#daniel blumenthal

[ivovynckier]

The making of Dirk Brossé's album "Seven Nocturnes".

[realjediverse]

The Equalizer 3 Movie Review!

The Equalizer 3 is a 2023 American action thriller film directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by Richard Wenk. It is the third installment in the Equalizer film series and stars Denzel Washington as Robert McCall, a former government agent who becomes a vigilante. The film also stars Dakota Fanning, Bill Pullman, Melissa Leo, and Pedro Pascal. The film follows McCall as he settles into a quiet…

[zvaigzdelasas]

The junta have explicitly justified their coup as a response to the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” plaguing Niger and complained that it and other countries in the Sahel “have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.” Even ordinary Nigeriens backing the junta have done the same.[...]

Only years [after enacting regime change] would a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report publicly determine, echoing the conclusions of other post-mortems, that charges of an impending civilian massacre were “not supported by the available evidence” and that “the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element” that carried out numerous atrocities of its own.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. “I love the military ... but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can,” complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka said it would be “an important humanitarian step.” The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who’s who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that “inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.”

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, “limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion” could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that “the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion.”[...]

Despite grave and often-stated reservations, Obama and NATO got UN authorization for a no-fly zone. Clinton was privately showered with email congratulations, not just from Blumenthal and Slaughter (“bravo!”; “No-fly! Brava! You did it!”), but even from then-Bloomberg View Executive Editor James Rubin (“your efforts ... will be long remembered”). Pro-war voices like Pletka and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz immediately began moving the goalposts by discussing Gaddafi’s ouster, suggesting escalation to prevent a U.S. “defeat,” and criticizing those saying Libya wasn’t a vital U.S. interest. NATO’s undefined war aims quickly shifted, and officials spoke out of both sides of their mouths. Some insisted the goal wasn’t regime change, while others said Gaddafi “needs to go.” It took less than three weeks for FPI Executive Director Jamie Fly, the organizer of the neocons’ letter to Obama, to go from insisting it would be a “limited intervention” that wouldn’t involve regime change, to professing “I don’t see how we can get ourselves out of this without Gaddafi going.”

After only a month, Obama and NATO allies publicly pronounced they would stay the course until Gaddafi was gone, rejecting the negotiated exit put forward by the African Union. “There is no mission creep,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted two months later. Four months after that, Gaddafi was dead — captured, tortured and killed thanks in large part to a NATO airstrike on the convoy he was traveling in.

The episode was considered a triumph. “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton joked to a reporter upon hearing the news. Analysts talked about the credit owed to Obama for the “success.” [...] [In October 2011], Clinton traveled to Tripoli and declared “Libya’s victory” as she flashed a peace sign.

“It was the right thing to do,” Obama told the UN, presenting the operation as a model that the United States was “proud to play a decisive role” in. Soon discussion moved to exporting this model elsewhere, like Syria. Hailing the UN for having “at last lived up to its duty to prevent mass atrocities,” then-Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth called to “extend the human rights principles embraced for Libya to other people in need,” citing other parts of the Middle East, the Ivory Coast, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.[...]

Gaddafi’s toppling not only led hundreds of Tuareg mercenaries under his employ to return to nearby Mali but also caused an exodus of weapons from the country, leading Tuareg separatists to team up with jihadist groups and launch an armed rebellion in the country. Soon, that violence triggered its own coup and a separate French military intervention in Mali, which quickly became a sprawling Sahel-wide mission that only ended nine years later with the situation, by some accounts, worse than it started. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the majority of the more than 400,000 refugees in the Central Sahel were there because of the violence in Mali.

Mali was far from alone. Thanks to its plentiful and unsecured weapons depots, Libya became what UK intelligence labeled the “Tesco” of illegal arms trafficking, referring to the British supermarket chain. Gaddafi’s ouster “opened the floodgates for widespread extremist mayhem” across the Sahel region, retired Senior Foreign Service officer Mark Wentling wrote in 2020, with Libyan arms traced to criminals and terrorists in Niger, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria and Gaza, including not just firearms but also heavy weaponry like antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. By last year, extremism and violence was rife throughout the region, thousands of civilians had been killed and 2.5 million people had been displaced.

