There are U.S. “advisors” in Ukraine

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

One of the perennial jokes of U.S. foreign policy is that the first U.S. troops to arrive in any foreign theater of conflict are just there as “advisors.” The U.S. intervention in Vietnam started off with just “military advisors” in 1950. Within two and a half decades, some 55,000 American soldiers had returned home in body bags from that tiny war-torn southeast Asian country on the other side of the world.

In recent days, President Joe Biden has made alleged “gaffes” about U.S. troops being present in Ukraine and removing Vladimir Putin from office, prompting administration officials, including secretary of State Antony Blinken, to make hurried correctives on his behalf that neither are official U.S. policy. While it remains unclear as to whether or not the latter is a serious U.S. policy goal, the former “gaffe” is a documented fact. There are in fact U.S. and NATO military personnel present in Ukraine at the moment, but only in a “limited” “advisory” capacity, of course. And they’ve been there since at least January–several weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Eerie echoes of Afghanistan circa late-1970s. The U.S. began supporting mujahadeen resistance to the newly installed Marxist regime in Kabul at that time and lo and behold the Soviets invaded several months after. The U.S. just officially ended its nearly 20-year occupation of Afghanistan last August.

The ability of the U.S. government to convince the vast majority of the American public of a false perception of what they’re really up to never fails to astound. The Biden administration keeps insisting that the direct involvement of U.S. troops in Ukraine is not in the cards, and yet we know for a fact that U.S. and NATO military advisors have been there for at least the past few months. They’re apparently teaching Ukrainian forces how to use all those weapons–including Soviet-made tanks being delivered by NATO allies–that were made possible courtesy of $1 billion—and counting–in U.S. military aid.

But yet we’re supposed to be convinced that Uncle Sam just isn’t doing enough in Ukraine. Never mind that this recent twist of tragic events was catalyzed by the Obama administration’s support for the Euromaidan putsch in Kiev some eight years ago. Never mind that billions of dollars in American military aid has been sent to Ukraine since then. Never mind that the U.S. and NATO are now facilitating weapons transfers to Ukraine. We’re supposed to believe that Washington has been acting with restraint and caution in regards to Russia v. Ukraine for fear of escalating into all out war with nuclear-armed Russia.

But doesn’t it appear more and more as though the opposite is true? The U.S.–which has launched a total of three regime-change and attempted regime-change wars since its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001–appears to be inching closer and closer to a direct military confrontation with Russia. Just as his “gaffe” about U.S. troops in Ukraine turned out to be an absent minded revelation of what was in fact true, perhaps Biden’s “gaffe” about Putin being forced out of power in Moscow will, in due time, turn out to be another slip-of-the-tongue that prematurely revealed the truth regarding Washington’s actual long term goal with regards to Russia.

Ukraine Notes

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

I caught Obama’s former CIA director, Leon Panetta, for a few minutes on CNN late this past week. He said that the U.S. put the kibosh on a proposal to transfer 29 Soviet-era MiG-29s from the Polish to the Ukrainian government as a result of some kind of “miscommunication.” Which is odd, because I had just seen it widely reported that the Pentagon threw cold water on the idea because such a transfer would run a “high risk” of escalating the war. It would directly implicate NATO in an armed conflict with Russia, you see, which is something that Biden has repeatedly stated he is studiously avoiding. (Though maybe he and his old boss should’ve thought through the possible consequences eight years ago when they decided to back the overthrow of the then existing Ukrainian regime for one that they thought they could more effectively control, and then arm that regime to the tune of $2.5 billion so that they could wage war on Ukraine’s Donbas region). We would then be in the World War III scenario that nobody wants: European states joining in the fracas, triggering Article 5, and before you know it, the nuclear-armed U.S. and nuclear-armed Russia are facing off not merely by proxy, as they are now, but directly, mano a mano. Cities of NATO countries then become Russian targets and vice-a-versa.

But I guess that was wrong…? Turns out somebody just didn’t get a memo or something…?

Nonetheless, there are members of the U.S. Congress calling for the enforcement of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, led by my adopted home state’s Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger. Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin seems open to the idea as well. To describe these individuals as being in dire need of mental health treatment would be an understatement. Vox explains why.

Pete Quinones recently interviewed Kirill from the podcast Russians With Attitude, who gives his no-nonsense take on the chain of events leading up to the Russian attack on Ukraine. This includes some deep background on the Ukrainian nationalist project as an anti-Russian project dating back to the 19th century and the rivalry between the old Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and the ad hoc invention of a “Ukrainian” language.

Michael Malice recently talked to Curtis Yarvin on the Russian-Ukraine war and Yarvin explains that based on an application of classical international law, Putin kinda has a legit beef–the U.S. would certainly take some kind of action if the Russians or the Chinese built military installations and bases in southern Canada or northern Mexico, which is directly analagous to how the U.S. and NATO have been gradually surrounding Russia since the mid-2000s or so. Yarvin, however, believes that Putin has likely miscalculated and is now in way over his head. Nonetheless, recent U.S. economic actions against Russia may lead to the unintended result of “de-dollarizing” the global economy, which would have some pretty serious economic consequences for Americans.

