Movie Review - "Loose Change"

(Brother Alexander gives us his take on the conspiracy movie "Loose Change.")

I've just viewed the documentary Loose Change (2nd Edition), a film which is growing in popularity and causing quite a controversy among anyone remotely interested in this century's turn of political events. It's primary message is that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11th were planned and executed by the U.S. government. As with many conspiracy theories, Loose Change bases it's theories off perceived anomalies in the way the September 11th attacks were reported.

Let me start, here, by stating my own point of view. I do agree with the basic premise of the film, that there was a huge coverup and (less than) masterful redirection of blame and attention committed. I do not necessarily agree with any of the conclusions this film jumps to, however. I feel the creators of this film are rank amateurs in the conspiracy world and wouldn't know a secret plan if it was jammed up their collective arses. It does have it's good points as well as the bad, however, and I wish to comment on those.

- Sequence -

I won't bother to restate any of their opinions or conclusions, since those are best heard from their own mouths, but I will give a brief overview of what is covered within the scope of the film. Loose Change opens with a brief history of the past plots and plans of thepolitical players at hand. Few, if any, sources are stated and we must take all of their history lesson at their word. I feel this is a bad position for the filmmakers to put themselves in, especially considering their credibility is the first thing on the chopping block.

They move next into the more common and "safe" concepts that surround the specific attack on the Pentagon that morning. The filmmakers then turn their attention on the twin towers, focusing their collected evidence towards the belief that the towers were brought down ultimately by explosive demolition charges. The filmmakers talk quitea bit about the flights being re-routed and replaced by drone aircraft, mentioning that the passengers were "disappeared" from normal society while their planes were replaced by automated drones and at least cruise missile. They also talk about Flight 93 that was, supposedly, taken back by the passengers and crashed in a field where virtually no wreckage nor bodies were found inside a 15-20 foot hole in the ground. Furthermore, they state that Flight 93 was sighted at an airport in Cleveland and that all of the cell phone calls from the flights were faked with recorded voices.

Lastly the filmmakers state repeatedly that bin Laden never claimed responsibility for the attack, that the government faked videos of him making these statements and that most of the terrorists that died for their cause in the attacks were alive and well in their home countries in the following days.

- The Good, The Bad and The Ugly -

While attempting to be "scientific" throughout the film, the filmmakers seem to be very confused about what temperature jet fuel will burn at, stating various temperatures throughout the film. They are very certain about the melting points of steel, however. It's a sad point since steel will melt at different temperatures and rates depending on what kind of steel it is. The filmmakers have completely ignored this point. A lot of assumptions are made throughout the film without the favor of expert testimony and often with the aid of misquoted scientists to back them up.

And this is how they completely lost me in their film - most of their"evidence" was brought forth via misquoting, placing video and quotes out of context and basing presumptions off non-expert opinions andstatements made in the heat of the moment. The film itself is very cheaply produced, but looks nice. They claim they spent $2k on theoriginal and $6k on the 2nd Edition, however virtually all of the special effects are easily produced with basic video editing software, much of the movie consists of simple screen captures of the GoogleEarth program and, from what I can tell, the majority of the movie consists of video footage and audio which was stolen without permission from the networks and other filmmakers. Indeed, Loose Change is in it's 2nd Edition for the very reason that some of theother filmmakers were threatening lawsuit if their misused footage wasn't removed.

If you can survive it, the entire film is narrated by a very dry monotone voice, reminiscent of the reading voice of Charlie Brown in the popular holiday cartoon specials. The narrator sounds completely disinterested throughout the film, which I believe was an attempt at making it sound like a serious film. I don't think they achieved this effect properly.

Regardless, there are a few good points to this film.. and I do believe it is at least worthy of a once-over look. First, it's free.They aren't out to make money. You can freely view this film on a number of internet sites, including Google Video. Second, while I do not agree with many of the theories put forward by the filmmakers, it does dare to question the official government statements and version of events that surround this confusing incident. I firmly believe the filmmaker gives a bad name to conspiracy theorists everywhere, but anything that makes people think a little harder (and more openly) about the situation is a good thing. Third... nope, I can't think of a third reason why this is a good film. Worthy of a view, perhaps, but as far as documentaries go I'd give it a three or four stars out of ten. Maybe lower than that considering they did not obtain proper permission for most of their footage use.

Visit the Wikipedia entry for further commentary and to be directed to where you may view it freely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_Change_(video) Or, try this one here.

Signing out from the Constitution State, Brother Alexander.