Things are scarcely better in “liberated” Libya today. The resulting power vacuum produced exactly what Iraq War critics predicted: a protracted (and forever close-to-reigniting) civil war involving rival governments, neighboring states using them as proxies, hundreds of militias and violent jihadists. Those included the Islamic State, one of several extremist groups that made real Clinton’s pre-intervention fear of Libya “becoming a giant Somalia.” By the 2020 ceasefire, hundreds of civilians had been killed in Libya, nearly 900,000 needed humanitarian assistance, half of them women and children, and the country had become a lucrative hotspot for slave trading. Today, Libyans are unambiguously worse off than before NATO intervention. Ranked 53rd in the world and first in Africa by the 2010 UN Human Development Index, the country had dropped fifty places by 2019. Everything from GDP per capita and the number of fully functioning health care facilities to access to clean water and electricity sharply declined. Far from improving U.S. standing in the Middle East, most of the Arab world opposed the NATO operation by early 2012.

8 Sep 23

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQ Nation:

The Senate has passed the Kid’s Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children’s and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) in 91-3 votes. While the bipartisan bills seek to reduce the harmful impact of social media on young people, advocates worry that KOSA in particular will enable Republicans to block queer youth from seeing age-appropriate LGBTQ+ content online.

Only three senators voted against the bills: Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Rand Paul (R-KY) — all three made statements explaining why. The bill will soon head to the House for a vote. Some advocates hope the House will amend or block the bill to reduce the likelihood of Republicans abusing it. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), authored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), mandates that social media companies take measures to prevent recommending any content that promotes mental health disorders (like eating disorders, drug use, self-harm, sexual abuse, and bullying) unless minors specifically search for such content. KOSA also requires platforms to limit features that result in compulsive usage — like autoplay and infinite scroll — or features that allow adults to contact young users or track their location. The bill says platforms must notify parents if their kids are exposed to potentially hazardous materials or interactions.

COPPA 2.0, crafted by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), aims to establish robust online privacy protections for minors under 17. Among its provisions, the legislation would prohibit targeted advertising directed at children and teenagers and introduce an “eraser button,” enabling parents and kids to delete personal information from company databases.

KOSA is supported by groups like Common Sense Media, Fairplay, Design It For Us, Accountable Tech, Eating Disorders Coalition, American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Many other groups oppose the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, the LGBT Technology Partnership, Fight for the Future, as well as LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations in six states. Because KOSA makes social media platforms legally liable for suggesting content that may harm kids’ mental health, the aforementioned opposition groups worry that Republican attorneys general who see LGBTQ+ identities as harmful forms of mental illness will use KOSA to censor queer web content and prosecute platforms that provide access it. To avoid lawsuits, social media platforms may just censor such content altogether.

[...] Supporters of KOSA point out that the legislation explicitly states that social media companies must only suppress content that encourages suicidal behaviors, eating disorders, substance use, sexual exploitation, and ads for tobacco and alcohol. The legislation allows social users of all ages to access any material that they deliberately search for, and the legislation excludes many organizational websites from possible lawsuits, including government platforms, libraries, and non-profits.

The Senate passed the highly controversial KOSA and COPPA 2.0 91-3, with Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Mike Lee (R-UT) voted against.

KOSA has some alarming provisions that could be used to censor age-appropriate LGBTQ+ content.