The blog Moon of Alabama recently relayed some disturbing reporting that 450 Islamic radicals have arrived in Ukraine by way of Turkey to fight the Russians. Meanwhile, the Russian government claims that 16,000 fighters from the Middle East have volunteered to go to Ukraine to fight on the side of Russia and the Donbas region. Whether either claim is actually true remains to be seen, in my own humble opinion. The propaganda always comes in hot and heavy from all sides during a war. However, there has just been some recent reporting today that the Russians have struck a complex housing some foreign fighters, killing 35. Perhaps more details on who they were and where they were from will be coming out in the coming days.

Scott Horton’s recent interview with journalist Ann Williamson is a must-listen. She was living and reporting in Russia at the time the USSR imploded. She discusses her testimony before the U.S. senate back in the late 1990s in which she predicted that U.S. ambitions to expand NATO further eastward would yield disastrous results. She wasn’t the only one, of course. A long line of U.S. Russia experts, ranging from the late George Kennan, the architect of the U.S. containment policy toward the USSR during the Cold War, to President Biden’s current CIA director, William Burns, had made similar predictions.

American Russia expert Gilbert Doctorow‘s recent conversation with Tom Woods is also well worth listening to.

Meanwhile, 52% of polled Americans appear to believe that Biden has not acted “forcefully” enough against Russia. This is the kind of poll that is ideally made into the warmongering bullshit that any astute observer has come to expect from Conservatism, Inc. in recent decades. Rather than call out previous Democratic administrations for crafting the foreign policy that has made this whole tragic shit show possible, they would much rather hector the current Democratic occupant of the White House into tangling directly with Russia, which, of course, as previously noted, would mean World War III.

ADDENDUM: Be sure to check out this March 2014 editorial by the late Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com, wherein he breaks down the list of neo-Nazis and fascists scattered throughout the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Democrats saw a brown shirt in every closet following Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 victory, and yet when they’re confronted with evidence of actual Naziism and fascism being the ideological standard of their Ukrainian allies, they barely talk about it. Appalling, but hardly surprising.

‘Belfast’

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

So over the holidays me and the fam had the opportunity to watch Kenneth Branagh’s new film Belfast, which he based on his own memories of growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Branagh was born into a Protestant family that fled Belfast for England around 1969-70 or so, when Branagh was about 10 or 11 (if I remember correctly), following the eruption of what came to be known as “the Troubles,” the cycle of violence related to the longstanding dispute over Catholic civil rights in Northern Ireland. We streamed the film at our home with my Belfast-born and bred mother in attendance, who was visiting for Christmas.

My mother is Catholic and was raised in the predominantly Catholic area of west Belfast, just off the Falls Road, so it goes without saying that she had a different perspective than Branagh, who as a Protestant was raised in a Protestant majority area that had some Catholic residents who were therefore a distinct minority in their neighborhood. I should note, however, that my mother left Belfast for the U.S. in 1963 (at the tender age of 19), about six years before the Troubles, and Branagh’s story, commenced in August of 1969. But based on what mom’s told me of her experience growing up there in a Catholic family through the 1950s and early ’60s, it seems to me that Branagh’s portrayal of Northern Ireland’s main political dispute as suddenly erupting into violence, seemingly out of nowhere, lacks a great deal of context.

Now keep in mind that by no means do I claim to be some kind of expert on Northern Ireland’s history and politics just because that’s where my mom is from and I’ve visited family there on a few occasions over the years. (I was last there as a teenager and that, my friends, was a very, very long time ago.) But just based on what little knowledge I’ve gleaned from my mother and relatives overseas, a couple of things struck me as a little odd.

“There is no our side and their side of our street, at least there didn’t used to be,” laments the father (ably played by a stolid Jamie Dornan) of the little boy through whose eyes we are told this family’s story. That observation seems a little strange. Mom has told stories of her and her sisters standing up and pelting their local cinema’s screen with food, various detritus, curses, and stiffly upright middle fingers whenever Queen Elizabeth II’s visage was displayed as the obligatory “God Save the Queen” came over the sound system, which always preceded the preview of coming attractions. That was well over a decade before the Troubles. One has to wonder where Mr. Branagh–the “Pa” in the movie is based on Branagh’s late father–had been during his 30-something years of existence.

Branagh’s family may have had no truck with the Catholics in their own neighborhood, but there was most certainly a very explicit sense of “us” and “them” that, by 1969, had pervaded Northern Ireland’s politics for decades, ever since Ireland’s six northeastern-most counties, with their Protestant majorities and Catholic minorities, were partitioned off as “Northern Ireland” in 1921 and kept under British rule, following Ireland’s war for independence and subsequent civil war. The rest of Ireland, meanwhile, with its Catholic majority, became a self-governing republic. Northern Ireland’s Catholics had protested that they had been effectively relegated to second class status almost from the very beginning. Prominent among their list of grievances was that they had been systematically excluded from certain jobs, particularly civil service jobs. That had profound implications for public and social services in Northern Ireland’s Catholic communities, and for their economic situation overall.

Surely, Pa Branagh was aware of all that, which renders his observation naive at best, or at the very least tone deaf.

That leads me to another claim that Pa makes during the course of the film that struck me as strange–that the source of the conflict was the religious differences between Protestants and Catholics. That seems to be more the kind of superficial assessment that you would expect from a casual outside observer who had absolutely zero knowledge of the conflict’s politics and history, rather than someone who had been born and raised in Northern Ireland and had lived there well into their 30s by 1969. The conflict was always political in nature, a brute struggle for raw power, with the fault lines naturally delineating the Protestants as British unionists and the Catholics as Irish republicans for historical reasons. To my understanding, theological differences between Protestantism and Catholicism as such never played much of a role at all.

