Films on major challenges to freedom

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close": the impact of 9/11 on a family with a gifted child

2012-01-20T17:43:00.001-08:00

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” was touted as one of the most important films of 2011, but it has been held back for very limited release and started in the DC area today.

The main elements of this film are a gifted but mildly introverted boy Oskar (Thomas Horn, 13 when the film was made), his family in NYC, and the loss of his father (Tom Hanks) in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Sandra Bullock plays the mother, who has to deal with the fact that she was not as “with it” on Oskar’s gifts (and emotions) as the father had been.

Oskar displays most of his talents in the physical world, with scrapbooks and art, as well as mathematical calculations – in the film, he shows little interest in computers, even though kids were already very fluent in them by 2001. His father had invented a “Santa Claus” myth of a sixth borough of NYC, somewhere else in space time. As the film starts, Oskar (narrating) says there are more people alive today than have passed away, which I don’t think is actually correct.

Sometime after 9/11 (Horn’s voice was just starting to change when he acted in the film, and scenes had to be shot in real chronological sequence), Oskar finds a key in a vase in the house, almost by accident, with a note from his dad to look for the lock where it fits. Oskar takes it to heart, and enlists the help of an elderly mute renter (Max von Sydow), living in his grandmother’s house across the street, with a mysterious connection to the family. Oskar has learned from dad that he was not “up to having a family”. Oskar manipulates (even regiments) him into helping, and in an odd exercise of human relations by someone with very mild Asperger’s, almost has to play disciplinarian with the old man. He even asks him some personal questions from a printed list (including, do you have children?) A family secret will be on the line, and then so will one for another family.

But the backdrop of the film is the unfolding of that “worst” day, when Oskar found six messages on his phone’s answering machine, from his father, caught in the North Tower above the area of the plane strike. (Cell phones were more primitive then.) Much of the horror of that day is reenacted (even visually) in relation to these messages (especially the very last one), and that plot device forms the basis for other metaphors in the movie. Oskar challenges his mother to make sense of what happened, why the perpetrators would do what they did, and she says it doesn't make any sense; it never can.

Stephen Daldry directed this film for Warner Brothers and Paramount, with script adapted by Eric Roth from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Under a Steven Spielberg, the film might have been a bit lighter.

At the end, you hope Oskar will go on to become another high tech superstar as a young adult, something his father and grandfather never had the real opportunities to do. (That playground swing reminds me a bit of the spinning top of "Inception".) Or, maybe more likely, an artist and novelist, maybe a filmmaker. That scrapbook is pretty impressive. “My dad said, the way I saw the world was a gift.”

The official site is here.

Local Washington DC area police department offers video on warning signs for terrorism

2012-01-14T09:10:00.000-08:00

The Montgomery County Police Department (from Maryland) offers a seven minute video, narrated by police chief Thomas Manger, “The Seven Sings of Terrorism”, in the middle of the page at this link.

The link will open a new window, and Windows 7 or Vista will request permission to run a new application to show the video. This is not a typical format like YouTube.

The seven signs include noticing unusual surveillance, or “elicitation”, people asking unusual questions or taking photography in an unusual manner about potentially sensitive locations. It also mentions unusual purchases of supplies (such as raw materials for weapons).

The video does not discuss cyber threats. But they are worth noting. For example, most people know about “Nigerian scams” and phishing attacks. But bloggers and journalists should be alert if they receive unsolicited information (by email or maybe social media) that does not seem like spam and seems totally inappropriate or “steganogrphic”, as an invitation to meet someone in an overseas location or a domestic location that one has no intention of visiting.

(This has happened before, and I have reported this.)

The MCPD link is here.

"Tornado Alley": IMAX 3D film documents efforts of "Vortex 2"

2012-01-11T12:53:00.000-08:00

“Tornado Alley”, a new 40-minute IMAX 3-D film from Sean Casey, follows the efforts of a tornado-hunting group called “Vortex 2” in the American Great Plains. Using an armored 200-mph-windproofed vehicle that Casey built himself in California, Casey finally sits inside a tornado.

Vortex 2 has a detailed website about tornado research, here.

The film does not identify the specific locations it chases tornadoes; the license plates suggest eastern Colorado as the site for climax. A town with houses is shown just as a tornado approaches, and the aftermath is shown, but the town is not identified.

I saw this in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum Imax auditorium. The film was produced by Giant Screen Films and the Discovery Channel.

Wally Kennedy has a video on YouTube, put up by the Joplin Globe, where graduate students accompany the team.

The official site is here.

Wikipedia attribution link for multi-vortex tornado in Dallas in 1957. The film has many shots of multi-vortex tornadoes.

If the 2011-2012 La Nina winter is unusually warm, how will the tornado season shape up in the Spring? The 2011 season was severe because the deep snowpack in the Rockies prolonged the cold air feeding into the Great Plains, to clash and spin with air from the Gulf of Mexico. Many of the worst tornadoes (Tuscaloosa, Joplin, even the Raleigh suburbs) wore farther East than usual as a result.

Tornadoes can occur almost anywhere and in any month of the year. On November 17, 2010, there was an F0 (maybe F1) small tornado in Arlington VA near the Hospital Center that did a lot of tree and power line damage, around midnight, when the air temperature was "only" about 65 degrees F. Winds 50 feet above the group were probably over 90 mph at one street intersection, but the funnel was very small, probably less than 30 feet in width. Damage, below.

Second picture (mine): Angry clouds near Ohio Turnpike in Oct. 2010, but cold front had already moved through. One thing I remember about boyhood summer trips to Ohio from Virginia: the weekly thunderstorms were far more violent in Ohio. We used to watch them from the porch, drinking Koolaid.

A review of Sony's "Take Shelter" appears on the Movies Blog Oct. 15, 2011.

A review of Leonardo Di Carpio's "Greensburg: A Story of Community Rebuilding" appears on the TV reviews blog April 15, 2009.

PBS Nova: "Deadliest Volcanoes"

2012-01-04T20:42:00.000-08:00

Tonight (Jan. 4) PBS Nova aired the 50-minute documentary “Deadliest Volcanoes”. The link is here. (Oddly, there is another link called “deadly volcanoes”).

The program presented the danger of the mid-plate Yellowstone supervolcano, which could bury over half of the US in ash, and completely obliterate several thousand square miles, and introducing a years-long cloud, seriously jeopardizing all civilization. It’s been 600,000 years since the last eruption, so we could be due.

But the most provocative part of the program dealt with Vesuvius, and the nearby Naples, which could be completely destroyed (link). The issue is not just the visible 4000-foot mountain, but the fact that the entire area sits on an underwater supervolcano, as evidenced by gradual land rise, exposing sea mollusks on buildings. (A prescient friend tweeted a note about a dream about this recently – maybe a psychic warning that eruption is near.)

The program covered the science of looking at supervolcanoes underground with muons, and other instruments to locate concentrations of sulfur dioxide. Many supervolcanoes have a “lava lamp” vertical channel underneath going 50 or more miles down below.

In 2004, the History Channel aired “Pompeii”, which dramatized the notorious 79 AD eruption. The program was widely advertised on the DC Metro as a major television event.

Another risk is that a lahar (mud flow) off Mount Rainier could jeopardize Tacoma and even Seattle, even without a major eruption. Evacuation would be difficult.

Wikipedia attribution link is here.

NBC News, Save our Planet, others produce film reports warning of planetary catastrophe with sudden methane release due to Arctic warming

2012-01-01T09:52:00.000-08:00

In Chersky, Russia, a geophysicist bought some land and replanted it with grass to make it more reflective, to hold down the melting or permafrost (near the Arctic Ocean, northeast Siberia), and releasing enormous amounts of methane, a much more effective greenhouse gas than even carbon dioxide.

Jim Maceda reports in this news film short from NBC News (the segment is called "What Lies Beneath?" after a 2000 Dreamworks movie thriller:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here’s a 4 minute YouTube video “Save our Planet: Account from scientists calculates methane emissions from fresh water”, as well as ocean water.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of burning methane hydrate.

"The Darkest Hour": a lesson in possible microwave weapons and EMP, as well as a horror movie about plasma "aliens" (like "Skyline")

2011-12-26T19:47:00.000-08:00

Well, Newt Gingrich, and perhaps other doomsday conservatives, ought to receive the total experience of the new 3-D horror film “The Darkest Hour”, directed by Chris Gorak, based on a story by Leslie Bohem, from Summit Entertainment, from Russian, French and German production sources, but in English.

The science is pretty scary. Let’s talk this backwards. One resourceful Russian engineer has placed a Faraday Cage around his high rise apartment, as if he expected the attack by the plasma aliens. (“I will accept nothing less,” a friend once said, “than an alien attack. That was a joke about global warming – that aliens were gradually reducing the distance of the Earth from the Sun and “they aren’t telling us.”)

Well, here, the aliens first seem like cauliflower light balls (Summit Entertainment calls it “ball lightning”) descending from the sky one night, just the way “Skyline” (Nov. 14, 2010 here) starts. Except here, there is a prologue in Moscow. Two nice “kids” – Sean (Emile Hirsch) and Ben (Max Minghella) – arrive in Moscow to sell their social networking site – only to get cut out by Russian business practices, through a twenty-something competitor (Joel Kinnaman). Then, they find themselves in a sexy Russian disco, marginally heterosexual, as social as well as business adversaries. Here the movie is in prologue move (aka “Cloverfield”), and the incidental scenery of Moscow is quite spectacular. Suddenly, the power goes out – more or less for good. They enjoy the descending plasma balls until the said beings start to attack them, going after anything that has energy.

Now, we can wonder if plasma could host consciousness with a free will, something to reverse entropy and create more beings. That might make sense, but toward the end we find out more about these critters, and they might well be castoffs in a Biblical sense. It’s going on all over the world. But survivors are figuring out that they can shoot them with microwave guns.

These items exist, as well documented before on my “International Issues” blog (March 4, 2010). Just before 9/11, Popular Science produced an article warning that terrorists could manufacture them to selectively knock out the power grid and all electronics – permanently – in local areas. So a lot of the science (and maybe religion, or at least cosmology) in the film deserves to be listened to. The ending leads us to expect sequels.

Now that the Cold War is long over, Hollywood seems to enjoy destroying Moscow, just as with the Kremlin in "Mission Impossible IV".

Maybe Hollywood should try making a prescient film about a solar flare knocking out our power grid, and draw comparison with the Carrington Solar Storm of 1859. In the end, Nature may be a bigger enemy than terrorists or extraterrestrials. But Stephen Hawking has warned us – we may have attracted their attention, and they may be mean when they show up. The darkest hour may not be just before dawn.

The film opens with interesting foreshadow: Emile's character refuses to turn off his cell phone on a plane when asked to (feeding on the debate about whether consumer electronics can interfere with planes on take-off and landing), and the power in the plane suddenly goes out for a few seconds, just before landing in Moscow.

Official site is here.

I saw this film at the Arlington VA AMC Courthouse (another old complex showing more indie films these days). The 3D looked great, but it was in a smaller auditorium that shows widescreen at about 2:1 (with slight chopping of the widest edges), and it did not have speakers around the auditorium (just two channels of stereo up front).

Wikipedia attribution link – making ball lightning with a home microwave oven – I don’ t recommend it around computers.

Second picture – stay out of jail, in Russia or anywhere.Third picture: a submarine can protect humans from the plasma aliens. This picture is from my trip in July 2011, to the Groton CT Nautilus Museum.

"The Blazing Forest" (1952) was oddly prescient of today's brush fire problem

2011-12-20T18:29:00.000-08:00

I thought I would make note of one of the first movies (and a prescient one) that I saw with my parents growing up, “The Blazing Forest” (1952), from Paramount, directed by Edward Ludwig. In the film, two brothers (John Payne and Richard Arlen) have a feud, and as a result (indirectly), one of them has a truck accident starting a catastrophic forest fire in tinder dry California Sierras. Agnes Moorehead is the landowner. The film is oddly prescient for one of today’s most serious dangers to property.

Forest, brush, and even prairie fires have caused catastrophic damage in many states, mostly in the west, since the late 1980s (as with Yellowstone in 1988; there was a catastrophic LA fire that I recall being reported in 1978); a few such fires have happened in the southeast, also. The media covered huge fires around Austin TX this summer, and warmer than normal winters can also lead to fires in the southern plains. Some are caused by dry lightning, some by accidents (even cigarettes) and some may be on purpose.

I remember the Cub Scout days of "Smokey the Bear" but we're a long way beyond that view of things.

NASA has a short film on the relationship between ocean temperatures and fires in the Amazon:

"Five" (1951) is said to be the first post-nuclear-war drama in film

2011-12-03T20:34:00.000-08:00

The 1951 curio end-times drama “Five” (or "5ive" or even just "5") is said to be the first post-nuclear apocalypse film ever made. Directed and written by Arch Oboler for Columbia Pictures, it followed the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949 by only about two years, and appeared before the hydrogen bomb had been tested. It’s certainly less well known than Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach”; the latest film of this kind is “The Road” (reviewed here Nov. 2009).

The title is based on the five adult characters in the “play”, and they don’t all necessarily make it. And the forlorn hope that there are other such enclaves around the planet to rebuild a civilization (as in Stephen King’s “The Stand”) is not to be, either.

As the film opens, a pregnant woman Roseanne Rogers (Susan Douglas Rubes) is wandering through a California coastal town desperately looking for help. Finally she wanders up a hill and finds a neat hut occupied by a former poet Michael (William Phipps) who had worked as an announcer atop the Empire State Building (now, in retrospect after 9/11, ironic). He rather likes a life with “no problems” (and no money system – no bills -- but no media audience for his poetry, either).

Others who stumble in are a former banker Oliver Barnstaple (Earl Lee), an African American who cares for him (Charles Lampkin), and a rather assertive adventurer Eric (James Anderson), who creates conflict.

Roseanne delivers her baby. The film would have a chance here to go pro-natalist, but doesn’t (thankfully). The group wanders down to the California beach (in an odd premonition of Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, maybe even an inspiration), and also scours downtown LA as Roseanne looks for her husband in a medical office. Everywhere there are skeletons of people stopped in their tracks. (The 1982 TV film “The Day After” [this film mentions “the day after tomorrow’] had shown such an effect at the time of impact – I remember watching the 1982 film in a Dallas apartment with a medical resident neighbor, still.)

Fights ensue, and in one scene Roseanne, resisting, tears open Eric’s shirt. But this is a pre-parody of what happens today on disco floors: his hairy chest is becoming covered with the white plaques of radiation poisoning. On her way back to the hilltop Drohega, the baby dies. She is left to start over farming with Michael.

The film is in black-and-white, full screen, and the California coast never looked cleaner. This little film probably is well for groups like the Nuclear Threat Initiative to bear in mind.

As the film neared an end, I remember a conversation with my father, as a boy, as we drove into Washington DC in Route 50, near the old Rosslyn one time, when I was about 10, that the country might not last much more than 25 years because of the nuclear threat. (Then why have children?) We did a lot better than that (by about 30 years, at least).

The film doesn't show physical destruction of buildings, and has some inaccuracies. For example, people are driving cars, and they wouldn't be operable after an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) associated with a nuclear blast.

The music score by Henry Russell is rather post-romantic.

The DVD has a two-part short “Martini Minutes”: that is, “The Secrets of Deception” and “How to Become a Villain”.

The full film can be rented from YouTube for $2.99 or from Netflix subscription.

(Note: posting url has misspelling "iis" in title because of a typo, fixed afterward.)

PBS Frontline presents story of American David Headley's role in Mumbai attacks

2011-11-23T07:04:00.000-08:00

The 50-minute film “A Perfect Terrorist”, from PBS Frontline and Pro Publica, written and directed by Thomas Jennings, reported by correspondent Sebastian Rotella, is one of the most disturbing documentaries about the post 9/11 world. It tells the story of David Coleman Headley, an American raised in Pakistan

The basic link is this.

Headley had been a “brick” (heroine) dealer in Chicago, but moved into undercover,DEA double-agent work. (Headley was born with a Pakistani name (Daood Sayed Gilani in Washington DC in 1960). Eventually, he would be recruited by illegal offshoots of Pakistani intelligence associated with Al Qaeda to case out the Mumbai (Bombay) bombings in November 2008, the deadliest incident since 9/11. His mother would operate a bar in Philadelphia called the Khyber Pass (named after a famous border area between India and Pakistan). There is a further story by Ginger Thompson from the New York Times in the Deccan Herald here.

Later Headley would “operate” in Copenhagen and try to plan further attacks regarding the Jyllands Posten Muhammad Cartoons Controversy, but these additional incidents were called off.

Rotella found that people who had known Headley did not want to talk about him, as if they could be made to appear responsible for the attacks.

The PBS link is here.

Watch A Perfect Terrorist on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Fox "Terra Nova" episode maintains that a meteor could cause EMP damage to electronics; in 2005, a young couple films a meteor hit near Seattle and then disappears

2011-11-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

Last night, an episode of “Terra Nova” on Fox (TV blog, Sept. 26, 2011) featured a meteor hit with an EMP effect on the “colony”, knocking out most chips and electronics in the compound.

The episode was titled “Nightfall”.