[lesser-known-composers]

Joseph Marx (1882-1964) - Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano (1913): I. Bewegt und frei im Vortrag

Tobias Ringborg, violin

Daniel Blumenthal, piano

[pseudonym-lux]

THE CAST OF DEAD RINGER (ACT ONE)

MORRIGAN BAUDELAIRE portrayed by lily james

ELIJAH MIKAELSON portrayed by daniel gillies

LIN BAUDELAIRE portrayed by daniel dae kim

MARA BAUDELAIRE portrayed by brie larson

DIANA BAUDELAIRE portrayed by zoey deutch

TERESA BAUDELAIRE portrayed by britt robertson

JULIET BAUDELAIRE portrayed by maia mitchell

ALAN BAUDELAIRE portrayed by michiel huisman

DAISY BLUMENTHAL portrayed by samantha logan

HANNA MIKAELSON portrayed by crystal reed

KLAUS MIKAELSON portrayed by joseph morgan

REBEKAH MIKAELSON portrayed by claire holt

DAMON SALVATORE portrayed by ian somerhalder

STEFAN SALVATORE portrayed by paul wesley

ELENA GILBERT portrayed by nina dobrev

JEREMY GILBERT portrayed by steven r. mcqueen

BONNIE BENNETT portrayed by kat graham

CAROLINE FORBES portrayed by candice king

reading links wattpad | ao3

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Sidney Blumenthal on the iconography of the Trump-era GOP. It's weird, but it really seems to work on the white Evangelicals who are the wellspring for MAGAdom. "All told, so far, Trump faces 91 criminal counts in four jurisdictions. Three other elaborate trials will follow his January 6 case, if it is scheduled any time in January or February. His trial date in New York is tentatively on the calendar for 25 March 2024. In that case, he is charged by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg “for falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election. During the election, Trump and others employed a ‘catch and kill’ scheme to identify, purchase, and bury negative information about him and boost his electoral prospects. Trump then went to great lengths to hide this conduct, causing dozens of false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity, including attempts to violate state and federal election laws.” But Bragg has suggested he would postpone this trial to allow the January 6 federal case to be first.

Trump’s trial in the Mar-a-Lago presidential records case is on the calendar in Florida for 20 May 2024, where he is charged with the illegal and willful theft of national security documents and obstruction of justice. Even more than during the gripping performance of his various indictments, the theatre of his trials will subsume politics. There will not be another campaign, some semblance of a normal campaign of the past, a fantasy campaign, separate from Trump’s trials. The scenes from courtroom to courtroom will overlap with the primaries – the final ones taking place on 4 June 2024 – only intensifying the zeal of his base. And then Trump’s battle with the law will engulf the general election. The trials are a continuous spectacle, featuring an all-star cast in far-flung locations. Political reporters are barely heard from, while legal analysts fill the airwaves. Every twist and turn, every motion, every argument is the breathless lead story. Everyone, from prosecutors to co-conspirators, named and unnamed, indicted and unindicted, are characters in Trump’s new reality show – part violent action movie (the insurrection), part sleazy porn flick (Stormy Daniels), part conspiracy thriller (Mar-a-Lago), and part mafia drama (the fake elector racket).

But the Trump trials are more than his means; they are his ends. The trials are not the sideshow, but the heart and soul of Trump’s campaign. They have become his essential fundraising tool to finance his defense, his platform for whipping up his followers into a constant state of excitement, and his instrument for dominating the media to make himself the center of attention and blot out coverage of anyone else. The trials are the message. They are the drama around which Trump plays his role as the unjustly accused victim, whose rights are trampled and who is the martyr for his oppressed “deplorables”. He is taking the slings and arrows for them. The narcissist is the self-sacrificing saint. The criminal is the angel. The liar is the truth-teller. If any Republican lapses in faithfulness, they are more than a mere doubter or skeptic, but a betrayer and traitor. Trump’s trials are the rigorous trial of his followers’ faith. Rejection of temptation in an encounter with an impertinent fact that might raise a qualm shows purity of heart. Seduction by fact must be resisted. The siren song of critical thinking must be cast out as sin. Trump’s convictions are the supreme test of his followers’ strength of conviction."

[universomovie]

Will Smith estrelará o thriller de ficção científica 'Resistor', da Sony Pictures

Por Ethan Shanfeld Imagens Getty Após o sucesso de “Bad Boys: Ride or Die”, Will Smith está se unindo novamente à Sony Pictures para o thriller de ficção científica “Resistor”, baseado no romance de 2014 de Daniel Suarez, “Influx”. O filme é de Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, Steve Tisch e Tony Shaw da Escape Artists, que desenvolve o projeto há anos ao lado de Smith e Jon Mone através de…

[ivovynckier]

What a lovely surprise this turned out to be!