But the above quibbles never prevented me from enjoying this film. The main dramatic thrust of Branagh’s story, after all, is a family’s struggle to choose between remaining in the only country they’ve ever known to be home even as it spirals downwards into an abyss of violence and chaos, or leaving for another, stranger, place in order to secure a more peaceful future for their young sons. It’s a touching story, one that many people all over the world, unfortunately, could certainly relate to. And though I think it’s usually too obvious to even state, I will remind the reader that one should never expect to glean any accurate history from the movies. For that, you need to do the much more difficult work of seeking out reliable sources and doing your own research.

And this movie has a great cast. As the child of a northern Irish mother, I can reliably attest that Caitriona Balfe is the very quintessence of northern Irish motherhood. Dame Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds as the grandparents are particularly moving, especially in their scenes with the story’s young protagonist, played by the undeniably charming Jude Hill. Your heart would have to be made of ice as thick as a glacier for it not to melt.

Though the film’s black and white cinematography has a kind of arthouse, Truffautesque feel about it, this movie is really just a straightforward tale about people who genuinely love and care for each other having to make tough choices when it seems that the whole world has gone stark raving mad. And for that, Belfast is a most welcome and refreshing diversion.

About ‘Last Night in Soho’…

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

So the wife and I decided to catch filmmaker Edgar Wright’s latest at the moving picture show last night, Last Night in Soho. I had never been as big of a fan of his work as some people–he seems to have a fairly devout base of fanboys–but I always thought that he at least knows how to serve up a decent couple of hours or so of entertainment. Actual storytelling was never quite Wright’s greatest strength but at least his movies were usually funny. Any plot deficiencies that Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz may have had were more than compensated by the humor that permeated those movies, as schoolboyish as it may be. I never got the impression from Wright that he was ever necessarily out to make grand cinematic masterpieces. His goal always seemed to be to simply provide some decent distraction for the moviegoer’s dollar. And that’s perfectly fine. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that at all.

But now he’s given us Last Night in Soho. It seems that Edgar wants to take himself a little more seriously these days, which is also fine, but the result is a bright and pretty neon dish that unfortunately serves up some very confused storytelling, with very little of the laughter that is usually to be had in his films. It’s so confusing, and so offensive to the audience’s intelligence, as to be downright embarrassing.

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that Wright has become anxious to change things up a bit and get a little more artsy. “Evolve or die,” as the late John Lennon once said during the recording of Sgt. Pepper. Wright’s 2017 movie Baby Driver attempted to extend his artistic reach beyond his usual grasp, but as far as plot and story goes, that action-heist-car chase crime thriller is far more satisfying than Soho. Of course, Wright reportedly spent two decades developing Driver, having started working on the script as an adolescent. Soho feels like it was slapped together over a long weekend of heavy drinking and bong hits some time during the height of the #MeToo controversy. This is all the more perplexing considering that the film was co-written with a woman screenwriter, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, who also co-wrote the script of Sam Mendes’ perfectly respectable (if not entirely memorable) World War I drama, 1917, for which she shared an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay with Mendes. Soho is definitely attempting to make some kind of a statement about women and what they have had to deal with in the professional world in both the past and in the present, but whatever it is that it’s trying to say is much too garbled to make out. Surely Wilson-Cairns must have a more distinct take.

The film looks good, to be sure. Edgar Wright never fails to deliver pretty pictures and some interesting camera work, and he obviously finds mid-1960s London to be quite the inspiration. But–and this should be more than obvious to a filmmaker of Wright’s caliber–if you’re going to pull a bait-and-switch on your audience, the switch had better turn out be a lot more satisfying than what they thought they were getting when they took the bait. At the very least, you shouldn’t totally undermine in the final act a major part of the premise that you had set up in the first.

It was entirely fitting that Wright should cast veteran actors Terrence Stamp and Diana Rigg in a film that in part harkens back to the swinging ’60s. But Stamp turns out to be a mostly incidental character and so he’s unjustly wasted in this movie. And it’s very sad that this was Rigg’s final curtain. Young lead actress Thomasin McKenzie is fine in the lead role of Eloise considering that she’s saddled with a character who’s almost an entirely reactive protagonist, an apparently unintended irony considering the film’s semi-feminist pretensions. (McKenzie was far better in the underrated and underappreciated JoJo Rabbit.) Matt Smith also appears to be trying his best with the script’s shallow character development.

I appear to be a part of a small minority, however. Soho has an audience rating of 92% on Rotten Tomatoes and though the critics’ rating is a more tepid 74%, that strikes me as surprisingly high in light of just how bad this film is. As horror, while I suppose it does have its moments of creepiness, it’s not really that scary. There aren’t any moments that shock and jolt you out of your seat. This flick also fails as suspense. Only a total moron would fail to see the film’s supposed “twist” being telegraphed well in advance of its “big reveal” (which, as I’ve alluded to above, completely contradicts a major element of the film’s established premise, leaving the viewer completely befuddled). Either people are getting dumber, or perhaps I’m becoming more and more crotchety as I age. Or maybe it’s both.

