Egypt's Government Releases Criminals, Rapists, Murderers to Increase Chaos?

(video below) ABC news and other outlets this morning  interviewed non-government leaders in Egypt who declare that the Hosni Mubarak government has deliberately released violent criminals in order to "show" protesters what the country would be like without his strict rule.    Update HERE and here thousands of convicts flee prison
Yahoo news http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/ml_egypt_protest  reports that   


You Go Girl news sources say thousands pour out of prison

   "After days of escalating chaos, gangs of armed men attacked at least four jails across Egypt before dawn, helping to free hundreds of Muslim militants and thousands of other inmates. Gangs of young men with guns and large sticks smashed cars and robbed people in Cairo."

See how things are not always as they seem? We do not really know what is real.
What is the truth? Were the jails so weak that inmates easily "escaped"? Or does the Mubarak government see a benefit in releasing violent men into the streets so the people will say, "oops--sorry, make us safe again."



How much freedom do you give up to be Safe?

 In this country we are giving up freedoms at a quick pace; how much is actually necessary?

How strongly should our American government, Our Leaders, speak
 For The People in countries where there is oppression?
 How much KISSING UP do Our Leaders do in the name of "slow progress"
versus giving those who
ARE LOSING THEIR LIVES trying to live free
 the United States of America's Imprimatur to act for freedom?
Are there worse folks hoping to move into power,
behind the revolution??
waiting for the instability of the revolution?
Battles for Freedom:
abandoning iran
burmas-mad-men
afghanistan-native-folk
sharia-law-muslim brotherhood
american rape

By the way, Mubarak has kept Egypt under "emergency rule" for 30 years!
what is the Muslim Brotherhood?

More Info and Photo galleries:
jim lehrer interviews Biden


Is Janet Jackson in Egypt?

 Can anyone say Shah?

Here
http://www.iranian.com/main/2011/jan/learn-our-mistakes
  is a letter from and Iraninan to the Egyptians:
Excerpt: "29-Jan-2011
The world is watching the heroic uprising of the brave Egyptian people, and their just demand for political freedom, government accountability and a better living standard. Over 32 years ago, Iranian people did the same against the oppressive regime of the then Shah of Iran, for the same reasons.
My dear Egyptian brothers and sisters,
When we look back in our own lives, sometimes there are situations we wish we handled differently, had we KNOWN more, or had we been wiser. Life of a nation is no different. So I am writing to you, to share our experience, in the hope, the people of Egypt can do better than people of Iran, in dealing with their dictator, and build a better Egypt.
32 years ago, as the emotions of our nation were focused on the immediate removal of the Shah, our mind was not looking forward as to what to replace that old bankrupt system with? Today, not only are Iranian people no closer to a more accountable government nor better living standards, our social freedom along with our political freedom has been taken away from us as well.
Egyptian brothers and sisters,
Today in Iran, we don't have basic political freedom to assemble, as the Islamic Regime of Iran, does not allow freedom of assembly. Today, the Islamic Regime of Iran, does not even allow a candidate that passed its filtering process, and according to their own statistics received over 13 million votes, to hold a simple rally. How much freedom do you think an Iranian have today? Today, we do not have political parties. Even political factions are not tolerated within the Islamic regime.

My dear Egyptian brothers and sisters,
In spite of Iran's vast natural resources, many in Iran live in poverty and those who ask for accountability, are persecuted. So to flee Iran, appears to be the main option. As a result, some of the best and brightest talents of Iran, lives outside Iran, contributing to the host country who sheltered them instead of their own! MORE

Pictures from above link Lehrer intervews Biden

Neda Soltani We will not forget!

Neda Soltan Angel of Iran

The Media and World Struggle

U.N.?

US media parties with the Prez while Egypt Burns?

(gripe grype. what were you doing, writing concerned notes to your congressperson?)

i hope our government is  well on top of this lil egypt thingy

I liked the way Hillary Clinton did not let the press put words into her mouth this morning. (Yes i watched the stagecrap today as i needed the sleep)

Can the U.S. Government Hit the Kill Switch for Our Internet? (Stop saying kill!)

The U.S. Government already can? HERE committee-passes-plan-for-internet-kill-switch in U.S.
is the story.

Here is the scary Close Call story of the day. Yikes!! man-arrested-with-explosives-at-michigan-mosque



Full Speed aHEAD



Dogtooth

Titel: Kynodontas / Dogtooth
Genre: Drama
Land: Grekland
År: 2009
Regi: Giorgos Lanthimos
I rollerna: Christos Stergioglou, Hristos Passalis, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni

Handling: Utåt lever han ett vanligt liv – hemma hålls familjen isolerad. Helt utan vetskap om världen utanför har de uppfostrats i tron att katter är köttätande monster och att Frank Sinatra är deras farfar.