Belgian (film) composer Dirk Brossé’s album “Seven Nocturnes” was inspired was by the days of the week - they all have a different vibe, don’t they?

Brossé composed 7 pieces to be played during the golden hour at the end of each day.

Each piece has two versions: the original version for the piano (played by Daniel Blumenthal) and another orchestration played by the chamber orchestra Prima La Musica.

[kiaraalmanzar]

THANK YOU!

Mrs. España-Tait, Jazlyn, Lydia, Binish, Tiffany, Edrica, Jennifer, Valentina, Emily, Jamie, Miller, Mary, Christine, Andrea Mowery, Allison Blumenthal, Kelsey Fleury, Maggie Dowling, Mallory, Alex, Mina, Maria Alejandra, Nicole, Lindsay Hudock, Joan McCain, Wes Davenport, Rebecca, Paree, Remi, Bailey, Caitlin, Katalina, Sophie, Mike, Brittany Hoydich, Ally, Amanda, Tina Flemming, Danielle Irigoyen, Jasmine, Mia, Melanie, Carlos, Orchee, Victoria Stokel, Mandi, Pricila, Zaynab, Katherine, Alex, Sofia, Julia, Alissa, Olutosin, Mami, Papi, Abuela, Emely, JACK, Ginger, and Doof

The journey so far would be abysmal if it weren't for the wonderful humans that held my hand along the way. Thank you to these individuals for all their support, guidance, laughter, and friendship. I would definitely split my orange with you.

[weil-weil-lautre]

Full story below break:

By Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean

WASHINGTON — In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.

Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.

For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.

The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.

The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.

On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.

Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.

Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee — Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat — also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012.

While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said. But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”

James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and the author of 10 books on spaceflight who often debunks U.F.O. sightings, was also doubtful. “There are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories,” Mr. Oberg said. “Lots of people are active in the air and don’t want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.”

Still, Mr. Oberg said he welcomed research. “There could well be a pearl there,” he said.

In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012.

“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in an email, referring to the Department of Defense.

But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A. He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.

“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Mr. Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.

U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the American military. In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially ended in 1969. The project, which included a study code-named Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.

Robert C. Seamans Jr., the secretary of the Air Force at the time, said in a memorandum announcing the end of Project Blue Book that it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”

Mr. Reid said his interest in U.F.O.s came from Mr. Bigelow. In 2007, Mr. Reid said in the interview, Mr. Bigelow told him that an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached him wanting to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.

Mr. Reid said he met with agency officials shortly after his meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a research program on U.F.O.s. Mr. Reid then summoned Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol.

“I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016. Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain.

The sightings were not often reported up the military’s chain of command, Mr. Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized.

The meeting with Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye, Mr. Reid said, “was one of the easiest meetings I ever had.”

He added, “Ted Stevens said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since I was in the Air Force.’” (The Alaska senator had been a pilot in the Army’s air force, flying transport missions over China during World War II.)

During the meeting, Mr. Reid said, Mr. Stevens recounted being tailed by a strange aircraft with no known origin, which he said had followed his plane for miles.

None of the three senators wanted a public debate on the Senate floor about the funding for the program, Mr. Reid said. “This was so-called black money,” he said. “Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted it.” Mr. Reid was referring to the Pentagon budget for classified programs.

Contracts obtained by The Times show a congressional appropriation of just under $22 million beginning in late 2008 through 2011. The money was used for management of the program, research and assessments of the threat posed by the objects.

The funding went to Mr. Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the program.

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.

“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program. “First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this plastic stuff. He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”

The program collected video and audio recordings of reported U.F.O. incidents, including footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves. The Navy pilots can be heard trying to understand what they are seeing. “There’s a whole fleet of them,” one exclaims. Defense officials declined to release the location and date of the incident.

