In Defense of Avatar
Do savages have rights?
by David R. Henderson, January 11, 2010
Antiwar
Some writers who are generally my allies in favor of capitalism and free markets have been critical of the movie Avatar. Reihan Salam, for example, on Forbes.com, writes, “In a sense, capitalism is the villain of Avatar.” Edward Hudgins, a fan of Ayn Rand, as am I, writes that Avatar is “loaded with tired, mind-numbing leftist clichés.”
But I don’t think Avatar is an attack on capitalism. One could leave the movie and have no idea, based on just the movie, about James Cameron’s view of capitalism. And while it did have some clichés (most movies do), I didn’t find it loaded. So what is Avatar? In fact, Avatar is a powerful antiwar movie – and a defense of property rights. For that reason, I found it easy to identify with those whose way of life was being destroyed by military might. (Warning: slight spoilers ahead.)
Consider one of Salam’s main arguments against Avatar. He points out, correctly, that the tremendous economic growth that relatively free markets have led to in the last two centuries is responsible for the fact that humans have grown taller, stronger, and healthier. The Na’vi, by contrast, even without clearly visible means of support, “do seem pretty tall, strong, healthy, and well-fed.” Point taken. But do we really look for realism in a movie that’s about people on a fictitious planet? I found many things implausible about the movie – start with the fact that people who are obviously American go to another planet and find people who speak English better than most Americans do. Surely, then, the size of the humanoids’ bodies is one of the least important implausibilities.
Ed Hudgins criticizes the movie on the grounds that Pandora, the alien planet, is a “Garden of Eden or lost paradise inhabited by noble savages.” This myth, he writes, “has done no end of harm to humanity.” I agree with him, both about how Pandora is portrayed and about how much harm the myth of the noble savage has done.
But here’s the crucial question, a question that neither Salam nor Hudgins addresses: Do savages, noble or otherwise, have rights?
If given a choice between high-tech, with all its creature comforts, and the jungle life of Tarzan, I, like Salam and Hudgins, will take high-tech every time. But that’s not what the movie’s about. It’s about people from a high-tech civilization using technology to make war on people from a more primitive society so that they can steal their stuff. That’s a very different choice. I would choose not to kill them and take their property. What would Salam or Hudgins choose? They don’t make their answers clear, although they show zero sympathy for the victims of the attack.
In fact, the defense of property rights in Avatar is so clear that, at one point in the movie, when the bad guys are justifying their war on the grounds that they need “Unobtainium,” I turned to a libertarian friend and said, “This is the Kelo decision.” Recall that the Supreme Court, in Kelo v. City of New London, decided that it was all right to take Suzette Kelo’s property from its low-tech use as a house so that a major corporation could use it for a “grander” project.
Filmtracks Editorial Review
Avatar: (James Horner) Every filmmaker strives to someday create the next “cinematic event,” but James Cameron has a proven ability to focus years of his attention into achieving just such success. Conceived of in the mid-1990’s by Cameron was the premise of Avatar, yet technological advancements in film only allowed him to begin tackling the topic in the following decade.
True to his self-professed “king of the world” stature, Cameron wrote, directed, shot, and, in some cases, edited the resulting blockbuster himself, emboldened by a budget well over $300 million and the powerful marketing efforts of 20th Century Fox. Not only did Cameron plan on pushing CGI animation to levels only explored on the surface by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but he would attempt to master a 3D technology that had always previously caused difficulty with screen darkness.
His story is clearly modeled after recent American history, telling of the corporate exploitation of a far away world in the interests of mining its minerals to help save a hopelessly polluted Earth. Humans’ interactions with the people of Pandora, the Na’vi, begin peacefully but eventually resort to forceful military relocation. Parallels between the Na’vi and Native Americans are unmistakable, not to mention a few connections to America’s war in Iraq in the 2000’s and ongoing environmental issues. Beyond all the innovation in the rendering of Pandora’s setting and creatures, as well as the purely gung-ho American displays of Marines in action (on that note, does America’s military represent all of Earth in 2154?), Avatar is a Titanic-like love story resulting between the two leads despite an obvious culture clash. When one of the Marines’ Na’vi-like avatars (meant to infiltrate the indigenous population) is helmed by necessity by a paraplegic ex-Marine named Jake, he is saved by a surprisingly sensual and tough Na’vi woman, with whom he learns about the people’s culture and (not so surprisingly) switches allegiances. By telling the conclusive battle between Na’vi and humans through the perspective of these leads, Cameron achieves the same balance between heart and destruction that kept audiences coming to Titanic a dozen years earlier.
