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The Killing at 70

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Did this clown mask inspire The Dark Night ? It looks familiar. Long-time readers know that Stanley Kubrick is my favorite film director. But he had a rather mediocre start to his career. Fear and Desire (1953) is a struggle to get through. Kubrick later wanted the physical reels of film destroyed but, of course, some copies survived. I’m glad I watched it. There is a crude outline of who he was then. The Eisenstein editing techniques of cutting on the action rather than before it or after it are there. Other than that, the film is not worth watching. Killer's Kiss (1955) is eh. There is a bit of Kubrick humor and the room filled with mannequins as two men try to kill each other near the end of the movie is rather eye-popping and interesting. Otherwise, it looks and feels like the first movie in a random 1950’s double-feature. Then came 1956. Kubrick is 27 years old and climbing the ladder. Killer’s Kiss proved he could direct scenes. His partner at the time, James B. Ha...
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In The Mirror, Again

My YouTube feed sent me another goodie recently.  The title was something about animal warfare and it opened with that Fallout  quote — "War, war never changes" — before pivoting to the paper just published in Science  about a chimpanzee civil war in Uganda. It was a reasonably good summary and I watched the whole thing. What it mostly did was make me want to write this post, which I have been pondering for a couple of weeks now since the study broke. Because this is not new territory for me. I have been looking into this particular mirror since long before I started this blog. Chimpanzee culture and behavior have always caught my eye for some reason. A natural curiosity. Jane Goodall’s first book gripped me in my college years. In 2009 I wrote about a BBC Planet Earth segment narrated by David Attenborough — extraordinary HD footage of 150 male chimpanzees in Uganda organizing themselves into a raiding party and attacking a neighboring group's territory. Several wer...
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What Epic Fury Stimulated

"It is important to remember that battlefield victories are not ends in themselves. Their worth is calculated from the strategic possibilities, military or political, that these stimulate." — David Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East We seem to have left the big action sequence opening of the movie and are now in the story development stage of the script. So what have Netanyahu and Trump stimulated with their attack on Iran? Stahel was writing about the Wehrmacht in 1941. About an army that won extraordinary battlefield victories and in doing so stimulated a Soviet mobilization Germany couldn't survive. Tactical brilliance was eventually overwhelmed by strategic catastrophe. We’re at the point where we can now ask what did Roaring Lion and Epic Fury stimulate? Well, the controlled closure of the Strait of Hormuz, obviously. The first sustained blockade of the world's most critical oil chokepoint in contemporary history. It stimulate...
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A baseball, tears and Ole No. 6

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"To Letha, Best Wishes Bobby Cox" Bobby Cox died yesterday.  He was 84. Why do we always give the age without thinking? I guess the age is the point to the living. I probably watched or listened to Bobby Cox manage close to 2,000 ballgames in my life. That number spans generations. My grandfather (who I called Pop) watched him. I watched him. The Atlanta Braves on TBS were the family's nightly summer entertainment long before I had any say in the matter. As long as MASH or The Waltons  weren't on or the score wasn't too lopsided, we were watching the Braves.  My mother was the baseball fan in the house. That's where I got it. Dad understood it. But he was more into horses and rodeos. Pop loved to watch Cox argue with umpires and get tossed. He would shake with laughter. It was comical to him. He'd start out with saying "Oh, now Bobby," to the TV set and then start rolling. I know what it was now. That hard-nosed, absolute refusal to let a possi...
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Göbekli Tepe: The Hill That Remembers

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A small part of  Göbekli Tepe with the viewing platform at its edge. There's a place in southern Turkey, on a limestone ridge, that shatters entire worldviews. This is undeniably something we can put our hands on. Human beings made this place circa 11,000 years ago. Other than late-paleo cave paintings, this is the oldest human stuff we can physically touch. Göbekli Tepe . The name means "potbelly hill." The site predates Stonehenge by 6,000 years. The Great Pyramid of Giza by 7,000. Everything scientists “understood” about the origins of organized human society — the clean progression from agriculture to settlement to religion to monuments — this place inverts it. First came the gathering. Then came everything else. That's unsettling in a specific way. The old story was comforting. It told us civilization was a logical climb. First you feed yourself reliably, then you can afford to think bigger. The monument comes last, as a kind of reward for having organized your...
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Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevsky's Final Years

[ Read my Dostoevsky stuff. ] I couldn’t let this tour of the novel pass without a bit of history about it. This is mostly from Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time  but some other sources were consulted too. On June 8, 1880, Fyodor Dostoevsky stood before a crowd in Moscow and delivered the most celebrated speech of his life. The occasion was the unveiling of a monument to Alexander Pushkin, organized by the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. The leading literary figures of Russia were present. The famous writer Ivan Turgenev spoke. Then Dostoevsky spoke. Turgenev's remarks were more formal for the occasion. His words chosen carefully and cosmopolitan. Pushkin was great, he argued, but regional — not quite Shakespeare, not quite Goethe. It was a defensible reading. The audience applauded politely. Then Dostoevsky got up. He argued that Pushkin embodied something no other nation's literature had produced: vsemirnost — universal responsiveness. The capacit...
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Nobody's Got A Plan

Time to walk across the room to the other side. Who's in charge in Iran? Are we about to get a coup? Uh, I don't think so.  The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps ( IRGC ) have a tight lid on dissent. The Iranian military is in charge in Iran. I've been watching the IRGC operate for two months now and I haven't given them the serious treatment they deserve. The decapitation strikes. The new Supreme Leader mostly absent. The Strait closed. I watched all of it from the outside but what is the view from inside Tehran right now? It's stranger than I assumed. Start with what happened to Iran on day one. Epic Fury killed or incapacitated most of the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic in a matter of hours. The precision was extraordinary. Khamenei — the new one, Mojtaba , elevated only recently — went dark almost immediately. Possibly injured. Possibly moved. Certainly absent from any public function. In forty-five years of the Islamic Republic, nothing like this h...
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