“Internationally, we are the most backward country in the world on this issue,” Mr. Bigelow said in an interview. “Our scientists are scared of being ostracized, and our media is scared of the stigma. China and Russia are much more open and work on this with huge organizations within their countries. Smaller countries like Belgium, France, England and South American countries like Chile are more open, too. They are proactive and willing to discuss this topic, rather than being held back by a juvenile taboo.”

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.

Mr. Elizondo, in his resignation letter of Oct. 4, said there was a need for more serious attention to “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” He expressed his frustration with the limitations placed on the program, telling Mr. Mattis that “there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”

Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.

In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects had come from. “If anyone says they have the answers now, they’re fooling themselves,” he said. “We do not know.”

But, he said, “we have to start someplace.”

[already-14]

(via Marie-Nicole Lemieux - Opéra national de Paris)

Marie-Nicole Lemieux — "À Chloris" (Reynaldo Hahn)

Marie-Nicole Lemieux, contralto & Daniel Blumenthal, piano

https://youtu.be/nrnCmGI9rnc

[lesser-known-composers]

Sandro Blumenthal (1874–1919) - Piano Quintet No. 1 in D major, Op. 2 (1898) Dedication: "A mio padre."

1. Allegro moderato (0:00) 2. Adagio espressivo (11:04) 3. Scherzo. Prestissimo (17:39) 4. Finale. Molto lento - Allegro con fuoco (21:44)

Daniel Giglberger and Hélène Maréchaux, violin I & 2

Corinna Golomoz, viola

Bridget MacRae, cello

Olivier Triendl, piano

[thosebrookfieldgirls]

The TWST equivalent to the theatre club (forget what it's called since the name is so outlandish) singing this...?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTsRcabrkrA

(But seriously, this song slaps.)

Vil: alright everyone I've got a new song for us to make a music video for here's your assignments. I shall be playing the part of the butler character: Sebastian. Alin: you will be playing the part of the young Earl Ciel. Don't mess up.

Alin: Yes!

Jamil who got volunteered by Kalim to play Soma: why am I here?

Val: no idea but these wig notes hurt to look at

Kim: and the embellishments on these costumes... help

Vil: are you three saying you can't do it?

Jamil, Val, and Kim with fear: no sir

[doshmanziari]

A Phenomenology of Gazes || Nope

“Nope” is almost aggressively defined by gazes. Anyone who has seen it will remember Daniel Kaluuya’s character, OJ, not so much deducing as intuiting, within a life-or-death scenario, that the movie’s flying saucer — really, more of an Unidentified Feeding Object — consumes anything which grants (or appears to grant, as the movie’s climax demonstrates) it attention. This recalls a pivotal scene from “Get Out” wherein the protagonist, also played by Kaluuya, avoids falling under hypnotic suggestion by stuffing his ears with cotton. In both scenes, the person is in direct contact with the threat and nullifies it by an autonomous denial, the preservation of a crucial sensory faculty.

But a quick review of the rest of the film reveals that the gaze is everywhere, from the eyes-on-you gesture shared between OJ and his sister, Em (Keke Smith); to the moment when a chimpanzee “animal actor”, Gordy, having just exceeded his limit for being a captive and gone violently berserk on set, locks eyes with a surviving boy actor, Jupe (Steven Yeun); to what becomes a shared concern, or obsession, among OJ, Em, Angel (an electronics store employee, played by Brandon Perea), and esteemed filmmaker Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) to film or photograph the UFO.

As with OJ’s intuition and aversion, the gaze here is also defined by its avoidance or negation: when OJ, who has inherited a horse ranch from his father, brings one of his horses to the set for a commercial, he tilts his head down and away from the reach of the rest of the irksome crew; OJ’s father is killed when miscellanea is ejected at blistering speed from the UFO’s oral-anal hole and a nickel enters his brain through his right eyeball; a recapitulation of the scene involving Gordy, as viewed from different cameras and moments before the assault, stresses the chimpanzee’s presence by his absence by keeping the focus solely on the humans (this ocular exclusion is also an effective technique for invoking an expectant anxiety).