Sharlene Holt
Musicians for Freedom
February 6, 2010
Kent Monkman is an artist of Cree ancestry who works in a variety of media including painting, film/video, performance and installation. Monkman has exhibited widely within Canada, and is well represented in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, UK, and Bailey Fine Arts, Toronto. The band, Propagandhi, features one of Monkman’s paintings on the cover of its latest album, Supporting Caste.
The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art has presented the flambouyant, multi-media extravaganza by Kent Monkman, The Triumph of Mischief, in their mainspace gallery. Monkman draws inspiration from the histories depicted in 19th Century art, including photography and Romantic painting, colonial portrayals of Aboriginal peoples and cinematic genres such as classic Hollywood Westerns. Using these conventions he constructs new stories through images that take into account the missing narratives and perspectives of Aboriginal peoples. His work furthermore explores stereotypes of masculinity and queer culture through the construction of witty situations and scenarios that use sexuality as a tool for challenging the authority of these established histories.
Sharlene Holt
Musicians for Freedom
Posted at Freedom’s Phoenix
For more than 25 years, Peter and Tamara Lowe have held their GET MOTIVATED Business Seminars. Rudy Giuliani, Steve Forbes, Laura Bush, Colin Powell, and others, attended the Lowe’s seminar Thursday in Phoenix. Activists were there to greet them.
In the midst of his presidential candidacy, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani faced a government investigation into his handling of the radios used by firefighters on 9/11. City Councilman Eric Gioia, a Clinton supporter who chaired the Council’s Investigations Committee, promised to investigate Rudy Giuliani’s role in the failure of the FDNY radio equipment on 9/11.
Calls for an investigation were first proposed by filmmaker Robert Greenwald who documented Giuliani’s handling of 9/11 in a series of shorts for Brave New Films. In The Real Rudy: Radios, Greenwald documented how radios used by the FDNY on 9/11 were the same ones that malfunctioned during the 1993 attack on the Twin Towers. Eight years later, Giuliani purchased new communications equipment for $14 million from Motorola, but it was never field-tested. A week later, the equipment was recalled after a firefighter’s mayday went unheard. Giuliani reissued the old batch of radios. And on 9/11, when a police helicopter warned that the North Tower could collapse, more than 120 firefighters remained inside.
“To know that we had failing radios in 1993 and did virtually nothing until September 11 is shocking to say the least,” said Gioia. “To watch this documentary and see the important questions that were asked and seemingly unanswered and ignored for so many years, it’s disturbing.”
More than 20,000 people signed a petition demanding an investigation into Giuliani’s handling of the FDNY radios. In an interview posted on YouTube, Gioia confirmed that he would take the steps to initiate public hearings, including sending out letters to fellow council members and requesting pertinent documents.
Top Intel Officer: U.S. May Kill Americans Abroad
John Byrne
Raw Story
February 4, 2010
In a striking admission from the Obama Administration’s top intelligence officer, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair announced Wednesday that the United States may target its own citizens abroad for death if it believes they are associated with terrorist groups.
“We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community,” Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee. He said US counter-terrorism officials may try to kill American citizens embroiled in extremist groups overseas with “specific permission” from higher up.
If “we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that,” Blair said in response to questions from the panel’s top Republican, Representative Pete Hoekstra.
Blair’s comments came after The Washington Post reported that US President Barack Obama had embraced predecessor George W. Bush’s policy of authorizing the killing of US citizens involved in terrorist activities overseas.
If a United States citizen was determined to have joined a foreign terrorist group, that person could be legally murdered under orders given by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks.
“After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said,” the Post reported. “The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose ‘a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests,’ said one former intelligence official.
“The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, ‘it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,’ said a senior administration official. ‘They are then part of the enemy.’”
The Post, citing anonymous US officials, said the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Joint Special Operations Command have three Americans on their lists of specific people targeted for killing or capture.
Blair said weighing whether to target a US national required determining “whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans.”
The intelligence chief said he was offering such unusually detailed information in public because “I just don’t want other Americans who are watching to think that we are careless.”
“In fact, we’re not careless about endangering lives at all, but we especially are not careless about endangering American lives as we try to carry out the policies to protect most of the country,” he said.
Hoekstra, the ranking Republican, asked what the standards were for targeting American citizens abroad. Blair didn’t specifically articulate them.
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Musician Elvis Costello performed onstage with Bruce Springsteen at the 2010 MusiCares Person Of The Year Tribute To Neil Young at the Los Angeles Convention Center on January 29, 2010 in Los Angeles, California.
