Murder on Falcon Lake

Drug cartel pirates control part of Falcon Lake on the Texas-Mexico border. Their savage murder of a Texas man may force Washington to finally address the violent border zone.

October 6, 2010 - by Bryan Preston
http://pajamasmedia.com/

September 30, 2010, is the date that may force the federal government to deal with the U.S.-Mexico border. On that date, Texans David and Tiffany Hartley were jet skiing on Falcon Lake. Only Tiffany would return alive.

David Michael Hartley, right, believed shot by Mexican pirates on Falcon Lake. (Personal Photo)

Dispatcher: Hello? Ma’am? Yes. Okay. Are you sure that your husband got shot?

Tiffany: Yes. In his head.

Dispatcher: Okay. Yeah. Was he thrown out of the jet ski that he’s in the water or something?

Tiffany: He was thrown off the jet ski and I couldn’t pick him up to get him on mine. (sobbing)

Oh God.

Dispatcher: Ma’am? Were you shot at on the Mexican side or on the US side? So it was the Mexican Side. Okay, did you see anybody?

Tiffany: There were three boats.

Falcon Lake straddles the Texas-Mexico border in a remote area between Laredo, TX, and Nuevo Laredo to the north and McAllen, TX, to the south. The Hartleys had stopped on the Mexican side of the lake to see the mission at Old Guerrero. Three boats belonging to pirates from the violent Zetas drug gang appeared out of nowhere and opened fire. The Zetas control the Mexican side of the lake and have turned it into something like a miniature version of the Somali coast, operating as pirates with near impunity. So far, Mexican authorities have questioned whether the shooting occurred, and have not allowed U.S. or Texas authorities in to search for Hartley’s body.

Up to September 30, the Falcon Lake pirates had never murdered Americans. But over the past several months, the Zetas have posed as game wardens and seized the boats of Americans enjoying the lake’s fishing. Having shaken down the fishermen for whatever valuables they had on board or on their persons, the pirates would let them go. And in June, authorities issued a very disturbing alert: The Zetas were plotting to destroy the Falcon Dam to strike out against a rival gang. That act had the potential to flood an area that is inhabited by about four million people.

But an uptick in violence was always inevitable: The Zetas are also involved in the civil war that has raged in Nuevo Laredo for the past several years. That war has seen everything from assassinations of public officials to bombings to beheadings to gun battles that leave neighborhoods looking like sections of Baghdad in the height of the Iraq war. I have cell phone video of the aftermath of a Nuevo Laredo gun battle that took place in July, but it’s so graphic that YouTube won’t host it. PJTV’s Brandi Milloy has hosted a terrific series on the Arizona border.[1] This story from Al Jazeera English, about the assassination of a leading political candidate this year, gives some hints as to just how violent the drug war there has become.[2]

Only the Rio Grande and a border checkpoint separate Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo. And at Falcon Lake, there’s nothing stopping the drug cartels from capturing Americans, robbing them, firing on them, and in the case of David Hartley, murdering them in cold blood. On the Fox News Wednesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry weighed in on the tragedy, the U.S. government’s failure to secure the border, and the Mexican government’s refusal to let Americans in to help search for Hartley’s body. And he revealed that David Hartley is actually the third American recently murdered on the border:

Just a week ago, we had two Americans killed assassination-style on the border in northern Hidalgo County. There are places along the border, Gretchen, that it is out of control. I don’t know how many more Americans have to lose their lives before the federal government steps in and sends the troops.

Bullets from gunfights in Ciudad Juarez have flown across the border and struck buildings, including City Hall, in El Paso. Nuevo Laredo is a war zone. And innocent American lives are being lost.

For their part, the Obama administration is sending in National Guard troops: About 1200 for the entire U.S.-Mexico border started arriving in August. But just in Texas, that border stretches nearly 800 miles. When Gov. Perry sensibly requested more troops, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano laughed him off.

How the Falcon Lake murder impacts politics and the race for Texas governor remains to be seen. Both Perry, the 10-year incumbent, and Democratic nominee Bill White have staked claims to being the best solution for border security. Perry has twice tried to meet with President Obama during visits to Texas to discuss the issue, and has been rebuffed both times. White never criticized Obama’s refusals, and has claimed that he can use his connections with the administration to get more action than Perry can. But as mayor of Houston, White presided over a sanctuary city, and the administration is exploiting the border to create racial tension in the hopes of locking in Hispanic voters as a Democratic bloc. Both Perry and White have gone on the record opposing Arizona-style laws that would empower local and state police to take more active roles in enforcing immigration law. Most in White’s party agree with that stance; most in Perry’s party disagree.

The Texas legislature, which won’t be in session until 2011, will have its own ideas regardless of whether Gov. Perry holds onto his large lead in the race or White slips up on him. Republicans are likely to capture up to 10 new state House seats in the November elections, giving them a solid hold on both houses of the legislature and all statewide offices. This increase in the House will move the caucus to the right, and several legislators have already said that they will propose Arizona-style laws for Texas next year. Such a law is likely to pass, putting the next governor on the spot to accept it or veto it. After the Hartley murder, a veto would be political suicide.

Regardless of what the Texas legislature does or does not do, securing the border is a federal responsibility, and the federal government has failed in its duty whether Republicans or Democrats have been in charge. The Obama administration, though, has taken this record of irresponsibility and added aggression against border states to it, by laughing off Texas’ requests and by suing Arizona to get its security law struck down. That lawsuit is not only controversial and unpopular across America, it has attracted intervention by 11 foreign countries — including Mexico.

Looking ahead, should Texas pass such a law, will the Obama administration put Texas in its lawsuit crosshairs? If it does, it will be facing a Texas that has already just about run out of patience with the Washington Democrats’ hard left social policies, and it will be facing Attorney General Greg Abbott. Abbott is one of the fiercest attorneys general in the country, already at legal war with the administration over its use of the EPA to stop Texas’ effective air cleanup program and ObamaCare. They don’t say “Don’t mess with Texas” for nothing. If the Obama administration attacks Texas again, Texas will fight back.

Whatever happens between now and the 82nd session of the Texas legislature next year, the tragedy of David Hartley’s murder is an outrage and it is galvanizing an already angry Texas that wants the federal government to do the jobs the Constitution tells it to do, and leave the rest to the states as the Constitution says. Texans have long been more than tolerant of the illegal immigrant population here, but have also long wanted real action to secure its border with Mexico so we can know who is coming here and what their intentions are. The drug war is changing the nature of the border, though, and along with that, Texans’ patience is running short. David Hartley’s murder may be the event that forces politicians from Austin to Washington to finally take real action.

If Washington doesn’t move, Texas will.

Update: Gov. Perry is calling on Mexico’s President Calderon to step up the search for Hartley’s body and wants a report within 48 hours.

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, hails from Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

Links:

[1] http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=174&load=4110

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kyVB7-0_ew

Embassy-Bombing Trial in Jeopardy

Civilian due-process standards are crippling the government’s case.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
October 6, 2010 4:00 A.M.


FBI pictures show Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa. Photograph: Reuters

Ahmed Ghailani has confessed to bombing the U.S. embassy in Tanzania twelve years ago. As he explained to the FBI in a series of 2007 interviews, he bought the TNT used in the explosion. He even identified the man from whom he purchased it — a man who was subsequently located, who corroborated Ghailani’s confession, and who has been cooperating with American and Tanzanian authorities ever since. Ghailani also helped buy the truck and other components used to carry out the suicide attack.

The two simultaneous embassy bombings — Ghailani’s in Dar es Salaam and a second, more devastating one at the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya — killed at least 224 people. The bombings made Ghailani, then in his early 20s, an icon of the jihad. He strode al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan and bonded with fellow terrorists, including some who would later conduct the 9/11 attacks. In fact, Ghailani was so highly regarded that he was chosen to serve as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden himself.

All of that should make Ghailani’s trial, which is slated to begin in Manhattan federal court this week, a slam dunk. It is, however, anything but. Once again, politics has trumped national security and common sense.

The Obama administration has made Ghailani its test case to prove that the civilian criminal-justice system works perfectly well in wartime against enemy combatants — to show that we don’t need military commissions or other alternatives specially tailored to address the peculiarities of terrorism cases. The administration figured Ghailani was a safe bet. After all, the embassy-bombing case had already been successfully prosecuted once: In 2001, prior to 9/11, four jihadists were tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment (although the jury voted to spare the two death-penalty defendants).

Yet, to prove its political point that there is no downside in vesting Ghailani — a Tanzanian national whose only connection to the United States is his decision to make war on it — with all the constitutional rights of an American citizen, the Justice Department has had to slash its case. DOJ is also finding that even more critical evidence may be suppressed by the trial judge. In short, the slam dunk has become a horse race, one the government could actually lose.

