The Comfort of Chaos

Conditions: Just About Perfect

Not Reading The Fine Print.

It never ceases to amaze me how easily people can allow themselves to be wound up over the bloody obvious. Come out with a scientific paper that proves cigarettes are bad for you and the people are in shock! Release a story about a politician cheating on his wife and the people are scandalized!! Put photos of dead civilians killed during warfare, and the people are outraged!! And always the overriding thought is "how dare they confront me with this truth?" Because of course the outrage and surprise is pure uncut bullshit. We were never surprised, the outcomes were logical. And so it is with some humor we uncover the latest "scandal" about mobile phones. Turns out they can be used to keep track of your movements! The hell you say?!

Amid rising scrutiny of their practices, Google Inc. defended the way it collects location data from Android phones, while Apple Inc. remained silent for a third day.

The companies' smartphones regularly transmit locations back to Google and Apple servers, respectively, according to data and documents analyzed by The Wall Street Journal.

Research by a security analyst this week found that an Android phone collected location data every few seconds and sent it to Google several times an hour. Apple disclosed in a letter to Congress last year that its phones "intermittently" collect location data, and the company receives it twice a day.

Both companies have said users can prevent the data collection by turning off location-based services, although doing so limits functions such as maps.

- wsj.com/

And of course in the time-honored tradition of software application options, it's set a certain way by default and it's likely damn difficult to turn it off, or fully understand all it does. Hence perhaps the suspicion of skullduggery, but honestly. In this day and age being surprised that your cellphone can track your movements is equivalent to being surprised that there really isn't some kind of magical bunny that shits out chocolate eggs.

It's kind of sad, but in another way amusing, to see everyone climbing up onto their high horses yet again. "What do you mean this mobile digital communication device can be used to track me? The nerve of you corporations!" I mean for pete's sake. It's the twenty first century, can we at least try to act a little more grown up about these things?



Film Review: Sucker Punch

This Snyder is a stylish guy, I bet he even brushes his teeth in slow motion with a heavy rock beat. After bringing us the large-scale epics of 300 and Watchmen, director Zach Snyder has turned inward for his latest film, Sucker Punch, which is essentially about a girl who finds freedom by escaping into her own mind, unleashing her imagination as a last chance to escape reality. Set in an insane asylum, our young heroine transforms it into a 30's style burlesque house. Confronted with a therapist who uses a stage to help patients act out their fears, she transforms it into wild missions where she and her friends must fight their way through great armies and monsters to reach their goals. Confronted with a warden who pimps out the patients, she comes up with an escape plan.

See, our heroine has five days to escape before she is lobotomized/sold to a high-roller, and is determined to escape before her time is up. Sucker Punch is a wildly, wildly imaginative movie about imagination. It's highly metaphorical, where the story is being told more visually than through dialog. The escape plan relies on our hero to distract people with her dancing, while her partners are able to grab the items they need. But the dancing is interpreted by the director as wild action sequences where the five of them go on outrageous missions that require the slaying of a vast amount of bad guys and monsters in order to collect the necessary items.

While visually stunning, what's interesting about this film is that you have to decide just how much is real and what your interpretation of it is. Does our main protagonist find a form of freedom from the asylum she was consigned to? Whose story is it, anyway? And is this a female-empowering film, despite our heroes being scantily-clad babes who are essentially slaves? Well I believe this is an empowering film. The characters take control of their destinies and fight (a lot) to escape their predicament. You know on a purely surface level this would seem a shallow nonsensical film, full of mad action and cute girls. But actually look at what's going on, and seriously understand the motives at play and you can see that this is a meaningful movie about imagination and sacrifice, and camaraderie. Add to that a director who is at the top of his game in terms of visual style, and you have a very interesting and exciting film. The only possible detraction is that it the overall story becomes a little incoherent the more we escape into the fantasy. Though is that criticism or preference? Four steam powered Nazis out of Five.


- Peace out

The Places You Won't Go

Conditions: Cold, Hard.

The Shit That Shouldn't Happen

This week we've seen the rise and fall of the sleeping air traffic controller scandal, where a number of airports across America have reported that landing planes have been cut off from ground control due to ground control being asleep.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport will get a second nighttime air-traffic controller after two flights had to land unaided, possibly because the lone person on duty was asleep. That controller was suspended.

“It is not acceptable to have just one controller in the tower managing air traffic in this critical air space,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
[...]

