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June 2013

If Christopher Nolan re-booted MARY POPPINS → kenlevine.blogspot.com

The color scheme must be grey. Most of the film will take place at night.

It is still a period piece but we update it slightly. It now takes place during the bombing of London in World War II. Let’s take some creative historical license and blow up Big Ben and the Parliament building. We have the means to do that in a very cool way. To punctuate the moment cut to an Englishman saying “SuperFUCKINGcalifragilisticexpialidocious!” as a double decker bus almost decapitates him. We can still say two fucks and keep our PG-13.

Bert, the street performer, is a loner with a dark past. Dick Van Dyke was fine for his day but I see Steve Buscemi. He should always be an ominous presence. He himself was abused as a child and we must always be afraid when he is around children.

His fellow street people are all damaged due to the horrors of World War I. There might be some comedy in seeing them act silly as long as we understand it is because they are deeply traumatized.

There will be no singing, dancing, or animation in this new version. Anything to take us out of the reality of innocent people being slaughtered is counter-productive. Modern children don’t want fuzzy bedtime stories. They want to be scared shitless. Let’s do that for three hours.

Mary Poppins arrives. She too has a dark past. Sexual abuse and forced into prostitution has caused her mind to snap. Her sunny optimistic disposition is really psychotic repression. She thought she was applying for position of madame not nanny. but to avoid a savage beating from her pimp she takes the job. Julie Andrews was serviceable for the time. But now we need a warrior. Casting suggestion: Katee Sackhoff as Mary Poppins.

Jun 19, 20131 note
#movies
“Frankly, any understanding of divine sovereignty so unsubtle that it requires the theologian to assert (as Calvin did) that God foreordained the fall of humanity so that his glory might be revealed in the predestined damnation of the derelict is obviously problematic, and probably more blasphemous than anything represented by the heresies that the ancient ecumenical councils confronted.” —David Bentley Hart
Jun 19, 20133 notes
Jun 19, 201310 notes
“Tyranny is a habit; it is able to, and does develop into a disease. I submit that habit may coarsen and stupefy the very best of men to the level of brutes. Blood and power make a man drunk: callous coarseness and depravity develop in him; the most abnormal phenomena become accessible, and in the end pleasurable to the mind and senses. The human being and the citizen perish forever in the tyrant, and a return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes practically impossible for him. What is more, the example, the possibility of such intransigence have [sic] a contagious effect upon the whole of society: such power is a temptation. A society which can look back on such a phenomenon with indifference is already contaminated to its foundations. Put briefly, the right given to one man to administer corporal punishment to another is one of society’s running sores, one of the most effective ways of destroying in it every attempt at, every embryo of civic consciousness, and a basic factor in its certain and inexorable dissolution.” —Dostoyevsky
Jun 19, 201312 notes
The so-called 'violence' of Jesus in the so-called 'cleansing of the temple' → clarion-journal.com

It seems bizarre to equate Jesus’ prophetic act as ‘violent’ at all, if our definition of violence has anything to do with ‘doing harm to others.’ Sure, the temple incident was ‘violent’ in the broader sense that it was a show of force or an intervention. But that’s not how the Bible uses the term: throughout the Bible, the word ‘violence’ is associated with injustice, bloodshed and death. There’s a galaxy of distance between what Jesus did in the temple and killing one’s enemies — something Jesus spoke directly against. This is especially so when just days later he rebukes Peter with the command, “Put down your sword. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword” — an injunction the early church canonized and understood as a universal instruction for all Christians (cf. John Driver, How Christians Made Peace With War).

Jun 19, 201310 notes
“The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu. For example, Jesus ascended to heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended to the sky. That’s literally what is being said. But if that were really the meaning of the message, then we have to throw it away, because there would have been no such place for Jesus literally to go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy; astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a literal, physical possibility, But if you read “Jesus ascended to heaven” in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward – not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source.” —Joseph Campbell
Jun 19, 20135 notes
The Price of Silence: Supreme Court Rules That Pre-Miranda Silence Can Be Used Against Defendant To Prove Guilt → jonathanturley.org

In a major loss for individual rights vis-a-vis the police, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that prosecutors could use a person’s silence against them in court if it comes before he’s told of his right to remain silent. The prosecutors used the silence of Genovevo Salinas to convict him of a 1992 murder. Because this was a non-custodial interview, the Court ruled that the prosecutors could use his silence even though citizens are allowed to refuse to speak with police. It is of little surprise that the pro-police powers decision was written by Samuel Alito who consistently rules in favor of expanding police powers.

