Tag: film

Trinity and the Parts Left Out of Oppenheimer

Every year at this time I trace the final days leading to the first use of the atomic bomb against two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945.   In this way the fateful, and in my view, tragic decisions made by President Truman, his advisers, and others, can be judged more clearly in “real time.”  As some know, this is a subject that I have explored in hundreds of articles, thousands of posts,  and in three books, since 1984:  Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton), Atomic Cover-up and my recent award-winner on the first atomic movie, The Beginning or the End.   Now I’ve directed an award-winning documentary. Here’s today’s entry. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.

While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its 79rd anniversary will be marked – or mourned today.

Entire books have been written about the test, so I’ll just touch on one key issue here briefly.  It’s related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era.

In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren’t sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, “The Father of the Bomb,” worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.

Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the Trinity site but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss, General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two physicians on Oppenheimer’s staff (though not Oppie himself) proposed an evacuation, Groves replied, “What are you, Hearst propagandists?”

Admiral Williams Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff – who opposed dropping the bomb on Japan – placed the bomb in the same category as “poison gas.” And, sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long. A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.

Still, it could have been worse; the cloud had drifted over loosely-populated areas. “We were just damn lucky,” the head of radiological safety for the test later affirmed.

The local press knew nothing about any of this. When the shock wave had hit the trenches in the desert, Groves’ first words were: “We must keep the whole thing quiet.” This set the tone for the decades that followed, with tragic effects for “downwinders” and others tainted across the country, workers in the nuclear industry, “atomic soldiers,” those who questioned the building of the hydrogen bomb and an expanding arms race, among others.

Naturally, reporters were curious about the big blast, however, so Groves released a statement written by W.L. Laurence (who was on leave from the New York Times and playing the role of chief atomic propagandist) announcing that an ammunition dump had exploded.

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AMC Slaps Trigger Warning On Goodfellas For Lack Of ‘Inclusion And Tolerance’

AMC has angered audiences by placing a trigger warning on the classic mobster movie Goodfellas, noting that it lacks “inclusion and tolerance.”

The New York Post notes that “AMC Networks added a trigger warning to the classic mob movie Goodfellas — rankling those who were in the film and wiseguys alike.”

The warning noted that “This film includes language and/or cultural stereotypes that are inconsistent with today’s standards of inclusion and tolerance and may offend some viewers.”

It’s a film about the mafia directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, and Joe Pesci. It isn’t supposed to be inclusive.

It is also based on a true story about Henry Hill, the infamous mobster who was associated with the Lucchese crime family of New York City from 1955 until 1980.

Pretty sure that he wasn’t tolerant or inclusive.

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The 2024 Santa Monica Film Festival was chock full of red-pilled conspiracy content

The 18th annual Santa Monica Film Festival, which held in-person screenings on Saturday, February 3 and which is running online screenings through February 28, chose to feature and then give awards to some dangerous right-wing conspiracy theories masquerading as “documentary” films.

The festival awarded “Best Documentary Feature” to The Great Awakening, the third film in anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Mikki Willis’ Plandemic series. The Santa Monica Film Festival website describes the film:

The Great Awakening is the third installment of the ‘Plandemic’ series. This documentary experience assembles forbidden puzzle pieces to reveal the big picture of what’s really happening in America and beyond. The Great Awakening is intended to be a lighthouse to guide us out of the storm and into a brighter future.

 The Plandemic website also provides a description of the film:

Witness the culmination of truth-seeking as PLANDEMIC 3: The Great Awakening unravels the layers of corruption and unveils a path towards a brighter future. Prepare to be inspired, awakened, and empowered to take a stand for liberty.

After the screening, the audience was treated to a Q&A with Rizza Islam, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and member of the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s disinformation dozen.

The first installment of Plandemic was released May 4, 2000, and was largely responsible for the viral spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and vaccine disinformation. The New York Times explained in 2020 that nothing in the pandemic had gone as viral as the 26-minute short film, “a slickly produced narration that wrongly claimed a shadowy cabal of elites was using the virus and a potential vaccine to profit and gain power. The video featured a discredited scientist, Judy Mikovits, who said her research about the harm from vaccines had been buried.”

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Did a dose of LSD spawn some of cinema’s greatest films?

Federico Fellini, one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century, attributes much of his success to a single dose of LSD he took in the summer of 1964 ​“during a time of creative crisis”. According to a recent study looking into how this experience influenced his work, the dose was administered by Dr Emilio Servadio, one of the most prominent Italian psychoanalysts of the time. It induced a trip so intense that the filmmaker later needed sedative medication to put it to an end.

Fellini took part in the psychotherapy session directly after he had finished working on his masterpiece 8 ½, and before he started writing his next film Giulietta degli Spiriti. The talking therapy that occurred after the LSD dose was recorded with a magnetophone. The tapes have never been found by researchers, but in an interview with the BBC a year later, Fellini explained how the experience stimulated his creativity by altering his perception of colour and allowing him to perceive colours in an entirely different light.

