The Communist regime produces 97% of the material vital to high-tech industries, including weapons.
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America Brought China’s Rare-Earth Elements Monopoly on Itself
German photographer and Beatles groupie Astrid Kirchherr is interviewed at Part I of ” George Harrison: Living in the Material World .” She said that George Harrison was kind to everyone he met. And that sense of Harrison is expressed again and again in interviews throughout the documentary. My personal policy is to avoid meeting stars and celebrities, to avoid the disappointments, but I would have never missed the chance to meet George Harrison. Part II was perhaps better than Part I, in that it focuses on Harrison’s post-Beatles life and legacy. The New York Times stresses these disparate aspects as well, ” A Life of Guitars, Girls and Gentle Weeping .” ” Give Me Love ” is one of the George Harrison songs I often forget about, but it came to me out of the blue while I was in the car yesterday, and parts of it are played in Part II, during the coverage of Harrison’s commercial successes as a solo artist. And that reminds me, the Phil Spector interview is one of the more amazing segments of the film. And Olivia Harrison is a fascinating woman as well. She has an interesting manner of speech, and her affection for George is almost scholarly in its expression. I’m watching an encore broadcast on HBO as this post goes live. Try to catch it if you can.
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Give Me Love: Thoughts on the George Harrison Documentary
I watched Part I last night. And the day before, Los Angeles Times had this: ” Documentary examines George Harrison .” When Martin Scorsese and Olivia Harrison first sat down about five years ago to strategize about a documentary on the life of George Harrison, both quickly zeroed in on a letter the young Beatle wrote to his family at the height of Beatlemania. “It was a letter George had written when he was not more than 22,” Harrison said of the man to whom she was married for 23 years before his death from cancer a decade ago. “It was in 1965, and the Beatles would have been really cresting at that point. He was writing home and told his family, ‘I know that this isn’t it. I knew I was going to be famous, but now I know I can reach the real top of what man can achieve, which is self-realization.’ He knew then that [material reward] wasn’t it.” That letter figures into a pivotal moment in Scorsese’s film, “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” (taken from the title of Harrison’s 1973 album), which premieres on HBO over two nights Wednesday and Thursday to accommodate its 31/2-hour length. In the scene, George says how lucky the Beatles were to acquire so many of the material goods early on that most people spend their entire lives yearning for, because they learned relatively young how hollow such things ultimately ring. Olivia Harrison gave Scorsese and his team virtual carte blanche access to home movies, family photos, audio recordings and other items from her husband’s estate for use in the film, which paints a richly detailed and unvarnished picture of the man initially pigeonholed as “the quiet Beatle.” A more accurate sobriquet might have been “the spiritual Beatle” to reflect the inward quest that seemed to capture Harrison early in a life about which he once famously said that his biggest break had been getting into the Beatles; his second biggest, getting out. More at the link. Also, ” TV review: ‘George Harrison: Living in the Material World’ ,” and ” George Harrison: A video miscellany .”
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‘George Harrison: Living in the Material World’
Longtime readers will recall that before my new found infatuation with The Beatles, I’ve long been intrigued by George Harrison, and I was sad when he died so young. So you can bet I’m excited about the new documentary coming out from Martin Scorsese, “George Harrison: Living in a Material World.” See Rolling Stone , ” George Harrison Hits the Big Screen in Scorsese Doc .” The schedule is here .
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George Harrison Documentary
The mysterious orange substance washed ashore in the village of Kivalina, Alaska. (AP Photo)
A sample of orange goo in Anchorage, Alaska, collected Aug. 3, 2011, in Kivalina, Alaska, after the substance came in from the river into the village's harbor. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)
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What is it? Mysterious Orange Goo Washes Up, Baffles Alaska Village
NEW YORK — A caretaker doing gardening work at a historic cemetery dug up a plastic garbage bag containing military-grade explosives last year and left it at the site, where it remained until a volunteer told authorities about it Monday, setting off a big police response. The employee found the C-4 in May or June 2009 after digging down about a foot into the ground at New York City Marble Cemetery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. It contained eight bricks of the explosive, which Kelly said couldn’t have gone off because there were nothing to detonate it. The spot was near a tombstone but not in a grave. It was unclear how long the bag had been at the cemetery, but “we believe it’s been there for a significant period of time,” Kelly said. He said it appeared to be military-grade explosive similar to the material used in the 2005 London transit bombings but that there were no suspicions of terrorism in connection to the discovery. The caretaker left the bag on the property, by a fence in the back. “It’s not clear at this time whether he understood precisely what was in the bag,” Kelly said. More than a year later, a volunteer cleaning the cemetery, a landmark built in 1831, came across it over the weekend and initially left it there before calling police on Monday because it wasn’t clear what the material was. Authorities closed nearby streets as they investigated. The bricks weighed just over a pound, Kelly said. C-4 is a plastic explosive that is more powerful than TNT. It’s commonly used by the military because it is easy to shape and relatively hard to set off by accident. C-4′s main ingredient is RDX, which also is used in fireworks. It is relatively insensitive to impact, friction or fire, although large quantities can explode if burned. Even shooting it with a rifle won’t trigger the reaction. Only a detonator or blasting cap will do the job properly. Less than a pound of C-4 could potentially kill several people, and several blocks of C-4, weighing about 1.25 pounds each, could potentially demolish a truck. Kelly said the material from the cemetery was being taken to the police range where explosives are tested. Authorities also were digging around in the cemetery to see if any more material was found. “We’ll have a better idea when the bomb squad looks at it, but it has yellow writing on a green material,” he said, adding that’s how C-4 is wrapped today. “It’s difficult to say with any precision how old this is.” A call to the cemetery seeking comment was not immediately returned. The New York City Marble Cemetery was designated a landmark in the late 1960s. Six members of a branch of the Roosevelt family are buried there, as well as Stephen Allen, former mayor and New York governor. Police were also looking into two messages that were found in the area to see if there was any connection. One, written in chalk on the sidewalk near the cemetery, said, “I really hope one of you finds this.” The other, a note placed on a police car at the precinct near the site, made a reference to Jesus Christ being kept out of the neighborhood and was signed by someone identified as “Jesus Christ.” Kelly said there’s no indication to think the three discoveries are linked, but investigators were checking into it. Neighborhood residents took the scare in stride, watching from police tape and snapping photos, while chatting on cell phones and drinking coffee. “I wasn’t worried, because everyone was out on the street and you have to think if it was something serious it would’ve been blocked off more,” said Danielle Baskin, 22 who lives across the street.