Weekend Update - September 29th

• Here's a real treat: Our good friend Danno and his grandson Jordan are a hit on YouTube.
• Is Keith Olbermann the next Edward R. Murrow?
• The learning curve of the magnificently obsessed. p m carpenter
• "You, Bill Clinton, and a Bowl of Chips." How campaigns use catchy titles to get you to open your E-mail.
• Here's the latest on our friend O'Reilly. This man is definitely becoming unhinged.
• And what's an O'Reilly without a Limbaugh?
• Our hilarious President: "Childrens do learn."
• Juan Cole reveals impeachable offenses by Bush. Let's do it!
• Wounded Vets Also Face Financial Woes. An American disgrace.
• Bill Kristol's "dark humor." What a putz.
• Krugman's excellent column on mercenaries in the military.
• Mark Morford's "Great American Hypocrisy Tour."

p.m. carpenter - A Colossal Swindle

p m carpenter's commentary

September 24, 2007
Demonizing the inconsequential: The happy hysteria of Monster-Making 101
Now this is startling -- assuming you haven't picked up a paper in the last six years or so: "Political analysts [in Iran] say they are surprised at the degree to which the West focuses on their president, saying that it reflects a general misunderstanding of their system."

It's only natural that the Bush administration should misunderstand. It's what it does. And if no troubling misunderstanding exists, it creates one, just to keep the dogs of war and distraction hungry. But if you caught that embarrassing "60 Minutes" interview with Majmoud Ahmadinejad last night, in which Iran's faltering president was treated with all the gravity of a virtual dictator, then you know the Bush administration isn't alone in fomenting misunderstandings. It can always count on assorted elements of the equally unschooled media.

Ahmadinejad is good copy, as the expression goes, mostly by virtue of having a big mouth. He's also the perfect and easily digested foil to our mountainous misunderstandings in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. And what a perfect face for a U.S. poster boy of unctuous evil -- one that slyly grins as it surely plots its nefarious schemes of global disorder and regional domination. It's always nice to put a face on these things, unless, of course, we don't know where the face is and can't find it.

But we know precisely where Ahmadinejad is and precisely what he's doing; or, perhaps, we have that muddled. No matter. For it may even be that we know precisely what we're doing in misunderstanding what Ahmadinejad is doing and can do, because clarity is the enemy of misunderstandings and all the happy military-industrial complexities that come with them. Better to leave things murky, and dark. They seem so much more intriguingly nefarious that way.

We're doing a bang-up job. For as Iranian insiders say of what's happening on the inside: "In demonizing [their] president ... the West has served him well, elevating his status at home and in the region at a time when he is increasingly isolated politically because of his go-it-alone style and ineffective economic policies."

"He's not that consequential," says one Iranian political scientist, who just previous to that comment nevertheless outlined the origins of his president's expanding consequence: "The United States pays too much attention to Ahmadinejad."

Of course it does. How, after all, can we have an inconsequential clown as the face of so many troubles?

Yet as his power and influence in Iran decline; as his economy tanks; as his political allies flee him (one former supporter's depth of support was reflected in merely having "liked [his] slogans demanding justice"); as some of his ministers walk out; as his head of the central bank resigns in disgust; as his judiciary takes potshots at him; as Iran's powerfully "entrenched interests" grow more disgruntled with his domestic misrule -- in the face of all this, Ahmadinejad's importance grows largely because of the "international condemnation he manages to generate when he speaks up."

Such condemnation feeds Iran's real power -- Ayatollah Khamenei and his fellow reactionaries -- rooted in a paranoid ideology: "Mr. Ahmadinejad’s power stems not from his office per se, but from the refusal of his patron[s] ... to move beyond Iran’s revolutionary identity, which makes full relations with the West impossible."

On the other hand, if we were so foolish as to show an interest in fomenting full and productive relations, we'd then be stuck without an enemy. There's always China, I suppose, but it's busily engaged in manufacturing our lethal toys, so best leave it for another day. Ahmadinejad is perfect for now.

Weekend Update - September 22nd

• The U.S. Government's plan to protect you from terrorist livestock.
• Someone you know interested in joining the military? Have them read this first: Top military recruitment lies.
• Mark Morford rejoices in the "Fall of the Godmongers."
• Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to justice. Michael Hirsh, in Newsweek.
• Petraeus is no General Smedley Butler.
• How George Bush became the new Saddam.
• p.m. carpenter has "A Conservative Epiphany."
• Wanna get your hackles up? Read "He Needed a Rescue."

What Bloody Nonsense!