The jury won’t be hearing about Ghailani’s confession. It has been reported that, because he was a highly sought and highly placed al-Qaeda operative, Ghailani was subjected to harsh interrogation tactics by the CIA after being captured in Pakistan in 2004. To be sure, no jury should be permitted to hear a coerced confession. That is not because an alien terrorist held outside the U.S. in wartime has Fifth Amendment rights; it is because a proceeding in which a person is forced to be a witness against himself does not meet rudimentary standards of justice. Nevertheless, we are not referring here to what Ghailani may have told the CIA under duress; we are talking about the confession he gave the FBI three years later. The FBI does not use the CIA’s controversial tactics.

There was nothing unlawful about holding Ghailani as an enemy combatant in wartime. Indeed, the trial judge, Lewis Kaplan, has already rejected the terrorist’s claim that this detention violated his (purported) right to a speedy trial. Furthermore, CIA coercion would not undermine the validity of subsequent lawful treatment of Ghailani by other government actors. Judge Kaplan has also turned aside the terrorist’s claim that the prosecution must be dropped because he was “tortured.” Similarly, the CIA’s tactics do not render the FBI’s subsequent questioning unlawful.

Clearly, however, the prosecutors in New York do not want the trial to devolve into theater over the CIA interrogation methods. Were the government to try to prove Ghailani’s statements to the FBI, defense lawyers would have latitude to summon the CIA interrogators. They would argue that the CIA’s earlier, rough tactics tainted Ghailani’s subsequent, seemingly voluntary confession. The Justice Department is determined to steer clear of that controversy, and of any criticism that it exploited Bush-era tactics, even indirectly. But there’s a trade-off: The jury won’t learn that Ghailani admitted to planning the bombing, buying the TNT, and being celebrated afterward as an al-Qaeda hero.

The Justice Department figured it could roll those dice because it has a witness, Hussein Abebe, who is prepared to testify that he sold Ghailani the TNT. Not so fast, say Ghailani’s lawyers. They argue that the government learned about Abebe only because of Ghailani’s confession. By their lights, having agreed not to use it, the government implicitly concedes that the confession is toxic; therefore, the argument goes, it is no more proper for prosecutors to call a witness discovered because of the confession than it would be to use the confession itself.

Prosecutors reply that there is a big difference between using admissions pried from a defendant under coercion and merely calling a witness. The government may inevitably have found the witness anyway. Moreover, even if the confession tipped the government off to Abebe’s existence, he is a volunteer, providing testimony of his own free will.


Bombings of the Nairobi, Kenya, US embassy (left), and the Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, US embassy (right). [Source: Associated Press]

Surprisingly, Judge Kaplan appears to be siding with the defense in this dispute. In a heavily redacted 37-page ruling issued in August, Kaplan concluded that the government had failed to meet the exacting burden required to show that it would inevitably have learned about Abebe without Ghailani’s confession. More dismayingly, the judge was unmoved by the government’s contention that the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine was inapposite.

Prosecutors argued that this doctrine — a Fourth Amendment suppression-of-evidence remedy invented by judges — was designed to discourage bad behavior by police (specifically, unlawful searches). To the contrary, the FBI’s questioning of Ghailani had been legal and in the national-security interest of a country at war with a ruthless terror network about which Ghailani has intimate knowledge.

Kaplan, however, accepted the theory pushed by the defense: that Ghailani has full-fledged Fifth Amendment rights, and that any coercion from the CIA interrogation infected all later government questioning of him. Thus, according to the judge, even if the FBI’s interrogation was proper, Abebe’s testimony could still be barred because a Fifth Amendment violation occurs, not when information is coerced, but when the coerced information is used against the accused.

Kaplan is more amenable to the government’s argument that Abebe is willing to testify of his own free will — in other words, that the witness’s voluntary act would be an independent development, one not directly caused by the coercion of Ghailani. Even here, though, the judge remains unconvinced. True, the government has represented that Abebe is voluntarily cooperating; but it has not proven that he is doing so. According to Judge Kaplan’s opinion, there has been no affidavit from the witness himself, nor any testimony from CIA, FBI, or Tanzanian officials about the circumstances of Abebe’s apprehension and eventual cooperation. The judge has not slammed the door on prosecutors, but he has indicated that the testimony will be barred absent a compelling demonstration that this witness — fully aware that he is under no obligation to provide evidence against a terrorist mass murderer — actually wants to come to New York and testify, and is not acting under any duress from U.S. or Tanzanian authorities.

If Abebe’s testimony were stricken, the Justice Department’s case would be deeply — and perhaps fatally — wounded. As one prosecutor told the court, “This is a giant witness for the government. There’s nothing bigger than him.” Without Abebe, prosecutors could not establish that Ghailani obtained the TNT. He’d be able to argue that his having helped a friend buy a truck does not mean he knew people were planning to use the truck in a bombing, much less to strike an American embassy. Even proving the truck purchase could be problematic. As Ben Weiser of the New York Times relates, it’s been nine years since the last embassy-bombing trial, and the owner of the truck — a witness in that case who helped establish that Ghailani participated in the truck’s purchase — has since died.

Ghailani’s trial was supposed to start Monday. It has been postponed until today to allow the court to resolve the witness issue. If Abebe’s testimony is disallowed, the government will almost certainly appeal, potentially delaying the trial for weeks, if not longer.

Playing with fire like this is no way to prove a point. Maybe the Justice Department will convince the courts to permit the testimony of their crucial witness. Maybe the very talented prosecutors in Manhattan will even figure out a way to convict Ghailani without Abebe’s testimony. But we are intentionally tying our hands behind our backs and running an unnecessarily high risk of acquittal in a case involving a war criminal.

Civilian trials have a vital place in our counterterrorism strategy — particularly in the terrorism-financing cases that the Obama administration shuns because they involve ostensible Islamic charities. Still, it is no denigration of civilian prosecutions to point out that in a military commission — the procedure Congress has designed and reaffirmed for war-crimes trials of enemy combatants — there would be fewer hurdles to placing the most important evidence before the tribunal.

Military commissions need not assume that a defendant is endowed with all the rights of American citizens. They need only be fair. Of course, coerced confessions would be suppressed. Voluntary confessions, however, would be admissible. Available witnesses would be permitted to testify. Prior testimony from unavailable sources might well be considered as long as it appeared reliable — such as the sworn testimony of a now-deceased witness who was subject to cross-examination. Nor would military commissions elbow the Justice Department out of the mix: Experienced federal prosecutors would be able to try the cases along with their military counterparts, just as civilian defense attorneys join military lawyers in the representation of defendants.

This shouldn’t be about scoring points. It should be about maximizing the chance of convicting a terrorist with American blood on his hands.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Truth On Trial

Posted by Robert Spencer on Oct 5th, 2010
http://www.frontpagemag.com/


How imperiled is the freedom of speech? Take this passage from Slate magazine: “In 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered after making anti-Muslim remarks, as was the anti-immigrant politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002. Why is there so much anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Netherlands?”

If Slate flipped those sentences, they’d have their answer. If there is any actual “anti-Muslim rhetoric” in the Netherlands, it is because those who dare to point out the outrages against human rights that Islamic law sanctions get murdered; and those who are still alive are vilified, marginalized, smeared, and put on trial – like Dutch politician and freedom fighter Geert Wilders, whose trial resumed Monday.

“I am on trial, but on trial with me is the freedom of expression of many Dutch citizens.” So said Wilders as his trial reopened in Amsterdam. Wilders faces a year in prison or a fine of up to 7,600 euros for supposedly inciting hatred against Muslims – which he has supposedly done by telling the truth about how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam themselves to incite hatred and violence against non-Muslims. If anyone should be on trial for “hate,” it should be the jihadist imams depicted in Wilders’ film Fitna – but in the hyper-politically correct Netherlands of today, the only offender is the non-Muslim who dared to call attention to the hatred they preach: Geert Wilders.

On Monday, after asserting that the freedom of expression of many Dutch citizens was on trial, Wilders continued: “I can assure you, I will continue proclaiming it.” He added: “I am sitting here as a suspect because I have spoken nothing but the truth. I have said what I have said and I will not take one word back, but that doesn’t mean I’ve said everything attributed to me.” Then he asserted the right to remain silent for the remainder of the proceedings — whereupon the presiding judge, Jan Moors, claimed that Wilders had gotten a reputation for making bold proclamations but then refusing to discuss them, saying that he was “good in taking a stand and then avoiding a discussion.” Moors added: “By remaining silent, it seems you’re doing that today as well.”

At that, Wilders’s attorney, Bram Moszkowicz, moved to have Moors removed for his bias, and the just-resumed trial ground to a halt. Wilders commented: “I thought I had a right to a fair trial, including the right to remain silent. It is scandalous that the judge passes comment on that. A fair trial is not possible with judges like that.”

