"We Caved In to the Terr'ists!" - No - Common Sense Prevailed!

"Bwaaahahahaaa! We surrendered to dem North Korean terrorists! We need to remove 'the land of the free and home of the brave'  from the national anthem!  Boohoooo...Bwahahahaaa!"

Gimme a  break!  A major movie studio makes a damned turd of a movie about killing the leader of another nation  - then has the nerve to call it a comedy. Then  its phony "free speech" supporters (e.g. Judd Apatow, Rob Lowe etc.) whine like brats when theaters correctly pull it, unwilling to risk attacks- even from lone American psychos looking for any excuse to kill. And all this  transpiring pretty close to the same time polls have found most Americans (59%) believe torture is necessary in some or most situations.  Sorry, neither the film studio or the ones clamoring for it to still show the film (The Interview)  have any moral compass by which to set standards for anyone!

As I examined numerous online news sites yesterday evening I was appalled and amazed at some of the stupid comments, which have convinced me that most of the assholes who spout free speech blather (and demand to see this abomination of a flick)  are the same degenerates that support torture. Yes, it's entirely logical, as per this comment I read on one website, after the original commenter mentioned needing to acknowledge 'The Interview' was "terrible" and "objectionable for portraying the slaughter of a world leader as comedy".  The hare-brained response?

"It's good we have drones to eliminate those people with opinions like yours!"

This same jingoistic nitwit replied to a comment by me along similar lines, asking me how I could support using the threat of mass slaughter to halt a comedy. I informed the punk, asking him what planet he came from (Uranus?),  that no one supported either the hacking or the threats of a 9/11 slaughter but merely noted that when actions are taken which include making a film depicting slaughter of another nation's leader then there are bound to be consequences. We use the term "blowback" coined by Chalmers Johnson from his book by the same name.  This is why Sony never should have greenlighted this  $44 m mess of a film. It is NOT a matter of "free speech" but of common sense and sound judgment. A sane film studio, then, has the sense not to release a movie about assassinating a living leader - especially after it receives a heads up from thee Department of Homeland Security to the effect that "the film could provoke retaliation."

I also want to know where these self-proclaimed  "free speech"  people were when Ward Churchill of Univ. of Colorado- Boulder lost his job over an essay he wrote after 9/11, entitled "On Roosting Chickens". The obscure essay, dug up by a college sophomore with too much time on his hands, asserted that those working in the Twin Towers were "little Eichmanns" and conformed to the amoral ethics defined by philosopher Hannah Arendt in terms of the "banality of evil".  No matter how despicable you believe the essay to be, if you truly defend the "right to free speech" - you were (are) obligated to defend his right to write it without repercussions that impacted his life station. But no one with any power or in the media stood up for Churchill.It was as if a lynch mob punished him - and let's bear in mind he wrote an essay, concerning ideas - opinions - he didn't produce a film showing the murder of a real person.

Let us accept as a proposition that a nation - like a person- can go insane, either all at once or incrementally if the right conditions are evident and the right (wrong?) stimuli administered. In the process of going insane, the country's populace loses its bearings, its judgment and even common sense. Because it absorbs PR and propaganda it elects fools to office who actually plan to undermine its very security - even as it applauds torture, and making a movie showing the slaughter of another nation's leader. It can in no way ascend to a larger perspective to allow it to see its actions from the POV of other nations. It claims "exceptionalism" but is really not exceptional at all - it tortures like other nations, and lets the torturers walk free like other nations with dictators.  In the ultimate form, the insanity manifests as mass slaughter and even genocide.

Examples from history come to mind, including Rwanda in 1994 after years of talk radio led the resident Hutus to go on a genocidal rampage leaving more than 800,000 Tutsis slaughtered. Then there was Nazi Germany, where nonstop propaganda from the likes of Leni Reifenstahl slowly gutted the Germans' minds and sensibilities - leading them to accept actions, national decisions they otherwise would reject.  My good fortune has been that on two occasions - one in August of 1978, the other in May of 1985 -  I was able to meet and talk to actual flesh and blood Germans from the WWII era. One  (Kurt Braun) who had been a member of the Hitler Youth, forced to join at the point of a gun to his mother's head.

Kurt Braun, ca. Aug. 1978,  shows Nazi era films and how Germans were brain-fucked.

He showed me a sequence of vintage films - starting with Kristallnacht- that clearly depicted how the Germans' were gradually mind-fucked - to the extent that by the end  of the war they expressed shock that concentration camps even existed.  They had to be frog-marched by U.S. troops into places like Buchenwald and Dachau to see the spoils of what their Fuhrer had wrought.

I submit that the loony outcry from the pseudo-patriots and free speech phonies in the wake of this vile film being pulled -  with few people offering opposite opinions, shows how loopy and unhinged from reason we've become. We're more or less on the same track as the Germans ca. 1932, when one third embraced Hitlerian fascism.. It only remains to be seen what sort of fool we elect in 2016 that might take us all the way. Say some bombastic asshole like Chris Christie, with Ted Cruz as Obersturmfuhrer,.....errrrr.....VP..