Ben Harper and Lucinda Williams were in attendance at the 2010 MusiCares Person of the Year tribute to Neil Young on Jan. 29 in Los Angeles. They joined other performers Jack Black, Jackson Browne, T Bone Burnett, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Sheryl Crow, Everest, Patty Griffin, Josh Groban, Emmylou Harris, Elton John, Norah Jones, Lady Antebellum, k.d. lang, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Ozomatli, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Leon Russell, James Taylor, and Wilco. The dinner co-chairs were Warner Bros. Records Chairman Emeritus Mo Ostin, Lookout Management President and Founder Elliot Roberts, and Warner Bros. Records Chairman/CEO Tom Whalley. Two-time GRAMMY-winning producer Don Was was the evening’s musical director.
The 2010 MusiCares Person of the Year gala is co-presented by AEG, ELS and Acura. The evening began with a special reception and silent auction that offered an exclusive and unparalleled selection of luxury items, VIP experiences and one-of-a-kind celebrity memorabilia for bidding guests. The auction was followed by a gala dinner sponsored by MasterCard, an award presentation and a star-studded tribute concert. The MusiCares Person of the Year tribute is one of the most prestigious events held during GRAMMY Week. Proceeds from the annual GRAMMY Week gala dinner and concert honoring Young provide essential support for MusiCares, which ensures that music people have a place to turn in times of financial, medical and personal need.
Alan Shore, Boston Legal: When the weapons of mass destruction thing turned out to be not true, I expected the American people to rise up. Ha! They didn’t. Then, when the Abu Ghraib torture thing surfaced and it was revealed that our government participated in rendition, a practice where we kidnap people and turn them over to regimes who specialize in torture, I was sure then the American people would be heard from. We stood mute. Then came the news that we jailed thousands of so-called terrorists suspects, locked them up without the right to a trial or even the right to confront their accusers. Certainly, we would never stand for that. We did. And now, it’s been discovered the executive branch has been conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on its own citizens. You and me. And I at least consoled myself that finally, finally the American people will have had enough. Evidentially, we haven’t.
In fact, if the people of this country have spoken, the message is we’re okay with it all. Torture, warrantless search and seizure, illegal wiretappings, prison without a fair trial – or any trial, war on false pretenses. We, as a citizenry, are apparently not offended. There are no demonstrations on college campuses. In fact, there’s no clear indication that young people seem to notice. Well, Melissa Hughes noticed. Now, you might think, instead of withholding her taxes, she could have protested the old fashioned way. Made a placard and demonstrated at a Presidential or Vice-Presidential appearance, but we’ve lost the right to that as well. The Secret Service can now declare free speech zones to contain, control and, in effect, criminalize protest. Stop for a second and try to fathom that. At a presidential rally, parade or appearance, if you have on a supportive t-shirt, you can be there. If you are wearing or carrying something in protest, you can be removed. This, in the United States of America. This in the United States of America. Is Melissa Hughes the only one embarrassed? *Alan sits down abruptly in the witness chair next to the judge* Judge Robert Sanders: Mr. Shore. That’s a chair for witnesses only. Really long speeches make me so tired sometimes. Judge Sanders: Please get out of the chair. Alan: Actually, I’m sick and tired. Judge Sanders: Get out of the chair! Alan: And what I’m most sick and tired of is how every time somebody disagrees with how the government is running things, he or she is labeled unAmerican. U.S. Attorney Jonathan Shapiro: Evidentally, it’s speech time. Alan: And speech in this country is free, you hack! Free for me, free for you. Free for Melissa Hughes to stand up to her government and say “Stick it”! U.S. Attorney Jonathan Shapiro: Objection! Alan: I object to government abusing its power to squash the constitutional freedoms of its citizenry. And, God forbid, anybody challenge it. They’re smeared as being a heretic. Melissa Hughes is an American. Melissa Hughes is an American. Melissa Hughes is an American! Judge Sanders: Mr. Shore. Unless you have anything new and fresh to say, please sit down. You’ve breached the decorum of my courtroom with all this hooting. Alan: Last night, I went to bed with a book. Not as much fun as a 29 year old, but the book contained a speech by Adlai Stevenson. The year was 1952. He said, “The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live and fear breeds repression. Too often, sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-Communism.” Today, it’s the cloak of anti-terrorism. Stevenson also remarked, “It’s far easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.” I know we are all afraid, but the Bill of Rights – we have to live up to that. We simply must. That’s all Melissa Hughes was trying to say. She was speaking for you. I would ask you now to go back to that room and speak for her.
Added by Steve Hall on June 6, 2007, AdRants
Dripping with egotistical irony, this Giovanni+Draftfcb Rio de Janeiro-created campaign for the Creative Club of Rio de Janeiro rips on the nation’s apparent obsession with the use of homeless and disabled people in advertising seemingly to achieve creative brilliance and win awards at their expense.
