Number one in Gaza

Anderson Cooper in Israel

There he is, right on schedule. Anderson Cooper, mincing around Israel whining about the suffering of God's Chosen People while children are slaughtered in Gaza.

The picture above is from 2006. He looks only slightly less dignified today.

What the hell is Justin Bieber wearing?

Is this what young people are wearing now? Here is Justin Bieber. What the hell is that thing? The boy is looking weird and sinewy anyway and the tattoos sure aren't helping.

Gaza, Obama

The majority of Israeli Jews hate Obama. Netanyahu openly insulted him and endorsed Romney. The Israel lobby attacked him, although most American Jews still voted for him.

If Obama has any self-respect at all, he'll remember who his enemies are. (He doesn't and he won't.)

The truth is that Israeli Jews feel very little attachment to Israel. Even the one who were born there. 70% of them either hold, have applied for, or plan to apply for a foreign passport. They're all ready to flee the country. They're no different from other colonialists. The French and the Brits were in Africa and Asia far longer than the Jews have been in Palestine. There were white Europeans who insisted they were Africans and would never leave! But they cleared out the instant colonial rule ended. The same will happen in Palestine.

We'll see how many Zionists die in their new attacks on Gaza. 1,400 Palestinians died in "Operation Cast Lead", around 400 of them children. When it was over, Israeli soldiers put out commemorative tee-shirts for the "war". One had a picture of a Palestinian child in the crosshairs of a telescopic rifle sight. The caption read "The smaller, the harder". Another showed a pregnant woman in the crosshairs with the caption, "One shot, two kills" and another showed a woman crying over a dead baby lying in a pool of blood. The caption read "Better use Durex", the slogan used in condom ads.

Gaza, Kim Kardashian

I thought it was rather big of Armenian reality star Kim Kardashian to tweet that she was praying for the people of Israel. Israel has spent the last sixty-four years claiming that the Armenian genocide was a hoax. When Bob Dole introduced legislation to make the 75th anniversary of the onset of the Armenian genocide a national day of remembrance, the Israeli embassy called on Jewish groups to oppose it, and oppose it they did.

Some claim that Zionists deny the Armenian Holocaust only because the Israelis were allies with Turkey. In fact, Zionist denial predates their alliance with Turkey.

People responded to Kardashian's tweet by informing her rather forcefully that it was Palestinians who were being murdered by the Israelis. So Kardashian tweeted that she was praying for the people of Palestine and all the other people in the world. The Chosen People got their yarmulkes in a bunch at the thought of anyone praying for people they intend to massacre, so Kardashian removed both tweets.

I'm surprised Kardashian is so religious. I have no strong feelings one way or the other about other people's religiosity, as long as they aren't Scientologists.

The Soviet Union always told their allies not to start wars because the consequences were always unpredictable. The U.S. launched it's bombing campaign against Libya, and here is the result. Fighters and weapons from Libya have been smuggled into Gaza. We'll see how well-armed Gazans are if the Zionists try to invade.

The U.S. has reportedly handed stinger missiles to "rebels" in Syria. Not all are rebels, strictly speaking, but are foreign terrorists. The U.S. is arming them without knowing who exactly they are and who they're apt to target next.

Bernie, Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, (2011)

Watched a pretty good movie called Bernie. From last year. Jack Black in the title role as a funeral director who befriends and wealthy widow (Shirley MacLaine) and kills her. I don't think I'm giving anything away.

It says it's based on a true story, and it seems like I saw the same thing on an episode of City Confidential.

Bernie starts out seeming like an exceptionally smarmy, vaguely effeminate funeral director. But as it progresses, it seems he was quite sincere. A very nice man who befriended an elderly widow who nobody liked. People had excellent reason to dislike her, and if Bernie hadn't been such a nice guy, he would have walked away from her. But, instead, he stayed around until she drove him off the deep end.

The movie seemed like a wholesome antidote to all the lurid murder documentaries they have on TV.

I'm as much against murder as the next guy, of course, but there is such a thing as voluntary manslaughter.

September Morn, 9/11 truther movie

There was a movie called Communion, a UFO movie based on Whitley Strieber's bestselling "memoir" about how space aliens keep abducting him.

The book was a huge bestseller, but the movie bombed. Stuff that sounded creepy and vaguely plausible on paper was laughable on film.

There's been other stuff like that. I watched the movie Sleepers, a supposedly true story. I didn't read the book and I held off watching it because I knew I would be upset by it, a true story of kids subjected to horrible abuse in reform school. But when I finally saw it, I didn't buy it for a second. Again, things that seemed plausible on paper looked absurd under the glare of the Kleig lights.

There was a fairly recent Russian World War Two movie, based on a book which claimed to be true. A group of Soviet middle school boys, juvenile delinquents incarcerated somewhere, are trained as commandos and sent on a suicide mission to destroy a Nazi installation in the mountains. It was anti-Communist. People were supposed to watch the movie and think, "What kind of monsters would use innocent children as commandos!" But on the big screen, it looked ridiculous. The movie was too grim to work as an adventure story for boys but too idiotic to be taken seriously.

September Morn

Now? Now we have a movie called September Morn which is set to star Woody Harrelson, Martin Sheen and Ed Asner. They're still raising money. It looks like it will be a 9/11 "truther" movie, based somehow on the theories that the September 11th attacks were an inside job. It's not clear how they're going to approach it. The production company's website says it will be in the "vein of Twelve Angry Men."

If the movie shows scores of men in coveralls pushing hand trucks, placing explosives in busy office buildings without anyone noticing and without any of these guys ever saying a word about it, it will make a lot of the Truther claims look silly. 

But it's something to think about. They're going for a niche audience. Like Kirk Cameron making Christian dramas, or Glen Pitre in Louisiana who made Cajun-dialect historical dramas. Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for the Spanish language video market.

It doesn't always work that well. Audiences that are ignored by Hollywood still watch TV and still watch movies. Kirk Cameron's movies still cost a relative fortune. In the late '70s, when Hollywood produced next to nothing for black audiences, independent filmmakers tried to fill the void, but they attempted it on very low budgets. They often used the approaches of Third World Cinema for a first world audience and they generally failed.

You have to find a niche audience that will accept really cheap movies.