As for 'The Interview'  being pulled by the theater chains, most dumbass critics don't seem to process that it was left to the chains themselves to deal with the threats . Other than allowing them out of their exhibition contracts, Sony provided nada nor any guidance.. Hell, it isn't even a matter of some actual terrorist  carrying out the threats. Given the U.S. population is riddled with nuts, many of whom own high -powered weapons, it would only take one lone wolf massacre - such as occurred in Aurora, CO in July, 2012-when James Eagen Holmes opened fire in a Cinemark Theater with his AR-15  and killed 12 and wounded 59. Then all the chains would reap the whirlwind, and all the twits now bawling about "the terrorists won" would be screaming "why didn't anyone see this coming and pull that film?"

Flash now to Hacktivist Hector Monsegur - now a security researcher - interviewed on CBS this morning, who disputes that the culprit was North Korea, as the U.S. is trying to claim. He noted first that "something like this to happen, it had to happen over a long period of time, You cannot just exfiltrate one terabyte or a hundred terabytes of data in a matter of weeks. It would have taken months maybe even years to exfiltrate one hundred terabytes of data without anyone noticing."

Which to me, suggests above all a disgruntled Sony employee who - given the content of the film - found it convenient to even leave North Korean 'tracks' (malware written in Korean) to mislead those trying to get to the source. Even Monsegur agreed the North Korean alleged language links don't tell him much as he's seen "Russian hackers pretending to be Indian, and Ukrainian hackers pretending to be Peruvian" - in other words leaving malware tracks to mislead. So we had better be careful before making wild accusations, or taking precipitous actions without 100 percent proof.

When pressed about the North Koreans as the hackers, Monsegur observed:

"In my personal opinion it's not. I mean look at the bandwidth in North Korea. I mean the pipes going in - they only have like one major ISP to handle all the data for the whole nation. That kind of information flow would have shut down the North Korean information flow completely.They don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the technical capability ...they do have state-sponsored hackers, very similar to Russia, to China and the good old USA."

Monsegur also suspects, like me, a former Sony employee (along the lines of Edward Snowden) downloaded all the info off Sony servers and sold it to someone else. Good luck on finding that lone wolf!

In the meantime, this country - now found guilty of the most abject and depraved tortures  (with a majority of its deluded people supporting them) - needs to back off and stop  its moral  posturing including yahoos squallering about the pulling of this disgusting flick out of theaters. And if you,  like the pundits,  make a really big deal out of protecting  "free speech" - be sure next time you support the speech of those like Ward Churchill too. Otherwise, don't waste your breath. Your 1st amendment eruptions don't mean diddly.

See also:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-sony-japan-ceo-interview-20141220-story.html

And:

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/18/everyone_caved_how_much_of_the_interview_fiasco_is_actually_hollywoods_fault/


Excerpt:

"emails suggest Sony execs remained nervous about the film’s content, especially the ending. On July 9, Lynton wrote to Pascal, “we cannot be cute here,” saying they could work with “no melting face and actually not seeing [Kim Jong-un] die. A look of horror as the fire approaches is probably what we need.” Rogen, while willing to play ball, appears reluctant to completely scuttle the visuals in this Sept. 25 email to Pascal: “There are currently four burn marks on his face. We will take out three of them, leaving only one. We reduce the flaming hair by 50% … The head explosion can’t be more obscured than it is because we honestly feel that if it’s any more obscured you won’t be able to tell its exploding and the joke won’t work.”

Lynton and Pascal ultimately allowed the film’s ending despite their misgivings and despite the industry’s general reluctance (see Sacha Baron Cohen’s “The Dictator,” a Gadhafi-style fictional tyrant leading a made-up country) to directly provoke volatile dictators in the first place. They had a lot of money wrapped up in the project, after all, and Sony’s job is to make entertainments that make money. 

SONY Pictures Should Have Never Greenlighted 'The Interview'

SONY Pictures, responsible for the so-called "comedy" flick, 'The Interview', is now in a world of hurt, feverishly doing damage control after a monumental hack by a bunch believed to be either North Korean or North Korean sympathizers. From news reports last night it's estimated that up to 100 terabytes of data may have been released, including thousands of private emails that have already embarrassed plenty of agents, studio execs, and stars. I am not going to repeat word for word what was said in those emails because I believe to dredge them up merely compounds the original assault. This would be analogous to a porn voyeur DLing nude Jennifer Lawrence images from a website that hacked them off her instagram.

But the question which occurred to both wifey and myself - as this news broke, is why a major Hollywood studio would put itself into harm's way and blowback by allowing a film to be produced that had as its main plot the assassination of another nation's leader. And let's cut the crap about this movie being "comedy" or satire or anything of the sort. Just think if another nation - say North Korea, or Russia- had pushed out a film about the assassination of a U.S. President. Do you seriously believe we'd sit back and let them get away with it? If so, you're further into la-la land than CIA Chief John Brennan who yesterday referred to torture as "EITs".