Last Night in Soho does seem to be the kind of neon-shiny crap that people typically flock to these days.

A Wilderness of Delusion

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

I recently finished watching Marc Smerling’s docuseries A Wilderness of Error on the FX network. This series is based on the book of the same name by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, published in 2012. The book relates the case of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, who was convicted in 1979 of brutally murdering his pregnant wife and two little girls when the family lived on-base at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, one cold and rainy night in February of 1970. MacDonald was a captain in the Green Berets at the time.

It’s an amazing story, in that it’s particularly amazing that anyone has ever believed that MacDonald could possibly be innocent. And yet Federal appeals courts have heard MacDonald’s case in the years since his conviction on several occasions, whenever some supposedly game-changing new evidence came to light. Appeals related to the case have even ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court—-twice. It is in fact the most litigated and longest running criminal case in U.S. history.

But every alleged piece of new evidence that prompted another appeal by MacDonald and his lawyers always related to the same old discredited story that the convicted family annihilator has been peddling from the very beginning: That a band of drugged out hippies forced their way into the townhouse where the MacDonalds were residing and butchered the family as they chanted, “Acid is groovy; kill the pigs.” (That little flourish in MacDonald’s tale would be laughable if not for the immensely tragic circumstances.) Colette MacDonald and little Kristen and Kimberly were all viciously stabbed and beaten multiple times, while the crazed hippies apparently left MacDonald with only a handful of wounds that were mostly superficial, with the sole exception of a neat, sharp puncture in his chest that collapsed one of his lungs.

I have not read the book but from what I understand Morris seemed strongly inclined at the time of its publication to believe that MacDonald is innocent; he seems much more reticent and ambivalent in the new TV series.

One of his best known documentary films is The Thin Blue Line, released in 1988. The film covers the case of Randall Dale Adams, who was convicted of murdering a police officer in Texas and subsequently sentenced to death. In the course of making the film, not only did Morris discover that Adams was innocent, but that the young man who had actually committed the crime testified against Adams at the trial, helping to convict him. The appalling miscarriage of justice makes for a compelling story. Adams was eventually released from prison and spared the electric chair at very near the 11th hour, in large part due to Morris’ film.

But if Morris has been obsessing over the MacDonald case since the early 1990s, as he says he has, then surely it must have dawned on him at some point that Jeffrey MacDonald is no Randall Dale Adams. The only person who has ever ventured to suggest that she could possibly corroborate MacDonald’s story, a very troubled young woman named Helena Stoeckley, proved to be wildly unreliable. Though she had reportedly told several people that she may have been in the MacDonald home that fateful night and witnessed the carnage herself, upon taking the stand during the 1979 trial she denied ever being there, much to the dismay of defense attorney Bernie Segal. (Smerling’s fascinating companion podcast to the series, Morally Indefensible, provides additional background not included in the FX series that casts even more doubt on Stoeckley’s initial claims.)

Since the marauding-band-of-drug-crazed-hippies story consistently falls apart under just a modicum of serious scrutiny, that leaves only one possibility as to who is the guilty party: Dr. MacDonald. It is tragically obvious. That someone as smart and educated as Errol Morris could seriously believe otherwise is a testament to the limits of human intelligence. Intelligence is often compromised by belief, and we are all vulnerable.

My wife and I once attended a talk given by Morris at the Music Box Theater in Chicago about two and a half years ago. He was not promoting a film at the time, but another book, The Ashtray: Or the Man Who Denied Reality. The book is highly critical of the theories of the famous philosopher of science Dr. Thomas Kuhn, under whom Morris had studied for awhile at Princeton University.

At one point in the evening, the discussion turned to politics. Morris informed his audience that he fully expected Donald Trump to launch a nuclear first-strike on North Korea. Granted, this was during the time of Trump’s rabid “fire and fury” tweets aimed at the Hermit Kingdom, but it also happened to play into the absolutely worst assumptions that his blue state audience had regarding Trump. It was a little too simplistic, this mutually reassuring belief Morris and his audience shared that night, and it turned out to be incredibly wrong. Not only was Morris’ morbid and apocalyptic prediction mistaken, but it turned out to be the exact opposite of what Trump actually did, which was to sit down and talk to Kim Jong-Un face-to-face. That approach was a very far cry from slaughtering the people of North Korea with nuclear fire.

But that didn’t matter at all, of course, for the historic summit that occurred, with its signed agreement for more peaceful relations between the two countries, then conveniently served as a yet another example of Trump’s ongoing affection for totalitarian dictators. But at least everyone has reverted back to their typical apathy toward the U.S.-North Korean relationship ever since it slipped back into its usual bellicosity.

However misguided Morris may be in the views that he may (or may no longer) hold regarding the case of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, he at least deserves credit for encouraging his audience to question their assumptions, and to remind them that the truth is usually not so easily gained.

A Wilderness of Error is imminently watchable, suspenseful, and fraught with dramatic tension throughout, and told through the eyes of memorable real-life characters—-some of them tragically so. This kind of soul searching, however, may be put to much better use than speculating on the decades long, overly indulged protestations of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald.