I wasn’t aware that a meteor could affect electronics with its blast. Of course, a meteor might contain a lot of magnetizable iron. According to a wiki networkdictionary article, this effect is actually possible, (website url) link.

In the episode, a middle-aged “techie” was able to repair one chip, and regenerate all the other chips used by the compound. This sounds very unlikely.

The concern might seem timely since an asteroid will pass by earth today at about 6:30 PM EDT, at a distance of about 200,000 miles. No one has suggested that there is any danger to electronics.

An alien or extraterrestrial attack really could start with a high-altitude EMP blast, however.

Fox’s link for the episode (requires subscription) is here.

Here’s a YouTube video (4 min) made by Scott Pendleton and fiancé Jen Fox on Feb. 14, 2005, when I videotaped a meteor crash, were “attacked” and disappeared (or “went up”). A pretty good horror short. Apparently this occurred near Tacoma, WA. The title of the film is “Case Tape 347”, posted by Paxton10, who says that the couple is still "missing". Is the couple pulling our leg? It's pretty effective low-budget horror filmmaking; ought to enter it into a short film contest.

Picture: Autumn light; note the UFO in the picture.

NatGeo's riveting "The Last Days of Osama bin Laden", a film by Peter Bergen

2011-11-06T19:51:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, Nov. 6, the National Geographic Channel aired Peter Bergen’s riveting documentary “The Last Days of Osama bin Laden,” one hour, at 9 PM EDT.

Mr. Bergen, well known as the media’s leading terrorism analyst in the days after 9/11 (and author of “Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden”, Free Press, 2002), starts the film by visiting bin Laden’s neighbors in Abbottobad. Then, the film reconstructs the raid in more detail than ever before, including all the meetings in the Obama administration leading up to it (starting in December 2010, about the time of the final debates on repealing “don’t ask don’t tell”), and showing members of the administration watching the raid inside the White House the afternoon of May 1, in a small room in the White House, which had been closed suddenly to visitors for the day (a tip-off that something was happening).

Osama bin Laden died in relative poverty. His compound had been set up to be relatively “self-sufficient”, and even had a miniature farm to raise its own food. However, captured notes after bin Laden’s death still showed very dangerous plans against the US homeland.

The Administration was no more than 65% sure, on circumstantial evidence, that bin Laden had been living in the compound. Nevertheless, on Friday April 29, Obama made the same decision Eisenhower had once made about D-Day.

The CIA had set up a training base in coastal North Carolina, not far from Fort Bragg, where the Navy Seals team rehearsed the raid.

The film documents more clearly than most, how the CIA, NSA, and military branches (and their personnel) must work together. Gen. Petraeus was in charge of the raid, and coordinated it from NATO headquarters in Kabul.

The CIA had, however, set up operatives (local people, or individuals who blend in with the locals) to gain intelligence as to how people had lived in the compound. Generally, this is how the CIA “hire” ground “agents” for anything; they are “ordinary people” (the issue was also covered in another natGeo film aired tonight, below). The NSA had satellite intelligence on the compound and had even measured the length of bin Laden’s shadow, rather like estimating a distant person’s height by trigonometric triangulation.

The link is here.

See TV blog today for related films “Bomb Hunters: Afghanistan” and “CIA Confidential: Pakistan Undercover”.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of White House Situation Room.

Recalling "The Last Wave" by Peter Weir (1977): a warning about Cumbre Vieja now?

2011-10-25T19:06:00.000-07:00

On Oct. 15, on the Movies blog, in reviewing “Take Shelter”, I made a comparison to Peter Weir’s 1977 Australian film (United Artists), “The Last Wave”.

The film is prescient as to today’s debate on climate change (although when it was made, scientists actually feared global cooling).

There are sudden and protracted torrential downpours in various parts of arid Australia (in areas that have been ravaged by wildfires in the past few years). The film gets into the issue of wrongs done to the aborigines, and a possible curse. A brawl in a bar and the death of one aborigine accelerates the plot, as does the background of a lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) who defends them. The idea of “DreamTime”, maybe like “Inception” in the recent WB 2010 film from Christopher Nolan, comes into play. But eventually there will be an apocalypse: a gigantic tsunami, maybe hundreds of feet high, a Last Wave.

This could be caused by a comet or asteroid hitting the ocean. Perhaps it could be caused by an underwater earthquake, although the tsunami in the movie (at the very end) is much larger than that in 2004 off Indonesia or this year off Japan. It could happen on the US East Coast because of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands; as far as I know, there has been no effort to prepare for it. See this link.

ABC Nightline reports on research into future pandemic viruses in Africa: they key concept is cross into humans from animals

2011-10-12T09:50:00.000-07:00

Last night, Bill Weir and Richard Besser introduced Dr. Nathan Wolfe on Nightline, in Cameroon, where he looks at the behavior and animal exposure of indigenous peoples whose close contact with jungle animals could lead to the next animal-human virus jump, leading to the next flu or possibly hemorrhagic fever pandemic.

The people in this areas hunt and eat monkeys and porcupines. A woman was shown skinning (shaving or dequilling) a porcupine before cooking it.

Wolfe has a new book, “The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age”, from Times Books.

There is a question as to whether money should be spent on diseases that “haven’t spread”. Yet, out of nowhere, a new virus could threaten civilization as we know it.

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

PBS Frontline questions the FBI's conclusions in the Anthrax Letters

2011-10-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday Oct. 11, PBS Frontline aired the one-hour report “The Anthrax Files” in conjunction with McClathcy Pro Publica, link (website url) here.

The report plays devil’s advocate with the FBI’s evidence against Bruce Ivins and the DNA evidence in a particular flask, and says that a report from the National Academy of Sciences weakens the FBI’s claim. This aspect of the reporting did not occur in the CNN version (Oct. 2). Here is the link for the Committee on Science, Technology and Law. Also, the PBS version presents non-alarming reasons why Ivins could have been working alone so many hours at night, although it's interesting to me that some of the heaviest hours were logged just before 9/11.

The PBS report also spent more space on an earlier “person of interest”, including the draining of a pond only to find a turtle trap.

US Assistant Attorney Rachel Lieber still insists that the confluence of all the evidence would have justified prosecution and conviction of Ivins.

But if the case against Ivins is not all that air-tight in retrospect, the real killer could still be out there.

Update: Oct. 21

Check out the NY Times editorial "Who mailed the anthrax letters", here. This does not seem to be quite ready to be called a "case closed".

CNN airs documentary film about 2001 anthrax incidents

2011-10-02T18:27:00.000-07:00

On Sunday night, October 2, 2011, CNN examined the 2001 anthrax incident ("Amerithrax" according to Wikipedia), with particular attention to the investigation of Dr. Bruce Ivins at Ft. Detrick, MD, with Joe Johns reporting. The name of the documentary film is “Death by Mail: The Anthrax Letters”.

By now the story may be familiar. I remember the fright of the first reports from Florida (the tabloid company) a couple weeks after 9/11.

One of the oddest facts about the Ivins case is that he often worked alone at night without a reasonable explanation. One claim by plaintiffs suing the government is that the Army should have required two people be in the lab at all time and should have done more psychological profiling.

Ivins showed signs of serious instability and compulsive behavior, particularly over the loss of attention from a female friend in graduate school. Eventually, he would admit to stealing her lab notebook in grad school, vandalizing her property, and forging her name on a bizarre newspaper letter to the editor supporting hazing as necessary to “weed people out”. A young female federal prosecutor says the FBI was very close to charging him, before he took his own life. But Ivins’s attorney says there is no DNA evidence linking him to the attacks.

I recall that there were two other arrests in the Trenton NJ area at the end of 2001, and the media never followed up on these.

Wikipedia attribution link for FBI reward poster.

PBS Nova airs two-part film on Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami, with graphic footage

2011-09-28T20:12:00.000-07:00

PBS Nova on Wednesday night Sept. 28 aired two hours of film on the Japan earthquake and tsunami.

The first hour was a rebroadcast, “Japan’s Killer Quake”. It showed actual footage in Tokyo of the duration of the quake, which was much longer than usual for any quake. The film depicts liquefaction of soil in Tokyo, with the emergence of water from the cracks. he resulting tsunami is explained, and depicted as a “glacier of debris”. A three-foot wave hit Hawaii with plenty of warning but did enormous damage to low-lying areas. It even reached the California coast. The tsunami also pushed rivers uphill and produced a salt-water lake in lower sections of the mountains. In one town, a thirty-foot retaining seawall fails because the ground sank three feet in the earthquake.

The inability of the electric utility to cool the nuclear power plant because of power failure is briefly explained.

Here is the link for the first hour.

The second hour is called “Surviving the Tsunami”. It provides harrowing, by-minute accounts of people caught by the tsunami when they went back to check on their property. The film would use a red circle to show the location of the person in danger and actually stop for a moment.

The mechanics of the tsunami are explained in more detail. The tsunami was “gradual” and exacerbated by a hard layer of undersea sediment, which hides many small faults. This “stratum of sediments” structure can make a tsunami larger -- in this case, sometimes over 30 meters. Is this a lesson to be learned in looking at the Cumbre Viejo volcano in the eastern Atlantic, since it could send a huge tsunami to the US East Coast?

In one town on an inlet, residents could not see the tsunami until it was already upon them. Parents were caught at an elementary school rescuing kids, and police were surprised by the approach of a “debris glacier” when they went to respond to earthquake-caused accidents.

The film has truly graphic footage, shocking in high definition.

The link is here.

Wikipedia attribution link for animated illustration

Discovery video with Samuel L. Jackson enumerates the ways the world could end; Supervolcano in Yellowstone singled out

2011-09-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

MSN today is promoting a Discovery Channel “Curiosity” video narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, “World’s End”, with a focus on the Mayan date of Dec. 21, 2012, and then a recognition that scientists believe there are five particular disasters that are most likely to eventually recur.

They are (1) a hypercane or super storm (2) a mega quake (3) a supervolcano (4) a mega tsunami, like Cumbre Vieja in the eastern Atlantic, or (5) an asteroid or comet.

The only direct URL seems to be this.

A second video, “Looming Disaster”, documents how Yellowstone could blow up with a supervolcano, starting with earthquakes, followed by multiple volcanic eruptions, leading to one big super eruption, that kills 90% of the population in western US.

Then with the one-minute “Do Parallel Universes Exist?” Morgan Freeman examines the possibility that each of us has multiple copies in other universes with different outcomes.

Wikipedia attribution link for map of history of Yellowstone super-eruptions

CNN, Time, HBO: "Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience"

2011-09-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

Saturday Sept. 10 CNN is airing twice the HBO 55-minute documentary “Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience”, produced with Time Magazine.

The film comprises a series of interviews by Kate Pickert, Paul Moakley, Kira Pollack and Mark Thompson.

Interviewees include former president George W. Bush, whose remarks are similar to those on his Dateline interview, and Cantor-Fitzgerald president Howard Lutnick, who was also interviewed by Piers Morgan Friday (TV blog).

It does start with the account of someone in a nearby building who heard the first crash, and it also describes some escapes by employees from upper floors.

Later, Donald Rumsfeld describes the "Dark Winter" war game where smallpox is carried into three different locations in the U.S., considering the fact that we have stopped smallpox vaccinations as public health policy. Tom Brokaw talks about the anthrax incident in 2001, including an employee who exhibited symptoms but who had been treated with Cipro in time.

The HBO link is here.

The director and film editor is Phillip Schopper.

Afterward Sanjay Gupta aired “Terror in the Dust”, on the cancer risk from responders who inhaled WTC dust.

"Contagion": all too believable docudrama of a bird flu pandemic; bloggers v. government v. virus

2011-09-09T17:14:00.000-07:00

I recall that director Steven Soderbergh, a few years ago, after accepting an Oscar for “Traffic”, thanked writers for making movies possible. That’s prescient for a subplot of the docudrama “Contagion”, the new Warner Brothers and Participant Media “thriller” which, released 9/11 weekend, credibly convinces us that H5N1-style bird flu viruses could deep-six western civ.

Actually, I’m ahead of myself. In the movie it’s called MEV-1, as if to warn us that new animal-related flus could crop up too suddenly for us to catch them. Indeed, in the film’s epilogue, there’s a clever preamble for “another” pandemic, just after “this” one is somewhat controlled.

The “powers that be” do quick-step to a vaccine and get it to the public in stadiums, after a number of major cities are in shambles from corpses and rioting. It’s hard to believe that a society so sacked could recover at all.

The movie does start out as a “conventional” thriller with plot. Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) calls her hubbie (Matt Damon) stay-at-home papa-ing in Minenapolis from Chicago O’Hare. She is tired from her trip from Hong Kong. At home, about to cook Thanksgiving dinner (there’s already snow in Minneapolis, which doesn’t always happen then – I lived there for six years), she collapses with a seizure. Pretty soon she’s gone. So is one of her kids. Mitch (Matt Damon is just starting to look ripe as he enters his 40s) is kept in isolation, but doesn’t get sick. Is he naturally immune by genetics?

Trouble is, the movie changes to Frontline-style documentary mode for much of the rest of its 102 minutes. Lots of people come down with fever, cough, and seizures and die in hours. This flu invades the brain as well as lungs (the “real” bird fly may affect the spine but tends to the GI track besides the lungs).

Laurence Fishburn (looking like Neil deGrasse Tyson) plays the CDC head, who is sending researchers all over the world to get specimens and get kidnapped, or others, like Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet) just to get sick themselves. He may have an ethics-violating collusion with the pharmaceuticals, to be uncovered by guerrilla blogger Alan Krumwiede (a grizzled and slightly aging Jude Law) in San Francisco. If Alan were as high-minded as Julian Assange, that would make for better story. But he winds up trying to see a homeopathic remedy, Forsythia, to prove you can really get rich by just blogging.

There is an early scene where he is told that “blogs are graffiti with punctuation” and that he isn’t even a real “writer”. Krumweide claims he is a “journalist”, but a true journalist isn’t supposed to be on the take either. Soderbergh must want us to think about the “amateurism” issue and the role of underground speech and publishing in “keeping them honest”. Krumweide will be set up and arrested; in fact, a few bloggers have been prosecuted for insider trading (going as far back as 1999), and the FTC is supposed to be making them disclose when they’re paid or given samples to review.

There's a scene where Emhoff's family resents the authorities' insistence on cremation of disease fatalities, no burial. But later cities are shown with mass graves and lime resembling the Holocaust.

There's an interesting concept of "R-0 number", the expected number of people to be infected by one person with a contagious disease through ordinary "casual contact".

Here is WB’s official site. WB used its Casablanca musical trademark this time, most welcome.

The film is shot in “only” 1.85:1 (Soderbergh seems to prefer that) but is still shown in Imax in a few theaters.

The story takes place in many cities. Many actual streets (like Lake and Lyndale, a famous intersection) in Minneapolis are mentioned, but I didn’t recognized any of the actual city (as I did with “Tree of Life”); I think Chicago was used for the snow locations. Atlanta, New Orleans and San Francisco are used, and some of the scenery in Hong Kong and in mainland China is most effective.

John Basedow's review on YouTube:

The film can be compared to ABC's "Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America" (2006) or Daniel Percival's "Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon" for Fox. We can compare the substance of the film to the experience with SARS in 2003, and later H1N1 in 2009-2010, which has turned out to be pretty controllable. I could say it's inexcusable that we haven't done more work on an H5N1 vaccine, since H5N1 could probably erupt at any time ("the birds are doing that"). But H5N1 could be too variable to make a reliable vaccine. The film mentions "social distancing" as a containment strategy, along with economically destructive curfews and quarantines. The new virus, researches say, is spread by "foamites" (surfaces). There's an interesting explanation of how the "handshake" evolved: as a way of proving you didn't carry a gun. A "High 5" is a lot safer, and less affectionate.

We could also compare this movie to Wolfgang Petersen's "Outbreak" (1995) (Warner Bros.), which was actually shown to an AP chemistry class in Fairfax County VA when I substitute-taught. Less convincing would be a comparison to "Robin Cook's Virus" directed by Armand Mastroiana, a TV film, or the overlong Hallmark film "Pandemic" from the same director.

See also story on "artificial" H5N1-like virus created in lab and controversy over publication on my Issues blog, Dec. 20, 2011.

NatGeo airs updated "Inside 9/11" (based on 2005 film, includes May 1 action on OBL)

2011-08-28T19:03:00.000-07:00

This evening (Sunday, Aug. 28), National Geographic aired most (3 hours)of its 2005 four-hour “Inside 9/11” series (directed by Mike Heasley), but revised in a number of places to account for the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1 (or 2, depending on time zone), 2011. (This was in preparation to the new interview with former President Bush at 10 PM, discussed Aug. 26 on mu TV blog.)

The first two hours (“Zero Hour”) recreate in detail the morning of 9/11. One detail that is particularly interesting is that a student in a middle school told his teacher a week before that the World Trade Center towers would not be standing a week later. (The third hour is “The War Continues”.)

There are many details of heroism in how people were helped to escape from the towers on the morning of 9/11. The film also gives a lot of details of the Madrid (2004) and London (2005) attacks.

The basic Natgeo link is here.

Discovery to run "Alien Invasion: Are We Ready?"

2011-08-20T14:21:00.000-07:00

Discovery Channel is hosting on “Curiosity” Sunday at 8, “Alien Invasion: Are We Ready?” MSN offers a large number of preview videos, such as this one, link.