Omdöme: En äkta, kärleksfull grekisk familj - eller inte. Ja, det beror väl på hur man ser på saken. Det är iaf en skildring som väcker en del känslor och tankar, som säkerligen påverkar alla som ser den på ett eller annat sätt. Eftersom det hela nästan blir dokumentärt som att följa ett experiment känner jag aldrig att jag blir särskilt illa berörd eller helt indragen i vad som händer.



Jag tänkte tidigt på en annan film med liknande innehåll och det var mexikanska Daniel & Ana (2009) som jag dock fann bättre och mer engagerande. Samtidigt känner jag att detta påminner om något som Michael Haneke skulle göra, det är lite av hans stil över filmen (då tänker jag främst på originalet av Funny Games från 1997). Skådespelarna sköter sig bra och känns äkta i sina roller, utmanande roller måste sägas.



Några av de bättre bitarna med filmen är när barnen frågar sina föräldrar om olika ord som de snappat upp och inte vet betydelsen av. Bl.a. att ordet "zombie" betyder gul blomma. Det intressanta är också att när ett av barnen får tag på material från världen utanför blir hon mer förstörd än när hon var ovetandes. Samtidigt tycker jag inte man förklarar varför föräldrarna gör som de gör och inte heller vad de vill åstadkomma. Trots ett starkt ämne, som kan ses som komiskt även om jag bara bitvis gör det, känner jag inget speciellt. Kan bara konstatera att det är en konstig film som inte gav mig så mycket.



3 - Skådespelare
2 - Handling
3 - Känsla
3 - Musik
3 - Foto
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14 - Totalt

Betyg:
IMDb: 7.4

The Matrix

Titel: The Matrix
Genre: Action/Sci-Fi
Land: USA
År: 1999
Regi: Andy & Lana Wachowski
I rollerna: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, Joe Pantoliano

Handling: Det är något som inte stämmer i Neos liv, något är konstigt och han söker svaret på en fråga han inte känner till. En dag börjar bitarna falla på plats och han ställs inför valet att se sanningen och aldrig mer kunna återvända till lögnen...

Omdöme: Kanske den mest omtalade filmen som kom i slutet av 90-talet med sina revolutionerande effekter och sin ganska komplexa story. Keanu Reeves spelar Neo, eller Mr. Anderson som han också heter, och är en datahacker/programmerare när en grupp latexklädda personer tar kontakt med honom. De är ledda av Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) och Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) som är övertygade om att Neo är den utvalde som ska hjälpa dem i kampen mot agenterna som leds av Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving).



Med ett uppenbart grönaktigt filter och många gröna inslag genom filmens gång, bygger man sakta men säkert upp storyn som ska förklara för oss och Neo om vad det hela går ut på. Ska jag vara ärlig har jag aldrig varit särskilt förtjust i storyn och det känns än mer uppenbart att det hela är aningen för utdraget när man ser den så pass många år efter att den kom ut. För egen del köper jag inte hela konceptet som många andra gör, men det är en välgjord och på sina håll klart underhållande film.



Det finns inte så mycket att klaga på med valet av skådespelare. De gör vad de ska och även om Keanu Reeves är lite stel så köper jag det för rollen. Hugo Weaving passar också bra som Agent Smith som talar med utdragna ord i slutet av meningarna. Filmens starkaste sida är den avslutande fjärdedelen där man verkligen visar upp tekniken och cinematografin från sin bästa sida. Det hela börjar när Neo och Trinity ska försöka frita Morpheus. Detta parti höjer filmen ett snäpp och utan det hade filmen inte varit vad den är. Men det tar också en och en halv timme innan man når dit.



3 - Skådespelare
3 - Handling
4 - Känsla
3 - Musik
4 - Foto
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17 - Totalt

Betyg:
IMDb: 8.7

Steve Brodner's Afghanistan Art Cartoon: Wach this from PBS Need to Know

Steve Brodner: A home in Afghanistan, but whose? January 28, 2011
what an art form!
more here pbs need-to-know video-a-home-in-afghanistan-but-whose

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

excerpt from PBS's Need to Know: "President Obama barely mentioned Afghanistan in his State of the Union speech this week. He said the words “Afghanistan” and “Afghan” a total of eight times, if you’re counting, including his declaration that American troops will begin leaving Afghanistan this summer — which was a big applause line. As for what we’ll be leaving behind there — editorial cartoonist Steve Brodner has some thoughts."
See more Brodner editorial cartoons at his site.