Feynman’s Answers

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

This is quite popular online:

Feynman Questions

The late American physicist Richard Feynman started his career as a young physicist on the Manhattan Project, the secret U.S. government project to develop the atomic bomb. He would go on to win a Nobel Prize for physics in 1965 for his work in quantum electrodynamics, which he shared with two other physicists. I couldn’t tell you much about quantum electrodynamics, but I know that Feynman also attracted a lot of attention as a member of the U.S. government’s Rogers Commission, which investigated the tragic Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986.

It was Feynman who figured out what went wrong: the rubber “O-rings” that were used to seal the joints of a solid rocket booster failed to expand at or below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and the temperature at the time of the shuttle’s launch on Jan. 28th, 1986, was right around 32 degrees F. Due to the O-rings’ failure to expand, gas escaped and turned into flame, heating the fuel tank until it ruptured and released liquid hydrogen into the atmosphere and exploded. Feynman and the commission also found a variety of other problems related to the O-rings.

In his own seperate report appended to the commission’s main report, as well as in media appearances, Feynman criticized NASA officials, who, he said, should have known about the O-rings, but they had ended up fooling themselves. They had not previously suffered any problems with other launches and so, reasoned NASA’s managers, things would continue to be hunky-dory. This blinded them to obvious flaws that had not previously led to disaster thanks only to mere chance.

They really should’ve known better, said Feynman. That nothing had gone wrong before was no excuse for those men of science, whose knowledge should have been their guide.

Those views did not win him many friends in Washington, where the unquestioned expertocracy rules all. No doubt these final words from his addendum to the commission’s report rankled the feathers of a D.C. bureaucrat or two: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

“Nature cannot be fooled,” implying, as emphasized by the bit about public relations, that human beings most certainly can be fooled, including scientists. We are all gullible and naive to some extent, and we all have our blind spots and shortcomings, including those with PhDs in physics who are employed by NASA.

Naturally, when people see the quote at the top of this post, they nod their head in agreement. For they instinctively understand that nobody has all the answers to everything and so there is always room for doubt and skepticism, for some more critical examination of people’s claims and ideas. And doesn’t agreeing with this very sensible insight show everyone just how open-minded you are, how liberal and tolerant you are toward contrasting and dissenting views?

But let’s be honest. A cursory glance across social media on any given day tells you that an overwhelming number of people really believe that it’s only other people’s claims that should be questioned, not their own. There are many, many people who sincerely believe that they really do have it all figured out, and there’s no amount of logic or evidence that could possibly persuade them otherwise.

“It’s all those morons out there who are polluting the world with silly and destructive notions,” goes this mindset, “and fortunately I’m far too intelligent to fall for any of them, and so I’m always prepared to set them right.”

Such people are a little too damn sure of themselves, in my opinion, and unfortunately they seem more numerous than ever. Even worse, they’re a little too intoxicated with their own moral righteousness. There’s no telling how much havoc such people can wreak on the world–indeed, how much havoc such people have already wreaked on the world throughout human history. It’s damn scary.

You can’t convince me otherwise.

 

Mitch McConnell Ruins My Fun

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

So the U.S. senate has voted against calling witnesses and examining evidence in its trial of Donald Trump. It was a bare majority vote, 51-49, as two Republicans, Susan Collins and bland-flavored-cream-of-wheat king Mitt Romney, joined the Democrats. This effectively brings the senate’s trial to a swift conclusion, of course. The senate is scheduled to vote on Trump’s removal from office on Wednesday, Feb. 5th, which will most likely be of a roughly similar result. Since the constitution calls for two-thirds of the senate to vote to convict in order to remove him, even if those figures are hypothetically reversed (and they won’t be), it’s still not enough to kick Trump out of the White House and replace him with every Democrat’s dream choice, Mike Pence.

Damn. I was so hoping for an all-out trial with the witnesses, the cross-examinations, and the evidence provided by both sides. My God, what a glorious shit-show circus it would have been. All the dirty laundry would very possibly have been aired right out in the nation’s collective front yard. Because if Democrats would have been able to call witnesses and cite evidence, they would have had to allow the Republicans to do the same. And the whole scenario is just the type of conflict-rich arena that Trump thrives in. It would have been a brawl. There was even talk of the Democrats and the GOP negotiating to call in Joe and Hunter Biden for testimony in exchange for disgruntled warmonger and ex-Trump employee John Bolton taking the stand.

Oh, what a glorious battle it would have been.

But, of course, it was never going to happen, as everyone with a fully functioning prefrontal cortex had been saying from the very beginning. (As for myself, I’m just a hopeless romantic.) There was no way Mitch McConnell was going to allow such a circus to take place in the senate during a presidential election year.

And so, my friends, the entire two-party establishment has been saved from yet another spectacle of embarrassment.

Damn it.

The Rise of Skywalker, the Implosion of the Star Wars Universe

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

I took the fam out to see the new Star Wars flick, The Rise of Skywalker, on New Year’s Eve. I’d been intending to sit down since and write up my own thoughts on this final cinematic chapter of the Skywalker saga, but just never seemed to have the time or motivation. It would basically have been a long rant on what a jumbled, incoherent, pointless mess of a movie it is. And who really wants to spend time writing or reading about that?

