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Author: Bryant

And then there were four

In the where are they now department: Lance Mungia, director of the excellent Six-String Samurai, just wrapped up The Crow: Wicked Prayer. It’s got a surprisingly good cast for something that looks like it’ll go straight to video: Edward Furlong isn’t bad, Dennis Hopper is good (and will appear in anything, granted), Danny Trejo is good… and there’s David Boreanaz and Tara Reid for eye candy. And Macy Grey! Hm, and Tito Ortiz (no holds barred martial arts fighter) is in it. But at that point we’re well past “surprisingly good cast,” I think. Still, that’s a lot of fairly real people.

Did you know Kirsten Dunst was in the third Crow movie? Me either. Rental time!

Anyhow, Lance Mungia plus a half-decent cast means I’ll keep an eye out for this one.

LA Weekend

“What is there to do on a Friday night in LA?”

Go to a trendy Thai restaurant somewhere in West Hollywood. Flirt with the waitress, who turns out to be the lead in a new indie film directed by some guy who was discovered three months ago by Stephen Soderberg; she’s waiting to get experience so she can get further into the character. She invites you to an after-hours party thrown by Parker Posey. You get there, with her, but it turns out that Parker Posey lost all her indie cred when she appeared in Blade: Trinity so you and the waitress and a guy you meet at the party who plays bass for the best post-punk melodothrash band in Serbia all take off together in his original VW Beetle and wind up at a permanent floating poker game slash rave run by Wil Wheaton down in Venice Beach. He really digs finding out what you do and you and the waitress and the bass player and a hitchhiking chick who you picked up and who turns out to be an activist poet from Venezula on a speaking tour to raise money for the cause, you all go play some D&D with Wil as the GM. It rocks a lot. You fall asleep in the middle of the game and wake up sometime Saturday in a box at the Staples Center. There’s a cigar on your chest with a note — “You can play a rogue in my game any time, love, Wil!” You smoke the cigar while watching some kind of existential circus preparing for the evening’s show; while wandering out of the building later, you run into Arnold, who is smoking the same kind of cigar. He likes you because of this and offers you a job as an aide, but you turn it down because of moral qualms about the Kennedy family. As you make your way back home, you realize that the cigar was laced with some obscure hallucinogen, or maybe the street really is filled with mimes reenacting the siege of Stalingrad? It’s so hard to tell in LA. Finally you get home, where the waitress is waiting, and she made some soup in a really grounded down home kind of a way and it seems like the beginning of a beautiful friendship that will last at least for the rest of the day. Saturday night? Well, that’ll be a completely different story.

Forbode

This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.”

Landscape of Thorns

Whip and chain

The Red Cross says conditions in Guantanamo Bay are problematic, but won’t confirm a New York Times report that said the Red Cross claims prisoners were effectively tortured.

The official White House response is not exactly conclusive: “We strongly disagree with any characterization that suggests the way detainees are being treated is inconsistent with the policies the president has outlined.” Well, that’s all very well and good, but it’s not entirely clear that it is inconsistent with the Red Cross claims. The President’s policies may or may not authorize actions that are effectively torture, after all.

Go back a few weeks, and you find official US reports regarding abuse at Guantanamo which mesh fairly well with much of what the Red Cross is saying. The parties responsible for events reported therein have been disciplined. The question boils down to whether or not that discipline has been sufficient to curb the problem or not; seems like the Red Cross is saying not.

Who’s telling the truth? Well, the actions described in those reports do not violate the recommendations in the Gonzales memos.

Get it right

Given the current state of the Ukraine, it is enlightening to look back on the history of Ukrainian nuclear weaponry. The Ukraine doesn’t have nuclear weapons because Senators Nunn and Lugar worked hard to convince Ukrainian leaders not to have nuclear weapons, backed up by government funding.

Funding for Cooperative Threat Reduction peaked under Clinton in 2000 at $475.5 million. In 2001, it dropped to $433.4 million. In 2002, it dropped to $403 million. More on this here (PDF).