The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist

Titel: Il cinico, l'infame, il violento / The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist
Genre: Action/Kriminaldrama
Land: Italien
År: 1977
Regi: Umberto Lenzi
I rollerna: Maurizio Merli, Tomas Milian, John Saxon, Renzo Palmer

Handling: Ett krig mellan den unge brottslingen "Chinaman" och gangsterbossen Frank Di Maggio börjar eskalera. Vem skall få kontrollen över Roms undre värld? Och vad har ex-polisen Leonardo Tanzi i görning?

Omdöme: Superblondinen Maurizio Merli spelar ex-polisen Leonardo Tanzi som efter ett mordattentat går under jorden för att lura sina fiender att tro att han dött. Men Tanzi har svårt att hålla sig undan när ett krig om Roms undre värld tar fart mellan mannen som kallas "Chinaman" (Tomas Milian) och gangsterbossen Frank Di Maggio (John Saxon). Snart har polisen fullt upp med döda kroppar, sönderskjutna affärer och blodiga gator.



Regissören Umberto Lenzi har verkligen fångat den italienska polisfilmen med en blandning av hårdkokt action och klockren humor i form av politiskt inkorrekta kommentarer och aktioner. Och det är inte bara en karaktär som står för dem, alla inblandade har sköna karaktärer. Men fokus ligger på de tre stora i Merli, Milian och Saxon som alla har sin stil och sitt tillvägagångssätt. Det blir till en underhållande film där det bara fattas en stor och bra biljakt för att vara komplett.



Trots högt underhållningsvärde saknas det något och det är väl en bra handling kanske med någon twist eller liknande. Filmen tappar även under sista tredjedelen, speciellt sin sköna humor som inte längre är lika närvarande som under första timmen. Men filmen har så många sköna ögonblick resten av filmen att detta är klart sevärt och underhållande om man gillar genren. Har svårt att välja vilken av de tre huvudpersonerna jag gillar mest då alla är bra.



3 - Skådespelare
3 - Handling
4 - Känsla
3 - Musik
3 - Foto
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16 - Totalt

Betyg:
IMDb: 6.9

Advert | Music | The Finest Piece Of Ass You'll Never Have

An interesting thing about Mad Men is that both its fiercest critics and its most dribbling fanboys draw upon a similar vocabulary when making their points.

Both camps’ starting points usually centering on the word ‘knowing’ – and then spinning off into rant or rapture about how this ‘knowingness’ is either intolerably smug or the only viable aesthetic treatment of a culture which viciously attacked women, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, men and women with even a passing interest in leftwing politics, whilst conceiving and celebrating new excesses of consumerism, vulgarity and kitsch. ‘Oh my, everything he says means something else too,’ murmurs a twenty-year-old identical twin halfway through Season One (the conquest of whom causes Roger Sterling to have a ‘coronary’) and truly Mad Men has become a by-word for winking doublethink. Take a recent CiF piece by Jonathan Freedland, discussing British republicanism and the King’s Speech:

Why do the Americans keep lapping up this stuff? Amateur psychology suggests it’s a collective case of projection. Americans take an aspect of themselves they don’t much like – in this instance, hierarchy and class difference – and dump it on someone else, in this instance us. Rigid, class-bound hierarchy can’t possibly happen in America, because look, there it is in Britain…with the US tacitly flattered by the contrast…But why do such stories work so well on us?...[There is] an element of Mad Men syndrome at work here. That excellent TV show flatters its audience, too: by exposing the gross sexism and racism of its 1960s characters, it implicitly praises the more advanced attitudes held by today’s viewers.

Another interesting thing about Mad Men is that seldom has this recognition of its effortless layering of irony been applied to its soundtrack. Actually, that’s not quite true – numerous CLEVER PEOPLE have noticed that, like, the second episode of Season One concludes with a song, The Great Divide, by the Cardigans, a band who, like, weren’t around in the early sixties, were they? Ergo, not all of the Mad Men music forms a part of the PERIOD DETAILING that folk are so into focussing on, for some reason.

And a more sophisticated reading of RJD2’s track, A Beautiful Mine – a brief cut of which accompanies Mad Men’s title sequence – has occasionally been attempted. Making some sense of the fact that a hip-hip producer sampling Autumn Leaves by Enoch Light – a man who produced the vast majority of his music during precisely the period during which Mad Men is set – might, like, represent a sorta musical mirroring of early-60s objects, lifestyles, attitudes, fashions being blended into an altogether contemporary television show. For Mad Men is not, after all, a Western like Bonanza; it is not a rock‘n’roll show like Hullabaloo. It bears, in short, absolutely no resemblance to early-60s television in its construction, choosing merely to depict an era, not become it (although it does make affectionate references to doing precisely that – Joanie becoming Shirley Maclaine in the Apartment in Episode 10 of Season 1, having earlier talked about the film with Roger – but in a knowingly noughties way).