There are fifteen videos, and Windows 7 or Vista may ask for permission before you can play them.

The general idea is that an alien invasion would be sudden, global, and massive, and shut down the entire planet with an EMP effect with a high altitude nuclear blast.

This "Event" wouldn’t be (just) a gentle young man like Mark Zuckerberg taking over the planet by writing a program like Facebook, particularly in a college dorm when drunk after an argument with a girl friend (the opening of “The Social Network”). (The central site promoting this urban legend is this.) On how many other planets in our Milky Way (how many "solar systems") is Facebook in use?

"Liberty Is Not Given" offers "common sense" video on solar storms and space weather

2011-08-03T08:09:00.000-07:00

“Liberty Is Not Given” has a 6 minute YouTube video “2012 Doomsday #1: Solar Flares”. The video says that solar flares and coronal mass ejections are not the same things (without clear definitions). It says that CME’s and flares can happen at any time, not just necessarily during maximum solar activity. It discounted the idea that a 1859-style Carrington-like event could cause enormous long-term power failures.

However, it’s clear that utilities should be hardening their substations and grids from natural disasters, including huge lightning strikes, fires, and solar events, as well as (in coastal areas) tsunamis.

And in the mean time, our political system debates debt as a purely financial matter, without regard to the possibility of sudden shocks to our infrastructure.

The video recommends a site called “Daily Common Sense”, link.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of coronal mass ejection.

Conservative video warns of the "real" financial risk in August, bringing down a Ponzi economy (it's not just the debt ceiling)

2011-07-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

I may be stretching things to call this a “movie”, but I think Tyler Durden’s YouTube video ("2011 Economic Storm to Prepare For") on the real danger to what he calls the Ponzi Scheme of our entire economy, deserves viewing. He says, like many conservatives, that the real danger in August 2011 doesn’t come from failing to lift the debt ceiling, but from the difficulty the government will have in rolling over its principal -- $500 billion in August, $90 billion in August 4. This can happen eventually when debts and deficits get large enough even with an extension. The Washington Times warned about this July 29 in an editorial.

Ali Velshi's CNN show warned of this Saturday afternoon July 30. Generally, the media has paid little attention to this. If this is part of the Tea Party's point, they haven't been very clear about it yet.

Here is the link to his website (ZeroHedge) explaining this.

AlterNet has a provocative story this morning about how “the rich” (which it defines as anyone with assets over $1 million, and that is not true anymore), are preparing for social and legal breakdown, link here.

There seems to be an underlying moral point: You can’t have sustainable freedom and prosperity unless every person can account for the actual earning of wealth personally and the ability to take care of others personally and locally even in the face of uncertainty.

We could go into financial Armageddon, and then have a real one suddenly. I like the “coronal mass ejection” scenario that we aren’t ready for. Get ready for the Purification, the Tea Party sayeth.

Recalling "Thirteen Days" of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962

2011-07-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

In these days of talk of various kinds of armageddons, it’s well to recall the 2000 film “Thirteen Days” (aka “13 Days”), directed by Roger Donaldson, from New Line (when that studio was healthier).

The film is a dramatization (not quite a docudrama) of the two weeks of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when John F. Kennedy had been president for less than two years.

I was a “mental patient” at the National Institutes of Health at the time (in an episode I have chronicled at various places on other blogs). But I was allowed to go to college at George Washington University in the evenings (the only patient who did), and I was sitting the old Student Union building on G Street eating a cheeseburger while watching Kennedy’s first speech about the matter on black and white TV. When I got back to the “ward”, none of the other patients had any idea what was going on, but I let them know. This was quite some period of my life. I really thought we would be the last to survive.

This is the closest we have ever come to the end of civilization during my lifetime.

The film (based on a book by Ernest R. May) is long, 145 minutes, and was filmed in regular aspect, despite some special effects like mushroom clouds.

Bruce Greenwood played president Kennedy, Kevin Costner played insider Kenny O’Donnell, and Dylan Baker played Robert McNamara.

Check the Movies Blog June 13 for “X-Men: First Class”, also about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

ABC, NBC both offer major videos on sudden concerns about domestic nuclear safety: floods, wildfires, tritium releases

2011-06-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

ABC News on Monday June 27 reported on the possible effects of river floods on two Nebraska nuclear plants, especially Fort Calhoun, which is surrounded by water now. However now water has affected the backup power systems that would cool the core.

Jim Sciutto of ABC Nws then provided a report on the fact that 40% of Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant. FEMA insists that only those within 10 miles need evacuation plans, but in Japan’s Fukushima, 50 miles was necessary. The report also covered apparently unsafe or illegal levels of tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) on private property of homeowners near nuclear plants, such as one near Chicago.

On Tuesday NBC Nightly News reported on possible dangers to nuclear materials at Los Alamos, NM due to the huge 93-square-mile wildfire. (It's funny, Michael Crichton used "Wildfire" as the name of a top secret government project in "The Andromeda Strain", a movie twice.) The clip talks about a particular concern over plutonium storage on the grounds and the effect of a possible release. The "Manhattan Project" during WWII, resulting in the atomic bomb, was conducted here. Just imagine the effect of the evacuations on the local population.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Back in New York City in 1978, an “Understanding” unit member named Barbara Charles wanted to mount a campaign to stop all nuclear power, and I opposed the idea of focusing so much on just one issue as a cause. Many parts of Europe, especially France, have run nuclear power safely and efficiently for years.

Short films on "demographic winter" abound

2011-06-12T08:58:00.000-07:00

I reviewed “Demographic Winter” on my Movies blog June 7, but there are a number of short films about the issue on YouTube.

For example, watch “The Sad Truth About Europe”, posted by Casa LuBanana (7 min).

The film says that a culture cannot sustain itself for more than 25 years with a fertility rate of less than 1.9 per couple. I think “you know” where this is headed, as it discusses Muslim immigration into Europe, and Canada and, to a lesser extent, the United States. I don’t think the film is correct on US fertility rates.

Ladyattis has a contrasting video, “Demographic Winter Is a Myth” (9 min). She argues that a young population is not necessarily essential to a technological culture.

Weather Channel punts on tornado documentary, coverage not as intense as CNN's

2011-05-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

The Weather Channel aired a one hour “Tornado!” last night, which I thought would be a structured documentary on the recent outbreaks, but in fact it was mostly a current news program.

It started reporting from El Reno, OK on the tornado swath through the state. Later it showed the funnel clouds above Love Field (home of Southwest Airlines), near the Oak Lawn section of Dallas, when the entire terminal was evacuated after planes were emptied.

Much of the rest of the broadcast dealt with Texas, as the storms moved east of the DFW Metroplex, rather than with the possibility of recurrence over Joplin, MO, which Anderson Cooper had covered earlier in the evening (see the TV blog).

The 1996 film "Twister" by Jan de Bont (WB; Spielberg was executve producer, written by Michael Crichton) seems all to true now.

CNN's coverage (much more than Weather Channel) has emphasized that winds of this magnitude (in an F5 tornado) are not survivable, much as a tsunami is not survivable. One victim literally "went up" through a car sun roof window, sucked out of the car as in a horror film, possibly carried in the winds for miles. This is possible with winds over 150 mph. It has become impossible for rescuers to identify victims found miles away, even those alive (CNN report Wed. night, AC360). CNN has also covered the damage to St. John's Hospital in Joplin in detail.

Wikipedia attribution link for Tornado Alley frequency map (pd).

CNBC covers Fukushima in one-hour "Nuclear Meltdown"

2011-05-22T20:42:00.000-07:00

CNBC’s one hour documentary on catastrophe at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plants severely damaged by the tsunami that followed the 9.0 offshore March 11, 2011 earthquake, is called naturally enough, “Nuclear Meltdown”, having aired first on May 18, and again May 22, pre-empting some more “popular” shows.

The plant simply wasn’t built to withstand a tsunami of this size, which destroyed the backup power needed to cool the reactors. It still isn’t clear how many other seaside reactors around the world could have such an exposure, when one considers that a 100 foot tsunami from a Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Atlantic might be theoretically possible, from an avalanche.

It’s also interesting to note how the radiation exposure to workers on the cleanup was managed, and that older workers, past reproductive age and with fewer life expectancy years to be lost to possible radiation exposure. It’s unpleasant to think about how democratic societies have to ration sacrifice.

Still, the one power source most consistent with not adding more carbon to the atmosphere is nuclear.

The link is here.

Here’s a video from Russia Today of the tsunami hitting the plant.

Picture: from Lake Anna plant, Dominion Power, NW of Richmond, VA

PBS documentary on Soviet, US nuclear tests in the 50s and 60s puts a perspective on today's asymmetry

2011-05-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

On May 17, PBS aired a frightening episode from its “Secrets of the Dead” series: “The World’s Biggest Bomb”, focusing on the Czar device detonated by the Soviet Union over an arctic island on Oct. 30, 1961.

The 50 megaton device produced a mushroom cloud that went 40 miles up. Compared to most devices even discussed in today’s warning (as by Graham Allison) about nuclear terror (which presumes much smaller devices), the device (if exploded at 2000 feet altitude) would have produced total destruction for at least a 3 mile radius and destroyed most buildings for 12 mile radius. The designer, Sakharov, had reduced the yield down from 100 megatons.

The documentary also covers the 1954 hydrogen bomb test at the Bikini Atoll (destroying a small tribal kingdom after evacuation and making the place permanently uninhabitable) of Castle Bravo, 15 megatons.

From the Soviet blast, there is controversy about the fallout, which stayed in the troposphere for a very long time. Buildings were damaged 300 miles away.

Could weapons like this have been fired as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962? If so, there would be no civilization today.

The documentary didn't cover the EMP issue.

The PBS link is here. The WETA link is this.

The fall of 1961 was a very trying time for me, resulting in a college expulsion, as detailed elsewhere in my blogs.

CNN: :Inside the Mission: Getting bin Laden" and "In the Footsteps of bin Laden"

2011-05-15T05:52:00.000-07:00

“CNN Presents” has aired a documentary, starting May 7, “In the Footsteps of bin Laden”, with transcript here, and then later, “Inside the Mission: Getting bin Laden”, with Chris Lawrence, which aired Saturday night at 11 PM EDT.

Oddly, CNN did not seem to have a separate website for the second broadcast, but did have a Blogger entry mentioning it, here.

Leon Panetta is interviewed, and he discusses the patience it took to come to the conclusion that the administration was a sure as it could ever be of the intelligence facts before “going in.”

Nic Robertson, Peter Bergen, Michael Hayden, and Gary Bernstein appear.

The show also discusses who one courier became his downfall, and how his dependence on a third party to make electronic contact with the outside world ultimately depend him in. That’s an ironic development, given today’s discussions about Internet “privacy”.

Bin Laden surprisingly spoke of the "Arab Spring" in his notes.

According to the latest bulletins, CNN will reair this Sunday May 15 at 7 PM EDT.

ABC 20-20 airs "documentary" tracing how Osama bin Laden was taken out

2011-05-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

“Kill Shot: The Story Behind Bin Laden’s Death” aired tonight on ABC 20/20 as the closest thing yet to a “movie” about the “hit” Sunday night on Osama bin Laden. (Yup, it answers Morgan Spurlock's "Where in the WORLD is Osama bin Laden" as well as Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11".

The report comprised a series of short clips, including an animated recreation of the “event”. The only “firefight” happened on the first floor, and Admiral McCraven led the raid from the Pentagon by radio (or high speed wireless satellite Internet, in a sense). ABC included a report on the use of dogs, equipped with high tech gear and even replacement titanium tooth implants in some cases. The bonding with canines is part of Seals and Special Ops “unit cohesion”.

The ABC report also examined how well movies have approximated raids like this, and Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” from Columbia (with Josh Hartnett as the gentle Sgt. Eversmann) in 2001 comes about as close as any.

ABC also offers a 1998 interview with bin Laden, where he warns that his “fatwa” will not distinguish between civilians and uniformed personnel.

The reports mention that the current Al Qaeda "plans" seemed motivated by "Atlas Shrugged" with threats against the rails (remember the bridge and gorge scene in that movie?)

Nightline reports that there was a secret CIA safehouse in Abbottabad. Osama was called “The Pacer”.

An interesting aspect of all this was how personnel estimated bin Laden’s height, to help verify his identity.

It appears that Osama bin Laden was actually shot at about 2 AM Monday May 2 Pakastani time (source http://wiki.answers.com/Q/FAQ/9372). I believe that was 5 PM Sunday afternoon EDT in Washington DC.

The Nightline report showed the White House “jubilation” at the time.

Another description link for ABC’s materials is here.

Wikipedia attribution link for CIA aerial photo of Bin Laden compound.

YouTube videos from Russia claim to show real "aliens", aka Roswell

2011-04-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

“Aliensweb” has some intriguing YouTube videos, some with translation from Russian, “Dead Alien Found in UFO Hotspot in Russia” and also (on the right column) “Alien Filmed Live on TV in UFO Hotpsot”. That’s Russian TV. That second video has an amorphous form sneaking up on the speaker. Paranormal activity.

The first film reminds me of the Roswell "alien autopsy" often shown on cable in the 1990s.

A “UFO Hotspot” is not a wireless hotspot.

I suppose the Hollywood movie that comes closest is the remake of H.G. Wells's story “War of the Worlds” with Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning in 2005 from Steven Speilberg and Paramount. Unfortunately, it was shot “flat” (without Cinemascope, even though the previews had been shown “with”). The premise that ordinary Earth germs would end the battle is valid. The film really has an impressive beginning with the invasion – as convincing as “Skyline” or “Battle LA”.

I still think that if an alien invasion ever happened, it would start with an EMP blast at high altitude. Scenarios like “The Event” on NBC sound very improbable. Sofia, however, is a convincing “villainess”.

Pictures (above, below): If extraterrestrials invaded our discos, we would be too sinful to notice. They would blend in, or seem like the Stars to dance with. (Don't worry about #1; it's "artificial".)

"Emerging Viruses and Vaccinations: Len Horowitz" DVD

2011-04-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

The DVD “Emerging Viruses and Vaccinations: Len Horowitz” (NSI/"New Science Ideas", 2004) has author Leonard G. Horowitz explaining his book “Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional?”, Amazon link here. The DVD actually has two lectures (the first is split, with the last part about vaccines at the end of the film; some of the lecture material dates to 1997).

Horowitz maintains that the viruses were developed in the 1970s and tested intentionally by introducing them into vaccines, especially Hepatitis B. He says that the first AIDS cases occurred in New York City in 1978 (which comports with an unusual incident that happened when I was living there the spring of that year). He provides an almost witty discussion of the enzyme reverse transcriptase, which he sees as a perversion of the way life is built from DNA and then RNA. He mentions the now little known HTLV-I leukemia virus (HIV was originally called HTLV-III).

He opens his first lecture with some discussion of Florida dentist David J. Acer (died 1990), who was claimed to have transmitted HIV to five of his patients. Horowitz claims that this was intentional, in order to implicate the government.

The second lecture gets into dicey territory, as he claims a link between eugenics and the Genome Project, and makes many other supposed links between vaccines and neo-Nazi agenda. He also talks about the "Rockefeller complex."

He mentions a connection between pharmaceutical companies and Uganda, quite chilling given recent events.

Howowitz also has a film “In Lies we Trust” on YouTube (not on Netflix as far as I can tell), which I will look in to.

He says that he is a Jew converted "simultaneously" to Christianity (so was composer Gustav Mahler).

I took the Hepatitis B vaccine in 1982 (three shots then) and never became HIV+.

There was no mention of the "controversy" over vaccines and autism.

Note: Robert Preston's "The Hot Zone" is reviewed on the Books Blog Dec. 11, 2009.

"Source Code": a fantastic premise, and a dire warning

2011-04-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

The thriller “Source Code”, opening this weekend, has the look of a French art movie rather than a big-budget Hollywood epic, however much the premise may remind one of “Inception”. From indie distributor Summit Entertainment (quite an enterprising company, in direct competition with Lionsgate) and French Canadian company Vendome and director Duncan Jones, it (shot 1:85:1 but for digital projection) focuses on closeups and repeated CGI shots of various places along Chicago’s commuter rail routes, as well as the inside of a government lab – actually shot mostly in Montreal and sponsored by Quebec film.

The premise, however, is indeed a warning. A lone wolf terrorist (not part of Al Qaeda, apparently) has planted devices on a commuter train, as a warm-up to a “radiological dispersion device” on Chicago’s Loop. The film shows the device, and that part of the premise sounds more believable than ever. (The only big threat it didn’t mention is EMP.)

The story, however, is something else. A helicopter pilot (character played by a robust and clean-cut Jake Gyllenhaal) is shot down in Afghanistan, his body bisected, and his brain is immediately preserved in a CIA lab so that he can be programmed through “the source code” to enter a simulation of the train explosion and find the “culprit” and prevent the second device from going off. The scientists say that it’s not time travel, but “time reassignment”. From the viewpoint of physics, the premise would seem to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because entropy cannot be reversed.

Other reviewers say that the film reuses an old premise, as from “Groundhog Day” and even an episode of “Supernatural”, as well as Sony’s recent indie sci-fi hit “Moon” (Movies Blog, July 10, 2009).