What to make of all this? Locating a theme only tells us that the theme is there, or that it may be interpreted as being there. What I’ve omitted to mention so far is that OJ is black, as are his sister and father.

In certain ways, “Nope” is as much a UFO movie as it isn’t. Although Jordan Peele’s screenplay engages with contemporary incidents and aspects, both reputable — Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean’s NYT article of 2017 is mentioned — and disreputable — Angel’s namedrop of Ancient Aliens prompted a ripple of knowing laughter among the theater’s audience — , its narrative is ultimately a divergent appropriation of the UFO phenomenon. The only black-eyed humanoids here are costumed folks playing a prank on OJ, while the UFO turns out to be an aerial life form, a sort of enormous, sky-bound variant of oceanic siphonophores. Its interiors are not curvilinear metallic chambers containing operating tables but a network of puffy, ribbed digestive tracts, an inflatable funhouse from a thrumming nightmare.

That these divergences might disappoint some people (including myself, to a degree) is beside the point that “Nope” is the first major UFO movie I can think of which so prominently foregrounds black people, to say nothing of Jupe or Angel. While it racially implicates the film industry and the uses of photographic technology, this foregrounding also evokes the notable lack of black Americans’ accounts of, or engagement with material concerning, UFOs. Barney and Betty Hill’s experience still stands out today, not just because of its situating as the United States’ first widely publicized, domestic account of alien abduction, but also because of Barney’s blackness. So obvious and pervasive is this lack that when Patricia Avant produced a short film featuring her own footage, she was compelled to entitle it like a corrective assertion: “Black People Do See UFOs.”

Undoubtedly, black people do see UFOs. The phenomenon is worldwide, relentless, and seemingly nonselective (excepting an understudied intergenerational pattern). Yet when one examines, at least as far as the United States goes, the details of authorship, reports, and cults, one does find a dearth of black people. Anthony Lane’s review for The New Yorker is keen to illustrate a difference between OJ and Richard Dreyfuss’ character in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”: “Both guys lean out to see what’s happening. Roy gets flashed and scalded for his pains, and, as the encounter ends, he is left panting and shuddering in shock. O.J., on the other hand, opens the driver’s door, glances upward, and then, with unforgettable aplomb, slowly closes the door again. He contents himself with uttering a single word: ‘Nope.’”

OJ’s utterance is the equivalent to “I don’t fuck with that,” and the retraction of his gaze is as self-assured as it is self-preserving. But we needn’t only look forty-five years ago to Spielberg’s movie to find a difference of attitude: during “Nope”’s final confrontation with the UFO, Antlers removes himself from shelter for the sake of a money shot and is gobbled up. Although the movie’s internal context might sooner prompt one to consider Antlers’ decision as being informed by a suicidal-romantic commitment to True Art, for me it recalls the cavalier attitude of modern contact-pursuing cults like Steven Greer’s, wherein everything that is dangerous about UFOs has been sidelined by an underlying arrogance. It is just as unsubstantiated and reductive to suggest that black Americans may generally avoid talking about UFOs because of some uniform, trauma-informed cautiousness as it is somehow unsurprising to know that Greer is white, as were practically all of the UFO cult leaders mentioned by Jacques Vallée in his 1979 book, Messengers of Deception.

Antlers’ hand-cranked film camera, like all cameras, is an eye with its own type of gaze: directive and reflective, but not affected. Its antique form calls to mind an early scene, wherein Em joins OJ on the commercial’s set to give the background for the ranch’s business. Referring to one of photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s later chronophotographic sequences depicting a black jockey upon a horse, Em explains that this “nameless” jockey, in contrast to Muybridge’s renown and the horse having a recorded name, is actually identifiable (a fiction of the movie’s) and her family’s thrice-great-grandfather. Expanded to a fuller context, the centrality of the camera here, and elsewhere, speaks to its real-world powers as an arbiter of history, reality, and humanization, or dehumanization. OJ and company’s fixation on the cameras they install on the ranch to film and thus prove the UFO’s existence is simultaneously reasonable and unprecedentedly modern. Objectivity, as it were (with all the ways by which the camera objectifies), has priority over empirical reality. The subject is made or unmade by the lens’ presence.

