that other’s made).
Hence…editing.
There will be some more videos on that subject coming out over the next little while (as there were all those videos about shooting) but the point here is that we are cleaning up the film, fixing it where it was broken (for a milliard reasons) making what really works even shiner. We’re finding music, composing music, we’re adding sound effects, cutting a scene here and there, a frame here and there. We take out a shot. We realize we were wrong. We put it back. We went up in December and shot more footage and have been cutting it into the film.
And out of all this work (and re-work and re-work) a movie is really emerging. It’s hard, hard, hard work. And that’s the fun part of it. Hard work. Not magic. Hard work, which keeps you occupied, like building a building, brick by brick, window by window.
Why tell you all this? First, to share the experience with as many people who are interested. And also, I guess, I want to speak to anyone who is (or wants to) make films, TV, web shows. I want to smash the bullshit that is put out there about some kind of “magic,” or “talent,” the whatever it is you want to call it that people want you to think you don’t have…because…because – everyone has it! Everyone! Everyone has something masterful in them if they just go after it, if they’re just told about it, if they are allowed to nurture it a little.
That’s, I guess, what Grassroots is really about. Nothing of value (I’m coming to believe) comes from the top. It comes from the bottom, from the roots, from every single one of us. So that’s my rant or thoughts or whatever you want to call them about editing for the day.
Someone In Egypt Ordered a Pizza For the Protesters in Wisconsin
Posted on 21 February 2011 | No responses
Ian’s on State Street – a small pizza place near the Capitol – has been fielding calls from citizens of twelve countries and thirty-eight states looking to donate free pizza to the Wisconsinites who have congregated to protest Scott Walker’s proposed legislation reducing the rights and pay of state workers. After promoting the cause on Twitter and Facebook, Ian’s gave away 1,057 donated slices yesterday and delivered more than 300 pizzas. The blackboard behind the counter now has a running list of places where donations have come from, and it includes China and Egypt. [Politico]
You Can Fool All of the People Some of the Time
Posted on 16 February 2011 | 2 responses
What has happened in Egypt and is happening in other parts of the Middle East is (of course) profoundly important for that region, but it also brings lessons to the so called First World, struggling with it’s reworking of financial structures (both in Europe and in the US). As we watch Obama (who has increasingly emerged as a closeted Republican) we must ask ourselves if we aren’t beginning to face similar issues, albeit at a very early stage.
In various parts of the Middle East one might ask (as Sara Palin did) if the protestors aren’t questionable – un-Christian, Islamic (which, I suppose makes them radical), dangerous (despite the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood has been one of the more moderating forces in Egypt).
Nonetheless, let’s allow the right-wingers (and the CIA, etc) their suspicions re the Egyptian protest movement. Instead, let’s turn our attention to Iran (we all know that it is correct to hate the government in Iran – terrorists to the core, as they build their weapons of mass destruction and as Ahmadinejad goes on about there never having been a holocaust. And then the crackdown of 2009.
And it’s funny how Obama (and the US government) played that moment of uprising in Iran and the more recent moment in Egypt.
It should give us humble citizens here in the US pause.
What would our government do if we suddenly started protesting the Corporate bailouts, the massive CEO’s salaries, the startling high quality Health Care that those in Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House receive – for free, while we more humble folk lose homes, jobs, hope, clarity, real healthcare, low priced food and gas, etcetera.
So here’s a quote from one of the leaders of the protest movement in Iran, Mahdi Karroubi, one of the two pro-reform presidential candidates in 2009. At the moment he’s under house arrest. The hard liners in the Iranian government are calling for his execution now.
“We warn (the ruling system) that before it is too late, stop being stubborn and hear the voice of the people,” he said in remarks posted on his website, sahamnews.org. “Exercising violence and opposing peoples’ wishes can last for a limited time. Take a lesson from the fate of governments that distanced themselves from the people.”
Yes, it should give us pause how Obama and his government have handled the uprisings (will continue to handle uprisings) in the Middle East. But this quote should give them pause. It should give Goldman Sachs pause. It should give the other bankers, CEOs and millionaire/billionaire Senators and Congressmen/woman pause.
You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