I had given this new trilogy the benefit of the doubt for the first two installments, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, for all of their flaws. But Skywalker wraps it all up with just a bunch of laughable MacGuffins that lead to other MacGuffins, unresolved relationships, and nostalgia-cheese that shamelessly exploits, for cheap feelies, the original characters and ideas of the franchise’s creator, whom Disney ironically shut out of their process. Skywalker even inexplicably resurrects the villain that George Lucas definitively killed off in Return of the Jedi.

This video from The Critical Drinker sums up the Skywalker train wreck much better than anyone else could, in his inimitably wry and uniquely entertaining fashion.

(Nod to author John C. Wright.)

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Rian Johnson Gets His ‘Knives Out’

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

Spoilers galore are ahead from the recently released ‘Knives Out.’

I recently took the family out to the movies to see Knives Out, the new film directed by Rian Johnson that’s being marketed to audiences as a “whodunnit” mystery-suspense caper. The trailers definitely give you the impression that the story is in the style of Agatha Christie or Clue, sort of cutting it down the middle between the two stylistically in that the comedy is much less broad than it is in Clue.

Come to find out, a whodunnit is not exactly what it is. It starts out that way, to be sure, but even before the story is half way through, the audience is supplied with a major piece of the puzzle, and at that point it becomes much more of a Hitchcockian suspense thriller than a mystery–though there’s still some mystery remaining to be solved, to be sure, as anti-climactic as it is.

Johnson’s first two indy features, the high school noir Brick and the time-travel potboiler Looper, while not flawless, are highly enjoyable and entertaining films worth watching. Disney took notice and tapped him to direct Star Wars: The Last Jedi. A lot of critics have referred to Johnson “subverting expectations” with Knives Out, and putting a new twist on a genre that’s been a bit of a chestnut over the years should be welcomed. And if there’s anyone who should succeed in doing that, it should be the director of Brick and Looper.

However, and call me old fashioned if you like, I’m of the opinion that the plot should make some sense. It should at least be somewhat believable in order for what the director intends to be the “twist”–the intended subversion of the expected, if you will–to be truly satisfying for an audience, rather than, say, an act of cinematic masturbation for the director’s own personal pleasure. The latter is much more the case with Knives Out than the former. And the reason is simply politics.

That’s right: Politics.

Politics is the reason that Knives Out‘s plot stretches credulity to the point where you feel as though Rian Johnson is literally urinating all over your brain. I had a similar sensation when I saw Carrie Fischer flying through space in Last Jedi. Only with Knives Out, it felt as though the urine stream hit my brain even harder, and it never stopped for the entire two hours.

This is where the spoilers come in, so if you’re thinking that you still might want to head over to your nearest cineplex and make up your own mind, now would be the time for you to check out of my little critique. I don’t think I’d be spoiling much for you, however, if you stuck around. Most of what I’m about to divulge you’d probably see coming from a mile away anyways.

Knives Out

But if you leave now determined to go pay full ticket price at your local cineplex, you should know that it’s the film’s star-studded cast that makes it as enjoyable as it is. In my opinion, it’s definitely a streaming-on-a-rainy-Sunday-afternoon kind of flick. Your life wouldn’t exactly suffer for the lack of enrichment in the meantime.

The catalyzing incident of our story is the sudden death of the very successful, very rich, and very old best-selling mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey, played by Christopher Plummer. It appears to be a suicide, and by a very grisly method at that. The morning after a lavish party at his house celebrating his 85th birthday, he’s found in an out-of-the-way room in his massive, labyrinthine gothic mansion, with his throat cut, the bloodied dagger he allegedly used on himself lying nearby.

The local police detectives have made up their minds that it’s an open-and-shut suicide, end of story. But a mysterious private investigator, Benoit Blanc–played by Daniel Craig with a southern drawl that’s not quite as jarring as you’d think it would be–shows up to question the suspects. He eventually reveals that someone has anonymously hired him to look into the case, having left him an envelope stuffed with a thick wad of cash. Thus, it seems, someone suspects foul play.

The suspects consist of Harlan Thrombey’s thoroughly cruddy family: his widowed daughter-in-law (Toni Collette), who Harlan has discovered pilfering money from him under the guise of paying for his granddaughter’s college tuition; his son-in-law (Don Johnson), whose extramarital affair is found out by Harlan, and which Harlan threatens to expose to his daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis); Harlan’s son, Walt (Michael Shannon), who, much to Walt’s dismay, Harlan cuts out of his independent publishing house due to Walt’s incessant badgering that Harlan allow film and TV adaptations of Harlan’s work; and Harlan’s wayward grandson, Ransom (yes, he’s actually named Ransom, played by Chris Evans), who storms out of Harlan’s study in a huff during the party, following a loud and heated verbal altercation.

So–whodunnit? If it really was a homicide, that is, rather than the suicide it appears to be.

As I’ve mentioned above, Johnson tips off the audience fairly early as to what actually happened to Thrombey–or at least most of it: by way of a flashback, we are informed that his nurse, Marta (a dull, thankless role expertly brought to life by Ana de Armas), accidentally overdosed Harlan with morphine when she mistook a vial of the stuff for the regular medication that she usually follows up with a low-dose morphine chaser. She realizes her deadly error when she examines the labels on the vials after administering both medications. And the antidote for the morphine is missing from her nurse’s kit.

