Welp. Here I am.

Conditions: Unstable

Worst Surprise Ever

Everyone knows the CIA tortured prisoners during the Iraq war. It’s not a secret, hell by now it’s essentially crossed over into meme territory. So now a new senate report is due to come out that goes into detail about how prisoners were treated by the CIA. There’s some speculation that the report is not going to be particularly complimentary. The Republicans in particular are unhappy.

But some leading Republican lawmakers have warned against releasing the report, saying that domestic and foreign intelligence reports indicate that a detailed account of the brutal interrogation methods used by the C.I.A. during the George W. Bush administration could incite unrest and violence, even resulting in the deaths of Americans.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney added his voice to those of other Bush administration officials defending the C.I.A., declaring in an interview Monday that its harsh interrogations a decade ago were “absolutely, totally justified,” and dismissing allegations that the agency withheld information from the White House or inflated the value of its methods.

- nytimes.com/

Ahhhh, smell that? The unmistakeable whiff of panic. Suck it, Cheney. So, the report was subsequently released, and detailed the various awful things that the CIA have done. Now what?

The UN has called for the prosecution of those behind a 'criminal conspiracy' at the CIA that led to the 'brutal' torture of detainees.

Ben Emmerson, United Nations' special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, said those responsible for planning, sanctioning or carrying out crimes including waterboarding should not escape justice – even senior officials from George W Bush's administration.

"It is now time to take action," he said in a statement from Geneva. "The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy ... must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.

"The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within the US Government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability."

- independent.co.uk

Oh that is adorable. The U.N, the very same U.N that America steamrollered over back in 2003 and effectively rendered useless, are calling for prosecutions against the U.S high command? Oh yeah. It is to laugh.



Film Review: Interstellar

Christopher Nolan has built himself into a brand name thanks to a long list of brilliant and entertaining blockbuster movies. It’s a brand that stands amongst the other great filmmakers, in that you know when you sit down before a Nolan movie that you are going to get certain things. It’s going to be smart, it’s going to be complicated, it’s going to demand certain things of you in order to keep up. Interstellar is all of these things we’ve come to expect from Nolan, but there’s more. This time he has, to risk the old cliché, really really outdone himself. It’s not just a story, it’s a gigantic mission statement, a statement of hope wrapped in a harshness that makes it a bitter pill to swallow.

Actually I think the biggest hurdle the film has to live up to is Contact, that came out a couple of decades ago. The most obvious parallel is Mathew McConaughey – who was in both. But the films are vastly different really. Contact was about exploration out of hope. Interstellar is about exploration out of desperation. The Earth, it seems, is doomed. After too many people, and too much pollution, and too much consumption, the crops have started to fail, and people began to die off. Mathew plays Cooper, a farmer (as is everyone) living in the aftermath. He used to be a Nasa pilot, now he’s just stuck in the dust with a couple of kids. Nasa technically doesn’t exist anymore, but he happens to stumble into a secret Nasa mission to save the human race, and things get a little nutty. Spoilers ahead by the way.

Apparently “someone” has created a wormhole that you can travel through, sitting out there just next to Saturn. So Nasa sent off some probes, in secret. They indicated like a dozen possibly habitable planets in another galaxy. So they built and sent off a dozen ships with a dozen hardy, brave, possibly mad explorers, with orders to set up a base camp, transmit back what the planet is like, then put themselves into cryo sleep until the next phase happens. The next phase is split into two parts. One is a ship filled with fertilized eggs ready to go, it needs to be flown to one of these planets where the human race can then keep going. The second is a giant space station that a select number of people will be loaded aboard and they too will make their way to the new Earth. It’s important to note that the Earth remains doomed.

However, as we progress things get complicated. It hinges on the central dramatic conflict of Coop having to leave his young daughter Murph behind, but with the promise that he will return some day. Thanks to wormholes he’ll be the same age, and she’ll be, well, who knows. He also leaves his son behind as well, but since his son becomes a hardy farmer that doesn’t seem much of an issue. So it’s the Murph/Coop relationship that forms the backbone of this film, that escalates in the late stages into something very transcendent and crazy.

I think I understand the nature of what Nolan is trying to do here. For a variety of reasons he has carte blanche to make big challenging movies at the moment. But he will know better than ever that that moment will not last. So while he’s got it he wants to challenge the audiences, and himself. And he has been doing that, no question. This movie I think is where he is finally outreached even himself. The film is grand, and thoughtful, and heartfelt, but it twists itself around so terribly, using science to create magic to serve a story that has separated itself from where we started to such an extent that the ending inevitably feels cut short, the stuff here is too big and bizarre to ever really be explained or summarised up and given the kind of happy ending that they try to slap on to it anyway. So despite the rosy glow and satisfied smiles the actors portray, the audience is restless. I know because I was restless. Questions have been left unanswered. Explanations are skipped. Expected character reactions are absent. Is the day actually saved? Somehow the original idea of exploration turned into escape, which morphed into rescue, which became redemption, followed swiftly by some kind of magical transcendence, and I don’t even know where we are any more. What was it all really about? Was that what it was about? The film needs more than a sequel, it needs rebuilding, stripping out, lightening and focusing.

Who created the wormhole? It’s kind of an important question. But during the standard geniuses-round-a-boardroom scene the topic is treated with a few embarrassed smiles. There’s this wormhole, see. And They built it. And we can go through it. With this ship. So off we go. I suppose we’re being invited to speculate, it seems the most obvious inference in the film is that future humans built it in order to save themselves. But that makes no sense – because obviously they did survive in order to build the wormhole in the first place. And that’s not even the most obvious direct causality issue – at one point Cooper is even screaming at his past self not to go off into space. But he obviously did go off into space. So... Er... Well... That just doesn’t add up to me. Maybe ultimately that’s what this film is – ambitious but ultimately not the sum of its parts. Four interdimensional bookshelves out of five.



- Peace out