There are some interesting “mini-drama” situations, such as when Gylenhaal’s character “follows” another suspect at a commuter station, and the other man asks “are you following me?”

Here is Summit's official site.

Michio Kaku discusses the movie and the idea of extracting information from parallel universes.

Is the “source code” and example of “Open source”?

I saw the film at a Regal in downtown DC, half full in a big auditorium (in Verizon Center, a few blocks from Landmark). I almost got pickpocketed going to the Gallery Plac Metro station (a tag team involving a fake homeless person). “They missed.” But "see something, say something". I told the Transit cops immediately.

NatGeo: :Collapse: Based on the Book by Jared Diamond": getting ready for life after most people

2011-03-20T20:32:00.000-07:00

There’s “another” movie named “Collapse” (see my Movies blog March 11, 2011 for the film based on Michael Ruppert), this one from National Geographic, “Based on the Book by Jared Diamond” , which is in fact titled “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”. Netflix has it available for instant play but not DVD and titles it "National Geographic: Collapse".

Diamond appears a lot, in a 96-minute documentary where in 2210, fictitious researchers with laptops and laser vision and other small relics from our advanced civilization, investigate the ruins of our whole planet. Diamond starts out with a review of the Anasazi, who would depopulate the southwest because of successive droughts, with the Pueblo culture left. He often makes comparisons also to the Maya, who overgrazed and cut down forests and gradually ran out of resources. He also offers comparisons with the fall of the Roman Empire, and they are more subtle than you think.'

That’s our problem. Diamond keys in on four major risks: water depletion (with Phoenix and the California central valley as the first casualties), fuel (peal oil), food, and climate change. Our global interconnectedness can work both ways: people are better informed, but a resource-driven collapse could spread much more quickly, and even tear civilization apart in a few months. But human beings tend to survive by simplifying and staying closer to home, becoming perhaps more tribal again.

Nuclear power is mentioned, somewhat favorably compared to renewable which he says takes much more in the way of resources (especially land) that we think; but the film predates the current crisis in Japan.

NatGeo’s website is here.

CBS short film examines safety of California nuclear reactors in quake zones; also "Chernobyl: The Abandoned City"

2011-03-16T20:45:00.000-07:00

CBS News has a 3 minute film “Are America’s Nuclear Plants Safe”, on youtube, here embedding disabled. California has two coastal nuclear plants: Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, but the plants were designed to hold to only a 7.0, not a 9.0. They also don’t use GE’s design, which may have smaller containment vessels.

It’s not all that reassuring.

Here’s a chilling 8-minute look at Chernobly and Pripyat. It’s called “Chernobyl: The Abandoned City”. It mentions the sacrifice of workers to tried to control the effects of the blast. In Japan, older or retired men may be asked to “volunteer” to work on the reactor because they do not have as long to live even without radiation.

These videos may work best in Internet Explorer (to get the right aspect ratios).

There was also an Oscar-nominated short film about Chernobyl named "The Door", reviewed on my movies blog, March 2, 2010.

Wikipedia attribution link of tsunami damage picture

"Battle LA": not as effective as "Skyline" but similar premise

2011-03-13T07:10:00.000-07:00

As “Battle LA” (aka “Battle: Los Angeles”) opens, Columbia Pictures shows its Statute of Liberty lady, not to its grand trademarked music, but to sound bites from media coverage of alien invasions of numerous coastal cities. It besmirches the studio.

Fortunately, the script takes us back 24 hours (pub), to the media coverage of simultaneous media showers at selected coastal cities all over the world. It doesn’t take long for people, including the marine Corps unit at Camp Pendleton, commanded by an aging Aaron Eckhart (who seemingly hasn’t been able to keep the hair on his legs – thank you for smoking) to figure out what they won’t say, we aren’t alone.

The aliens are a bit like those of District 19, but have weaponry surgically implanted (that would mean shaving). The weapons gear, modular and capable of self-assembly and spawning, looks like it was made from parts in a junkyard of landfill (or at least the used car lot).

The premise resembles that of a smaller film. “Skyline”, reviewed here November 14. That film’s beginning was much more chilling, and treated us to seeing what happens to the abductees. But “Battle LA” tries to reproduce the intensity of “Hurt Locker” and becomes trite and tiresome. As for organized invasion, the premise of NBC’s “Event” is much more interesting.

True, the aliens want our water. Maybe the ocean levels need to be taken down to counteract global warming. But the film is wrong; there are probably dozens of planets within 30 light years with surface water and oceans.

The trailers for the film (like “The Event”) mention the 1940’s UFO sightings, especially on the West Coast, that allegedly affected the defense effort in 1942, but the film doesn’t go into it.

If aliens really wanted to colonize us, take our resources or take us out, they’d probably detonate high altitude nu clear weapons for global EMP effect (electromagnetic pulse wiping out most electronics and power grids). And there is nothing we could do to stop it (maybe learn how to harden everything with Faraday cages). How’s that for a movie premise. (Maybe “The Road”?) Ask “The Washington Times.”

The film is directed by Jonathan Liebesman. Here’s the official site.

Wikipedia attribution link for drawing of Gliese 581 c

Bonus: identify the extraterrestrial(s) and angel(s) in this disco picture: Not at LA's Studio 1. But they're better looking than movie aliens or grays.

Update: 6/30/2011: see Movies blog on this date for review of similar "Transformers: Dark of the Moon".

Thai TV has aerial video of tsunami in Japan Friday; remember the Canary Island

2011-03-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

One of the most graphic videos of the tsunami in NorthEast Japan, over 30 feet, after the earthquake Friday comes from ThaiTVNews, on YouTube, 10 minutes, here.

The tsunami was much lower (about 7 feet) in Hawaii and on the US West Coast. But a landslide following an eruption and collapse at the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands reportedly could cause a 100-foot-plus tsunami on the US East Coast, inundating the Coastal Plain up to the Fall Line (including most of Florida) and much of New York City. America is not ready for this.

Wikipedia attribution link for Sendai Earthquake Map

Spacerip's "Venus: Death of a Planet", and a word of warning

2011-03-02T19:58:00.000-08:00

Spacerip: “Venus: Death of a Planet” with Thomas Lucas (writer) and Dick Rodstein narrator, takes us through the mythology of early horror movies about invasions from Venus, including one rather like “The Event”, starting with earthlings find a computer disk (e.g. DVD) from Venus and go.

The film (22 min) explores the theory that Venus may have at one time had water and been capable of supporting life. Part of this evidence comes from deuterium in the high atmosphere. But Venus, if so, did not have enough ocean to dissolve carbon dioxide the way Earth does. And it did not keep a magnetic field to protect it from “coronal mass ejections”. It wound up with a runaway greenhouse effect that would indeed make for an “Inconvenient Truth”.

Could Venus have retained Earth-like temperatures had it been somewhat smaller? It still would have had trouble having a magnetic field. On the other hand, were Mars about twice the volume of Earth instead of smaller than Earth, it might be much warmer (because of a thicker atmosphere) and be more likely to have kept a magnetic field. Such a Mars could have been capable of sustaining life similar to ours. There are other theories that say that both Mars and Venus could have lost magnetic fields due to large asteroid strikes.

All of this provides fair warning to what could happen to Earth. Listen to professor Al Gore.

Here’s a short Spacerip video with a simulated flyover of canyons on Titan.

Wikipedia attribution link for size comparisons of terrestrial planets

(Spelling of his post URL changed from what is displayed because of typo)

Can mankind really find a new planet to live on in a hurry if "we" have to? "Voyage to Pandora" looks at the question

2011-02-11T05:56:00.000-08:00

If mankind loses its home, Earth, with some advance notice, could it move to a new planetary home?

A 20-minute film on Youtube by SpaceRip, written and directed by Dave Brody, looks at this question. It’s “Voyage to Pandora: First Interstellar Space Flight” looks at that question.

It supposes that Pandora, in James Cameron’s “Avatar”, really exists as a habitable moon around a gas giant circulating Alpha Centauri, actually a binary star system with two Sun-like stars about 4.37 light years from Earth. Astronomers haven’t found any gas giants around the planets (which orbital mechanics may make difficult), but smaller worlds could exist as primary planets around one or the other. (The two stars are as far apart as Earth and Saturn.) But if so, why haven’t we detected them if we can detect small planets around Gliese 581, a red dwarf 20 light years away.

In fact, the film points out that there are 22 stars within 12 light years of Earth, many of them red dwarfs, whose planets would likely have small orbits and face the same side toward their sun, with an annular habitable zone and a “termination barrier” on either side. That could make for politically interesting worlds.

But with current technology it would take almost 100000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. But the film discusses the idea that anti-matter engines could enable us to build huge spaceships in space capable of reaching the system in less than 10 years. In any case, a closed society would have to live for that time, probably not in hibernation as in Cameron’s film. People in such an environment would not have the social freedoms we have come to take for granted today. Maybe the interior would look like what Arthur C. Clarke envisioned in his novel “Rendez-vous with Rama” which may finally become a film in 2013.

My review of "Avatar" is on my movies blog, Dec. 18, 2009.

History Channel: "Megaquake 10.0"

2011-01-13T07:17:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday night, Jan. 12, the History Channel aired a two hour documentary “Megaquake 10.0”, which is much in the tradition of its earlier Megadisaster series.

The film examined the types of faults that lead to earthquakes (normal, thrust, strike-slip, and subduction), and theorized that each type of fault has a “speed limit”. In California, the speed limit is probably that of an 8.5 quake.

The Richter Scale has actually been replaced by a “Moment Magnitude” Scale, where every point is a 30-fold increase in power.

There is a theory which says that if all the major subduction faults linked up across the Pacific, a 10.4 quake might be possible. But the largest known quake in history occurred in Chile in 1960 (a 9.5), and the Alaska quake in 1964 was a 9.2 It would be possible for faults in California to link up and for a single quake to destroy both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Other cities exposed to possible total destruction include Mexico City, Tokyo, and Tehran.

The area of the US most exposed to a possible 10.0 subduction quake would be the Pacific Northwest, the Seattle area. A large tsunami would occur around the Pacific, also.

The film simulated the damage that might occur in a number of quake situations, with whole skyscrapers (such as one in downtown LA) toppling over.

It also provided a discussion on the New Madrid dimple and predicted the destruction that could occur in the Midwest should another similar quake appear today.

Earthquakes might not be able to match supervolcanos or asteroids in the potential for destruction. But asteroids we can see coming.

Here is History Channel's feedback site on the film.

The Discovery Channel has a similar video on YouTube saying that there is a 1 in 3 chance that a megaquake will hit the Pacific Northwest in the next 50 years.

Wikipedia attribution link for USGS diagram of fault types, here.

YouTube has some videos on how homeowners can make their own Faraday Cages

2011-01-09T20:10:00.000-08:00

"EMP/Solar Storm and Faraday Cage, How to Make, Maybe", is a Youtube video, from OBXSOLWIND, is a ten minute YouTube video, typical of what one finds for “Faraday Cage”. The owner, an engineer, shoes his system near the North Carolina Coast. He says, don’t put things in straight lines, and ground everything properly. He says his system of “containerizing” his electrical system (off his solar panels) is not expensive if you can do your own work. And he says he won’t show everything.

Very little has appeared in the popular media so far about what homeowners could do to protect their own electronics from a Carrington-style coronal mass ejection (solar storm) or possibly an EMP attack, on the ground or from a high altitude nuclear blast.

(User has apparently replaced the video with this new one [12/2011]):

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of a Dutch Faraday Cage room. Looks like it belongs in a black-and-white film noir!

"Carriers" shows a world destroyed by an H5N1-like pandemic

2010-12-07T19:16:00.000-08:00

I’m not that much on post-apocalypse movies (actually, the church-sponsored films are actually more interesting, like “Left Behind”, of which I’ve seen the first). I’d rather see the “Event” happen in the movie’s middle and see how people adjust, gradually (sort of like the 1982 film “The Day After”). The cable film “Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon” did that particularly well (ABC’s “Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America”, not so well.) I've seen just one "Resident Evil" and was not too impressed.

Unfortunately, “Carriers” (from Paramount Vantage and the Pastor brothers, David and Alex) puts a few people in an almost zero-population world (it wouldn’t please Phillip Longman); it’s as grim as “The Road”.

The premise of the pandemic is important. Maybe a “super flu” (as in Stephen King’s “The Stand”, a 1995 TV miniseries) could be fatal for almost everyone, and maybe the “carrier state” would be morally important: people without symptoms could infect others, maybe selectively (only the genetically susceptible). In fact, the “sacrifice” involved in “social distancing” to control a pandemic (it was talked about with H1N1 and really could be necessary for H5N1 if it erupts) would make good material for film. The “ethics” of handling carriers (or “typhoid mary’s”) is different for contagious infections compared to STD’s.

In this low-budget Spanish thriller filmed in New Mexico and Texas, four friends (a pun for another film of that name), including two brothers (played by Chris Pine [“Unstoppable”} and Lou Taylor Pucci, head in their car through a wasteland depopulated by the virus. It’s everyone for himself in this world (even for “Christians”); in the opening scene, to avoid giving away any gasoline, Chris’s character speeds the car around a block and breaks his oil pan. That’s not what I needed to see the same day that my own car gave a low tire pressure warning after I hit a pothole.

You see the G-men in bunny suits, and you see what the disease does to the skin, and you rightfully wonder who will be left to restart the world, “On the Beach”.

The website for the film is here.
Here’s an interview with Chris Pine on the movie.

Bing/Discovery present short video debunking ideas about doomsday viruses

2010-11-28T20:35:00.000-08:00

James Williams narrates a 2-1/2 minute Discovery Channel video in which he asks “Could a Single Virus Destroy Humankind?”, link (website url) here (no embed offered).

Bing says this is the stuff of sci-fi horror movies. Williams says that such a virus would have to be asymptomatic while it was transmissible, which is usual except for STD’s. But people may shed some viruses (even smallpox, and certainly flus) before they are noticeably sick.

During the 1980s, there was right wing speculation (“There’s always a first time” – the idea of “eventually” in mathematical analysis or topology) that HIV would mutate into something casually contagious (an idea the right wing could make political use of then); I even heard this at an AIDS convention in Houston in late 1984. But such a virus, in changing transmissibility, would probably adapt to the host and become much less lethal.

The Ebola virus is generally transmitted only in blood contact, but it was thought that the Ebola Reston virus in 1989 (among chimps) was airborne.

In my novel manuscript, I speculate that a virus, containing a radioactive isotope and generating buckeyball-like micro black holes, could cause people to consolidate “identities”. There was an idea vaguely like that in the 1999 horror film (Universal, John Bruno) “Virus” (where an alien life form on a boat views people as “viruses”).

Here’s a table on how things would work in my novel. Not sure it will mean a lot, but I want is somewhere online.

Kind of person	Count	Awake	Memory trace	Kids	Marriage	afterlife	virus	example
Orig angel	144000	Continuous	Real	Yes	Yes	immortal	immune	Toby, Matt, Frankie (corrupt)
New angel	Converges	Continuous, benign infection	Real memories; can share dreams of very few people, not always permanently	No kids unless eternal marriage	Kids if eternal marriage; must get old soul to have kids	Immortal	Immune w exposure	Sal
Old soul	F (C(new angel))	On permission	Image memories	Yes, must have	Yes	Immortal	No im, sudden non-perm changes	Bill
Ordinary person		Continuous	real	Yes	Yes	Grace or rebirth	No imn	Ali
Ordinary angel		Continuous	Image, shared; other person in dreams	Yes. Must have	n/a	immortal	Immune, must recover	Randy

"Skyline" presents an apocalypse "Cloverfield" style

2010-11-14T19:46:00.000-08:00

Well, the movie “Skyline”, from Colin and Greg Strause, opens with the skyline of Los Angeles, with all the glitter even at 4:27 AM, when a single light appears, with a misty object coming down, and then others appear. Inside an apartment building, young swinger wake up and are very confused when they get burned if they look outside.

Then the movie switches into “Cloverfield” mode (Jan 18, 2008 on this blog) as it goes back 15 hours and sets the party up, with Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and Elaine (Scottie Thompson). In fact, the movie would be even more effective if shot in dogme with hand-helds, and examined how real people deal with an unknown threat from out of the blue.

The actual extraterrestrial attack is rather overdone. It’s rather like Independence Day. Huge organic octupoid spaceships bud off with little feelers that can probe building, such out people and eat them up.

And I have to say that the sight of people drawn up into the spaceships like moths to a flame, as seen by Jarrod from rear-window-like telescopes. The desertion of the city within an hour or so, with little physical damage, is creepy. But soon the aerial octopuses come looking rather like the SS.

The ending is pretty interesting. Imagine waking up inside the slime of some huge organic vessel, with bodies thrown around you. But if you’re immune, they may give your brain a new body. This sounds like the “warning” originally intended for “Alien”.

Eric Balfour looks “thmooth” – his body waxed absolutely hairless for the movie, and it actually turns out that this is significant – some Freudian games.

Stephen Hawking says we ought to be careful about announcing our presence, because within a few decades aliens from a few dozen light years away could reach us with hostile intentions. It sounds like the equivalent of Chicken Little’s drawing attention to his existence through the Internet.

Seriously, would the power stay on this long? Real aliens would probably knock us out with EMP first.