(The following is the latest Letter to the Editor of the Register-Guard from Uncle Bob)

Tom Preuss (letter to the editor of 20 September) is extremely unhappy with the Register Guard for its “biased news” and “sickening” editorials and hopes to smile one day upon the “smoking crater” where the building containing the “shriveled souls” of its editors once existed.

I assume that such venomous hyperbole is merely evidence of a severe case of right-wing mental and moral indigestion and denial of reality and not evidence of a “maniacal barbarian” plot, as Mr. Preuss handily describes it in his letter, so I will not notify Homeland Security that a local citizen is recommending there be a “smoking crater” where our local newspaper building used to be.

So Mr. Preuss is home free, as far as I am concerned, and can continue to spread his poisonous gospel among us “shriveled souls” right here in River City.

And that he does; citing General Vo Nguyen Giap’s alleged remarks on the Vietnam War “currently found in the Vietnam War Memorial in Hanoi.”

General Giap is responsible for two memoirs; whether he actually wrote either of them personally is a matter for literary discussion. What is not at issue is the fact that he never said or wrote the comments quoted in Mr. Preuss’s letter. They are completely bogus, which should be evident to all concerned not only from the second sentence of the alleged remarks, which reads, “You had us on the ropes,.” an Americanization that no Vietnamese would ever use, and then the general’s alleged remarks that if it were not for the media “causing disruption in America” we “were ready to surrender.”

I must sum up Mr. Preuss’ allegations and quotations with three words:

What bloody nonsense!

ROBERT E. WINSLOW
Eugene, OR

Sunday Treat: p m carpenter

p m carpenter's commentary

September 15, 2007

The "Cult" of Republicanism: Simplicity as Idol

OK, Barry, I'll take your advice and simply blame it all on you. For as you, Mr. Goldwater, advised during your ill-fated 1964 presidential campaign: "The big trouble with the so-called liberal today is that he doesn't understand simplicity."

Problems? No problems, you said, as long as "we have the courage to face them.... Those who don't have that courage want complicated answers" -- a spirit of wholesale anti-intellectualism that prompted NYT columnist Tom Wicker to note that you're like a "child..., with a child's directness and lack of complexity."

From that '64 campaign, you, Barry, inadvertently created the New Republican Guard -- the New Right -- which morphed over the years into the blind, anti-intellectual monsters in control today; those who, in their pursuit of electoral dominance, trashed the electorally inept Old Guard's cherished principles of small government, balanced budgets and fiscal sanity.

And trash them they did -- soundly, solidly, completely -- endowing us with a bloated, supply-sided, debt-ridden, ineffective government; ineffective, that is, except for those who don't need it. The anti-intellectuals would merrily rake in the plutocratic cash to grease their political machine and further indulge the plutocracy, leaving the middle class and poor to fend for themselves. Socialism, as they say, for the rich; capitalism for the rest of us.

As columnist Jonathan Chait observes in a recent New Republic article, "Feast of the Wingnuts": "American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane. The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda. Notions that would have been laughed at a generation ago ... are now so pervasive, they barely attract any notice
.
"The result has been a slow- motion disaster," writes Chait, availing massive deficits, unsustainable income inequality and big government by business lobbyists.

Meanwhile the anti-intellectual politicos on the right hysterically charge that, for instance, rising income inequality -- buttressed by slashes in marginal tax rates and resulting in jumbo deficits which the middle class and poor will inherit -- is merely a demagogic fright-mantra of liberalism in its habitual campaigns of class warfare.

But the demagoguery was, and is, all theirs, of course. And now, as the economic chickens come home to roost, some of their then-gleeful co-conspirators are bellowing blame and fingering the real culprits. But only from a safe and sagacious distance.

The latest self-sparing, safety-first co-conspirer to rat out his pals is Alan Greenspan. Monday is the official launch of his delicious memoirs, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," in which -- from that familiar distance -- he not only fingers the culprits, he screws them but good.

According to a NYT advance peek, "Greenspan paints a picture of Mr. Bush as a man driven more by ideology" -- that would be the ideology of simplicity advanced by Barry Goldwater -- "and the desire to fulfill campaign promises made in 2000, incurious about the effects of his economic policy...."

Incurious. The perfect word. For when one possesses an all-encompassing, roundly simplistic ideology that makes intellectual strain a needless exercise, curiosity becomes merely a time-consuming interference with presidential bike rides.

Jonathan Chait's article delves deeply and insightfully into the origins of what he calls today's Republican "cult" of ideological economic madness. Some may care to read it. But me? I'll just take Goldwater's anti-intellectual advice and simplistically blame it all on him -- much as he did himself, after it was too late, and he saw what madness he had wrought.