So there is an irony to Em’s historical pride, not lost, I think, to the movie: a dimension of her and her family’s racial, cultural, and vocational lineage has been legitimized by a prototype of the same technology which has been used to invisiblize them. The fact that we are, in many respects, more beholden to the camera, and its industries, than it is to us is suggested by a feature of the shapeshifting UFO’s final form: an angular, green projection containing a sort of inscrutable mouth and, with each of its undulations, producing a whipping sound. Here is the green screen placed behind actors, ready to tame and overpower them, and future audiences, with a consuming spectacle. Naturally, this implicates “Nope” itself, to a degree.

The movie’s simultaneous engagement with and disengagement from the UFO phenomenon, and its fixation on the gaze’s powers and vulnerabilities, also aligns it — unintentionally or not — with a commonality among abduction reports. The main pop-cultural legacy of Whitley Strieber’s Communion: A True Story, published in 1987, may be the crude, shameful reduction of Strieber’s trauma to a sort of prison-rape “joke”; but its secondary legacy is surely its disturbing cover: a painting of an almond-eyed being who looks at us with a sort of unknowable, arresting placidity. Accordingly, one finds within the literature (John E. Mack’s and David M. Jacobs’ books being exemplary) descriptions of a being staring into the abductee’s eyes. The abductee, who has little to no control over their body, has the profoundly naked impression that they are being mentally infiltrated, that nothing about their inner or outer life can be kept secret from the gaze. These experiences are caught between the aforementioned mean-spirited joke, New Age sentimentality determined to see the phenomenon only as a drawn-out protocol for spiritual guidance, and scientific disciplines which categorically refuse to study them even from the angle of a collective, subconscious fiction with psychosomatic effects.

If the phenomenon is the product of human minds, then it would seem to be meta-fiction rather than fiction, in the sense that dreams are also sorts of demon-strative fictions with, nevertheless, a psychic (and then physical) reality. This reflective quality of meta-fiction brings us back to the fact that to examine aspects of UFOs is to also examine aspects of ourselves and the ways of the world (and perhaps universe). In cattle mutilations are resonances of our meat industry; in crafts’ killing of the verdure they land upon are resonances of the effects of our vehicles and airplanes; in their effects upon witnesses’ skin, hair, and internal organs are resonances of our scientists’ acquiescence in developing weapons of biological warfare; in the beings’ remorseless forcing of humans to be medical subjects are resonances of productions such as Unit 73, or our experiments upon “lower” animals.

It is the Otherness of the phenomenon which simultaneously readies a gazeful cognizance of its horrors and a blindness to our own capacity for even greater heights of “inhumanity” — a nice word that allows us to believe evilness is the corruption of an inherent gentility. That the threat of “Nope”’s UFO centers around its voracious nature and violent excretions (an inversion paralleling the camera’s inversion of an image) is not, then, only symbolically indicative of socioeconomic or sociocultural hegemony but its phenomenological nearness to us, a horrific immanence settled below a constructed normality. This nearness is never more powerfully illustrated by the movie than in its thunderstorming scene where the UFO hovers right above the ranch house, dumping a deluge of blood and phantasmic screams upon its exterior. It is this scene above all others where one may reconsider whether or not this is truly “just” a hungry creature, and not also the revenge of the unconscious, or the anima mundi.

When OJ asks Em, after having first seen the UFO, “What’s a bad miracle?”, the answer to his question might be a miracle, all the same. Sophocles’ tragic observation, “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse”, is as applicable to the invention of the magical camera (now so common as to have had its obviously magical qualities regularized and diminished) as it is to the emergence of the magical UFO phenomenon. Prior to the camera, there was the camera obscura, the “dark chamber.” We can literalize and metaphorize this term for a statement: the camera obscures as it reveals. And is not the same thing true of UFOs, those cameras, vaulted chambers, of the sky? To gaze upon the miraculous, the wondrous, is to receive all of its afflictions.