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Mystery: Police Find C-4 Explosives in Manhattan Cemetery
It’s strange, since I was just listening to a 20 minute interview with Julian Assange yesterday at TED. I had planned to write about that as soon as this latest breaking news cycle winds down (JournoList, Shirley Sherrod, etc.), and now we’ve got the release of the Afghanistan war logs, which had been expected. Yeah, since the Iraq Apache video smear (and the detailed coverage at Jawa Report , et al., and my own), I’ve been gaining a sharper understanding of Assange and his hard-left enablers worldwide. It’s simply more clear by the day that America’s enemies are not just on the battlefield, but also among the global transnational issue networks working to bring down the United States and its Western allies. I need to research the war logs and find out more on this, so expect updates. Below is a clip featuring Julian Assange for The Guardian . There’s also a big exposé at The Guardian as well, so it’s clear that the newspaper’s coordinating its coverage with WikiLeaks. See, ” Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation .” And of course, the New York Times is on the case, seemingly as deeply involved as is The Guardian . See, ” Inside the Fog of War: Reports From the Ground in Afghanistan .”Also at NYT (FWIW), ” Piecing Together the Reports, and Deciding What to Publish “: The articles published today are based on thousands of United States military incident and intelligence reports — records of engagements, mishaps, intelligence on enemy activity and other events from the war in Afghanistan — that were made public on Sunday on the Internet. The New York Times, The Guardian newspaper in London, and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the material several weeks ago. These reports are used by desk officers in the Pentagon and troops in the field when they make operational plans and prepare briefings on the situation in the war zone. Most of the reports are routine, even mundane, but many add insights, texture and context to a war that has been waged for nearly nine years. Over all these documents amount to a real-time history of the war reported from one important vantage point — that of the soldiers and officers actually doing the fighting and reconstruction. The Source of the Material The documents — some 92,000 individual reports in all — were made available to The Times and the European news organizations by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing secrets of all kinds, on the condition that the papers not report on the data until July 25, when WikiLeaks said it intended to post the material on the Internet. WikiLeaks did not reveal where it obtained the material. WikiLeaks was not involved in the news organizations’ research, reporting, analysis and writing. The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today. The three news organizations agreed to publish their articles simultaneously, but each prepared its own articles. Classified Information Deciding whether to publish secret information is always difficult, and after weighing the risks and public interest, we sometimes chose not to publish. But there are times when the information is of significant public interest, and this is one of those times. The documents illuminate the extraordinary difficulty of what the United States and its allies have undertaken in a way that other accounts have not. Most of the incident reports are marked “secret,” a relatively low level of classification. The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests … There’s more at the link , but I stopped at this line. ” The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests “? Don’t believe it for a second. The New York Times has been the radical left’s institutional organ working to bring about an American defeat in Iraq and the War on Terror, and now in Afghanistan. Recall Heather MacDonald’s piece from 2006, on the Times ‘ reporting that helped killed the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. See, ” National Security Be Damned “: BY NOW IT’S UNDENIABLE: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives. The Times’s latest revelation of a national security secret appeared on last Friday’s front page–where no al Qaeda operative could possibly miss it. Under the deliberately sensational headline, “Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror,” the Times blows the cover on a highly targeted program to locate terrorist financing networks. According to the report, since 9/11, the Bush administration has obtained information about terror suspects’ international financial transactions from a Belgian clearinghouse of international money transfers. RTWT . See also, Michelle Malkin, ” NY Times Blabbermouths Strike Again .” I’ll have more later after I read and research a bit. Meanwhile, readers can check WikiLeaks directly: ” Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010 .” And the Der Spiegel piece is here: ” Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It ” (via Memeorandum ).
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WikiLeaks and the Afghanistan War Logs