“The doctor gave me an explanation and I agree with him,” he told a reporter in 1965. ​“He said that an artist lives always in the imagination so the barrier between sensorial reality and his imagination is very vague… I saw colours not like they normally are – we see colours in the objects, you know; we see objects that are coloured. I saw colours detached from the objects. I had for the first time the feeling of the presence of the colours in a detached way.” Fellini’s work after the acid trip was later praised for having ​“supernaturally brilliant colours”.

Fellini’s perception of time was also altered during his trip, which was was reflected in his work post-LSD trip – the authors of the study said his films started to incorporate plots involving ​“puzzling and disorienting flashbacks”. The filmmaker was also said to have had epiphanies during the trip involving space and perception of self, both of which were apparent in his subsequent work. ​“The world depicted in his post-LSD movies includes major changes in the perception of space, time and others,” the study concluded.

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Bloomberg ‘Sound Of Freedom’ Hit Piece Written By Pro-Pedo Contributor

Following the release of the “Sound of Freedom,” Jim Caviezel’s anti-child-trafficking film, a chorus of mainstream hit-pieces came out denouncing it as a “QAnon” conspiracy flick.

But one author of a recent SoF hit-piece in Bloomberg isn’t just against the movie, he’s a pedo-defending freelancer who used to work for an organization working to normalize pedophilia.

Meet Noah Berlatsky: he’s just your average liberal mainstream media news contributor. Ironically, Berlatsky’s latest criticism of the drama focusing on the grave yet glossed over issue of child trafficking lambasted the movie with vitriolic scorn for perpetuating dangerous tropes, whilst he himself turned to the truly tired trope of accusing the movie of packaging together various QAnon conspiracy theories and being a movie made for alt-right boomers. There’s just one problem…Berlatsky has a sordid history of advocating for the normalization of pedophilia.

In 2021, Berlatsky was named the communications director at Prostasia, a non-profit organization which has dedicates itself to a self-avowed mission of protecting children from sexual abuse. While that on its face sounds antithetical to advocating for the normalization of pedophilia, a deeper look into Prostasia’s published content shows it merely masquerades under the guise of acting in the interest of protecting children from sexual abuse in order to promote a much more perverse ulterior motive.

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40 Years Ago, Monty Python Predicted (and Mocked) Wokeness

Monty Python’s Life of Brian is the most prescient movie ever made, predicting exactly in 1979 the cultural madness you see around you today.

Despite that, the flick was wrongly derided four decades ago by the very people who might find it gob-smackingly funny today.

Life of Brian was vigorously protested during its U.S. release by various groups who believed — apparently without having seen the movie — that it was anti-Christian.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are only two appearances by Jesus in the movie, one of which is off-screen. The first is the night of Jesus’ birth (Brian’s, too) and what little we see is true to the Bible.

Well, except for the part where the Three Wise Men first tried to deliver their gifts to baby Brian in the manger next door.

In the other scene, years later, we briefly see Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount. No mockery is made of Jesus or His message.

Of all the jokes, gags, and barbs thrown in every direction, Jesus is the only figure shown respect. Monty Python trouper Eric Idle later said of Jesus, “What he’s saying isn’t mockable, it’s very decent stuff.”

For a non-believing, take-no-prisoners comedian like Idle, that’s practically a whole-hearted endorsement.

Instead, the film — Python’s only real film, the others were basically collections of sketches, even Holy Grail — is anti-authoritarian, anti-fanaticism, anti-nihilism, and anti-humorless prigs.

Life of Brian is, however, very pro-funny.

The Pythons even saved their sharpest barbs for political extremists and self-deluded lefties.

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On This Halloween, REAL Monsters are Wreaking Havoc on Our Freedoms

We are living in an age of mayhem, madness and monsters.

Monsters with human faces walk among us. Many of them work for the U.S. government.

What we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.

Through its acts of power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny, the government has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, disease, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

We have let the government’s evil-doing and abuses go on for too long.

We have bought into the illusion and refused to grasp the truth.

We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.

We’re living in two worlds: the world we see (or are made to see) and the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

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There’s One 80s Cult Classic That Perfectly Captures The State Of Today’s Politics

For conservatives, every expansion of government power pushes the country closer to Big Brother’s surveillance state in “1984,” while for liberals even the slightest restriction on abortion means that the theocracy depicted in “The Handmaid’s Tale” is poised to take power. Truly, comparing America’s current political climate to some dystopian work of fiction has been a favorite among commentators.

But few pundits draw attention to John Carpenter’s 1988 cult classic “They Live” — perhaps because the message of the film hits a little too close to home.

In the movie, a drifter finds a unique pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the real world. Disgusting, skeleton-looking aliens have disguised themselves as humans and taken control of the media, the financial system and politics. Without the sunglasses, billboards, magazines, books, TV shows and other media seem normal, but the glasses reveal that those flashy ads actually display messages like “OBEY,” “CONSUME” and “NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT” to keep the human population docile and unaware of of the aliens’ control.

Carpenter, an avowed leftist, intended for the movie to act as a critique of Reagan-era corporate greed and consumer culture. Though it’s an adequate commentary on the excesses of the ’80s, “They Live” is actually a more accurate prediction of the socio-cultural climate we’re seeing in the 2020s.

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