And what’s Harlan’s initial reaction? Is it, “What the f**k did you just do to me?” Why no. The film has established that Harlan and Marta have a close, grandfatherly/granddaughterly kind of relationship, so naturally, even Marta’s fatal error doesn’t stir up any anger towards her. Once he realizes that he’ll be dead from the OD by the time paramedics reach his secluded big house out in the country, Harlan decides to spend his last several minutes on this Earth–as his life is supposedly ebbing from his body with each passing moment–concocting an alibi for Marta so that nobody discovers that she accidentally caused his death. Because if anyone discovers that Marta was responsible for Harlan Thrombey’s death, her mother, an undocumented immigrant, would most certainly end up deported, as would Marta and the rest of her family, most likely.

Once Harlan concocts a scheme for Marta to secretly flee the scene of the crime undetected and he sends her on her way with his careful instructions, the old man then proceeds to slice his own throat with the dagger.

“Subverting expectations?” Sure. The immigration politics of the film, integrated into the script in such a clumsy and hamfisted fashion, completely subvert the audience’s expectation of a plot that fits into some sort of logic recognized by other human beings who are not so politically obsessed as Rian Johnson.

But wait, it gets better.

It turns out that Marta didn’t actually kill Harlan after all! Not even on accident. The real culprit, the grandson–the improbably named Ransom (Evans)–in an effort to kill his grandfather and frame Marta for it, swapped the vials of morphine and the other medication with the hope that Marta would end up overdosing Harlan with the morphine. Harlan, you see, has stipulated in his will that his entire estate be left to Marta, leaving nothing at all for his cruddy family. But Marta is such an expert nurse that she reflexively gave Harlan the correct medication after all, and the usual low, safe dosage of morphine, just based on the look of the medicine that was stored in each vial.

I wonder if the following scene will be included in the extended director’s cut:

HARLAN (after having just explained his plan to Marta that will help her sneak out of the house and evade detection, looking a little puzzled): By the way, are you sure you just accidentally gave me a 100mg overdose of morphine?

MARTA (teary and upset): I just happened to look at the labels after I injected you…so yes, I’m quite sure. Again, I’m so sorry!

HARLAN: And you said I have only 8-10 minutes to live?

MARTA: That’s right.

HARLAN: You told me that about, what, 3 or 4 minutes ago, would you say?

MARTA: Yes, I think that’s about right.

HARLAN: So I only have about, what, 5-6 minutes left to live…?

MARTA: Yes! Oh, I’m so sorry!

HARLAN: You know, it’s funny, but…I don’t feel anything yet. No dopiness or wooziness. Nothing at all. Shouldn’t I be feeling some symptoms of the overdose by now…?

(But Marta, overcome with emotion and desperation, has already fled. Harlan shrugs his shoulders, picks up a dagger, lies down on the divan, and slices his own throat.)

The actual murder that occurs in our story, as it turns out, is that of Fran, Harlan’s housekeeper (Edi Patterson). Fran knew of Ransom’s deception with the medication–or rather, attempted deception–and she was trying to give Marta a toxicology report from the medical examiner that showed there was no morphine overdose after all. By this point in the film, Ransom has been befriending Marta and misleading her into thinking that he’s an ally ever since the reading of Harlan’s will. Ransom, it turned out, killed Fran by overdosing her with morphine (or some other such drug).

And it’s Marta who coaxes a confession from Ransom by telling him, following a phone call she takes in Ransom’s presence, from a doctor where Fran is hospitalized, that Fran has actually survived. As soon as Ransom admits to having attacked Fran, Marta lets rip a stream of vomit. I forgot to mention–it’s established early in the film that Marta literally cannot tell a lie without becoming physically ill to the point of throwing up. The lie in this instance was that the phone call she took from the hospital was to inform her that Fran had actually died rather than survived.

It turns out that it was Ransom who secretly hired Blanc to look into the case, apparently with the hope that Blanc would conclude that Marta was responsible for Harlan’s death. There’s no indication that any of the other characters in the film ever suspect Marta, much less Blanc. And it’s clear throughout that the audience isn’t ever expected to, either.

If a director wants to present a political angle in his film, there’s nothing wrong with that. But at least strive for some artistic finesse, please. A second generation daughter of illegal immigrants who cannot tell a lie without becoming violently ill does not make for very believable storytelling, not because we’re supposed to assume that such a person must be dishonest, but because the character approaches a saintliness that matches no real live human being.

And Marta is a dull and boring character. The camera loves Ana de Armas, and her eyes convey multitudes. She is interesting to watch, with absolutely no thanks from Rian Johnson’s lifeless writing, and she rescues her role from terminal lameness.

There are some clever nods to the current political zeitgeist throughout the film. Walt’s teenaged son, who gives the impression of being constantly on Twitter harassing liberals and minorities from his smartphone, is referred to by another character as an “alt-right troll.” “What are you doing on Twitter today, swatting Syrian refugees?” Toni Colette asks him in one scene. And a scene during Harlan’s birthday party in which members of the family square off against each other over Trump and immigration is probably the most believable scene in the entire film.

But the sledgehammer dialogue at the end–good grief. Ransom’s “how-dare-you?” speech in which he rails at Marta for invading his family’s “ancestral home”–did Johnson lift that right off of an alt-right web site?

Don’t piss on my brain and tell me I’m being enlightened.