The National Transportation Safety Board began an examination after pilots on two flights were unable to contact air-traffic control at the hub airport outside Washington, forcing them to land unassisted, Peter Knudson, a spokesman, said in an interview yesterday. The board doesn’t yet know why contact couldn’t be made, and it is looking at the possibility that the sole controller on duty was asleep, he said.

The AMR Corp. (AMR) American Airlines and United Continental Holdings Inc. (UAL) United planes involved landed safely around midnight on March 22, Knudson said.

The American pilots aborted a first landing attempt when no one in the tower responded to calls, and landed the second time without assistance, Knudson said. The United pilots regarded the airport the same as others that don’t have controllers in early morning hours, and landed on the first attempt, he said.

The planes were in contact with controllers at a regional center in Virginia, he said.

- bloomberg.com/news/

Here's what I don't get: I don't get how this could have been allowed to happen in the first place. How could organizations running airports have allowed a situation where just one person is in the tower through the night and is therefore solely responsible for landing places? And it's only now that we're all getting on our high horses about people falling asleep and planes landing themselves? I feel sorry for the controllers, obviously being forced past their limit and eventually breaking under the strain. I've watched the Discovery Channel, and I know that in any air investigation when that happens, you have to go back to all the times in the past when the problem could have been identified and fixed, and was not.



Film Review: Limitless

Before it even starts, this film has a strike against it. It's one of these films that starts out with the ending, then cycles back to the start, which means we then have to spend the next hour and a half waiting to get back to the point we started from. I hate this technique, and what's more it indicates a lack of confidence in the story: the director is bribing you to stick around till the end by giving a quick taste of it at the start. And frankly, I think they were right to lack confidence in the story. Limitless tells the tale of a shiftless loser who stumbles onto an illegal wonder drug that makes him super smart and focused like a laser. The problem is that he only has a limited amount of pills, and it becomes apparent that if you stop taking the pills you die, and if you take too many, you start skipping forward in time. So to start with the loser, played well by Bradley Cooper, uses it to write his book, and clean up his life. But the lesson of this film, the one effectively written across the top of the screen, is that enough is not enough.

So Bradley comes up with a plan. It's a brilliant plan, except we don't get told what the plan is. The plan requires money, so Bradley naturally becomes a wall street genius, which brings him to the attention of the sharks. Both the ones who wear suits, and the ones who don't. Russian mobsters are now after him, because they know about the pills. And Wall Street goons are after him, because they know about the pills. In fact the further along we go, the more it becomes apparent that a lot of successful focused people know about the pills. Including Robert Deniro, who plays a Gordon Gecko type tycoon who's meant to be part mentor, part competition to Bradley. It seems obvious to me, and everyone else in the theater, that the fact that the pills can kill you make them not good. And the fact that there's a limited supply is not good. There's a very real possibility that Bradley killed a girl one night after taking one pill too many, and that too is not good. But instead of trying to solve any of these problems, the director essentially gives up.

After slowly and carefully spending nearly two hours backing his lead character into a corner, or more accurately pushing him up onto a ledge, he then provides one of the quickest and laziest reversals I've ever seen. And the film literally ends with Bradley not having learned a damn thing. In fact, this film is a heartfelt endorsement of the drug mentality. That all that matters is getting what you can, and that salvation lies in some wicked combination of chemicals. As long as you have money, smarts and deep blue eyes, you can have anything. This is a terrible movie. It's truly awful, with no redeeming factors at all, and near the end of the film I found myself actively rooting for some Russian thug to blow the hero's brains out. Why not, this guy does literally nothing at all that's worthy of any kind of redemption or success of any kind. Because it's not about worth, it's about luck, and ruthlessness. One pill out of five.


- Peace out

Here We Go Again

Conditions: Cold, Dusty.

That Old Sinking Feeling

Recently the western powers decided that Libya required a no-fly zone. This is because there is currently a civil war brewing in the country, and the leader, Gaddafi, was using his air force to wipe out the rebels. Since no one likes Gaddafi, Nato's response is to setup a no fly zone in order to allow the rebels to stay in the fight. But a funny thing happened once the resolution was passed. Because I was under the impression that a no fly zone only meant you were allowed to shoot down their planes which were, you know, flying in a no fly zone.

A coalition air strike has killed seven civilians and injured 25 injured, according to a doctor working with rebel forces.