A ruling will be made Tuesday on Moszkowicz’s motion, which, if granted, could delay the trial for months. But if the Dutch authorities had any sense of what is really at stake, they would drop all charges against Wilders and adjourn the trial for good. The Wilders trial is a turning point for the West: will Western authorities defend the hard-won principle of the freedom of speech as a bulwark against tyranny and the establishment of protected classes that enjoy rights that other citizens do not have, or will they – in the interests of suicidal political correctness — allow Islamic supremacists to obliterate that freedom in the interests of establishing in the West the Sharia principle that Islam is not to be questioned or criticized, especially by non-Muslims?

If they succeed in doing this, Europeans and Americans will be rendered mute, and thus defenseless, in the face of the advancing jihad and attempt to impose Sharia on the West. It is no coincidence that one of the key elements of the laws for dhimmis, non-Muslims subjugated under Islamic rule, is that they are never critical of Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur’an. Thus this prosecution in Amsterdam not only aids the advance of Sharia in the West, but is itself an element of that advance.

This is part of an ongoing initiative by the 57-government Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). In 2008 the Secretary General of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, issued a warning: “We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed” regarding free speech about Islam and jihad terrorism. Even at that time, he reported success: “The official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.”

Since then, Ihsanoglu must be more than pleased by how successful his offensive against the freedom of speech in the West is proving to be. Wilders is on trial for charges including having “intentionally offended a group of people, i.e. Muslims, based on their religion.” If intentionally offending someone is a criminal offense, numerous Islamic supremacists could end up in court, but of course that is not the purpose for which the law was drafted. The Dutch political establishment hopes to use the Wilders trial to stop his rise in Dutch politics, since he challenges so many of the core assumptions upon which current Dutch and European Union policy are based. Since one of those policies is unrestricted immigration from Muslim countries, Dutch officials hope to discredit Wilders’s work in exposing how Islamic jihadists use violent passages of the Qur’an to justify violence and supremacism.

Unfortunately for them, however, Wilders really is telling the truth: Islamic jihadists really do use the Qur’an to justify violence and supremacism, and as I show in my book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, there is plenty in the Muslim holy book that they can use in this way. As my colleague Pamela Geller has noted, “Truth is the new hate speech” – and nowhere is that aphorism truer than in the trial of Geert Wilders. The Dutch authorities can jail and fine Wilders, and do their best to discredit him domestically and internationally, but there is one thing neither they nor anyone else can do: engage him in honest debate and prove him wrong. And so instead, we have this Stalinist show trial.

Wilders has stated the problem plainly: “I am being prosecuted for my political convictions. The freedom of speech is on the verge of collapsing. If a politician is not allowed to criticise an ideology anymore, this means that we are lost, and it will lead to the end of our freedom.”

Wilders’s words are true not just for the Netherlands, but for all of Europe – and ultimately for the United States of America as well.


Related Links:

http://www.slate.com/id/2269658?wpisrc=newsletter

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/10/05/dutch-courage-liberal-cowardice/

To view Geert Wilders' film Fitna click on link below:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/03/here-is-fitna.html

Environmental Endgame

Among the Intellectualoids

By Matt Purple on 10.5.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org

I have an idea for a commercial. A teacher is speaking to a class of students about how the United States is in grave danger. She warns her young charges that spending is out of control, government has become too big, and bureaucrats have too much power. She lectures that the government has expanded far beyond its constraints which are laid out in the Constitution. She then asks the students if they will join the local Tea Party and fight to restore America to its founding principles. All the little tykes -- first or second graders -- raise their hands, except for two. The teacher reassures the dissenters that this is okay. "No pressure," she says. She then presses a red button on her desk. The two children explode in a red flash, splashing gore on the other horrified students. The apathetic teacher then starts assigning homework.

Political advertising at its finest, wouldn't you agree?

Actually, if I ever even suggested such a commercial for the Tea Party (let alone actually made one), I'd be rightly branded a sociopath. The media would devote wall-to-wall coverage to the commercial for six months. Think Progress would try to trace my funding back to the Koch brothers. The Southern Poverty Law Center would declare the Tea Party a hate group. Keith Olbermann would drive the point home by literally exploding on air.

But almost the exact same commercial was released by the 10:10 Global environmentalist group, murdered children and all. The only difference was that the homicidal teacher hit the detonate button after two children were reluctant to cut their carbon emissions. The four-minute piece went on to show several corporate workers, a soccer player, and a radio host played by Gillian Anderson (of X-Files fame) meeting the same grisly demise. The final shot refers viewers to 10:10's website while streaks of blood and Anderson's eyeballs gush down the screen.

It's perhaps the darkest, vilest, most disturbing political ad ever concocted. Incredibly, it was produced for 10:10 by Richard Curtis, the British comedy writer behind legendary shows like Blackadder and Mr. Bean. Curtis apparently believed that exploding children would be a real knee-slapper. The rest of the civilized world disagreed. Within hours of the video's release, frantic greenies were trying to yank it off YouTube as the conservative blogosphere reacted with disgust. Ed Morrissey called it "the dumbest most self-defeating campaign ad ever."

It's not like 10:10 Global is some fringe eco-terrorist group. They're a worldwide campaign funded by big-name donors like Sony and Kyocera. They've already extracted a promise from Britain's Conservative government to reduce its carbon output by 10% in one year. Hundreds of businesses, colleges, and schools have pledged to do the same. That makes 10:10 a big player on the environmentalist team.

And yet they managed to produce this splatterfilm dreck. It would have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall during that meeting. Say Frank, you know what would make people like us more? Let's blow up children who disagree with us and then laugh about it. All this time I've been worried that climate hysterics were a savvy and well-organized intellectual machine. Take heart, doubters! If this ad is any indication, our opponents make up the most dithering collection of socially maladjusted morons ever assembled on the very planet they're trying to save.

As The American Spectator reported on Friday, 10:10 reacted to the controversy by claiming they'd "missed the mark" in their attempt at humor. In an e-mail to Mark Morano, the group noted that the commercial "was intended for a British audience." We Americans lacked the perceptive wit needed to truly understand their message. Apparently the same British sense of humor that produced Monty Python, Keeping Up Appearances, and The Thick of It has now been reduced to belly-laughing at exploding youngsters.

Except, of course, the Brits condemned 10:10's macabre skit with the same ferocity as their across-the-pond neighbors, particularly Telegraph columnist James Delingpole who popularized the story.

It's a shame Dr. Michael Crichton isn't around to see all this. Crichton, the author of countless brilliant techno-thriller novels and a scientific genius in his own right, gave a groundbreaking speech in 2003 in which he claimed environmentalism was a fundamentalist religion. (Crichton is one of those recalcitrants who would have been blown to bits in the 10:10 ad.) For environmentalists, Crichton claimed, there is an impending apocalypse and sustainability is the only way to achieve salvation.

"Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary," Crichton said, "because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them."

For true green believers, those who question anthropogenic global warming are "them" -- the apostates. Thanks to these doubters who refuse to shop with cloth bags, the environmental apocalypse draws ever closer. So why not detonate them in a gory mess? As Franny Armstrong, founder of 10:10, said, "We 'killed' five people to make No Pressure [the title of the commercial] -- a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change."

It's the same religious zeal that drives John Holdren, the most powerful environmentalist in the world and Barack Obama's climate advisor. Holdren co-authored a book with spectacularly discredited population hysteric Paul Ehrlich in which he called for the world to be depopulated. Among Holdren's solutions were forced abortions and compulsory sterilizations for women. Lives and liberties were both expendable to stop the coming apocalypse.

It's why progressives universally refer to those who question global warming as "climate deniers." We're not just offering a different opinion on a scientific issue. We're denying a fundamental truth, like the Holocaust or the resurrection.

It's why hacked e-mails from East Anglia University showed climate scientists trying to blackball those who questioned climate change. Dissenting thought is heretical and cannot be tolerated.

Now, thanks to the public relations imbeciles over at 10:10 Global, we have our greatest proof yet that radical environmentalism is a religion. The gory deaths in the commercial were only secondarily an attempt at humor. They were primarily a masturbatory fantasy for the acolytes of environmentalism. As 10:10 admitted (before the outrage), "It's a fairly simple and to-the-point premise, I'm sure you'll agree: we celebrate everybody who is actively tackling climate change… by blowing up those who aren't." Among the deniers, there would be great wailing and gnashing of teeth, no doubt.

Fortunately, there's a solution for we heathens. For October 10, 10:10 is planning a day of global climate action that will supposedly be held in 140 countries. Want to protest their evil ad? This Sunday, leave your car idling in the driveway. Crank your heat up before you leave the house. Grab a couple of aerosol cans and point them skywards.

Don't think of it as destroying Mother Earth. The earth will be just fine. Think of it as an act of protest against Mother Church.