And so having a contemporary framing of a contemporaneous fragment of music as a theme song makes coherent stylistic sense…

...And that’s where the commentary stops. At the bloody obvious, in other words.

Of course, it might sound bloody obvious to point out that Mad Men is a show about an era, rather than a show pretending to be of an era. But it’s something that simply isn’t emphasised enough, I think – particularly where the show’s accepted-too-much-at-face-value soundtrack is concerned. That there is residue all over the internet of people complaining about the fact Episode Two of Season One closed with a song by the Cardigans is concerning. Why shouldn’t a show utilising gorgeously contemporary cinematography, and laced with undertones of modern, liberal ideology, also play around with its own music? To say it shouldn’t is to suggest that music has no purpose to play in filmmaking beyond establishment of time, place, context atmosphere…

Indeed, atmosphere is at the heart of the standard complaint about 1.2 – that introducing the Cardigans at the end of an impeccably dated episode was a jarring, uncomfortable, emotionally confusing moment.

It’s easy to see where such a complaint comes from: one of the most original things about the Mad Men soundtrack is that it’s often impossible to tell whether the music you’re hearing is also being heard by the characters in a scene, from a jukebox or a radio. The man who scored the series, the excellently named David Carbonara, actually appears in an episode, as a member of the band in that hilarious beatnik club, what sing about weeping for Zion etc. In the publicity material orbiting the series, the music is often characterised as being chosen by the characters, rather than the producers. Here, for example, is Don Draper’s very own iTunes ‘radio playlist’ (as chosen by creator Matthew Weiner, but that's not important):

Misery – Barrett Strong

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes – The Platters

Late Freight – Dave Hamilton

The Big Wheel – Howard Crockett

More – Kai Winding & Claus Ogerman

(There’s a bunch of these and they’re actually pretty fun. Albeit in a rather cartoonised way: Savlatore’s features a track by Liberace, for fuck’s sake.)

In short, everything about Mad Men’s music is telling you that its only aim is to be swallowed up by the show’s created world – to be assimilated within it, rather than to mess about with it from the outside. Everything about Mad Men’s music is suggesting that there’s no reason to unpack it in the way one feels compelled to unpack the show's other components. Even those moments when you’d have to be blind, deaf, stupid and dead not to realise the music is referring to the content of an episode – Pete Campbell looking out over the New Yoik skyline whilst Manhattan by the Buddy Bregman Orchestra skips into the foreground, Peggy, erm, vibrating to an accompaniment of ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ – are framed in such a comforting, almost silly way, that they feel like a flamboyant closing flourish, rather than a representation of how the show works as a whole.

***

To let oneself think this way is, I think, to fundamentally miss the point of the show though – both its soundtrack and its totality. To not, indeed, think hard enough. To forget that, as well as being a show about the early 60s – more than being a show about the early 60s – Mad Men is a show about advertising. About adverts. Every cliché, every stylistic over-emphasis, every full-of-itself moment of every episode can be (not that they necessarily need to be – but they can be) justified as a reflection upon the framework of gorgeous, glamourised manipulation that was conceived and brokered by the Mad Men of the 50s and 60s. A framework that continues to define our every decision, opinion, choice, to this day. The things we think we choose to like about Mad Men are the things Mad Men is telling us to like about it. It is perhaps the world’s greatest advertisement for the potency of the aesthetics of advertising.

Which include, of course, music among their number. There’s a wonderful moment in an episode towards the end of Season One when Kennedy’s presidential advert is favourably compared to Nixon’s – Don describing the latter as ‘an advert made by a public relations team: message received, and forgotten.’ The difference: Kennedy’s ad comes with music, and ‘catchy’ music at that. One of Don’s underlings goes on to convey the effect of Nixon’s music-less advertisement via – what else? – a song:

Ethel, go get the ice-pick: that Nixon ad is on TV again.

The music of Mad Men is a constant reflection on the power of music to influence, to affect, to convince – in advertising, in television, in one's own imagination. That's why when Weiner explains, in the sleeve-notes accompanying Mad Men (Music from the Television Series) that the show’s soundtrack ‘is never an accident,’ that it attempts to ‘enhance the feeling of the period while offering an artistic commentary on the themes of each show’ (my italics), he isn’t referring to a cheesy coincidence of content and lyrical accompaniment, or to an underwhelming commentary on the coming together of old and new. He’s referring to the fact that when Christina Hendricks jessicarabbits through the Sterling Cooper offices, all 39D-30-39 of her, it is the trumpets and swing of Carbonara’s theme, choreographing her every movement with a kind of delicious intendedness, that ensure she truly is the finest piece of ass you'll never have. Unless, of course, you're Roger Sterling.

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

I should add that this is a reading of Season One of Mad Men, and Season One only. I'll write about the others when I've, y'know, watched them like.