Dr Suleiman Refardi said that the incident happened on Wednesday in the village of Zawia el Argobe, near Brega, when the air strike hit an ammunition truck in a pro-Gaddafi convoy and damaged two houses. According to the doctor, the dead were four girls aged between 12 and 16 and three youths aged between 14 and 20.

The doctor said that villagers considered the casualties a "sacrifice and a price worth paying" for stopping Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's troops from taking back rebel-held territory. Zawia el Argobe is nine miles from Brega, where rebels forces are massed.

Nato officials said that they were making inquiries "down our operations chain to find out if indeed there is any information on the operation side that would support this claim".

Details of the incident came as Libyan rebels called for a ceasefire after Gaddafi forces drove them back for a third day after sandstorms and clouds hindered Nato air strikes.

- telegraph.co.uk/news/

See from what I've been hearing, a lot of the action being carried out by the Coalition forces seemed to be more along the lines of straight up military action, rather than just "no-fly-zone" action. Unless of course that was some kind of new, flying, ammunition truck they were targeting in Zawia el Argobe. Are we actually at war in Libya? Who the hell approved that?

The House of Commons is debating the government stance on UN resolution 1973, having been invited to give its approval or withhold it. It's a bit late, as the prime minister made a statement to the Commons on Friday and within 24 hours the bombing had started. We are presented with a fait accompli.

The debate, however, takes place against a background of growing concerns about the nature of the military operation, the intensity of the air strikes, the implications for the whole region, and the real motive behind the Arab League in calling for this in the first place. India is the first country to publicly call for a cessation of air strikes. Others are likely to follow.

UN security council resolution 1973 was heavily trailed as a no-fly-zone resolution. Like most UN resolutions it is very long. It specifically welcomed the appointment of the UN special envoy Abdel-Elah Mohamed Al-Khatib and in its proposals under chapter 7 of the UN charter (mandatory for all member states) demanded a ceasefire, stressed the need to find a solution to the conflict through the UN special envoy, and demanded that the Libyan authorities fulfil their international obligations under humanitarian law.

- guardian.co.uk/

Look nobody likes Gaddafi, the man by most accounts is a monster, but I thought we learned (yet again) in the Iraq war that attacking a country to get them to depose their leader never, ever, works. Remember how we chiseled that lesson across George W Bush's forehead? Remember George W Bush?

We couldn't possible have forgotten that already, surely?



Film Review: World Invasion. Battle: Los Angeles

If you watched Black Hawk Down and thought to yourself 'Yes, not bad, but it would have better with aliens instead of Africans", then this is the film for you. Battle: Los Angeles tells the tale of one marine unit's adventures in the middle of a surprise alien attack on the Californian coastline. They're attacking everywhere else as well, but it's just L.A that we see, for this movie at least. Focusing on just the one unit allows the filmmakers to not have to bother too much with generals and presidents and Europe and all the other hoo-hah more ambitious alien-invasion films have to concern themselves with. Aaron Eckhart plays a staff sergeant fresh from a rough tour in the middle east, who's impending retirement is interrupted by some intergalactic bullies. We're quickly introduced to the cannon fodder, I mean, soldiers who make up the unit we'll be attached to, each with their own cliche to carry, and then we're into the chopper and away.

The film is shot handheld-style, and is constructed just like a video game. The only thing missing is a controller. Our task is to get to an abandoned police station that apparently is sheltering some civilians, and get them out before the air force levels the place. Once there we need to find a bus to escape in, and then a chopper to get the civilians out on. Then the finale where we take on the command and control ship in order to take out the Alien drone air force. But despite the video-game style plot, the actors do a heroic job in breathing some life and character into this film. The ongoing battle scenes are shot very realistically, and despite the annoyance of the shaky-cam you can experience the chaos and fear of close-quarters combat.

The underlying current, being pushed by Eckhart, is based on his last tour where a bunch of his men were killed, and he now carries that burden. Can he overcome his feelings of guilt to lead again and make the hard decisions? Will the marines trust him and fight by his side? Despite it being an alien invasion movie, it's actually a pretty fair war film, complete with gritty rubble-strewn camaraderie and grimy desperation. Unfortunately, I am not and will never be a fan of the relentless shaky-cam style of filmmaking, which always comes across to me as distracting and annoying. I believe this film would have been much much better without it, but of course without it they would likely have had to spend more money on the special effects. So in the end it's a small chaotic snapshot of a bigger overall war, full of bravery and sacrifice and a little bit of human drama thrown in as well, only really difficult to see. Three and a half grenades out of five.


- Peace out