Matt Purple is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

10:10 Video - 'No Pressure'

(Click on title to play video)

Dinesh D’Souza on the Anti-Colonial Business

Explaining President Obama, rereading Dreams from My Father.

http://www.nationalreview.com
October 5, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Dinesh D’Douza’s new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, has a reputation that precedes it — in large part due to some advance buzz from Newt Gingrich and a piece in Forbes. Now that the book is on shelves, in a conversation with NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, Dinesh D’Souza seeks to set the record straight about The Roots, and Obama.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What makes you so sure you know how Obama thinks?

DINESH D’SOUZA: It’s really simple: I figure out how Obama thinks by reading what Obama writes and says. My theory about Obama is really derived from Obama himself. It’s quite silly how people are saying things like, well, Obama didn’t really know his absentee father, so he couldn’t have been influenced by him. Go read his book, starting with the title Dreams from My Father. The whole book is about how Obama shaped his values, personality, and identity in the image of his father. So I took Obama at his word on this and then asked the question, “If Obama took his father’s anti-colonial ideology, how does that help to explain his policies?” Not only it does it explain Obama’s foreign and domestic policy, it also explains lots of little details about Obama’s actions that no other theory can explain.


LOPEZ: Be honest. You were worried everything had been said about Barack Obama, so you looked for something new and found yourself in Kenya.

D’SOUZA: Actually, I started with another theory about Obama, no less original. My working hypothesis was that Obama was really a civil-rights guy — shaped, that is, by the ideals of the civil-rights movement. This would explain Obama’s fierce allegiance to the federal government. After all, it was the federal government that desegregated the schools; the federal government helped to create a black middle class; to this day, blacks are much more sympathetic to the federal government than whites. So this was my theory: Obama is a civil-rights guy, but his innovation was to take the black civil-rights agenda and remove the word “black.” It was only when I began to study Obama’s own background that I realized that my theory was wrong. Obama has little or nothing to do with the civil-rights movement. His roots are in Kenya, and he is shaped far more by anti-colonialism than by anything that Martin Luther King said or did.


LOPEZ: Much of your argument could have been made during the presidential campaign — based on Barack Obama’s own writings. Why is it new and important now?

D’SOUZA: My argument is relevant now because if we know what motivates Obama, we have his compass. Not only can we explain what he is doing, but we can also predict what he is going to do in the future. For instance, there is a lot of speculation now about whether Obama will be a centrist after the midterm election, like Bill Clinton became after 1994. My theory says that he won’t because he cannot. Clinton was largely a non-ideological guy. If Obama came by his liberalism in the faculty lounge, then sure, he can see it hasn’t worked and he can modify it. But if Obama got his formative ideas when he was very young, and if they are the result of his traumatic relationship with his father, then they are built into his psyche. He’s not going to change because, to his anti-colonial mindset, meeting the Republicans halfway is a form of sellout. He would be untrue to his principles if he were to cut deals with a group that he considers to be the neocolonial party.

LOPEZ: You write that “Obama recognized that he had to deliver radical and even revolutionary themes in a bland, anodyne way so that they could cross the threshold of political acceptability.” Isn’t that just smart politics?

D’SOUZA: Yes. We can all admire the skill with which Obama does this. Somehow he has the ability to translate the dreams of his father — a Luo tribesman from the 1950s — into language that mainstream America can understand. So Obama doesn’t say, “I don’t care whether Iran gets a nuclear weapon; my goal is to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal because I consider America to be the world’s rogue nation.” Instead, Obama says, “I want a world free of nuclear weapons.” And the only practical action he takes in this connection is to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal, while North Korean continues its nuclear buildup and Iran continues to move closer to acquiring a nuclear bomb.


LOPEZ: If you have so much in common with Barack Obama, how did you wind up as a conservative intellectual, now president of an evangelical university?

D’SOUZA: Obama remains frozen in his father’s time machine. His anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of Africa in the 1950s: state confiscation of land, confiscatory taxation, and so on. My anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of India in the 21st century. Recently, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, gave a speech at Oxford in which he gave two cheers for colonialism. He said India is growing fast and is on its way to becoming a superpower. How? Because the Indians speak English, they have technology, they have universities, they have property rights, they have democracy. And why do they have these things? They got them from the British. Now, Singh could never have said that a generation ago. But the world is changing. Poor countries today have a better solution to the legacy of colonialism. They are able to use their cheap labor costs to make what other people want to buy. This is what the economist Thorstein Veblen once called “the advantage of backwardness.” So the difference between Obama and me is that I have embraced the new world of globalization and free trade, and he continues to be haunted by his father’s ghost.


LOPEZ: Why does Barack Obama look so angry on the cover of your book?

D’SOUZA: Obama looks angry on the cover because he is angry. The cover image captures Obama’s suppressed rage and is true to the argument of the book.


LOPEZ: I know from listening to him that he’s condescending and annoyed at the fact that he has critics, but rage? What justifies use of that word? How has “rage” manifested itself in the Obama administration?

D’SOUZA: Some people consider Obama very serene because he talks about issues like equality and the poor in a very calm manner. He sounds like he is reading from his tax return. Some liberals are confused, and say that Obama must be a very cerebral guy. But there is an alternative explanation. He sounds bored about these issues because he doesn’t care about them. He isn’t motivated by poverty or inequality. He is motivated by hatred of the rich and the banks and the investment companies and the drug companies. Notice that when Obama speaks about these groups, his lip curls and his face darkens and he shows real passion. That’s when he wants to, in his words, “kick ass.” So there is a sublimated rage in Obama that is reminiscent of the rage of Barack Obama Sr., a man who often sat outside his hut and went into drunken rages against the West for denying him the fulfillment of his anti-colonial dreams.

LOPEZ: What are some clear examples of how this anti-colonialist mindset can be seen in the presidency of Barack Obama?

D’SOUZA: Ramesh Ponnuru and others say Obama is a conventional liberal. But conventional liberals don’t come out for the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Conventional liberals don’t return the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. Conventional liberals don’t block oil drilling in America while subsidizing oil drilling in Brazil. Conventional liberals don’t try to turn the space agency NASA into a Muslim-outreach program.

My anti-colonial theory beautifully explains all these facts. If Obama views America as the neocolonial occupier of Iraq and Afghanistan, then Muslims fighting against America are anti-colonial resisters and deserve a measure of sympathy; no wonder Obama has no problem with releasing the Lockerbie bomber. Obama hates Churchill because Churchill was the prime minister who cracked down on an anti-colonial uprising in Kenya, one in which Obama’s father and grandfather were both arrested. Obama’s oil-drilling double standard is fully understandable when you see that he wants the neocolonial oppressors to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. If Obama sees NASA as a symbol of American power — not only are we the world’s superpower, but now we are trying to colonize space — then we can see why he might want to convert NASA into a symbol of international achievement, not American greatness. So plug in the anti-colonial theory and you can explain the facts; remove it and Obama’s behavior becomes almost impossibly difficult to account for.


LOPEZ: Do you worry you’re encouraging “birthers” and those who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim by going all the way to Kenya to figure him out?

D’SOUZA: My argument has nothing to do with the “birther” claim that Obama was not born in America. In The Roots of Obama’s Rage, I specifically say that Obama was born in Hawaii. His birth was noted in two local newspapers in August 1961. That pretty much settles it for me. The White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is the one who raised this “birther” allegation in connection with my book. Others, like the New York Times, have uncritically circulated it. But it is a complete misrepresentation of my argument.


LOPEZ: You’re not disputing that Obama is a socialist, though? You’re simply saying it’s not the full picture?

D’SOUZA: Socialism is clearly part of the picture. Remember that many Third World countries, in opposing Western colonialism, allied themselves with the main alternative, which was Soviet socialism. Obama’s father, Barack Sr., was by his own account an African socialist. He wrote a paper in 1965 proposing tax rates of up to 100 percent. He said that there was nothing wrong with 100 percent taxation as long as the benefits accrue to the state and to society as a whole. Interestingly, Obama, who knows everything about his father, has never alluded to this paper in any of his writings or speeches. Even more remarkable, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems to throw valuable light on what Obama is doing in the White House, on what Obama means when he says the rich won’t pay their “fair share,” and so on. So socialism fits within the larger anti-colonial model. Both theories, viewed in conjunction with each other, are necessary to give a full account of what Obama is doing.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is an editor-at-large of National Review Online.

HBO's 'The Promise' chronicles creation of Bruce Springsteen's 'Darkness on the Edge of Town' album

By David Hinckley
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com
Monday, October 4th 2010, 4:00 AM


Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa arrive at the premiere of 'The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town' at the Toronto Film Festival.(Gunn/AP)


Nancy Geller says you don't need her level of Bruce Springsteen devotion to appreciate "The Promise," a documentary, on HBO Thursday at 9 p.m., about the making of Springsteen's 1978 "Darkness on the Edge of Town" album.

But okay, it wouldn't hurt.

Which has also turned out to be sound ratings business, because a film like "The Promise" just plain tells a good story.