Movies about how we respond to sudden and unexpected existential perils are inherently interesting. “What would you do?” But the greatest perils are probably more gradual (even like “The Event”). Perhaps the only thing that interacts with Dark Energy is the karma of our own soul or consciousness, and just once in a while breaks in karma release perturbations.

The film comes from Rogue/Relativiy Media, but Universal stuck its own brand on it.

Rogue’s website is this.

For a comparison to Tri-Star's "District 9" see the Movies Blog Aug. 24, 2009.

Fox's "Unstoppable" vs. History Channel's "Glow Train"

2010-11-13T19:47:00.000-08:00

“Unstoppable”, from Ridley Scott (2oth Century Fox) does recall some earlier out-of-control movies like “Cassandra Crossing” and “Runaway Train”, discussed on this blog March 3, 2010. (Somehow the title also reminds me of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable”).

The “didactic” value of the movie, of course, is to highlight the risk to the public of freight trains carrying hazmat materials through populated areas. The History Channel gave us a scenario like this with “Glow Train”, reviewed here June 24, 2008, where a train with radioactive waste derails near Las Vegas. In real life, Homeland Security has considered rerouting some trains away from the route through Washington DC and Union Station, taking it too near the Capitol. Here, the runaway freight train rambles down the mountains running from northern PA to southern (fictitious towns, as “Scranton” becomes “Stanton”, etc), with eight cars of phenol, highly flammable. A railway engineer makes a “human error” (very improbable), and a comedy of errors and cover-ups (which manager Connie (Rosario Dawson) desperately tries to make right behind her computer terminals and phones).

The film’s tag team (Frank and Will, played by Denzel Washington and Chris Pine) form a subplot, which Frank’s (“retirement home”) resenting the younger Will’s (“day care center”) taking his union job. Will has been thrown out of his home by a family court after a domestic custody dispute (itself a scary issue). They commandeer a lone locomotive and try to slow the train down from behind. The heroics mount up toward the end, where the film sometimes takes on the look of a great model railroad set.

The geography of central Pennsylvania, with its Horseshoe Bend curve down the Allegheny Front mountain, could make it prone to accidents.

In the early 1980s, I worked for a man who had previously worked in railroad information technology.

Coming from Fox, the action film with a background warning about railroad safety and hazardous cargo (particularly a potential terrorist target), provides good entertainment for and from conservatives.

Here is Fox’s link for the movie.

"Attack of the Sun" from Cosmic Journeys; Fox news in 2009 reports NASA warnings about 1859-style coronal mass ejection in 2012; a months-long power blackout for the US?

2010-11-03T07:12:00.000-07:00

Cosmic Journeys, “Attack of the Sun” (Thomas Lucas and Dave Brody), starts with an account of the Halloween 2003 solar storm (not the Halloween Blizzard of 1991!) which occurred in the middle of the sunspot cycle, when activity is supposedly the lowest. The Sun emitted coronal mess ejections, making the Sun a “plasma weapon”.

A solar eruption in 1859 set fires in telegraph offices and gave shocks when people touched metal.

The film shows how the Earth, because it rotates quickly (once every 24 hours) has a magnetic field that tends to shield it from the storms somewhat. Venus, because it keeps one face to the Sun, has no such field, and solar storms in the past shred away much of its water, leaving it to build up a greenhouse effect. Earth-like planets around other stars, particularly M stars, may keep the same side toward their sun (if they are close in), which may argue against having magnetic fields and argue against having intelligent life, even if the planets are old and stable enough for civilizations to have developed. Nevertheless, the speculation (as in a National Geographic film on other suns a few years ago) is interesting.

Coronal mass ejections are more dangerous now than before because we are building a “smart energy grid” with many solar components sensitive to the static electricity in the ejections, meaning possible huge power blackouts.

CME’s would also affect the climate, exaggerating El Nino and La Nina in the Ocean.

Michio Kaku talks to Bill Hemmer at Fox News about the 1859 solar storm in this YouTube clip from Fox News (link), 4 minutes, made in April 2009. Kaku warns that an 1859-style event, according to a NASA study, would knock out the US power grid for months. It’s like a “Katrina from Space”. NASA published such a study in 2009, and warned there are some concerns about a solar super storm in 2012 (the Mayan end of time), which could fry the Earth’s technology if the planet happened to hit the CME while revolving around the Sun. The most dire warnings compare the effect of a direct massive coronal mass ejection hit to that of a terrorist (or even extraterrestrial alien) electromagnetic pulse attack from high altitude. Can critical instrastructure transformers be reinforced? I'm vaguely familia with the talk of military faraday cages for protection, going back to a 2001 Popular Science article just before 9/11; these would seem to apply to CME's as much as EMP's.

I’ll look for the newer NASA report soon. Here’s an older one from 2000, link.

"The Asteroid that Flattened Mars": a warning for Terra Firma?

2010-11-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

SpaceRip has a “Cosmic Journeys” video “The Asteroid that Flattened Mars”, by Thomas Lucas and Dave Brody. The 21-minute film, interrupted by two commercials, gives a history of our knowledge of Mars, starting with Lowell, going into the 1960s when we knew that Mars was a desert, and the 1976 Viking lander with attempts to find life, that had even attracted comment by Dan Fry and Understanding at a 1978 “Man in Space” convention in Arizona.

More recent probe have provided elevation maps of Mars, show in the film in “World Book” fashion with the lowest elevations in blues and greens and the highest in red. The southern hemisphere is much higher than the northern, a fact which the film says leads to the theory that Mars was smacked by a large asteroid early in its history. The asteroid impact seems to have destroyed most of Mars’s magnetic field, causing it to lose most of its atmosphere and become a dry and cold place. In a sense, this seems like a tragedy, possibly depriving us of a planetary neighbor that could have evolved a civilization comparable to our own. (Maybe that protects us from potential competitors or enemies, depending on how you look at things.)

The implication, of course, is that a large enough asteroid strike on Earth might cause not only a “nuclear winter” but also the loss of its magnetic field, or at least a major shift.

National Geographic has a story by Ker Than, May 11, 2009, that corroborates this theory, "'Supergiant' Asteroid Shut Down Mars's Magnetic Field", link here.

Picture: I doubt you can find such accommodations on Mars now.

Challenger Center: "Asteroid Impact Hazards"

2010-10-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

CCSSE has a 10 minute YouTube video from the Challenger Center (with Rita Carl) (site ) by Dr. Alan Stern, “Asteroid Impact Hazards”

I was motivated to look for this by a Bing video, less than one minute, of an asteroid hitting the Earth and with the impact surrounding Earth with a huge dust cloud. I can’t find that now.

Stern’s discussion is less ominous, but he says there is a big effort to track all asteroids in remotely near Earth orbits of 1 km in diameter or more. It would be possible to deflect one by changing reflectivity so that the pressure of sunlight changes the orbit slightly, or even the mass of a spacecraft could do so. It would not be a good idea to blow one apart. The video contained animated reconstructions of Tunguska in 1908, and of the dinosaur-killing impact on the Yucatan 65 million years ago leading to the rise of mammals (and us).

Various other sources says that a 1 km asteroid hitting the ocean could completely destroy the Earth’s ozone layer.

By the way, take a look at Sam Hughes "recipes" on Live Science, "Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth", link. I like #8, make your own mini black hole (as if neutronium were mentioned in every cookbook)-- except that the singularity point replacing Earth would eventually evaporate in Hawking radiation, leaving nothing. I like #10, too: Existence fails, and the one about the contagious strangelet.

AP, MSNBC post video of the innards of a Texas tornado

2010-10-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

NBC Nightly News tonight broadcast an AP amateur video, 46 seconds, of the inside of a tornado from Navarro County, Texas. No cows fly through the air (as in “Twister”) but it’s pretty scary. The county is between Dallas-Ft. Worth and Waco, and includes Corsicana. I passed through the area many times in the 1980s. The closest a tornado came to a residence of mine was a small F0 or F1 in December 1987 (missed me by less than one mile on Lake June Road in Dallas).

"Digital Age" YouTube interviews look at Cybersecurity and WMD's

2010-10-07T18:14:00.000-07:00

James D. Zirin interviews Adam Segal (Senior Fellow, China Studies in Foreign Relations) in “Digital Age: How Ready Are We For a Cyber War?”, as posted by Goodaletv, Feb. 2010. Most of the discussion concerns China and the suspicions that it was behind numerous security breaches at American companies and government agencies, particularly in the summer of 2009. The question comes up as to whether Chinese hackers would sell out to Al Qaeda under the table to attack American infrastructure like the power grid, but that is easier said than done.

On the related items on the YouTube page, there is another video of about the same length in the Digital Age series. James C. Goodale, former Vice Chairman of the New York Times, interviews Michael Sheehan of Lexington Security Group and former Deputy Commissioner of Security for New York City, in a 26 minute clip: “Are We Winng the War on Terrorism?” Goodale reviews all the major government policy initiatives to prevent Al Qaeda from launching major attacks, particularly with WMD’s, and suggests that Al Qaeda is probably too decentralized to carry something like that out now. But it is very difficult to stop the lone actor attack attempts like those on Christmas Day (or last May).

On the same page there is a 10 minute “World at Risk Conference on WMD’s” (10 min) from Feb. 2009

Lawrence Wright's "My Trip to Al-Qaeda": part lecture, part play, part documentary

2010-09-30T19:41:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, Sept. 30, HBO presented the documentary “My Trip to Al-Qaeda”, directed by Alex Gibney, written by professor Lawrence Wright.

Dr. Wright starts with his own time in 1969 at the American University in Cairo but quickly moves into an illustrated lecture or monologue (set up as a one-person play) giving a history of radical Islam, and his exploration of it.

He describes the hajj as a dress rehearsal for the process from life to death, with complete subjugation to God.

He describes Saudi Arabia as a place with no sense of democratic participation in public life as we know it; one always knows one’s “place” relative to royalty.

He describes 9/11 as having a “Hollywood” aspect.

The HBO mirror website is here. The film apparently was shown at Tribeca.

He describes what expectations must have been like for Osama bin Laden’s first wife; everyone was struck with this concept “I chose humility, but humiliation is forced on me”. It goes back to Sept. 11, 1683. He says “the humiliated have a license to regain their dignity”, and explains how humiliation, and the addictive hatred associated with it, “sells”. He goes on to explain the nihilism of Al Qaeda ideology.

He describes a visit from the FBI, wanting to know about calls made to London from his phone. His daughter gets linked to their lists, and finds out the FBI has been listening in.

Bin Laden said “all I have to do is make a statement, and the Americans will terrorize themselves.” Then “Al Qaeda can’t destroy America. Only we can do that to ourselves.” And the film ends.

As filmmaking goes, how effective is "the annotated lecture" without even an interviewer? All Gore made it work in "An Inconvenient Truth".

PBS Nova explores the Toba supervolcano eruption 75000 years ago

2010-09-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

“Mystery of the Megavolcano”, part of the PBS Nova series, was aired on Sept. 21, 2010. The best link seems to be this.

A megavolcano is more commonly called a supervolcano. The huge dimples in the Earth, up to a 100 miles across, have only been discovered in the past few decades.

The film shows the efforts of four independent geologists around the world to trace a suspected massive eruption in the distant past. Examination of Greenland ice samples showed the emission of sulfuric acid about 75000 years ago, consistent with a supervolcano eruption about the time that homo sapiens was almost wiped out.

Examination of oxygen isotopes in the ocean shows enormous ocean cooling about this time. The first thought was the supervolcano could have been in Iceland.

But investigation led to Lake Toba, over 100 km long, in Indonesia. This may have been the largest supervolcano in the world and its explosion may have precipitated an ice age. Apparently this is a different volcano from Krakatoa, about which several films have been made, concerning its 1883 eruption; this was a borderline “supervolcano”.

The documentary covered briefly the US supervolcanoes, Yellowstone and Mono Lake. Since Yellowstone (which moves east gradually) erupts every 600000 years, we are about due. And a supervolcano eruption would be a civilization challenging “Event”, spreading ash over an entire continent, maybe leading to a prolonged “winter”.

Wikipedia attribution link for Labe Toba aerial view, p.d.

Episode of "The Closer" demonstrates domestic "lone wolf" and "Manifesto" problem

2010-09-13T20:09:00.000-07:00

A new episode on TNT of “The Closer”, staring Kyra Sedgwick as the Georgia detective Leigh Johnson who now leads the LAPD’s Priority Murder Squad, demonstrated some of the problems that both federal (FBI and Homeland Security) and local law enforcement have with domestic “lone wolf” types. Tonight , in Season 6, Episode 10, “Executive Order”, the “villain” (Phillip Keene) bears a resentment over “reserve discrimination” and “affirmative action” from having not been chosen for the Fire Department. In fact, he “failed” personality tests that showed he had a “narcissistic personality”, because is responses to standard questions showed an unrealistic sense of his own importance apart from dealing with other people in real ways. For example, the character says that violence is sometimes necessary to show other people how wrong they are. While taking care of an old man, he steals a wheelchair and pretends to be a disabled policeman. He has engineered unusual poisons leading to deaths of EMT personnel, and in the final scene in a garage seems to have a sarin dispersal device on his body.

His personality is depicted as like that of "Ted" Kaczynski, and he even has a “Manifesto”. The idea of a “Manifesto” is getting a bad rap.

The link for the show is here.

CNN: "Bin Laden's New Jihadists" has provocative commentary, not on web yet

2010-09-12T15:37:00.000-07:00

Saturday Sept. 11 CNN aired a one hour report “Bin Laden’s New Jihadists” with Drew Griffin, Fran Towsend and Nick Robertson, link here. The site links to CNN’s SIU (Special Investigations Unit) page that as of now does not yet have any material on the program. The closest news story I can find, about Omar Hammami , is dated Aug 12 , here.

Much of the program focused on Anwar al-Awlaki, hiding out in Yemen, and who is now on the government’s kill-or-capture list, such as is discussed in this Christian Science Monitor article by Gordon Lubold, here

The most extreme voices in the world of radical Islam, as depicted in the program, demand that all people become literal believers (as they see it) and that religious law take over the entire west, including the United States.

The show went into discussing the lone wolf “bad actors” also.

The program noted that many of these persons were well off at one time but it did not get deeply into the psychology (or forensic psychiatry) of turning to extremism.

Here is a related CNN video from Aug 2 on Anwar al-Awlaki,

I suspect that the broadcast will be replayed several times in the next couple of weeks.

CNN video: San Bruno residents had detected odor of gas weeks ago

2010-09-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

CNN has a video documenting that residents of San Bruno CA had smelled gas in the area for as long as three weeks, before the gigantic explosion Sept. 9. If complaints had been ignored, this would become a huge legal issue.

There are many other videos documenting the destruction to over 50 homes in one of the largest residential gas explosions ever. Flames shot several hundred feet into the air, and many residents thought that a jumbo jet plane had crashed.

There was a much smaller incident in the Bay Area in 2008, and apparent Pacific Gas and Electric employees did not follow through properly on a suspected error in engineering. The media has reported the area as a "crime scene" although the "crime" is likely to be corporate negligence.

The idea of an incident like this is in a natural gas line is scary. In many older cities and some suburbs, water main breaks are common. One in suburban Montgomery County, MD in December 2008 swept away many cars. Deterioration of a gas main with time would be an even bigger public safety problem.

Moxnews has a longer version of this video from CNN (link) Moxnews describes itself as a news documentation and “keeping them honest” site.

I remember there was a major gas explosion in northern Virginia in 1972.

Personally, I like “all electric” and think that the ideal home would have solar or wind on the premises to use when possible. Such a home would have utilities even when all power is out. If all homes did this, the US would be much more secure from an enemy attack on the grid.

All of this speaks to the importance of infrastructure safety.

History Channel: "9/11: State of Emergency" and "The Man Who Predicted 9/11"

2010-09-09T20:54:00.000-07:00

The History Channel aired a two-hour documentary “9/11: State of Emergency”, which replayed the events of the first two hours of the 9/11 tragedy, with particular emphasis on the communications between the president (starting with Andrew Card’s notification at a school) and the rest of the defense staff. Flight 93 is relived, and the order to shoot it down issued by Cheney is recounted. A young flight attendant on American Flight 11 was the first to notify ATC of the hijacking of the fist plane.

The President did not realize it was an attack until the second plane hit. The CBS footage from “What We Saw” was used.

Some firemen and one civilian were trapped on the 4th floor of the North Tower when it collapsed but were rescued.

The film was preceded by a one hour documentary, “The Man Who Predicted 9/11”, about Rick Rescoria, head of security for Morgan Stanley. This goes back to the 1993 WTC incident. This does not seem to be the same film as one by the same named aired a few years ago on PBS Frontline.

AP releases color street level video of London during Battle of Britain

2010-09-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday Sept. 7, AOL put up a 1+ minute AP “rare colour” video of the results of the Luftwaffe attacks on London during the “Battle of Britain” in 1940. These may have been the September attacks. It’s quite impressive, and disturbing, to look at, and gives a feel for what it is like for a civilian population to deal with destruction caused by an outside enemy at war.

The link is here. I didn’t see any embed code.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture. Sorry, it's in black and white. Only a nitwit would make a movie called "color" in black and white!