Jun 19, 201314 notes
Jun 19, 201314 notes
It's A Turd! It's Plain! Man Of Steel, Reviewed. → deadspin.com
Jun 19, 20132 notes
#movies
“But here’s what journalists should be asking at this point: What data does the government store? How long have they been storing it? Do they ever delete it? All of the government arguments around 4th Amendment protections center on policy decisions regarding what the NSA and FBI can look at. But as they make these arguments they imply that the data is already sitting on government servers. Snowden, of course, doesn’t imply this, he says it flat out.” —Journalists Need To Start Asking About Storage, Not Access
Jun 19, 201320 notes
“Americans have a right to know what kind of “evidence” or innuendo is sufficient to land them on the No Fly List, and to have a hearing where they can defend themselves. Without this bare minimum, there is no meaningful check to correct the government’s mistakes or ensure that it uses the blacklisting power it claims fairly and appropriately. We are asking the court, therefore, to vindicate a basic yet fundamentally important proposition: a government black list that denies Americans the ability to fly without giving them an explanation or fair chance to clear their names violates the Constitution.” —American Civil Liberties Union
Jun 19, 201312 notes
The Constitution Applies When the Government Bans Americans From the Skies → aclu.org

The government does not have the unchecked authority to place individuals on a secret blacklist without providing them any meaningful opportunity to object, the ACLU argued in a brief filed last Friday with the federal district court in Oregon.

We made the filing in Latif v. Holder, our lawsuit asserting that the government violated the Fifth Amendment due process rights of 13 Americans, including four military veterans, by placing them on the No Fly List and refusing to give them any after-the-fact explanation or a hearing at which they can clear their names.

Jun 19, 20137 notes
Jun 19, 201310 notes
“We have become a technologically addled society that is obsessed less with the question of whether something is true or false, or good or evil, and more with the question of how something works and what its consequences will be. The technological realm has been promoted as the very model of thought for human relations and all sorts of human activities. Our society has come to scorn what is called humanism or the humanities. And I think that is terrible thing, because there are many things about human life that cannot be quantified. So the re-assertion of the centrality of humanistic ideas is a very high priority right now.” —Leon Wieseltier
Jun 19, 201325 notes
Rousseau Revisited → jareddiamond.org

Frequencies of violent deaths have been calculated for many tribal and state societies, studied by four different methods: observations by scientists, observations by others, oral histories, and archaeology. Each method has its own advantages and its own pitfalls, which I discuss. Four scholars – Samuel Bowles, Lawrence Keeley, Steven Pinker, and Richard Wrangham – have extracted the resulting numbers. They all conclude that the percentage of a population meeting a violent death per year, averaged over a long period of alternating war and peace, is on the average considerably higher in tribal societies than in state societies. This statement about averages does not deny that there are some peaceful tribal societies and some violent state societies, and that absolute death tolls are much higher in state societies because of their much higher populations.

Many people are initially surprised by this conclusion. Anyone could be excused for expecting that modern high-tech warfare with large armies would produce higher, not lower, percentage death tolls. The reasons for the initially surprising conclusion become clear when one reads accounts of tribal societies. Tribal warfare tends to be chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce peace, while even the nations with the highest war-related death tolls in the 20th century (such as Russia, Germany, and Poland) were mostly at peace and only intermittently at war. In tribal warfare the fighting is carried out by all able-bodied men of any age, not just by a small professional army of young men. Killing of women and children is common in tribal warfare, but exceptional in state warfare. Tribal victors kill their captives and don’t take prisoners, because they can’t be readily imprisoned or exploited.

Jun 19, 20133 notes
“The deep intuitions of most church doctrines are invariably profound and correct, but they are still expressed in mechanical and literal language that everybody adores, stumbles over, denies, or fights. Hold on for a while until you get to the real meaning, which is far more than the literal meaning! That allows you to creatively both understand and critique things—without becoming oppositional, hateful, arrogant, and bitter yourself. Some call this “appreciative inquiry” and it has an entirely different tone that does not invite or create “the equal and opposite reaction” of physics. The opposite of contemplation is not action; it is reaction. Much of the “inconsistent ethic of life,” in my opinion, is based on ideological reactions and groupthink, not humble discernment of how darkness hides and “how the light gets in” to almost everything. I hope I do not shock you, but it is really possible to have very “ugly morality” and sometimes rather “beautiful immorality.” Please think and pray about that.” —Richard Rohr
Jun 19, 20136 notes
3 Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims → theatlantic.com
Jun 19, 201317 notes
Jun 19, 20139 notes
“Every Tuesday, President Obama personally checks off the names of people he wants killed. George Bush, a bit more squeamish than Obama, never did that; but Mr. Obama felt those decisions were the president’s responsibility: he want[s] to keep his own finger on the trigger,” according to one report. A tidy, scheduled man, the President only picks his victims once a week, now called “Terror Tuesday.” —The Drone Ranger: Obama’s Dirty Wars
Jun 19, 201322 notes
Obama's Dangerous Dilemma → smirkingchimp.com

President Barack Obama, known for preferring thoughtful accommodation to tough-minded confrontation, finds himself caught in a political quandary that could have dire consequences for the world’s future.

His dangerous dilemma is this: the planet is facing a rising tide of existential threats – from widening income inequality to life-threatening global warming – that require coordinated and aggressive responses from nation states and particularly the United States. But, simultaneously, his support for expanded government surveillance and national security secrecy is undermining trust in government.

So, just when the people need government the most – to literally save the world – government is giving them more reasons to reject government. It is a moment when Obama’s proclivity for careful political calibrations adds to the danger.

If he doesn’t move quickly and decisively to let American citizens in on as many of the government surveillance secrets as reasonably possible – and dial back the dragnet on people’s personal information – he risks playing into the hands of anti-government extremists like the Tea Party who are now casting themselves as the protectors of America’s constitutional rights.

Jun 19, 201311 notes
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