"When we premiered it at the Toronto Film Festival," says Jon Landau, Springsteen's manager and working partner, "it was clear this isn't just fan-oriented."

"I had known Bruce since the early 1970s," says Rebo. "I wanted to be a cameraman, and here was this great performer who was also incredibly charismatic. It was a natural fit, so I shot him on and off for years.

The fact that the film exists at all is a happy bit of serendipity. Even better, says Zimny, is the feeling Rebo captured.

"He was the classic fly on the wall," says Zimny. "You get a very honest look at what's going on."

"Ninety percent of the time," says Landau, "we didn't even know or remember that he was there. We didn't do anything for filming purposes. If we were listening to playbacks in a dark room, that was the light he had."


"Often there was virtually no light," says Rebo. "I'd rig up a tube on the camera lens to focus in. When the film looks grainy, that's why. I wanted to live the moment, not influence it."

Perhaps the film's most exuberant scene has Bruce at the piano pounding out a crude version of "Sherry Darling" - which didn't make it onto "Darkness" - with Little Steven Van Zandt beside him, beating on the top of the piano with a pair of drumsticks. "That scene says so much," says Zimny. "It's an unedited view of exactly how it was in 1978."

That meant "Darkness" had to reestablish him. Both at the time and through subsequent interviews Zimny weaves into the film, Bruce explains he wanted a darker sound, feeling and message about coming to terms with the adult world.

He wrote some 70 songs and cut them down to 10, leaving out gems like "The Promise" as well as tunes like "Fire" and "Because the Night" that became big hits for the Pointer Sisters and Patti Smith.

Landau admits in the film that at times, the marathon process "wasn't fun," and Springsteen jokes that "since I had no life," he forced the band to share his obsession with perfection.

But in the end, a classic rock 'n' roll record emerged, and Zimny says he tried to make a film that told that story while showing the same discipline.

"We lost some great scenes," he says, "so we didn't slow down the story we wanted to tell."

Both in message and feel, says Nancy Geller, it works.

When you go to a live Bruce show, she explains, "You want to be within ‘sweat distance.' "On the ‘Born in the U.S.A.' tour, I made it to the front row a couple of times, and that was the best. A film like this makes you feel like you're inside sweat distance."


HBO film captures key moments for Springsteen

By DAVID BAUDER – Mon Oct 4, 9:18 am ET
Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/

NEW YORK – Bruce Springsteen doesn't imagine his three children, ranging in age from 16 to 20, would be that interested in a new HBO documentary on his 1978 album "Darkness on the Edge of Town."

Maybe they will later, since the movie is partly for them.

"Do you really want to watch your dad, watching thousands cheer your parents?" he said. "Nobody wants to see that. Watching people boo your folks, that would be something worth coming to see."

For his fans, the film "The Promise: The Making of `Darkness on the Edge of Town" is an intriguing peek, supplemented with home video from the time, into the creative process of a music legends at a key time in his career. Burdened by a management lawsuit and brooding over newfound fame at age 27, Springsteen and his E Street Band produced a taut treatise on growing into adulthood within a faltering economy. The film debuts Oct. 7 at 9 p.m. ET.

Getting there was anything but easy. Springsteen wrote and discarded far more songs than he used — fans will be able to hear many of them later this fall — as he whittled the band's sound from expansive to lean and made sure the disc hung together creatively.

One night a bleary-eyed Springsteen forced poor Max Weinberg to repeatedly hit his snare drum, searching for a sound he imagined in his head but could never quite get on tape.

"Madness has its rewards — if in the end you don't destroy yourself," Springsteen said. "I had an idea but a lot of it, looking back now, probably could have been dispensed with and everyone would have been left with a little more of their sanity. But that was how we made those records. I believed at that time that you had to work hard at something. I didn't trust anything that came too easily."

That may have tortured a few band members but the attitude made him think hard about what he wanted to say and made for well-constructed songs.

"I wanted them to last and they did last," he said. Along with the title cut, the album features "Badlands," "Prove It All Night" and "Racing in the Street."

Sheer luck made this video document possible.

A friend at the time, Barry Reebo, frequently followed Springsteen and his gang with a video camera, back to when the rocker played small clubs. No one thought twice when Reebo hung around the studio during the "Darkness" sessions. He didn't use big lights. Sometimes it seems the musicians forgot he was there.

After reforming the E Street Band a decade ago following a hiatus, Springsteen began thinking about video archives of their work, particularly for younger fans who knew nothing of their epic late 1970s performances.

Reebo hadn't sold his footage, and Springsteen was surprised at all he had. He struck a deal, and filmmaker Thom Zinny made "The Promise" by mixing the old tapes with current recollections from Springsteen and his band.

"We caught the band at a very pivotal moment — immediately post-success, and I'm in the throes of trying to figure out what I'm all about, trying to figure out what that success meant," he said.

Success was fine, but he mistrusted it. He felt safe among the places and people he grew up with in New Jersey.

"I felt there was a story there, the late '70s in the United States, what they call the Carter recession," Springsteen recalled. "I thought there was an interesting and unique story in my neck of the woods that wasn't being alluded to or told very much in American rock music. It was being told in England by the Clash, but not so much in American rock music."

He pursued it with an almost maniacal sense of purpose.

"We were in the studio for a long time not because we were interested in making records, but because we were interested in making purposeful records," he said. "We were interested in making essential records."


George Pimentel/Getty Images

In September Bruce Springsteen sat down for an hour-long chat with actor/friend Ed Norton as part of the Mavericks program at this year's Toronto International Film Festival.

Family was also on his mind. He didn't feel he really knew his parents and what they went through — the song "Factory" was about his dad's blue collar life — and "The Promise" exists in part so Springsteen's children will have a document of how their father handled the curiosity of his own teen years.

The "Darkness" album came three years after "Born to Run," a lifetime in that musical era. For much of that time, Springsteen was prevented from releasing music due to a lawsuit involving his former manager, Mike Appel. Appel was a big music fan with his own vision for Springsteen's career, and the lawsuit was strictly about control, Springsteen said.

Appel even appears in "The Promise" and issues what could be interpreted as an admission that he had been wrong. "I had strong ideas," Appel said. "In the end, you have to say, `Mike, who's the artist?'"

Springsteen laughs when he's asked if he's ever gotten an apology. "No," he said. "I've never asked him to and he doesn't have to. We're very good friends."

It's a season of "Darkness" for Springsteen. On Nov. 16, Columbia will release two products centered on the period. One is "The Promise," a two-CD set of material recorded then that never made the original 10-song album. It contains 21 songs, including "Fire," which became a hit for the Pointer Sisters, and "Because the Night," which Patti Smith took, added some of her own lyrics and turned into the biggest hit of her career.

The songs likely formed the bones of an album never made between "Born to Run" and "Darkness."

A more extensive package, formed to look like the notebooks Springsteen used for song lyrics at the time, contains those two CDs and a remastered version of "Darkness on the Edge of Town." It also contains three DVDs with the HBO documentary and four hours of concert footage.

The material includes an entire 26-song Houston concert from 1978, and a 2009 recording of Springsteen and his band performing the "Darkness" album in its entirety at an empty Paramount Theater in Asbury Park, N.J.

Springsteen described his recording process at the time as "making a huge splatter painting and standing back and editing and shaping the way I wanted it to come out."

The outtakes "really hold together as a body of work because they all came out of the same sessions, the same sounds and tones. ... It's an interesting bunch of music that I hope the fans enjoy."


On the Net:

http://www.hbo.com

http://www.brucespringsteen.net/



The Big Picture

Patrick Goldstein on the collision of entertainment, media and pop culture

'The Promise': Who knew Bruce Springsteen owned so many white T-shirts

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/
October 1, 2010 11:45 am

If you're any kind of music fan at all, you'll want to see "The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town." This new film gives us a fascinating glimpse of Bruce Springsteen in 1977, when he was in the midst of making the pivotal, post-"Born to Run" album that established him as more than just a one-hit Time and Newsweek cover boy wonder. The documentary, made by Thom Zimny, will debut on HBO on Oct. 7. I got a chance to see it the other night at Sony Music, which is housed in CAA's old Beverly Hills headquarters.

Half the fun was seeing all the old Springsteen fans on hand, including the likes of New Line chief Toby Emmerich, who got his start working at Atlantic Records, and my old pal, longtime Sony soundtracks guru Glen Brunman, who took me backstage to meet Springsteen when I was just a hopelessly dopey college kid. I'm no longer a starry-eyed Springsteen fan, having been underwhelmed by much of his recent work. But he was at the top of his game when he was making "Darkness on the Edge of Town," which as the documentary makes clear, was the work of an artist determined to make his mark. Or as Springsteen says of his youthful self in a present-day interview in the film: "More than being rich or famous or happy, I wanted to be great."