Discovery: "9/11: After the Towers Fell"

2010-09-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

On Sunday Sept. 5, 2010, the Discovery Channel aired “9/11: After the Towers Fell”, a new one hour documentary of the rescue work to save victims trapped in “The Pile”, the seven-story mountain of debris at ground zero. The best link for the show is here.

A high school principal faces the loss of her younger sister at Cantor –Fitzgerald (while leading the students to safety in other boroughs), and a firefighter doesn’t know if his brother survived. Firemen carry equipment that makes high pitched beeps from debris to help locate them. One man is rescued when found. People keep getting delayed voicemails from people in the towers for two days.

The documentary echoes Oliver Stone’s 2006 film for Paramount, “World Trade Center”, which I saw and found rather painful to watch.

The Discovery Channel followed this show with a one hour “Secrets of the Secret Service”. The show described the expensive armor that a Utah company can provide for limos of the president or of corporate executives, and a company in Colombia makes not only bulletproof suits but even polo shirts. I doubt anyone wears them in discos. Read Thomas Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus".

The documentary discussed how the Secret Service changed after the 1963 JFK assassination and also the 1981 attempt on Reagan. The Secret Service has always been pretty active on USA Jobs, and the show would have done well to go into the requirements for employment.

The film also covered the attempts on Gerald Ford. The Secret Service had interviewed Sara Moore before and thought she was not dangerous. A gay man, Oliver Sipple and former Marine, stopped the attempt (not covered in the film), sometimes mentioned in the "don't ask don't tell" debate.

"Asteroid Attack" on "The Universe" on "History Channel"

2010-09-02T18:30:00.000-07:00

The Universe episode “Asteroid Attack” aired on Sept 2, 2010 on the History Channel’s “The Universe” series, directed by Ron Beemer. Again, "The Universe" is starting to replace "Mega-Disasters".

It starts with a discussion of the asteroid Apophis, which at one time (in 2004) was thought to have 1 in 37 chances to hit Earth in 2036. Now that’s reduced to 1/250000. But if it passes through a sliver of space in a 2029 approach called “The Keyhole” the odds go way up.

I wasn’t aware that the Chesapeake Bay, along the East Coast, was created by an asteroid 30 million years ago, striking above what is Norfolk today; the crater was found in the 1990s with underwater oil exploration. The tsunami wave may have crossed the Appalachians. Rocks from the explosion are located along the coast.

With most asteroids large enough to do huge damage, there would be years or decades of warning. Comets, on the other hand, because they come from the outer reaches of the Solar System, are not seen until perhaps six months before they could strike.

The largest impact crater in the world is in South Africa, about 180 miles across, with a rebound peak in the middle.

The Obama administration has made exploring asteroids a priority. Larger one have some tectonics and may have internal ices, and enough gravity to hold a spaceship. One unmanned probe has landed in Australia with a sample of an asteroid.

In 1972, amateur filmmaker caught an asteroid skimming the top of the atmosphere over the Tetons.

Wikipedia attribution link for Apophis orbital diagram

"Magnetic Storm" on The Universe, History Channel: Coronal Mass Ejection could wipe out most of electrical grid, permanently

2010-08-12T19:56:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, August 12, the History Channel’s “The Universe” series produced a one hour report “Magnetic Storm” (link ).

The basic premise is that a sufficiently large coronal mass ejection(CME) from the Sun, which would probably occur at maximum sunspot activity, might overwhelm the Earth’s magnetic field and wipe out all electronics in one hemisphere, first by generating currents in transmission lines and frying transformers.

The show simulated aurora lights as far south as Washington DC in 2013, followed in minutes by a coast-to-coast blackout.

Then practically all infrastructure systems, like running water, would fail and millions of people in the developed world would die. This is the ultimate “mega-disaster” although the same effect might happen from a high altitude nuclear blast launched by a rogue state (North Korea or Iran), terrorists, or even extraterrestrials.

The massive damage from a CME could be more likely after a sudden magnetic pole shift, which hasn’t happened in 700000 years (the subject of Alan W. Eckert’s 1975 novel “The HAB Theory”). That’s because the Earth would have a period with a weak magnetic field.

The show took a sidetrip into explaining how Mars lost its magnetic field. Venus also doesn’t have one.

Utilities could harden power grid components with Faraday-cage like devices and should start planning to do so now, because a massive CME is unpredictable.

A moderate CME knocked out power in much of Quebec for a day in 1989.

The 1859 Solar Superstorm is thought to have been strong enough to be capable of knocking out the entire grid if it were to happen today. See this source at Scientific American, link . This was called the "Carrington Event".

The film discusses a National Academy of Sciences study in 2009 on CMEs, which I could not find. But here is a rogue copy of a New Scientist report from “GodLike Productions” where the US winds up a “developing country,” link.

There was a minor CME in late July 2010. There was a scare over one in October 2003, with minor disruptions to satellites, the same day that Smallville aired an episode about a "Solar Flare".

Decentralized power, with solar and windmills, would seem to reduce the risk, too.

Maybe the Amish are on to something. See my Movies blog, Dec. 28, 2008. The Amish could survive CME's but not an asteroid strike, which a techie civilization might prevent. Nobody could stop or survive a supernova gamma ray burst, which, however, is much less likely that a CME.

Wikipedia attribution link for a diagram.

"Volcanoes" episode of "This Angry Earth" on Weather Channel covers Mt. St. Helens, and Mammoth Lakes risk

2010-08-01T15:44:00.000-07:00

On July 25, right as a brutal thunderstorm exited the DC area, the Weather Channel aired an hour-long episode from its “This Angry Earth” series called “Volcanoes”.

Most of the episode focused on the May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. The May 18 eruption occurred after a series earthquake caused a landslide and unplugged a volcanic cap, which exploded the way a pop bottle fizzles.

The show focused on local hermit Harry Truman, as well as a young geologist, and others who lost their lives when they were obliterated. Various sites around the mountain were covered with 300 feet of ash, and the mountain lost over 1300 feet of elevation, a kind of natural “mountaintop removal”.

The show went on to cover the apocalyptic hazard posed by other Cascade Range volcanoes, especially Mt. Rainier itself, which could become vulnerable to an explosive eruption after a landslide.

The show then covered the hazard of the Mammoth Lakes area (also Mono Lake) of the Sierras in California, along US 395, somewhat north of Bishop. An explosive eruption could obliterate everything for 75 miles, and cover the entire country with an ash cloud. I've been in the area several times.The supervolcano caldera around Yellowstone has erupted once every 600000 years (moving East with each eruption) but that hazard was not discussed.

Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted explosively in 1991 and was discussed, as were other eruptions in the West Indies and Colombia.

YouTube video of eruption by Spikedeadman:

Wikipedia attribution link for NASA view of St. Helens. I flew over it in a commercial flight from Seattle in August, 1980.

"Countdown to Zero" is a summary film about the nuclear weapons threat

2010-07-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

Suppose some time in the near future I’m living in Toronto or Vancouver or maybe even LA making my movie, have any major television channel on in my condo, and suddenly get “breaking news” that a small nuclear device went off in New York City or Washington DC (or maybe both). The world would never be the same. Simulation of such a fictitious day would probably make an “interesting” event for a network like CNN. We were warned.

The film “Countdown to Zero”, directed by Lucy Walker, from Participant and Magnolia Pictures, starts its argument (after a brief prologue with Gary Oldman) exploring the ease with which highly enriched uranium (HEU) can be sequestered in lead containers so that normal shipping security doesn’t detect them. Sleeper cells could, with moderate know-how, construct a crude weapon. Less likely is the theft or illegal purchase of a suitcase device. But Al Qaeda is dead set on trying to do this, according to the film. Osama bin Laden’s sense of revenge is measured in body counts, almost like the morbid way we once looked at the Vietnam war.

About half way through the film, it shifts gear to examination of the spread of nuclear weapons to unstable countries like Pakistan and probably Iran and North Korea soon. The geopolitical ramifications are explored, as there would develop a number of Islamic states in the Middle East with nuclear weapons to oppose Israel.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, but the US and Russia, while having negotiated some reduction of nuclear weapons, still maintain over 23000 nuclear warheads. The film covered the SAC and the weapons silos in the Great Plains, maintained by airmen who drill checklists all the time. In 1995, there was an “accident” off the coast of Norway that, according to the “launch on warning” policy, could have led Russia to attack the US; Yeltsin kept a cooler head.

The film shows photo maps of many world cities and the reach of nuclear blast zones over them. It covers the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis briefly, but cites John Kennedy’s “Sword of Damocles” speech.

The film does mention the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat, but in conjunction as the first step of an all out nuclear attack (starting with high altitude EMP blasts to disable defenses in a region). In fact, as noted here, it's conceivable that a terrorist group or a rogue state (Iran or North Korea) could fire an EMP device from offshore with a scud-type missle from a ship.

The film makes a strong philosophical point: "there is always a first time" ("eventually" in a mathematical sense, just not "frequently") for low probability events.

The film starts to make the point about the importance of policing up all the nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union (an aim of Sam Nunn and the Nuclear Threat Initiative) but then wanders away. I think one could make a documentary film about how those inspections should be conducted!

Magnolia’s website for the film is here.

Participant Media has a petition site called “Take Part” here. The movie poster has both yellow (for “yellowcake”) and red versions.

Here is the “Trailers” YouTube entry:

"2012: Supernova" mixes apples and oranges on SyFy

2010-07-04T07:26:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, July 3, the SyFy Channel tried to “warn” us, or perhaps just “entertain us”, with a film from “The Asylum” (not “The Factory”) and director Anthiny Fankhauser, “2012: Supernova”. Now the title of that movie concatenates the titles of two much better films (without the help of a java string operator, thank you), and the precept is pretty silly. The scientist is hiding a government secret: that a Supernova will soon destroy the earth with climate change and electromagnetic storms.

It’s not clear where the Supernova is, but the closest possible one would be over 1000 light years away. But a supernova that far away could fry the planet with a gamma ray burst, and there would be nothing we could do about it. This may have happened once, about four billion years ago.

The government plans some high altitude nuclear bursts to deflect the radiation, a silly idea; in fact, what such bursts would probably do is fry a lot of the Earth’s electronics with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The cure is as bad as the disease, it’s like whole body radiation. The film has lots of earthquakes and silly car chases, too.

The Washington Post had listed an older 2005 Hallmark film named “Supernova” here. It’s directed by John Harrison and features Peter Fonda and Luke Perry (playing astrophysicist Chris Richardson). What if the Sun were going to explode or at least suddenly expand and “they” just didn’t tell us. (There is no “they”, remember.) That doesn’t happen, but as in “Deep Impact”, the government has provided for some people to survive underground, and the world is beset with EMP pulses. There’s massive damage to Sydney and other cities (presumably the film is Australian).

There was actually a TV series “Supernova” where a British astronomer goes to live in the Australian outback.

There was also an MGM-UA film in 2000 named “Supernova” with James Spader (directed by Walter Hill), where a deep space probe finds an artifact from a black hole produced by a supernova. The artifact apparent contains strangelets or instrumentalities of other dimensions that some people say could “infect” the universe (or at least a planet) and turn it into mush, much the way prions can “infect” a brain by propagating changes to the surface geometry of all of the cells. Some people have expressed that fear about the use of the CERN Hadron Collider in Europe.

The nearest supernova candidate (type 1) is IK Pegasi, about 150 light years from earth, a multiple system with a white dwarf that could get too big

1572 Supernova explosion Tycho Brahe on Youtube

YouTube video "CERN LHC Black Holes and Strangelets - May Appear Years Later and Destroy World" by "Standard99999"

Wikipedia attribution link for core-collapse scenario for a type 1 Supernova explosion diagram

"Last Best Chance": 45 minute docudrama from Nuclear Threat Initiative demos problem of loose waste

2010-07-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

Back in 2005, I received, upon request, a complimentary DVD of the 45-minute docudrama “Last Best Chance”, directed by Ben Goddard, from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, of which former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn is a party.

The film dramatizes terrorists trying to husband nuclear materials including HEU (which can be handled because it doesn’t emit a lot of radiation) to make rogue nuclear weapons. The DVD also includes a panel discussion led by Richard Lugar. Fajer-Al Kaisi, Dennis Arndt, Fred Dalton Thompspn and Jon Gries star, and Tom Brokaw appears as himself.

Recently, there have been a few television shows or episodes discussed here dealing with sudden nuclear threats, so I thought it would be good to give the link for the film here.

Graham Allison talks about the threat on ABC in this YouTube video two months ago, about a summit called by the president. He proposes not just “mutually assured destruction” but “mutually assured detection”. The entire notion of globalization and urban civilization as we know it could be destroyed by a single nuclear blast.

Wikipedia attribution link for Vitrification picture here.

ABC Nightline: Underground "Noah's Ark" bunkers

2010-06-26T07:28:00.000-07:00

On Friday, June 25, ABC Nightline (with Terry Moran and David Wright) presented a seven minute short film on or underground “Noah’s Ark” or doomsday bunkers being built privately in rural areas around the country, often by the same engineers who build them for governments. They are built to be experienced as like cruise ship luxury spaces.

Pricing varies. Some charge $50000 per family or $25000 per additional child. Some sell space at about $1 per floor or level. Typically a bunker has 10-15 levels underground. I recall a science fiction novel named “Level 7” about this concept back in the 1960s.

The shelter shown in the Nightline report apparently was being built somewhere in the Mojave Desert in California (maybe near "Zzyxx Road" perhaps? ["It's Academic"]. Other attractive areas would include Nevada, Arizona, and the western Great Plains.

The report showed comical excerpts from the “Duck and Cover” clips of the 1950s when nuclear war was feared.

The report also showed a father and son preparing to purchase a unit, with a “boy scout be prepared” mentality. The report mentioned the movies “The Road”, “The Book of Eli”, and the “Mad Max” Australian movies of the late 1970s.

Doomsday could occur because of terrorism, natural cataclysm (the 2012 effect), destruction of the environment, or the breakdown of a fiat money economy. Another interesting possibility could be EMP (electromagnetic pulse, as from a high altitude nuclear blast doing little damage at ground level); don't know if that would affect an underground facility, which could be protected by Faraday-like devices.

The company was also building shelters in China and Russia.

I visited the Greenbrier Resort shelter (now no longer in contingent use) in White Sulphur Springs W Va. in August 1997. There appears to be a smaller similar facility on Mount Weather in the Va Blue Ridge between Routes 7 and 50, which can be driven by but not visited.

My novel manuscript imagines an "Academy" in west Texas to re-educate people for "apocalypse" (set up as a right wing plot with religious and possibly extraterrestrial connections), and a related underground bunker in Arizona, on the Mogollon rim, which was envisioned as able to take in refugees when the final pandemic comes. However, I have several locations related the effort, and the difficulty in a novel is maintaining the same level of tension in plotting at each location. The different characters may be in different locations.

Wikipedia attribution link for Mt. Weather photo (actually taken by Homeland Security Department)

Below, personal picture (2005) along route 601 near Mt. Weather.

CBS 60 Minutes reviews raid on Pelindaba nuclear plant in South Africa; brazen attempt to steal HEU

2010-06-21T09:49:00.000-07:00

On June 15 or so, CBS 60 Minutes updated a story about a break-in on a nuclear facility, the Pelindaba, in South Africa on Nov. 7, 2007, originally carried on CBS Nov. 28, 2008.

The video, set in dry countryside that looks a lot like inland southern California, documented how saboteurs defeated the electric fence and disabled the current to it.

The highly enriched uranium is itself not very radioactive and be carried away to other sites to manufacture crude nuclear weapons. The thieves did not succeed this time in stealing any HEU. But the attempt was brazen, somewhat an "Oceans 11" "smash and grab job" with nefarious planning.

CBS also has a link to a May 3 story by Dan Farber, “Nuclear attack a ticking time bomb, experts say”, with link here. The average young American has a statistically significant chance of being affected by a nuclear exchange during his lifetime, even dying from it. For example, the article says “In a 2005 survey of 85 national security experts, 60 percent of the respondents assessed the odds of a nuclear attack within 10 years at between 10 and 50 percent, with an average of 29.2 percent. Nearly 80 percent of respondents expected the attack to originate with a terrorist group.”

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Attribution link for Wikipedia Hiroshima picture

NatGeo offers brief video on EMP threat (from high altitude nuclear blast)

2010-06-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

MSN Bing gave a link this evening to a NatGeo 4 minute video “Could Electromagnetic Pulse Make U.S. Dark?” The URL is here. There was no embed code.

Dr. Richard Muller explains how EMP works: a high altitude nuclear blast causes no blast effect on the ground but emits gamma rays that set up electric currents in the atmosphere that fry all the electronics on the ground.

But the US Air Force has planes designed to withstand EMP. But civilization would go back to the dark ages.

Conservatives have been concerned that rogue states could give Al Qaeda or a similar group the ability to launch an EMP rocket from the high seas of a US coast. (Theoretically an extraterrestrial alien civilization could use one to cripple us and there would be nothing we could do.) Smaller EMP devices non-nuclear in nature based on microwaves have been built by the military and have limited use even today in Iraq and Afghanistan to disable mines and weapons (the "Hurt Locker" effect). (Example from US Army Ordnance Museum in Aberdeen MD shown below.)