With headlines, “I helped a copywriter become a creative director”, “I’ve made a creative team win a lion at Cannes” and “Thanks to us. An art director had his salary doubled,” pulls no punches while, at the same time, does the very thing it’s trying to stop.
The copy reads, “Homeless and disabled people are helping many advertising professionals achieve success. Not mentioning the ones wounded in wars and the ones infected with AIDS, who are always giving a helping hand. But, isn’t it the other way around? Next time you have a brilliant idea for a starving nation, war refugees or AIDS victims ad, remember to ask yourself this: brilliant for whom?
We don’t know whether to praise this campaign for its noble efforts or condemn it for egotistical ignorance.
By Sharlene Holt
Posted at Freedom’s Phoenix
“You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go;
I owe my soul to the company store.”
“Sixteen Tons” is a song about the life of a coal miner, first recorded in 1946 by American country singer Merle Travis and released on his box set album Folk Songs of the Hills the following year.
Well, it appears that slaves down on the Phoenix Plantation will be paying more for their groceries in a couple of months with their increasingly-devalued Federal Reserve Notes, or FRNs.
As expected, Phoenix Overlords approved a 2 percent sales tax on basic food items during a hastily-called meeting Tuesday. The move is an effort to close the city’s $245 million budget deficit.
The tax, which amounts to $2 for every $100 worth of food purchased at grocery stores and other retailers, would kick in on April 1, and would close the deficit through June 2011. Overlords claim they will sunset the tax after five years. Yeah, sure.
The song describes how workers were not paid cash; rather they were paid with unexchangeable credit vouchers for goods at the company store, usually referred to as scrip. This made it impossible for workers to store up cash savings. Workers also usually lived in company-owned dormitories or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay.
In the United States the truck system and associated debt bondage persisted until the strikes of the newly-formed United Mine Workers and affiliated unions forced an end to such practices.
Overlords could, however, reverse their decision based on input from a series of meetings scheduled for later this month. At the meeting on Tuesday, Overlords recognized that slaves may not have had enough time to consider the tax hike, so they encouraged all slaves to participate in these upcoming meetings in order that they might fully grasp the futility of their resistance! Barry Hess, Donna Hancock, and others have already begun the process to challenge the decision.
Supporters of the tax, including Mayor Phil Gordon, say it will generate an additional $50 million for the police department, fire department, parks and other city services that are currently on the chopping block.
Opponents say it will hurt the poor and those on fixed incomes. Phoenix is one of about 20 Arizona municipalities that does not collect a tax on food.
The expected 2 percent food tax is the same as the city’s current sales tax rate. While the food tax was approved, the vote was not unanimous.
“This tax is wrong,” said Overlord Sal DiCiccio. “It’s the wrong direction for the city of Phoenix. It’s not fair to burden the poor, the seniors and the working class — when they’re struggling — with a tax this.”
For more bold and creative expression, visit us at http://www.musiciansforfreedom.com
Peace, Sharlene
Qik is a mobile live streaming web application that allows users to stream live video from their cell phones to the internet. Qik enables users to record and upload video directly from supported cell phones. Qik, a Silicon Valley startup, launched its alpha version in December 2007 and went into public beta in July 2008.
As of April 2009, Qik supports about 128 cell phones for its software. Qik videos can be shared via Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and many other online web 2.0 sites.
On April 2009, Qik was the first mobile video service to support Facebook Connect. It allows Qik users to automatically post videos directly to their video collection or wall and does not require them to install additional Facebook applications.
The Company’s headquarters is located in Redwood City,California. Qik has another office in Moscow, Russia.
Restore the Republic
In this edition of the Reality Report, Gary Franchi covers:
The banker bailout payback extension
A victory over socialized healthcare in Virginia
The new facial recognition hardware that could be headed to your local police station.
Footage from the Lewis burglary
Exclusive footage from the new film “Don’t Tread On Me”.
Giuliani Time is a documentary by Kevin Keating about Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York City.
The Village Voice called this 2006 documentary “an incisive portrait of power seizure and class combat as it was performed, by the numbers, on the municipal level.” The film contains several archival segments, as well as interviews with Village Voice writer and unauthorized Giuliani biographer, Wayne Barrett and radio journalist Doug Henwood.[1] The documentary’s title is a reference to phrase that police officers allegedly uttered to Abner Louima when they tortured him in a Brooklyn police precinct house. Louima himself later recanted that statement, saying he had made it up.
As of late 2007, Giuliani Time has 85% at Rotten Tomatoes (22 fresh, 4 rotten).[2]
Giuliani Time is distributed by Cinema Libre Studio. A special election version of the film was released on 2/5/2008.