Further, no comedy I know of  has ever featured a final scene with the exploding head of the assassinated leader  -  replete with so much gore that a studio honcho even had to ask Seth Rogen if there wasn't some way to tone it down. (Rogen replied he'd take out "three" of the four" massive wounds - but the exploding head had to remain else "there'd be no joke"). I mean seriously, Seth?  Can you not see you are totally deranged? Apart from that, let's agree there are certain cultures and nations that don't do such "humor" and hence to even put such a film out there in the public domain the studio would  have to know invited some kind of reprisal.

Indeed, an LA Times account of the studio debate, featured on a Chris Hayes' All In segment two nights ago (and which can also be glimpsed I the first link at the end),  showed that SONY execs were indeed worried - as they ought to have been.  The LA Times header declared:

'SONY Picture Execs Debated Risk of 'The Interview' Before Cyberattack'

We also read, highlighted on Hayes' segment:

"Studio executives were cautioned by the Department of Homeland Security this summer that the film could provoke retaliation."

Did the studio listen? Did they pay attention? Hell no! They went ahead with the production despite the risks they knew had to exist, living in la-la land (A SONY exec denied being warned, but this is more likely just an effort to cover the studio's ass.)

Also, as Hayes' segment showed via some of the excavated emails, SONY brass "worried over Kim's Fate in 'The Interview'. Well, they ought to have! Leaving the dude bloody with at least four (initial) massive wounds in the final and graphic scene. And let's again clear our heads - given this whole country seems to be slowly descending into insanity and an inability to reason properly: e.g. worshipping an 18,000 DOW while infrastructure crumbles, calling torture "enhanced interrogation" - and a majority of American sheeple now supporting it,  and issuing a spending bill with an amendment that could sink the whole economy again - ignoring the lessons of the 2008 crisis.

Then producing a film featuring an assassination of a real head of state. I mean, it's one thing to imply hurt to a leader in a movie scene, it's another to actually show it - which is sure to enrage that nation and its people who take their leader's welfare seriously  - no matter how much we may make jokes.

Another thing that brought this on is the use of actual names as opposed to fictitious ones. The studio thereby committed the same error as the inflammatory video movie ‘Desert Warrior’  with its trashing of the Prophet Mohammed back in September, 2012  - which directly incited the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, as a subsequent NY Times investigation showed.

Recall in ‘Desert Warrior’  in the actors'  actual script the Prophet Mohammed was called “George”. Actress Cindy Garcia, who made the script-based (fictional) child molestation accusations against “George” (as she pointed out to ABC interviewer Brian Ross) had no remote idea the references were to be later altered when the film was released by the renegade film maker, Sam Bacile, aka Basselly Nakoula, who adopted the nom-de-plume “Sam Bacile” for the purposes of avoiding responsibility for his disgusting film.

As I noted in a blog post at the time:

"Let's get this straight once and for all: Any movie made under "bait and switch" false pretenses, to the extent the partaking actors are lied to concerning the film content, characters, is NO work of cinematic art but a TERRORIST act - especially when it incepts the violent reactions it did!"

I will now add to that and include any film which depicts a realistic killing of a living head of state, especially machinated by an agency (CIA) known to have actually planned and killed heads of state in the past, e.g.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/


The CIA was also responsible for having Chile's Salvador Allende assassinated, and attempted to hit Fidel Castro via its then operation ZR/Rifle, which was later turned against John F. Kennedy - at the behest of William Harvey and his Staff D NSA -driven affiliate (which roped in Lee Oswald as the patsy).

My point is that there is a real history concerning the CIA  taking out heads of state via historically documented assassinations, or hiring others to do it for them (Mafia, in the case of ZR/Rifle). Therefore,  when you concoct a fictional film plot depicting the CIA arranging an assassination of a head of state, there are many who will likely take it seriously, not as frivolous fare.

Had SONY done due diligence in researching all this genuine history, and then scuttled this screwball movie, they likely wouldn't be in the predicament they're now in - trying to limit the fallout from the cyber leaks. This is not to justify the hack, only again to note that when reckless stimuli are circulated such as this movie, or the earlier Desert Warrior, there is bound to be blowback.

People need to think, clearly reason,  before they allow their Ids to unleash a provocative film that may incur harsh blowback.  In this case, Seth Rogen and James Franco ought to have had the brains never to have even proposed this inflammatory nonsense to a major studio. The studio, at the final stage of the green light, ought to have tossed the script into the dumpster and said a firm 'NO!'.  There is free speech and then there is shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater, which isn't free speech. Other nations do not share our overly liberal view of how and what speech is "free" and in Germany you can still get a year in prison for denying the holocaust - even in jest.  And when you present a CIA-backed  assassination of a head of state, even mockingly, you are flirting with fire - or equivalently shouting 'Fire' in that theater. Even if you reside in the U.S. - since that film may have far reaching influence beyond our borders.

See also:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-sony-japan-ceo-interview-20141220-story.html

Excerpt:

"Kazuo Harai was worried. For months the Tokyo-based chief executive of Sony Corp. had been raising questions about the Hollywood studio's plans to go forward with a film depicting the assassination of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. In a June 23rd email a Sony Executive in Japan sent word to the studio writing that Harai 'was very much worried about this film' and its potential or angering the North Koreans."


And:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/12/so-we-now-know-benghazi-was-incited-by.html