The film is punctuated with present-day interviews with Springsteen, his longtime manager Jon Landau and the rest of the E Street Band. But what makes it worth seeing is the extensive footage of Springsteen and Co. at work in the studio, the Boss almost always clad in a white T-shirt, involved in the often-agonizing process of making the "Darkness" album. After the success of "Born to Run," Springsteen became embroiled in a dispute with his former manager, Mike Appel, which had prevented him from recording a new album for nearly two years -- an eternity in that era. So Springsteen and the band rehearsed and worked on new material every night until the lawsuit was settled and they could go back into the studio.

The film offers a rare look at an artist trying to establish an identity while also attempting to come to terms with his own ambition. Springsteen acknowledges viewing success as a dark cloud, since stardom was cutting him off from his deep, bar-band, working-class roots, which were exactly what provided the fuel for his sucess in the first place. So how did he survive?

Watching him in the studio recording "Darkness," Springsteen reminded me of a lot of young filmmakers that I've seen at work -- apparently it's a common artistic trait to feel the need to keep tight control of the decision-making process without ever actually committing to a decision. Springsteen had written untold dozens of songs, but he had such trouble picking a final lineup for the album that the bandmembers would regularly bet on which ones he'd keep and which ones would get bumped. Even the film's title is something of a sly joke, since "The Promise" was a song that Springsteen spent three months recording, and then yanked from the record, saying in retrospect that he was too close to it.

Still, Springsteen's writing process is pretty fascinating. He would take a verse or a riff from one song in his notebook and graft it onto another song, likening it to how a mechanic would pull parts out of one car to make another one run. "Because the Night" -- one of Springsteen's most commercial songs -- was a product of these sessions. But it was left off the record because, as Springsteen now tells it, he was "too cowardly" to really write a love song, so he gave it to Patti Smith, who completed the lyrics and had her only big hit with it.

The movie has its share of light touches, including a comical sequence in which we see Springsteen, ever the perfectionist, obssessing for days over how to properly record Max Weinberg's drum sound. But as with so many films that show us our icons in their youth, the best moments allow us to see an artist exploring and experimenting with his gifts, trying to figure out what kind of artist he wants to be.

At the time of "Darkness," Springsteen was so young and strikingly handsome (and full of inner turmoil) that it's easy to see why filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese thought he could have been a terrific actor. When he's in the studio, soulfully singing one of his heart-breaking ballads, Springsteen has just as much live-wire charisma as the young DeNiro or Pacino. But Springsteen only wanted to be a rock star, and the biggest joy anyone can get from this film is seeing just how hard he worked to fulfill that promise.

Photo: Bruce Springsteen, appearing on the cover of "Darkness on the Edge of Town." Credit: Frank Stefanko / Sony Music Entertainment

Film Reviews: 'The Social Network'

Millions of Friends, but Not Very Popular

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
September 23, 2010

Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures

Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network.”

What makes Mark Zuckerberg run? In “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s fleet, weirdly funny, exhilarating, alarming and fictionalized look at the man behind the social-media phenomenon Facebook — 500 million active users, oops, friends, and counting — Mark runs and he runs, sometimes in flip-flops and a hoodie, across Harvard Yard and straight at his first billion. Quick as a rabbit, sly as a fox, he is the geek who would be king or just Bill Gates. He’s also the smartest guy in the room, and don’t you forget it.

The first time you see Mark (Jesse Eisenberg, firing on all cylinders), he’s 19 and wearing a hoodie stamped with the word Gap, as in the clothing giant, but, you know, also not. Eyes darting, he is yammering at his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), whose backhand has grown weary. As they swat the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s words at each other, the two partners quickly shift from offline friends to foes, a foreshadowing of the emotional storms to come. Soon Mark is back in his dorm, pounding on his keyboard and inadvertently sowing the seeds of Facebook, first by blogging about Erica and then by taking his anger out on the rest of Harvard’s women, whose photos he downloads for cruel public sport: is she hot or not.

Although the names have remained the same, “The Social Network” is less of a biopic of the real Mr. Zuckerberg than a gloss on the boot-up, log-on, plug-in generation. You don’t learn much about him other than the headlines, beginning with Facebook’s less-than-humble start in 2003. Despite its insistently unsexy moving parts (software, algorithms), the movie is paced like a thriller, if one in which ideas, words and bank books blow up rather than cars. It’s a resonant contemporary story about the new power elite and an older, familiar narrative of ambition, except instead of discovering his authentic self, Mark builds a database, turning his life — and ours — into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul.

The price of that ambition, at least as dramatized here, is borne by those around Mark, who remains a strategic cipher throughout: a Facebook page without a profile photo. Charmless and awkward in groups larger than one, he rarely breaks into a smile and, if memory serves, never says thank you. He seems wary at some moments, coolly calculating at others: when his eyes haven’t gone dead, you can see him working all the angles. One of those angles, according to Mr. Sorkin’s script, which follows the outline of “The Accidental Billionaires,” Ben Mezrich’s book about Facebook, was one of the site’s co-founders, Eduardo Saverin (a very good Andrew Garfield), a fellow student of Mark’s as well as his first big check writer and personal chump.

Eduardo strides in early, his collar turned up against the Cambridge winter, and quickly moves in on our sympathies, which Mr. Eisenberg, guided by his supremely confident director, never does. Mr. Garfield can sometimes wilt on screen as if in surrender, but here his character merely sways, held up by an essential decency that makes Eduardo so appealing and such a contrast to the sometimes appalling Mark. (When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark’s face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it’s a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.) Mark might be the brains in this unlikely friendship, but Eduardo is its conscience and slowly bleeding heart. Though he knows better, he hangs on even after he’s been cut loose.


Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures

Defriended: From left, Andrew Garfield, Joseph Mazzello, Jesse Eisenberg and Patrick Mapel in “The Social Network.”

The plot thickens after Erica dumps Mark, and he meets a pair of near-comically-perfect supermen, the identical twins and future Olympic rowers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (An amusing Armie Hammer plays both brothers with wit and the aid of different hairstyles, special effects and a body double.) The Winklevosses emerge as unlikely objects of Mark’s interest and, much like Erica, his eventual contempt. The twins and their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), have a Web site idea and need Mark’s programming help. They’ll pay (and how!), but the gig, they grandly explain, will also rehabilitate Mark’s reputation on campus after the hot/not scandal, a patronizing moment that echoes Mark’s breakup with Erica. “You’d do that for me?” he asks the twins flatly, recycling a line Erica once used on him.

The conspicuous paradox that “The Social Network” plays with is that the world’s most popular social networking Web site was created by a man with excruciatingly, almost pathologically poor, people skills. The benign view of Facebook is that it creates “a community,” a sense of intimacy, which is of course one reason it also creeps out some of its critics. As the virtual-reality visionary Jaron Lanier puts it bluntly in his manifesto “You Are Not a Gadget,” Facebook also reduces life to a database. In “The Social Network,” a character lashes out at both Mark and “the angry” who haunt the Internet, but Mr. Lanier takes the view that it’s fear that drives the idolizers of what he calls the “new strain of gadget fetishism.”

Beyond the obvious (money, sex, fame) it’s hard to know what truly pushes Mark, whose personality emerges in furtive smiles, gushes of words and painful pauses. Eventually everyone does pay: the Winklevosses, Eduardo, even Mark. The filmmakers have their ideas about who did what to whom, but they don’t try to fill in all the blanks or, worse, soften Mark’s edges with a Psych 101 back story. You see what turns him on: software, revenge and, in several lightly comic and darkly foreboding scenes, Sean Parker, the flamboyant co-creator of Napster, who’s played by Justin Timberlake as a jittery seducer. Sean oozes into Mark’s life for a piece of the action and instantly dazzles the younger man with his bad-boy ways (coke and Champagne for everyone!), sexy dates and big, brash talk of riches.

Shooting in digital and working with the cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, Mr. Fincher turns down the lights and tamps down his visual style, deploying fewer special-effects sleights of hand than he did in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” with its wizened and baby Brad Pitt, while also maintaining the familiar Fincher atmosphere of dread. Harvard has rarely been represented to such dolorous effect as in “The Social Network,” where even the colors seem leached of joy. A restrained, somber palette and the shallow depth of field express the limits of Mark’s world, while the rapid, seamless cutting among different times and spaces — scenes of him creating Facebook are woven together with scenes of him in separate depositions — evokes the speed of his success, giving the narrative terrific momentum.

Mr. Fincher pointedly abandons his smudged browns for a gauzily lighted sequence of the twins rowing at a tony British club that, with the edges of the image blurred and movements slowed, looks like a dream. This is a world of rarefied privilege in which men still wear straw boaters, and royalty blathers within earshot. Mark isn’t invited, not because he’s poor (he isn’t), but because this is a closed, self-reproducing system built on exclusivity and other entitlements, including privacy. (The movie refers to Mark’s being Jewish, and the twins look as if they crewed for the Hitler Youth, but that’s just part of the mix.) Mark doesn’t breach this citadel, he sidesteps it entirely by becoming one of the new information elite for whom data is power and who, depending on your view of the Internet, rallies the online mob behind him.