Since National Geographic offers this video, there is some evidence that concern about the EMP problem is moving away fromt he realms of the extreme "Right".

But the EMP threat is one more reason to rein in on loose nuclear material, as discussed in the previous posting about “The Unit” show.

Wikipedia attribution link for US Army map diagram here.

"The Unit" epsiode rerun examines speculative underground sale of nuclear materials from Russia to Iran

2010-06-09T20:04:00.000-07:00

Some channels, including UPN in Washington, re-aired an important episode of David Mamet’s “The Unit” tonight, called simply “Security”.

The team gumshoes for evidence that Russia is selling nuclear materials to Iran. That would be controversial because one of the most important strategic steps in preventing a nuclear detonation from a rogue state or a non-state group (like Al Qaeda) or perhaps special cells put at work by countries like Iran or North Korea, would be to reign in on all the nuclear raw materials in the former Soviet Union. This is the aim of the group “Nuclear Threat Initiative.”

In the episode, one of the team members is not welcome because of his trips to Israel, suggesting his religion; there is a scene where a wife tells a husband that she expects to mean more to him than his “hobby”.

This particular series does bring up significant potential homeland security issues. I also discussed it on my TV reviews blog on Nov. 27, 2009.

“The CyMan” and Warezfaw.com have a four-minute film on YouTube “The Nuclear Threat is from Israel, not Iran”.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of nuclear waste canister http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_waste_container_2010_nevada.jpg

CNN: "Toxic Towns USA" examines PVC, dioxin contamination in a small Louisiana town

2010-06-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday June 2 CNN featured Dr. Sanjay Gupta hosting a home hour documentary “Toxic Towns USA” as part of “Toxic America”, focusing on Mossville, Louisiana, an unincorporated and largely African-American community near Lake Charles, LA in Calcasieu Parish. The town does not show up in the World Book Encyclopedia or in the index of standard road atlases.

The May 27 entry on CNN’s own blogger site here describes the show. Much of it focuses on the activities of chemist Wilma Subra and long term resident Dorothy Felix, to expose the risks to residents from nearby petrochemical plants (as from companies such as Sasol), especially from dioxins and polyvinvylchlorides used in plastics, which we depend on. Wilma was faced with threats and her office (a long distance from Mossville) was shot at. Both women and Gupta tried to get in to see LA governor Bobby Jindal and Louisiana agencies, but were kept out. The EPA Superfund may eventually help with a cleanup.

The inadequacy of the supervision from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSRD) of the Centers for Disease Control was mentioned (link ).

Dioxin is associated with the defoliant Agent Orange, used during the Vietnam war. The CNN report focused on long term cancer and health risk due to slow accumulation of dioxin or PVC’s in various internal organs (including the liver and pancreas), which shows up in areas that have been contaminated by industry or government.

Mossville was mentioned in a 2002 documentary film “Blue Vinvyl” which I have ordered from Netflix.

Another town affected by dioxin contamination was Times Beach, MO (less than 20 miles S of St; Louis), which was relocated and bulldozed in 1983. So petrochemcial or environmental contamination can have catastrophic consequences for a town.

It's not clear that the current oil spill in the Gulf could force evacuation of small coastal bayou towns, beyond destroying the fishing and tourist economies of these towns. The draining of the marsh has made it more vulnerable not only to hurricanes but also to environmental pollution.

Wikipedia attribution link for polyvinylchloride diagram.

See also my coordinated review "Blue Vinvyl" (2002) on the movies blog on June 10, 2010.

The "BP Deepwater Horizon Spillcam mudsplosion": Here it is!

2010-05-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

So here’s 10 minutes on YouTube of “BP Deepwater Horizon Spillcam mudsplosion”

Hank Stuever has an article on p C1, the Style Section of the Washington Post, Wednesday May 26, “BP Presents: One slick horror film: Spillcam’s images of the silent, inexorable disaster in the gulf are deeply compelling”, link here. (The post caption said “is” instead of “are”; grammar?)

The article reports that the House Senate Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming requested that BP make its live, “reality show” continuous image of the spillcam (from the Macondo Blowout), so that everyone learn the scope of the problem.

Wikipedia attribution link for a A robotic arm of a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) attempts to activate the Deepwater Horizon Blowout Preventor (BOP).

PBS: "The Storm that Drowned a City" and "the Hurricane of 38"

2010-05-18T18:56:00.000-07:00

Some PBS stations (WETA 26 in Washington) aired the 2005 NOVA program “The Storm that Drowned a City”, giving an almost Biblical chronicle of Hurricane Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans. The link is (web url) here. Many residents in the downtown area north of the French Quarter went to bed Monday night thinking they are safe, and woke up in the middle of the night as the Love and 17th St Canals broke, admitting five feet of water. The documentary shows the hundreds of people stranded, as in the Superdome where Oprah would visit.

The film shows how the levees were undermined from beneath, as the pilings for the levees were not dug deep enough.

YouTube video by LPBTV

Then MPT (Annapolis) aired “The Hurricane of ‘38”, link here, from the "American Experience" series "The 30's".

The black-and-white documentary shows how residents of Providence RI were oblivious to the approaching storm in September 1938, concerned mainly about the Depression. The sky turned yellow before the storm came, according to one elderly (now) observer, who said that it made her feel like the only living thing in the world, as the birds grew quiet.

The film covers the effect on New York City (65 mph winds), and eastern Long Island, where (in the wealthy communities) it was much worse. With telephone lines down, communications were very poor.

The hurricane did a lot of damage even inland in New England, which was shocked that a hurricane of this size could go so far north. The Weather Bureau denied responsibility for the 700 deaths.

Wikipedia attribution link for NOAA picture of Rhode Island damage. I last visited the area myself in January 2003.

AC360 airs "American Al Qaeda", biography about New Yorker Bryan Neal Vidas

2010-05-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

Anderson Cooper and British correspondent Nic Robertson ran the one hour documentary “American Al Qaeda” on Saturday, May 15. CNN does not seem to have a stable link for the program, but Mediabistro has a synopsis here.

The film traces the biography of Bryan Neal Vinas, on Long Island New York, after his parents broke up. As a result of emotional turmoil, he migrated from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity eventually to radical Islam and journey for training in Pakistan.

Brian withdrew into a closed circle of friends and became persuaded by radical ideology on the Internet. He finally wanted to go to a madrassah.

At one point he cross-dresses with a burqa while looking for a training camp that will accept him after going to Pakistan. He has shown “perseverance.”

But in time he would be arrested and brought back to the US for trial. He would give authorities information about Al Qaeda plots against the Brussels, Belgium subway and then against the Long Island Rail Road. Security on the LIRR would be stepped up in late 2008.

Authorities see his arrest as a real break, effectively giving them information like that gathered by a mole in an Alfred Hitchcock spy movie.

There was no video from the AC360 show yet covering this episiode, but I found an unrelated one (lined from the AC360 site) about the dangers of flesh-eating bacteria during pregnancy that is so startling it’s worth pointing out somewhere, maybe as a “public health” advisory.

Picture: from Office of Emergency Management, Arlington, billboard in a Metro station

PBS Nova: "The Hunt for the Supertwister" airs right after deadly 2010 tornado outbreaks in OK, deep South

2010-05-11T18:41:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday May 11 PBS Nova presented “The Hunt for the Supertwister” and depicted the work of modern tornado chasers, as well as presenting simulations (in pixar-like animation) and computer simulations of how supercell thunderstorms form tornadoes. The link for the film is here. The film shows several outbreaks in the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, and South Dakota.

An interesting middle-section episode of the documentary concerns the long-track supertwister that struck La Plata, MD in April 2002, on the East Coast, outside of Torndao Alley. The film speculates on what might have happened had the storm tracked further west and gone through Washington DC. But in the DC area, the violent storms tend to track across southern Maryland, with flat land and a lot of water. Sometimes there are pockets of violent weather just east of the Catoctins around Frederick. The configuration of the Blue Ridge seems to affect the track of the most violent storms in the DC area, but sometimes violent storms form when moist southeast winds are blocked by the Blue Ridge and bounce back as a cold front approaches.

I witnessed a small tornado along Route 9 near Rehoboth Beach driving back (it didn’t hit anything), one month before 9/11, in August 2001.

The deep South (Mississippi and Alabama) seems as susceptible to tornadoes as the Great Plains.

Oklahoma tornados from May 10, 2010 from Tornadovideos.net on youtube (and Discovery)

Wikipedia attribution link for NOAA diagram of tornado

CBS 60 Minutes: the "Lone Wolf Problem"

2010-05-09T18:30:00.000-07:00

On Sunday Night, May 9, CBS "60 News" featured a 20 minute report by Steve Kroft, “Uncovering the Roots of Homegrown Terrorism”, about lone-wolfs who grow up in the west and become attracted to jihadist ideology. (A variation is other lone wolfs like Timothy McVeigh who get attracted to extreme Right Wing or neo-Nazi ideology.) New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly contributed to the report.

The concern is that someone like Faisal Shahzad is almost undetectable before the fact. Something goes wrong in the person’s life, and the person is attracted to absolutist ideology, and willing to throw away the entire rest of his life (as Richard Clarke told NBC this morning) to “make a point”. The person believes that letters to the editor or blog postings will not attract attention, but violent acts will. Ironically, the person may have been recruited partly by jihadist websites, now often available in English. All of this sounds like a curious observation in view of all other discussion in recent years about “free entry” to the Internet and how the Internet (both social media and conventional blogs) have “democratized” public policy debate.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

The White House said on Sunday that the Pakistani Taliban was behind the Incident in New York City May 1. It seems that the greatest problem comes from people acting alone or in very small groups that contact Al Qaeda cells or other groups overseas. So far these small groups have not gotten access to WMD technology.

Discovery Channel offers Stephen Hawking "extraterrestrial videos" with a sober warning; tonight: "Into the Universe"; "How the Universe Works"

2010-05-02T20:52:00.000-07:00

Recently Larry King Live broadcast a discussion with professor Stephen Hawking on the possibility that aliens could have detected our radio signals – including “I Love Lucy” shows – since they’ve now had about 70 years to do so. It’s conceivable that if there is an advanced civilization within 35 light years, it could be on its way. And it might not treat us better than we treat native populations. So some sobriety is indicated in contemplating the possibility of alien abduction.

I had thought that tonight’s Discovery Channel films were going to expand; they did not cover aliens, but I found a link on Discovery with seven videos showing Hawking’s conception of possible aliens and even invasions. Possibly, with mirrors around a star focusing energy to a collection point (a good algebra problem involving hyperbolic foci) aliens would generate enough energy to navigate wormholes. Or they might approach Earth in large flotillas of space ships. They probably won’t be as kind-hearted as Smallville’s Clark Kent. An attacking alien flotilla could knock out Earth electronics permanently with a high-altitute EMP blast. (A "sequel" to my "Titanium" screenplay called "Prescience" includes that idea.)

But Discovery tonight did broadcast a one hour “How the Universe Works” with a program about black holes, similar to that of the History Channel’s Universe series. Some of the footage seemed to be the same. But the documentary proposed that every super black hole (as at the center of the Milky Way) could have a White Hole on the other end that creates a new universe, leading to infinitely but countably many universes. They could have different forces or constants (a weakless universe, without the weak force, would not have heavy radioactive elements but might still host life). The documentary explained how black holes can emit gas streams that generate whole galaxies, called quasars as they start.

Discovery continued with Hawking’s “Into the Universe” for two hours. Early on, they covered a type of super nova that could generate a gamma ray burst, and suggested that life on Earth was severely impacted 450 million years ago by such a burst. There is one star about 1000 light years away that could conceivably generate such a burst again.

The second hour covered a “Man in Space” forecast (very much like the “Understanding” convention from 1978 (check the posthumous website for Dan Fry) ). The nearest known “Earth 2” is about 20 light years away, and that would take 300000 years to reach today. But presumably we will develop Diaspora-like spaceships capable of approaching life speeds. But still, we could not ethically send whole generations abroad, some of whom might have whole generations living on the ships, without resolving our whole “culture war” debate – consider the “natural family” debate that I’ve covered on other blogs. A society that built such a flotilla could not recover the economic investment within current lifetimes. But technology that increases longevity, as with gene therapy or even new kinds of radiation-resistant skin, comes into the debate as to how to make interstellar colonization possible, as well as discussions on how much procreation would occur.

Discovery does have Stephen Hawking’s material on aliens on its website here, with seven short videos, showing possible squid-like beings in the undersea area of Europa, grazing and hunting animals on other worlds, and gas-bag life in the atmosphere of Jupiter. On earth, the box jellyfish might be something like alien life.

Discovery Networks offers this brief trailer on YouTube:

Picture: could an earth-like alien hang-out at a gay disco?

MSNBC: "The McVeigh Tapes"

2010-04-19T20:39:00.000-07:00

The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC on Monday April 19 (15 years to the day of the Oklahoma City tragedy) presented the MSNBC documentary film, “The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist”.

MSNBC compiled the film from 45 hours of interview tapes made by author Lou Michel.

Through the interviews, the film recreates his life, his disenchantment, and the evolution of his sociopathy, after a career in the Army broke down after the Gulf War. He became directionless and then angry and looking for enemies, which would turn out to be the government. “Here is one kid who decided he could play god.” Later there is a particularly notorious line from an arrogant McVeigh, “get used to it.”

McVeigh seemed to have contempt for people who depended on government without recognizing it; of course, the right wing is always saying that people should depend on their own families, not government. He was said to have no compassion, but that's an odd characterizion given that he had committed the crime. His attitude toward "civilians" sounds like that of Nazi Germany when it invaded other countries. The early part of the documentary says that McVeigh was bullied as a youngster, but early on found meaning in the regimentation of Army life. McVeigh saw himself as a soldier, and as a one-man Army cleansing the world of dependency and "evil"; but the "logic" of some of his statements (as about "collateral damage") quickly becomes self-contradictory. (Note: The US Army has used "Army of one" as a recruiting phrase and the term is actually trademarked.)

His image was recreated with actors and cgi programming, but the voice, which sounds a bit shrill, is his.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

McVeigh paid the supreme penalty at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana on June 11, 2001, three months to the day before 9/11.

The documentary explains his quick apprehension, partly by luck with a particular state trooper, and by an incredibly easy trail to find that he had left behind in Kansas. (For only a few hours the media thought that the attack had been perpetrated from the Middle East, which 9/11 would be.) His co-conspirator Nichols, now serving life terms, had “more to lose” because he had a family and tried to drop out.

The film does not cover lawyer Steven Jones, a “good Republican” from Enid OK who defended him.

Still pictures: Oklahoma City memorial, 2006; Herrington, KS, 2006, both taken on a personal trip.

CNN: "Death and Taxes: Joe Stack's Attack on the IRS"

2010-04-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

On Saturday April 17, CNN aired a one-hour film “Death and Taxes: Joe Stack’s Attack on the IRS”, from the CNN Special Investigations Unit (SIU) with Abbie Boudreau. The transcript is here.

Stack flew a plane into the IRS office building in Austin, TX on February 18, after setting fire to his own home.

The film traced his boyhood, including family tragedies that made him an orphan, and his rearing at am orphanage in Hershey, PA, being turned loose with $100 in his pocket at 18 after graduation.

Stack, like Theodore John Kaczynski , wrote a “manifesto” before his act, and posted it on his website. The screed ended with “The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.; The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.” There is a "Reaganite resistance" blogger thread on the manifesto here. The original site was apparently called “embeddedart.com” and the following blog (“Bungalow Bill”) contains much of the text of the manifesto, which the FBI took down (link) . I would expect this to get put up on Wikipedia soon.

The show discussed the “lone wolf” problem, and distinguished between people who disagree with government policy and taxation but who participate politically in legitimate debate (including blogging) – the “Tea Party” movement – an sociopaths. Remember, the original “Tea Party” evolved when there was no representative government.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of building after the Piper Dakota crash, here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Damage_to_Echelon_complex_from_2010_plane_crash.jpg

"Nature Unleashed: Earthquake": low budget Canadian thriller filmed in Lithuania

2010-04-17T20:55:00.000-07:00

“Nature Unleashed: Earthquake” (2004) is a Canadian-UK-Lithuanian film taking us to what might happen if earthquakes destroyed a nuclear power plant near a fictitious large city in Russia (Kasursk). Directed by Tibor Takacs, it proposes China Syndrome scenarios worse than Chernobyl or anything ever imagined by Karen Silkwood (and certainly a lot worse than Three Mile Island, the worst disaster in the US).

The plot is a bit contrived. Josh (Fintan McKeown) is a nuclear engineer whose family lives in an American compound in Russia and whose kids attend an academy there. In fact, in an early scene we see his teenage son in chemistry class, with the teacher telling them when to light matches for a Bunsen burner (something I was afraid to do in high school at one time). Soon the earthquakes strike and multiple. In one scene, daughter is trapped in a subway crash, which is actually well done (like that in Summit’s “Knowing”).

Josh’s wife implores her son to watch his sister, before she knows she was trapped in the subway. The screenplay hits the family responsibility set up by parents (to kids to be responsible for and protect siblings, who were born by their parents) pretty hard, and the tone of the film becomes hysterical as the hunt to save everyone from the earthquake and meltdown damage escalates.

