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.
June 2013
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