“The Social Network” takes place in the recognizable here and now, though there are moments when it has the flavor of science fiction (it would make a nice double bill with “The Matrix”) even as it evokes 19th-century narratives of ambition. (“To be young, to have a thirst for society, to be hungry for a woman,” Balzac writes in “Le Père Goriot.”) The movie opens with a couple in a crowded college bar and ends with a man alone in a room repeatedly hitting refresh on his laptop. In between, Mr. Fincher and Mr. Sorkin offer up a creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale, one driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal and inspired by the new gospel: the geek shall inherit the earth.

“The Social Network” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The usual college high jinks, drugs, drinking and semi-naked women.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

The film, to be shown on Friday on the opening night of the 48th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, opens nationally next Friday.

Directed by David Fincher; written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires,” by Ben Mezrich; director of photography, Jeff Cronenweth; edited by Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter; music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; production designer, Donald Graham Burt; costumes by Jacqueline West; produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Cean Chaffin; released by Columbia Pictures. At 6 and 9 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Jesse Eisenberg (Mark Zuckerberg), Andrew Garfield (Eduardo Saverin), Justin Timberlake (Sean Parker), Armie Hammer (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss), Max Minghella (Divya Narendra), Josh Pence (Tyler Winklevoss), Rooney Mara (Erica Albright), Brenda Song (Christy), Rashida Jones (Marylin Delpy), John Getz (Sy), David Selby (Gage), Denise Grayson (Gretchen), Douglas Urbanski (Larry Summers), Aaron Sorkin (Ad Executive) and James Shanklin (Prince Albert).

Influencing People

David Fincher and “The Social Network.”

by David Denby
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/
October 4, 2010

“The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, rushes through a coruscating series of exhilarations and desolations, triumphs and betrayals, and ends with what feels like darkness closing in on an isolated soul. This brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching movie is built around a melancholy paradox: in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), a nineteen-year-old Harvard sophomore, invents Facebook and eventually creates a five-hundred-million-strong network of “friends,” but Zuckerberg is so egotistical, work-obsessed, and withdrawn that he can’t stay close to anyone; he blows off his only real pal, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), a fellow Jewish student at Harvard, who helps him launch the site. The movie is not a conventionally priggish tale of youthful innocence corrupted by riches; nor is it merely a sarcastic arrow shot into the heart of a poor little rich boy. Both themes are there, but the dramatic development of the material pushes beyond simplicities, and the portrait of Zuckerberg is many-sided and ambiguous; no two viewers will see him in quite the same way. The debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun, but Fincher and Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created a work of art. Accuracy is now a secondary issue. In this extraordinary collaboration, the portrait of Zuckerberg, I would guess, was produced by a happy tension, even an opposition, between the two men—a tug-of-war between Fincher’s gleeful appreciation of an outsider who overturns the social order and Sorkin’s old-fashioned, humanist distaste for electronic friend-making and a world of virtual emotions. The result is a movie that is absolutely emblematic of its time and place. “The Social Network” is shrewdly perceptive about such things as class, manners, ethics, and the emptying out of self that accompanies a genius’s absorption in his work. It has the hard-charging excitement of a very recent revolution, the surge and sweep of big money moving fast and chewing people up in its wake.

We know from “The West Wing” that Sorkin can write the smartest and swiftest dialogue since Ben Hecht and Preston Sturges. His adrenaline-pumped men and women anticipate one another’s best shots; they fill out or overturn one another’s half-finished sentences, answering what’s implied rather than simply what’s said. Sorkin’s script for “The Social Network” is his best work yet—incisive and witty from moment to moment but expansive over all as a picture of college social life, hipster business enterprise, friendship, and rivalry. But Sorkin’s particular skills in “The Social Network” are familiar. The unexpected element is David Fincher’s work. The director of “Fight Club,” “Zodiac,” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a master of sullen menace, convulsive violence; he loves creating an aura of the magical and the uncanny. Yet he treats Sorkin’s real-world situations with extreme delicacy and precision. Fincher has always been obsessed with outsiders and rebels, but now, in mid-career, he has transferred that obsession into a subtler, more telling form, with both comic and tragic implications.

“The Social Network” draws on a 2009 book, “The Accidental Billionaires,” by Ben Mezrich. Mezrich also went to Harvard, and in both the book and the movie the Harvard lore is laid on a little thick. The eager suburban co-eds trucked in for parties, the rabbity competitiveness and status-seeking among the men, the terrific excitement of being “punched” for one of the all-male “final clubs” (off-campus social sites for the chosen élite)—to outsiders, all this frenzied self-importance seems slightly mad. Yet the filmmakers don’t satirize Harvard, and you can see why: they needed to re-create the pressures and the social stratifications that led to Zuckerberg’s revolt. Fincher has often worked within a frantic boys’ world—by way of having fun in “Fight Club,” guys literally punch one another, to a pulp—but here the violence is emotional, not physical. Watching Zuckerberg and his friends toss beer-bottle caps and ideas at one another in the dorm, we’re meant to think that they really are the brightest (and perhaps the most obnoxious) kids in the country. In the opening scene, Zuckerberg tells his lovely and intelligent girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), that he could introduce her, a mere Boston University student, to important people if he gets into one of the clubs. He’s prickly, overprecise, condescending; he keeps wrong-footing her and then scolding her for not keeping up. Yet, even as he acts like a jerk, you feel for him, because at some level he wants Erica, and the harder he tries to impress her the faster he drives her away. Sorkin created an emotionally stunted, closed-off young man, and Fincher pulled something touching out of Jesse Eisenberg. Slender, with curly light-brown hair and dark-blue eyes, Eisenberg pauses, stares, then rushes ahead, talking in bristling clumps, like a computer spilling bytes. The self-assurance he gives Zuckerberg is audacious and funny. It’s also breathtakingly hostile. Yet, after many of Zuckerberg’s haughtiest riffs, a tiny impulse of regret quivers across his lips.

As Zuckerberg and his friends lay siege to computers in marathon sessions—the pace is giddy, Beck’s-enhanced—they turn women into objects, even prey. In the end, Facebook becomes gender neutral, but the movie is sparked by a bitterly comic irony: a worldwide social revolution, capable of rattling authoritarian governments, began with nothing more urgent than the desire of two middle-class Jewish boys to be considered cool at college and meet girls without having to endure the humiliation of campus mixers. By focussing on the moment of creation, Fincher and Sorkin are getting at something new. From the first scene to the last, “The Social Network” hints at a psychological shift produced by the Information Age, a new impersonality that affects almost everyone. After all, Facebook, like Zuckerberg, is a paradox: a Web site that celebrates the aura of intimacy while providing the relief of distance, substituting bodiless sharing and the thrills of self-created celebrityhood for close encounters of the first kind. Karl Marx suggested that, in the capitalist age, we began to treat one another as commodities. “The Social Network” suggests that we now treat one another as packets of information. Mark Zuckerberg, as interpreted by this film, comes off as a binary personality. As far as he’s concerned, either you’re for him or you’re against him. Either you have information that he can use or you don’t. Apart from that, he’s not interested.

At Harvard, Zuckerberg hacks into the university’s computer system, a stunt that gets him into trouble with the administration but also brings him to the attention of the seniors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who are identical twins and American aristocrats. In a weird touch, balanced between derision and awe, both brothers are played by the dazzlingly handsome Armie Hammer. Devoted to physical cultivation, civility, and fair play, the twins row at dawn on the Charles River; they’re headed for the Olympics. Yet the Winklevosses—or Winklevi, as Zuckerberg calls them—want to get into the social-media business. Zuckerberg strings them along while he and Saverin develop the prototype of Facebook; that’s the root of his eventual legal troubles. The movie is framed by the two civil suits brought against Zuckerberg a few years later—one by the Winklevosses, who claim that he stole an idea that they had developed with their partner, Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), the other by Saverin, whom Zuckerberg may have aced out of the company. The movie is a tightly fitted mosaic of agitated fragments. As the lawyers and the disputants throw verbal darts at one another across a conference-room table, the filmmakers repeatedly cut, sometimes in mid-sentence, first back to Harvard and then to Palo Alto, where Zuckerberg lands in the summer of 2004, enticed by the siren song of Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the co-founder of Napster.

Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg

When Zuckerberg first gets to Silicon Valley, he’s as unworldly as a cloistered monk. Surrounded by pizza boxes and beer cans, and dressed in gray sweats, flip-flops, and a hoodie, he even looks like a monk. But Sean Parker, a hustler of genius, says to him, “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” And though the hoodie remains, everything else changes. Parker, who foresees the universal success of Facebook, comes off as intelligent but reckless and dissolute—a candy man who brings the goods (venture capital, mainly, but drugs, too). Justin Timberlake, with his charm and his physical dynamism, and with a wicked visionary gleam in his eye, torques the movie even higher. The colors in Jeff Cronenweth’s cinematography change from Harvard crimson to the electric pink of a San Francisco night club. Yet, no matter how quickly the film moves, Fincher, working with the editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, pauses within the fast tempo and lets the emotional power of the moment expand. Relying on nothing more than tiny shifts of emphasis and inflection, the director, to an amazing degree, makes us care about the split between the unyielding Zuckerberg and Saverin, who’s a decent guy but unimaginative and perhaps a little timid. As Saverin, Andrew Garfield has the emotional fluency—the fear, the indignation, and the hurt feelings—that Eisenberg has to suppress. In the legal dispute, a college prank that was once a joke between them is recalled and used as ammunition, and the moment rips what is left of their youth to shreds. “The Social Network” is a linear accelerator that breathes, and Fincher is the one who created the breathing room.

Fincher has been a bit of an outsider himself, working at the edge and celebrating inspired screw-ups, marginal eccentrics, and monsters. Born in Denver in 1962, he grew up in Oregon and Northern California, skipped college, and, at the age of seventeen, went to work as a camera operator for the San Francisco independent filmmaker John Korty, the director of “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and other gentle movies. A few years later, Fincher moved to George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, where he worked on the special effects for “Return of the Jedi” (1983) and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984). By his late twenties, Fincher had found his own cinematic style in razory, provocative, and beautiful music videos—for singers like George Michael and, most notably, Madonna—and in a series of commercials that added exciting and disturbing images to the collective unconscious: increasingly fast speed demons (a dog, a runner, a horse, a bullet train) racing across a sunbaked desert, for Nike; a fetus slowly and thoughtfully taking a drag on a cigarette, for the American Cancer Society.

Fincher was never an outsider in the way that, say, an independent filmmaker like Jim Jarmusch is. But he may be one of the few directors who can flourish as an idiosyncratic artist amid the quarterly-return mentality of the conglomerate-controlled studios. There’s no indication from his work that he has read much, or that he has lived much outside the movie world, yet he’s not, thank God, another director obsessed with the movie past, like the pop-scholastic Quentin Tarantino, whose virtuosity with camera, mood, and tone Fincher more than equals. Fincher has his own obsessions. The 1993 video for Madonna’s “Bad Girl” is Fincher’s work in miniature: The police enter and examine a corpse (Madonna’s)—a visual motif that he returned to in the grisly “Se7en” (1995), in which cops repeatedly walk in on deliquescing or bloody corpses. In “Bad Girl,” Madonna is murdered by a serial killer, and both “Se7en” and “Zodiac” (2007) are about serial killers. Outside Madonna’s apartment, Christopher Walken, as some sort of angel of death, looks at his watch, which is running backward. That image became the key visual idea in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008).

Fincher is now a demon on the set, controlling everything, demanding, in “The Social Network,” seventy or eighty takes of a single shot. But, like any director working in the mainstream, he has to fight to impose himself. He was only twenty-eight when he started on his first feature, “Alien 3” (1992), and he got pushed around on the set by the studio, Fox, which then recut the movie. Still, there’s a peculiar look to this noir sci-fi horror movie, with the camera often positioned beneath the actors and tilting up at black or mucky ceilings. It’s a look that could have been produced only by a man ornery enough to attempt to have his own way with a prized studio franchise. In “Se7en,” the first real Fincher film, there’s a prolonged philosophical dialogue between a pessimistic, isolated older cop (Morgan Freeman) and an idealistic, life-loving younger one (Brad Pitt). But then, at the end, a surprise: the killer, a religious-fundamentalist nut calling himself John Doe, shows up in the hyper-articulate person of Kevin Spacey, and he turns out to be cogent and comprehensive in his disgust for the world and most of the people in it. Fincher almost makes John Doe a sympathetic character. Sympathy for the devil has always been a productive mood for an artist, and particularly for Fincher; he could probably make a thrilling version of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” with Satan reigning heroically in Hell.

Spacey’s killer boasts of his ability as a murderer to overturn everyone’s complacency, to disrupt the bourgeois order, and a version of that disruption is enacted upon the body and the spirit of Michael Douglas’s wealthy and pleasureless banker, Nicholas Van Orton, in Fincher’s “The Game” (1997). Terrible things happen to Van Orton, and it turns out that they are all part of an elaborate prank, a kind of benevolent shock therapy administered by his kid brother (Sean Penn) in order to jolt him out of middle-aged rigor mortis. Yet what one remembers from the film isn’t the reassuring hugs at the end but the way the world falls apart for Van Orton—his pen leaks, staining his shirt; bullets whiz around his head; a taxi races down a hill and tosses him into San Francisco Bay. The banker is toyed with—terrorized, really. Fincher’s mischief was taking on a malevolent edge.

Rooney Mara and Jesse Eisenberg

Genuine terrorism shows up in “Fight Club” (1999), which begins with another rant against bourgeois order and conformity. Hoping to escape mediocrity and boredom, a depressed corporate worker (Edward Norton) joins a sub-fascist group of disaffected men, a band of bloody brothers, which grows larger and more organized, finally planting bombs. The movie has a wacko happy ending in which the bombs go off, bringing down office towers. (It’s pre-9/11.) Towers remain standing in “The Social Network,” but barriers fall; the barbarians not only enter by the gates but destroy them. Every Facebook user, Zuckerberg tells Saverin, becomes the president of the club, and the reign of the Winklevi and their kind is over. At last, Fincher has made a movie about a revolution that succeeded.

Despite the half-craziness of the themes, the early Fincher movies have a visual distinction that makes them galvanic, irresistible. Even Fincher’s patented junk and mess, first seen in “Alien 3” and then in the rubbishy, derelict rooms in “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” has a perversely attractive appeal, a glowing awfulness, as if it were lit from within. He doesn’t hide the disintegrating walls, the sordid beds; we are meant to see the ugly poetry in them. Whatever locations he uses, Fincher brings out their special character. At the beginning of “The Social Network,” Zuckerberg runs across the campus to his room at night, and Harvard, its many enclaves lit with intellectual industry, looks glamorous, like an imaginary city. The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in. The revolution brews amid garbage.

In the early movies, and in “Panic Room” (2002), a well-made but meaningless B movie, Fincher worked in overdetermined forms, with plot arcs as rigid as steel. Formally, the outlier in Fincher’s work is “Zodiac,” based on the investigation of an actual serial killer in Northern California. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith, who pursues the murderer for years, is another of Fincher’s inspired outsiders, an obsessive who so thoroughly gives himself over to his task that he almost destroys his own life. Graysmith comes very close to cracking the case, but, in the end, proof falls maddeningly out of his grasp. “Zodiac” feels open-ended. It lasts more than two and a half hours, but it might have gone on for hours more; it accumulates a series of suspicions rather than working toward a simple resolution. The truth, Fincher seems to be saying, is best approached with data, impressions, and interpretations. The double-deposition scenes in “The Social Network” would also seem to be a way of attaining proof, but, again, truth slips away. Fincher and Sorkin have turned a philosophical position into a dramatic strategy. We see the events of 2003 and 2004 from different sides—Zuckerberg’s, Saverin’s, the Winklevosses’—and all the self-serving versions have a degree of validity.

The movie’s evenhandedness forces us to make our own judgments. For instance, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, despite their hilarious double perfection, are never caricatured as muscle-bound jocks. They understand the idea of a social-dating site. What they lack is Zuckerberg and Parker’s intuitive apprehension of it as a new form of virtual social life. Fincher and Sorkin treat the brothers as squarely honorable traditionalists. They go to see Larry Summers (Douglas Urbanski), then the president of Harvard, to complain about Zuckerberg, and one can feel, in this seemingly unimportant scene, history falling into place, a shift from one kind of capitalism to another. Fincher and Sorkin wickedly imply that Summers is Zuckerberg thirty years older and many pounds heavier. He has the same kind of brightest-guy-in-the-room arrogance, and little sympathy for entitled young men talking about ethics when they’ve been left behind by a faster innovator.

Zuckerberg’s tragedy, of course, is that he leaves behind his friends as well as his intellectual inferiors. It may not be fair to Zuckerberg, but Sorkin and Fincher have set him up as a symbolic man of the age, a supremely functional prince of dysfunction. Charles Foster Kane was convivial and outgoing; Zuckerberg engages only the world he is creating. But those viewers who think of him as nothing more than a vindictive little shit will be responding to only one part of him. He’s a revolutionary because he broods on his personal grievances and, as insensitive as he is, reaches the aggrieved element in everyone, the human desire for response. He’s meant to be a hero—certainly he’s Fincher’s hero, an artist working in code who sticks to his vision and is helpless to prevent himself from suffering the most wounding personal loss.


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