Blood for Blood

Conditions: Bitter, Bitter

Can Takes No More

Alright, with the current bodycount for Gaza residents at over 1,000, does anyone know how many Israelis were killed before this massive bombardment started up? Was it less than five? Ten? Could what we’re seeing, every damn day on the television, could this level of death and devastation be considered a reasonable response to Hamas’ (also stupid and pointless) rocket campaign? How difficult could it be for the Israeli defense force to target the places where rockets are fired from, instead of just blowing up every bloody building and mosque there is? And what chances are there of any end to it all?

For the moment, the deadlock is well-entrenched: As long as the crippling blockade of Gaza remains in place, Hamas says it will continue firing rockets at Israel — terrifying but mostly ineffectual, thanks to the “Iron Dome” defense system. Israel says the blockade must stay to stop a terrorist government from importing yet more weapons.

- washingtonpost.com/

Meanwhile, further east, the Russians are about to pay for assisting the Russian separatists in the fight with Ukraine. The European union and the U.S have both implemented higher sanctions on Russia.

These punitive and carefully orchestrated actions go considerably beyond any previous sanctions. They are designed to exact a heavy price from President Vladimir Putin, and deservedly so. Russia’s behavior since the downing of a Malaysian jetliner with the loss of 298 lives has been a string of lies and a sharp escalation of direct involvement in the Ukrainian fray.

Russia, Mr. Obama said, “is once again isolating itself from the international community, setting back decades of genuine progress. It didn’t have to come to this. It doesn’t have to be this way. This is a choice that Russia, and President Putin in particular, has made.”
[...]

Economic sanctions are a flawed and double-edged weapon, but, short of armed force, they are the only tools at the disposal of the West to make President Putin and his revanchist-ruling clique understand that breaking the rules of international behavior carries a cost, and, further, that there can be no business-as-usual when Russia carries out armed aggression against a sovereign state while enabling proxies in eastern Ukraine who shoot down an unarmed passenger plane.

- nytimes.com/

So, I’m just curious here. After the U.S bombed the shit out of Afghanistan, and then invaded and blew up Iraq, causing literally countless amounts of civilian casualties, all for no actual reason or purpose, exactly how many economic sanctions were levelled at them from the international community?



Film Review: Days of Future Past

So the people behind the X-Men movies had a problem. They’d decided to reboot the franchise, and the reboot didn’t make as much money as they were hoping it would. So now they had the old well-known actors who’d been shunted aside by the new not-well known actors. What to do? What to do? I know, how about a time travel movie, so we can mix in all the actors? So the latest movie uses its best asset (Hugh Jackman, yet again as Wolverine) to link together a story set first far in the future, and also far in the past.

The X-Men films I thought always concentrated so much on mutants fighting mutants that the humans were kind of lost in the middle. Well in the years since the last film the humans have finally got off the bench and got in the fight, ultimately building big mutant-killing robots capable of somehow mutating themselves to adapt to any situation. Er, ok. So we see the world has become a dark place with a lot of dead mutants. The few left are basically on the run, but wouldn’t you know it, one the mutants has the ability to send someone’s consciousness back in time. It’s up to the Wolverine to go back to the 70’s in order to get help from Charles and Eric in order to stop Mystique from killing the robot scientist, which somehow is what led us to this.

Of course these films revel in throwing spanners in the works and so 70’s Eric immediately kicks off his own plan to the one Charles thinks everyone is following, while Logan gruffs his way along as ever. It’s been crafted very cleverly, and up until the end it kind of rolls along like a mad X-Men film usually does, with crazy stunts and effects. But then the ending happens, and it’s the kind of ending that really lets you leave the theater on a high. That’s the beauty of time travel films, there’s always a chance to build a happily ever after. And so all the grind and depressing death is magically wiped away, and we get a nice happy ending to walk out on. Neat. Three flairs out of five.



- Peace out