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Both videos brighten my Sunday morning. Both also raise a serious point about intellectual property related to SOPA. I think the first video is okay and deserves legal deference. The second video seems markedly less legit. I’d pay $1.50 for both.
January 14th, 2012
Category: Crime Control, Film
How much would you charge to dig a 100 foot long tunnel, install supports and lighting throughout it and then break through more than a foot of concrete at the end? Surely more than the 6,000 pounds (about 10k USD) earned by these thieves in the UK.
The tunnel diggers did all their work to break into an ATM machine. Other criminals put similar levels of effort into robbing banks, with comparably meager results. The average bank robbery in the U.S. nets about $8,500. Compared to other types of robbery targets, banks have better security systems and more attention-getting power with law enforcement.
One of RBC’s criminologists might know why thieves stupidly go to such lengths to rob banks versus softer, richer targets. Are criminals being influenced by movies like the Bank Job, Heat, The Limey etc. into thinking that they will walk away from a bank robbery with millions of dollars?
January 14th, 2012
Category: Campaign 2012
The most important choice in politics isn’t what to say about an issue, and the most important victory isn’t winning the argument about an issue. What really counts is which issues are being talked about; if you can keep the conversation focused on topics where you hold the high ground, you win.
So I’m with Steve Benen: if the Republicans want to talk about whether Barack Obama deserves credit for an improving economy and for killing Osama bin Laden, Democrats should be happy to accommodate them.
January 14th, 2012
Category: Watching Conservatives
Newt Gingrich makes fun of Mitt Romney for being able to speak French. (Very badly, I might add.)
Joe Scarborough and Donald Trump attack Jon Huntsman for being able to speak Mandarin.
You might almost think that ignorance – especially ignorance about the rest of the world – was a Republican virtue.
January 13th, 2012
among them was Walt Kelly. I grew up on Pogo, as my kids did on Calvin and Hobbes. Finally, here is volume I of something that should have been done a long time ago (all the Amazon reviews seem to say, correctly, “Finally!”) . My daughter gave it to me for Christmas and after all those decades away, I wasn’t sure it would hold up, but it does, even though I haven’t got to the Simple J. Malarkey episodes with which Kelly protected our national sanity while (for example) Al Capp pusillanimously sat out the bad times safely drawing shmoon.
Young readers, you can now fill in an important gap in your cultural capital.
January 13th, 2012
Category: Campaign 2012, Public management
Two days after Barack Obama was inaugurated, I gave him some political advice:
In the run-up to the 2012 Election, President Obama should propose abolishing the [Department of Commerce]. It would be his equivalent of Bill Clinton’s support of school uniforms and V-Chip: small, symbolic gestures that send a sort of cultural signal. You can trust the Democrats to run the government frugally. (One could argue that no Democrat ever wants to send this signal because it reinforces a Republican frame, but I don’t think that that’s true: even socialists don’t like to waste money). The Gingrich Republicans vowed to eliminate the Department, but as with most conservative beliefs, it was quickly forgotten as soon as the GOP took power. This would be a nice act of political jiujitsu if Obama could do it.
And just this week, he proposed just that!
Now if only he would listen to me on everything else, we could actually get somewhere.
January 13th, 2012
Given that I am in London and sitting in the very chair you see pictured here, it is only natural that I make this weekend’s film recommendation the movie in which it appears: Matthew Vaughn’s stylish and brutal “Layer Cake”. That’s obviously not me pictured, but the magnificent Sir Michael Gambon. He plays wily drug kingpin Eddie Temple in one of the great British gangster films (which is saying something, they have been making outstanding movies about guns and geezers over here for three quarters of a century).
The film centers on cocaine middleman “Mr. X”, played convincingly by a pre-James Bond Daniel Craig. One of the many things the film gets right about the illegal drug trade is that it includes people like Mr. X who think they can make big money while remaining untouched by the damage that drugs do downstream and the violence and immorality of the kingpins who call the shots upstream. Mr. X tells himself he is just a businessman whose commodity happens to be illegal, and that he will simply leave the drug trade behind him when he is financially secure. But when drug honcho Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) gives him an unusual assignment, his assumptions are shattered and he quickly gets in way, way over his head. Meanwhile, he develops a serious case of the hots for a low-level gangster wannabe’s girlfriend (played by Siena Miller…rumor has it that she and Craig prepared for their scenes together Lee Strasberg-style).
The supporting cast is uniformly strong, especially Colm Meaney as a long-time gangster. There are some over-the-top camera shots by Vaughn which some people found self-conscious and annoying, but they work well given the kinetic story line. And Gambon’s soliloquy on “the facts of life” is as quotable and as well-delivered as anyone could ask.
p.s. This film is rated R with an exclamation point, so by all means don’t bring the kids.
p.p.s. Vaughn shot three different endings for this movie, all of which I’ve watched and he definitely picked the right one.
January 13th, 2012
Category: Film, Middle East Politics
Andrew Sullivan flags a propaganda video made by the Assad regime that uses Darth Vader’s theme as background music.
That would actually be a compliment to Assad; at least Darth was competent and cool-looking. The movie joke I have heard over and over about Bashar Assad in the Middle East is both more accurate and more painful:
“Syria is living the plot of The Godfather. Except in this version, after Don Corleone died, Fredo took over”.
January 11th, 2012
Category: Affordable Care Act, Sports
My daughters’ high school plays football every year against Eisenhower High School in nearby Blue Island. I’m guessing that not too many Eisenhower voters still live in this economically embattled south-suburban community.
Eleven years ago, one of Eisenhower’s fine players, Rocky Clark, was rendered quadriplegic by a mishap on the gridiron. For years, his mother Annette Clark cared for him at home. As recounted in a poignant commentary by Sun Times’ sports writer Rick Telander, it wasn’t easy or pleasant to care for a loved one trapped in an essentially useless and immobile human body. As Telander relates:
Without the most obvious thing every football player at every level should have—lifetime health insurance for the worst of injuries—Annette had to become the round-the-clock nurse in a role that stole her life.
Rocky’s main health insurance coverage ran out nearly two years ago, and Annette was forced to cut his pills in half, sleeping no more than three hours at a time, becoming a kind of Mother Sisyphus, rolling the medical stone up the hill each day so her only son could live.
She had helpers—her two daughters, Deacon Don Grossnickle…The Rev. Anthony Williams…but it wasn’t enough.
Rocky died last Thursday night. His mother is grieving, and she’s apparently in financial trouble. She has a funeral to finance. She has a mortgage and stacks of medical bills she really can’t pay…. Read the rest of this entry »