Brendan O’Neill Doesn’t Want You to Talk About Conspiracy Theories

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

I have a new piece up at Medium.com offering my own theoretically conspiratorial take on the recent death of multi-millionaire financial guru and alleged teen sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. I speculate in the piece as to what people should really be focusing on in regards to Epstein’s mysterious life, never mind his death.

While poking around the internets during the writing, I came across this piece on the Epstein conspiracy theory mill by the British political commentator Brendan O’Neill of Spiked-Online. In it, O’Neill derides the open discussion of conspiracy theories.

I’ve always liked O’Neill. He is, as I like to say with my tongue in my cheek, one of my favorite commies. He’s one of the small handful of pundits who can actually scribble genuinely critical and logically coherent opinion pieces in this age of emotion-driven, brain-clouded hyperbole. And he’s always been a fearless advocate of completely free and unfettered speech. But I’ll have to respectfully take some issue with him on this one.

He starts off deriding the popular meme circulating through the right-wing web that the Clintons had Epstein murdered. Fair enough. It is indeed a theory entirely lacking in evidence. I make no such claim in my own piece. For what it’s worth, I think Occam’s Razor dictates that the creep did indeed hang himself. He wasn’t murdered by the Clintons or anyone else.

But O’Neill then goes on a rant against the discussion of conspiracy theories in general. My criticism is that he treats all of them equally.

Yes, many, if not most, of the conspiracy theories out there are batshit-crazy. Where did the whole “Clinton body count” meme even come from? So far as I can tell, it originated with the late Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Clinton Chronicles videos that he peddled on late night TV in the early to mid-1990s. Falwell tosses around all sorts of dark rumors about the Clintons, including accusations that they had various enemies murdered in Arkansas during Bill’s 12-year reign as that state’s governor.

So far as I’ve ever been able to tell, the foundation of Falwell’s rumor mill was laid by the infamous case of the double-murder of the two teenaged “boys on the tracks” in Arkansas during the 1980s. Journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard documents a solid circumstantial case in his book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton (terrible title, fascinating read) that the county prosecutor at the time, Dan Harmon, was involved in the boys’ murder and subsequent cover-up. The two murdered boys, Kevin Ives and Don Henry, may have stumbled upon a nighttime drug deal that involved Arkansas state or local law enforcement officers. This occurred during the same time that the infamous CIA operative Barry Seal was trafficking cocaine into the Mena, Arkansas airport as part of the “Iran-Contra” operation. Harmon was eventually arrested for dealing drugs some years later.

Though there’s no evidence to implicate the Clintons in the boys’ murder, Harmon was definitely a connected political player at the time who was jacked into the Clintons’ Arkansas machine. Thus, I suspect, the “Clinton body count” meme was born.

Anyway, everybody knows that the only person the Clintons actually had murdered was Vince Foster.

But I digress. What was I talking about? Oh, right. Conspiracy theories, and how Brendan O’Neill thinks discussing them is bad. They’re bad, says O’Neill, because the people who buy into them deprive themselves and others of agency. They become convinced that everyone is secretly manipulated by dark, sinister forces. They’re anti-democratic because they ultimately pacify people. Why bother organizing for any kind of change if the dark conspiratorial forces always prevail?

Pish. Posh.

Such people as O’Neill singles out for eating up the most absurd nonsense are the most easily duped who will believe almost any hysterical nonsense that Alex Jones shouts into his camera. (Ironically, such people now include, as O’Neill points out, members of the establishment liberal “intelligentsia”, who continue to insist that Vladimir Putin used voodoo social media ads to elect Donald Trump president.)

That doesn’t mean that mature adults can’t entertain the possibility that there really are people–in government, high finance, or otherwise endowed with enormous political privilege–who really do get up to some genuinely shady shit from time to time. Do they “control the world”? Nobody controls the world. But do these aforementioned privileged fucks occasionally get away with fucking over people less politically endowed than themselves? Absolutely.

The killer, though, is that the most sinister conspiracies are carried out right before our eyes: The false pretext for the Iraq War; the false pretext for intervening in Libya; hell, the false pretext for the first Iraq War; the Big Bank bailouts of 2008–the biggest heist carried out in U.S. history–and in broad fucking daylight right on our television sets–are just a few examples of the plots that have been carried out right in front of us in recent years. Most of us are just too duped by the daily propaganda of the usual news outlets to recognize them for what they really are.

And never mind about Jeffrey Epstein’s death–how the hell did he get that secret non-prosecution deal with the feds back in 2008? It’s not unreasonable to speculate that if he had lacked all of his high-flying social and political connections, they would have been more than happy to throw the book at him and make him into the poster boy of the evil denizens from whom they protect us and our daughters on a daily basis–oh what we would do without the ever-vigilant federal agents of law enforcement?!

So, sorry, Brendan, but the rest of us do intend to continue speculating, and to openly discuss our speculation, about what socially and politically powerful people do when nobody’s watching them, or caring enough to hold them accountable. It is sheer speculation, of course. But the difference between speculation about conspiracy theories and the kind of speculation that political commentators such as yourself frequently indulge in is only a difference of degree, not of character.

And it is, in fact, quite democratic in its own way. It’s the way we ordinary folk remind ourselves and one another that as the ruled, we need to watch out for what the rulers are up to. That they may only be interested in serving the public good rather than their own personal gain sounds a little too much like a, well,–wild conspiracy theory.