This might be a good place to mention the short "The Door” (18 min, dir. Juanita Wilson, Ireland/Ukraine), reviewed March 2, 2010 on the movies blog, about the after effects of Chernobyl on a family.

YouTube trailer by “Terminator”

Some versions of the full film on YouTube were removed for copyright reasons.

You can rent the film from Netflix (the word “Earthquake” appears first). It appears that NBC-Universal may have bought the copyright for the film. The film (DVD from Platinum films right now) does not seem to have its own official site. Typically films like this get aired on SyFy or Ion.

Of course, the granddaddy earthquake movie was titled just that ("Earthquake") in 1974, complete with sensurround.

Wikileaks releases video of Baghdad incident that it decrypted

2010-04-07T17:13:00.000-07:00

Wikileaks has put on its website a 39-minute short film of video that it acquired and decrypted, showing the “friendly fire” killing of at least twelve civilians in “New Baghdad” near Baghdad itself. The video many still panes of explanation and subtitles, and is in black-and-white. The title is “Collateral Murder.” Right now there is a direct YouTube embed of the short 17-min version on the Wikileaks site (web url) here.

The long version is on “Collateral Murder” here Two Reuters staff members were killed, and Reuters was not able to get the video through the Freedom of Information Act.

The film is shot from overhead in choppers, but the intensity reminds one of Kathryn Bigelow’s film “The Hurt Locker” from Summit Entertainment. I also recalled the movie "The Killing Fields."

Noam Cohen and Brian Stetler have a story in the New York Times, “Iraq Video Brings Notice to a Web Site” here.

Wikileaks was founded by Australian Julian Assange in 2006.

I found an embeddable version on open YouTube by AlJazeeraEnglish.

The original Wikileaks video will play on YouTube, but because of “sensitive content” you have to log on to your YouTube account.

Update: June 8, 2010.

Ellen Nakashima has a front page Washington Post story "Army intelligence analyst held in Wikileaks incident", link here. The online title for the article is "Online contact says he turned in analyst who wanted to leak information". Army Specialist Bradley Manning was detailed June 7 for disclosing classified information, after he had contacted Adrian Lamo, who turned him in. Nevertheless, the video still works and can be viewed by the public; the cat's out of the bag. I hope bloggers don't get in trouble for displaying it (what the law is if an amateur jouralist stumbles on classified informationa and is not sworn to protect it as a government employee, contractor or armed forces member is a good question and brings up the journalist sield law question).

My picture here (below, from March 2010): from US Army Ordnance Museum at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD. There is an exhibit there of a robot that defuses ordnance with a microwave device associated with EMP (second picture).

Fox continues "24" season 8 with two-hour clips; but the scenarios start to wear thin

2010-04-05T19:48:00.000-07:00

I peeked at “24” on Fox tonight for two hours, as it is in now in Season 8. A few years ago, the “real time” approach seemed effective, and I watched this series as a favorite (along with “Smallville” and “Everwood”). Now it seems a bit staid, as the series has gone through so many over-the-top crises that this “The West Wing” approach no longer seems as compelling.

But right now, a president Hassan of an Islamic country is held hostage, and the US government has to consider whether to fake a delivery of Hassan, making it appear that the rebels took him themselves, while the government also deals with a “radioactivity dispersion device” threat in New York City. That seems mild compared to the suitcase nuke that the show detonated in LA in 2007 (a fatality count of 60000 as predicted in the show sounds very unlikely), but such a dirty detonation of a conventional explosive in New York could contaminate the real estate in some number of blocks there for years or decades. Discussions like this abounded in the months following 9/11.

Ironically (given what’s in the movies now) the show has a character named Chloe, played by Mary Jane Rajskub, and she looks but does not act like the temptress in the recent Sony indie film.

President Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones) may supposed to emulate Hillary Clinton, but she sounds much noire sharp-edged, ready to pull the switch herself.

Kiefer Sutherland gives an ITN interview here, and explains how the seasons of “24” are separated by a year each, but Season 7 flows into Season 8.

Originally, the series as advertised heavily with previews in National Amusements theaters and in the Washington DC Metro (as sensitive as that would seem now).

Revisiting the FX film "Smallpox 2002": a dire argument for resuming routine vaccinations

2010-03-22T20:01:00.001-07:00

Since I’ve reviewed some recent films about pandemics, some less credible than others (whether or not government-created), I thought I’d remind the visitor of the 2002 film from Britain for the FX network by Dan Percival, “Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon”. The film starts with a lone infected visitor in the New York subway and in three months the world has a shocking epidemic killing millions and destroying the economy. The government tries diluting the vaccine (a trick tried in the early days of H1N1). A few characters are followed, and some, such as a teenage boy who goes to London, come to a tragic end.

In the film, the “guilty party” is a loner, not part of Al Qaeda.

The film makes a powerful argument for the idea that we ought to renew smallpox vaccinations as routine.

"Thirst" (Korean) hypothesizes "Emmanuel virus": what happens to a priest who gets infected and vaccinated

2010-03-16T19:44:00.000-07:00

The Korean film “Thirst” (“Bakjwi”), directed by Park chan-wook, based loosely on the novel “Therese Raquin” by Emile Zola, at least starts out with a plausible thesis. A new virus has emerged that seems to combine the symptoms of Ebola and smallpox, and is called the “Emmanuel virus”, as if the virus could transmit supernatural abilities, perhaps by carrying bizarre radioactive isotopes. It may have been government designed.

A “sincere” priest Sang-hyun (Song-kang ho) volunteers to take an experimental vaccine, and apparently has to be infected with live virus to test the vaccine. He gets sick, but miraculously recovers after a blood transfusion.

Then the movie takes a turn that may be silly or profound. What if a virus really did give somebody supernatural powers. In this case, he becomes a vampire. Pretty soon he is a “relationship” with the wife of a childhood friend.

Asian “existential” horror films tend to be long and drawn out (like the Japanese horror film “Kairo” or “Pulse”). This one runs well over two hours, but gradually builds on its abstract imagery (many of the clinical scenes are filled with white, and medical devices figure into the vampire scenes). The concluding sunset is quite beautiful, as if the last one the not-so-permanent vampires will ever see. The image of their feet disintegrating in their shoes closes the film.

The film really starts out with a warning – the description of the virus (in English) is quite chilling. Then it turns artsy.

The official site for Cannes is not too helpful, link here.

Don’t confuse this with a (brand new?) documentary film “Thirst” from Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, about water preservation, from Bullfrog films. It’s not on Netflix yet, and I don’t see it yet on imdb. But it has a DVD/book order site. I’ll look into this soon for possible review. I didn’t see it listed in the DC Environmental Film Festival starting now (“Carbon Nation”, March 28, looks important).

Picture: Waste from a health care demonstration in Washington DC.

YouTube interview with director, by Comic-Con.

Discovery Channel airs documentary "Underwear" about Christmas Day Detroit Incident

2010-03-11T20:33:00.000-08:00

The Discovery Channel, on Thursday March 11, aired the one-hour special “The Underwear Bomber: The Detroit Bomb Plot”, about the incident with the Northwest Flight 253 landing in Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

The film traces the three-part journey of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and examines in detail the security steps that let him slip through. The was on the 600,000 member “Tide” (apparently maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) in McLean VA, which maintains a "national targeting enter" for watch lists) list which can trigger questioning of someone who lands in the US but which did not cause the flight to return to Amsterdam even though his name did not come up until the flight was in the air. Umar had been on this list partly because his father had become concerned and contacted authorities about his extremist activities in Yemen. The watch list, by the way, is much larger than the no-fly list.

I actually went to a job fair to consider becoming a TSA screener, in August 2002, after my layoff. I was particularly concerned about the idea of having to do pat-downs.

The film gave limited details on how PETN works and how Abdulmutallab was able to hide it.

The show maintains that very intrusive pat-down searches by security screeners would have been needed to detect the device, which he tried to prepare in the lavatory 40 minutes before landing. The film dramatized the questioning that Umar would have received in Amsterdam from a screener trained to read body language, a process called "spot profiling".

The film interviewed a number of passenger, including Jasper Schuringa (38, an independent film producer who is said to be making another documentary of the incident), who tackled him. Here’s an interesting story about the payoff later to Schuringa, on gawker.

The movie also demonstrated, with an experiment, what would have happened if the PETN had detonated. Several passengers including the perpetrator would have died, but the plane would not have been brought down.

Discovery also re-aired “The Flight That Fought Back” (2005, dir. Bruce Goodison), about Flight 93 on 9/11. The film maintains that Air Force fighter jets could not have engaged the flight for 28 more minutes after the plane came down, which it says means that the passengers really did prevent a crash into the White House or Capitol.

Here's a personal opinion on the "political" significance of the Flight 253 incident.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Michigan prison where suspect is held.

"The Crazies": Participant media helps remake a classic Romero horror movie to tell us that government will do anything

2010-03-07T14:32:00.000-08:00

When I saw that the remake (directed by Breck Eisner) of George Romero’s “The Crazies” was accomplished with Participant Media (the distributor is indie-friendly Overture Films, even if the narrative style would fit Screen Gems; the director is ) I presumed there was a political message; I had never seen the 1973 original – I have seen the zombie-fest “Night of the Living Dead”.

To its credit, the film has a message, well suited to any state’s libertarian party: the government will do anything it can get away with to cover up its mistakes (that happens in “Cassandra Crossing”, previous post). So if it invents a dangerous virus or toxin and accidentally releases it (here it’s a plane crash, covered up in a river bottom, that could be the Mississippi in the northeast corner of Iowa), and the people go crazy with rabies symptoms, well, you’ll see a heavy-handed G-man presence, with fences, choppers, people in restraints, turning into monsters. At times I thought of “District 9” although this movie is not so artsy; I remembered the panicky pictures of predicted quarantine camps in “The Advocate” in the 1980s.

Yes, government will do anything, including nuke its own citizens, and entire town, to contain it; but of course the heroes (played by Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell; the lean and hungry Joe Anderson gives a good performance as a guy who sacrifices himself) could contaminate a larger city, which might have to be taken out later. Pretty soon we will reach a post-apocalyptic world. I last drove through Cedar Rapids in 1998. Anyway, the ending takes the movie into zones like “28 Days Later”. By the way, there is no Pierce County in Iowa.

The other “obvious” comparison could be the three “Invasion of the Body Snatcher” movies, but that concept is much more subtle, and frightening. In fact, my own novel manuscript supposes that a novel virus, catalyzed by an unusual isotope capable of encapsulating a micro black hole, can allow people to be taken over by “stronger” entities (“angels”) as the world population faces “contraction”, a play on “demographic winter.”

Look at “Save Ogden Marsh” on blogger here and “The Truth about Trixie here.

Overture's official site, and Overture's own embed of its trailer:

Hollywoodstreams Youtube trailer for the original 1973 film (Pittsburgh Films and Cambist Films; the original film takes place in PA):

Static pictures (mine): Antimine weapon with microwave disabler at Aberdeen Ordnance museum. MD (it's scary what the government has); H-bomb picture from Smithsonian, American History.

Films on major challenges to freedom

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close": the impact of 9/11 on a family with a gifted child

Local Washington DC area police department offers video on warning signs for terrorism

"Tornado Alley": IMAX 3D film documents efforts of "Vortex 2"

PBS Nova: "Deadliest Volcanoes"

NBC News, Save our Planet, others produce film reports warning of planetary catastrophe with sudden methane release due to Arctic warming

More videos on coronal mass ejections

"The Darkest Hour": a lesson in possible microwave weapons and EMP, as well as a horror movie about plasma "aliens" (like "Skyline")

"The Blazing Forest" (1952) was oddly prescient of today's brush fire problem

"Five" (1951) is said to be the first post-nuclear-war drama in film

PBS Frontline presents story of American David Headley's role in Mumbai attacks

Fox "Terra Nova" episode maintains that a meteor could cause EMP damage to electronics; in 2005, a young couple films a meteor hit near Seattle and then disappears

NatGeo's riveting "The Last Days of Osama bin Laden", a film by Peter Bergen

Recalling "The Last Wave" by Peter Weir (1977): a warning about Cumbre Vieja now?

ABC Nightline reports on research into future pandemic viruses in Africa: they key concept is cross into humans from animals

PBS Frontline questions the FBI's conclusions in the Anthrax Letters

CNN airs documentary film about 2001 anthrax incidents

PBS Nova airs two-part film on Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami, with graphic footage

Discovery video with Samuel L. Jackson enumerates the ways the world could end; Supervolcano in Yellowstone singled out

CNN, Time, HBO: "Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience"

"Contagion": all too believable docudrama of a bird flu pandemic; bloggers v. government v. virus

NatGeo airs updated "Inside 9/11" (based on 2005 film, includes May 1 action on OBL)

Discovery to run "Alien Invasion: Are We Ready?"

"Liberty Is Not Given" offers "common sense" video on solar storms and space weather

Conservative video warns of the "real" financial risk in August, bringing down a Ponzi economy (it's not just the debt ceiling)

Recalling "Thirteen Days" of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962

ABC, NBC both offer major videos on sudden concerns about domestic nuclear safety: floods, wildfires, tritium releases

Short films on "demographic winter" abound

Weather Channel punts on tornado documentary, coverage not as intense as CNN's

CNBC covers Fukushima in one-hour "Nuclear Meltdown"

PBS documentary on Soviet, US nuclear tests in the 50s and 60s puts a perspective on today's asymmetry

CNN: :Inside the Mission: Getting bin Laden" and "In the Footsteps of bin Laden"

ABC 20-20 airs "documentary" tracing how Osama bin Laden was taken out

YouTube videos from Russia claim to show real "aliens", aka Roswell

"Emerging Viruses and Vaccinations: Len Horowitz" DVD

"Source Code": a fantastic premise, and a dire warning

NatGeo: :Collapse: Based on the Book by Jared Diamond": getting ready for life after most people

CBS short film examines safety of California nuclear reactors in quake zones; also "Chernobyl: The Abandoned City"

"Battle LA": not as effective as "Skyline" but similar premise

Thai TV has aerial video of tsunami in Japan Friday; remember the Canary Island

Spacerip's "Venus: Death of a Planet", and a word of warning

Can mankind really find a new planet to live on in a hurry if "we" have to? "Voyage to Pandora" looks at the question

History Channel: "Megaquake 10.0"

YouTube has some videos on how homeowners can make their own Faraday Cages

"Carriers" shows a world destroyed by an H5N1-like pandemic

Bing/Discovery present short video debunking ideas about doomsday viruses

"Skyline" presents an apocalypse "Cloverfield" style

Fox's "Unstoppable" vs. History Channel's "Glow Train"

"Attack of the Sun" from Cosmic Journeys; Fox news in 2009 reports NASA warnings about 1859-style coronal mass ejection in 2012; a months-long power blackout for the US?

"The Asteroid that Flattened Mars": a warning for Terra Firma?

Challenger Center: "Asteroid Impact Hazards"

AP, MSNBC post video of the innards of a Texas tornado

"Digital Age" YouTube interviews look at Cybersecurity and WMD's

Lawrence Wright's "My Trip to Al-Qaeda": part lecture, part play, part documentary

PBS Nova explores the Toba supervolcano eruption 75000 years ago

Episode of "The Closer" demonstrates domestic "lone wolf" and "Manifesto" problem

CNN: "Bin Laden's New Jihadists" has provocative commentary, not on web yet

CNN video: San Bruno residents had detected odor of gas weeks ago

History Channel: "9/11: State of Emergency" and "The Man Who Predicted 9/11"

AP releases color street level video of London during Battle of Britain

Discovery: "9/11: After the Towers Fell"

"Asteroid Attack" on "The Universe" on "History Channel"

"Magnetic Storm" on The Universe, History Channel: Coronal Mass Ejection could wipe out most of electrical grid, permanently

"Volcanoes" episode of "This Angry Earth" on Weather Channel covers Mt. St. Helens, and Mammoth Lakes risk

"Countdown to Zero" is a summary film about the nuclear weapons threat

"2012: Supernova" mixes apples and oranges on SyFy

"Last Best Chance": 45 minute docudrama from Nuclear Threat Initiative demos problem of loose waste

ABC Nightline: Underground "Noah's Ark" bunkers

CBS 60 Minutes reviews raid on Pelindaba nuclear plant in South Africa; brazen attempt to steal HEU

NatGeo offers brief video on EMP threat (from high altitude nuclear blast)

"The Unit" epsiode rerun examines speculative underground sale of nuclear materials from Russia to Iran

CNN: "Toxic Towns USA" examines PVC, dioxin contamination in a small Louisiana town

The "BP Deepwater Horizon Spillcam mudsplosion": Here it is!

PBS: "The Storm that Drowned a City" and "the Hurricane of 38"

AC360 airs "American Al Qaeda", biography about New Yorker Bryan Neal Vidas

PBS Nova: "The Hunt for the Supertwister" airs right after deadly 2010 tornado outbreaks in OK, deep South

CBS 60 Minutes: the "Lone Wolf Problem"

Discovery Channel offers Stephen Hawking "extraterrestrial videos" with a sober warning; tonight: "Into the Universe"; "How the Universe Works"

MSNBC: "The McVeigh Tapes"

CNN: "Death and Taxes: Joe Stack's Attack on the IRS"