blacksundae

Coal torpedo

The coal torpedo was a hollow iron casting filled with explosives and covered in coal dust, deployed by the Confederate Secret Service during the American Civil War, and intended for doing harm to Union steam transportation. When shoveled into the firebox amongst the coal, the resulting explosion would at the very least damage the boiler and render the engines inoperable, and at most cause a catastrophic boiler explosion that would kill crewmen and likely start a fire that would sink the vessel.

Read on.

Holy shit! Starship Troopers 3 is coming to a video rental place near you, and from the looks of this trailer it sports some of the tone of the Verhoeven’s original. I found number two sorely lacking in satire and graphic violence.

MetaFilter’s billyfleetwood posted an absolutely wonderful comment today. Here’s a snippet, but you should probably read the rest of the thread for context.

Nobody trains their kids to be killers. Your hyperbole shows an astounding and dare I say juvenile lack of understanding of the world, and the people in it. People raise their children to believe in things outside of themselves. Family, community, country, tradition. People raise their children to believe in simple things like right and wrong, good and bad. and you know what? There is a great benefit to us all in people raising their children to believe in such things.

So sure, we could ask hundreds of thousands of young men and women to follow your lead, abandon their trust in their communities, their country and their traditions. We could raise our children to believe in noone but themselves. We could stop telling our kids that Being President is a noble aspiration, that the word “leader” is a word we reserve for the best and brightest.

We could stop teaching kids that they shouldn’t take their privileges for granted, and that under no circumstances does freedom require sacrifice.

Or we could continue teaching them all of those things, and instead of cynicism, demand that the the few people we choose to lead us not shit on those beliefs, misrepresent that truth and send our kids off to kill and be killed for profit, politics and a misguided sense of personal glory.

The thread. Made me kinda misty.

Reuters:

John Cusack is outraged over the Iraq war, so the U.S. actor channeled his anger into a low-budget political satire — complete with a chorus line of scantily clad female amputees — that he hopes will offend.

Inspired by anger about the war and questions about the political power held by global corporations, “War, Inc” is set in Turaqistan, a fictional nation occupied by a private U.S. company called Tamerlane and run by a former American vice president.

Link!

I thought it was bad back in the 1980s when the Reagan Republicans sold weapons to the enemy. Now the Bush Republicans have given innovative warcraft another twist by bribing the enemy into not attacking.

The so-called Surge of 2007 was billed as an increase in troops in Iraq designed to reduce the out-of-control violence. But the biggest part of the plan involves bribing Sunni Muslim insurgents into not attacking. Approximately 70,000 of them are being paid $10 per day to hang around, armed, keeping the peace.

So in addition to the bizarrely ginormous cost of the war, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people killed, now we’re spending over a quarter billion more per year to create another militia that, no doubt, will eventually turn around and bite us, just like militias (excuse me - freedom fighters) we’ve created elsewhere.

And fuck Clinton in particular. Huffington Post:

The defense industry this year abandoned its decade-long commitment to the Republican Party, funneling the lion share of its contributions to Democratic presidential candidates, especially to Hillary Clinton who far out-paced all her competitors.

An examination of contributions of $500 or more, using the Huffington Post’s Fundrace website, shows that employees of the top five arms makers - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics — gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to Republicans.

Senator Clinton took in $52,600, more than half of the total going to all Democrats, and a figure equaling 60 percent of the sum going to the entire GOP field. Her closest competitor for defense industry money is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R.), who raised $32,000.

Read on.

From CHUD’s script review of John Rambo:

The Rambo films - if we’re to attach any sort of cultural significance to them at all - are the continuing story of how the Vietnam war reshaped and ruined many a man, and this makes them inherently critical of the government in general - and since all three films were produced and released during a particularly hardcore Republican regime - they can only be indicting the foreign policy of the day (policy that paid only lip service to the notion of soldiers incarcerated on foreign soil, or policy that left “the gallant people of Afghanistan” high-and-dry, stewing in their own juices until they came to realize that yes, America may indeed suck).

From the beginning of the first installment, these films call out our government for its inability to grant the slightest aid or respect to people who sacrificed their health, sanity, and lives for some of its most misguided notions.

[snip!]

These films get their jingoistic/patriotic rep because of the manner in which at least one self-serving politician tried to align himself with the character. Ronald Reagan once said that he’d know how to handle foreign devils “now that he’d seen Rambo”, and he mentioned the character quite a bit in speeches in his day (guy never really did leave Hollywood). I always laugh when some out-of-touch politician tries to hip it up by name-dropping some pop-cultural tidbit he doesn’t understand. Reagan was great for that - like when he wanted Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA to be his campaign theme - have you heard the song, Bonzo? Have you? Really?

[snip!]

No one will be able to swat at this film with the face-saving/revisionist history criticism Rambo II has engendered…or dismiss it as Red Scare posturing - this film is all about human rights. John Rambo is not about winning a war or fighting a government-generated boogeyman - it’s about surviving in the face of atrocity. The script’s structure is very similar to that of Rambo III, (Rambo finds himself reluctantly dragged into the battle) but without the elements that make that film so easy to write-off as propaganda. The tale is crude and conflicted, as Stallone the writer seems to have a deep respect for the bright-eyed activism of the missionaries…he just knows it doesn’t always work out - especially not in a part of the world where turning the other cheek gets you decapitated, and the meek inherit bullets.

And sure, as a war film, it’s not The Thin Red Line (John Rambo is a film that needs to blow shit up), but it does feel as though it was conceived as an homage to Samuel Fuller-style “tabloid” screenwriting - it’s brutal and arguably exploitative, but with a point to make about people. Of course, the film must stand as a nostalgia piece first and foremost - and if it can’t trade on your love of Stallone’s second most popular character (right behind Joe Bomowski), then it’s more than ready to trade on your fuzzy affection for the genre Rambo inspired. As the aforementioned trailer garishly demonstrates, the film is constructed to be a love letter to every over-the-top, mud-covered, jungle-creeping, throat-slitting, garrote-wired, squib-splattered, bamboo-splintered ‘80’s actioner ever made. If Stallone does his screenplay justice, John Rambo will stand as the best Joseph Zito movie Joseph Zito never made.

And really, who can’t love that?

Read the whole damn thing here. John Rambo sounds great. If you haven’t seen the internet trailer, check it out. Bad. Ass.