Weekend Update - September 15th

• Because the Capitol Hill Police did not like a button this minister was wearing on his lapel, they banned him from entering the Petraeus hearing room and then attacked him and broke his leg when he resisted. Looks like Nancy Pelosi inherited a real problem when she took over responsibility for this bunch of Nazi wannabe's. I'm making my call to her office protesting this outrage, and hope that you will do the same. -Uncle Bob
• LEAVE GENERAL PETRAEUS ALONE!
• A war that isn't really a war. Mark Morford comments. Outstanding!
• Of all people, Alan Greenspan says the Iraq war was all about OIL. Holy crap, who woulda thought!
• Few Americans see an end in sight of the Iraq war.
• John McCain's Psycho Express keeps on rolling....
• How stupid does Bush think we are? And, another conspiracy theory. Oh, and here's one more.
• Good News: Non believers are becoming more vocal. Uncle Bob's comments are working!
• Did you like "Star Wars?" Check out "Rods From God."

Hamburgers, Brandy, and the Scientific Method

(Uncle Bob's comments below come from an otherwise innocent barbecue in my backyard, where there was a bit of brandy consumed, but no one came to blows. If anyone wishes to liven up an otherwise mundane backyard party, I suggest you invite Uncle Bob over. He never disappoints.)

In the midst of conversing on topics of interest while lubricating ourselves with our genial host’s brandy the other evening, my young friend (also a shirt tail relative) argued that since a scientific viewpoint is based on "faith" in the scientific method it is therefore no more credible or reliable than any other form of belief which may be based on faith, such as in holy scriptures, for example. Faith is faith, in other words.

This old atheist unbeliever leaped to the challenge of refuting this skewed and faulty premise, and the resulting discussion may have been heard several backyards away from our bower in Nephew John’s backyard.

My point, which I reiterated in every way I could think of, was that the scientific method is not based on fact or faith, but on trial and error. There are no “facts” in science, only theories. When a scientist proposes a new theory to explain his/her new view of reality, he/she is immediately challenged by his/her peers, who immediately set out to prove or disprove his/her findings by trying to replicate his/her results. If the results can not be replicated, the whole shebang gets consigned to the junkyard of “scientific” endeavor, such as recently happened when so-called cold fusion of atomic nuclei to produce endless energy could not be replicated anywhere outside the great state of Utah.

If further research validates the new theory, it becomes part of the scientific curriculum, but only as long as it can withstand further tests of its validity. And it is never a “fact.”

The process is called “peer review” and is not a friendly or tidy process. Scientific egos and professional reputations are at stake. As in all human enterprises, errors occur, but continual peer review pressure ensures that eventually all errors will be corrected.

Even with such checks and balances, scientific egos go astray. Native Oregonian Dr. Linus Pauling earned two Nobel prizes, one for Chemistry and one for Peace, but unfortunately is remembered primarily for his adamant and irrational advocacy of Vitamin C as a sure cure for the common cold. Most of his scientific colleagues were mum on the subject, perhaps because challenging the diktats of a Nobel Laureate on a topic of his choice is usually not a good career move.

Many of those folks who rushed out to buy Vitamin C to cure their colds soon decided that eminent scientist Dr. Pauling was a fraud so let's call him a phony and ask our pastor to lay on some hands.

So much for faith, and just as a reminder, a recent poll tells us that most Republicans believe that a Cosmic Supernanny created the entire universe about six thousand years ago, and Republicans are, unfortunaterly, half or more of this nation's true believers in whatever, such as who shall be our next president.


Uncle Bob

Weekend Update - September 8th

• Here's why it would be a good idea to keep Bush home cutting brush, or whatever it is he does.


• From The Nation: "Why We Must Leave Iraq."
• Just in time for September 11th, the man Bush promised to smoke out of his cave and get "dead or alive" is back.
• Local papers get the grim details about "non-combat" deaths.

Weekend Update - September 1st

• Sign this petition.
• Presenting the Pentagon's "three day blitz" plan for Iran.
• Bill Clinton is a "nasty, bad, naughty little boy." Okay Larry, whatever you say.....
• Is Bush REALLY planning a war on Iran?
• Visiting "The War Room." Right out of Dr. Strangelove.
• Happy Birthday and congratulation to Uncle Bob on being "86'd"
• Honoring the Fallen.
• It's Labor Day. Who do good working men and women turn to?
• Miss Teen South Carolina vs. George Bush. A mental face-off.