Kandahar Treasure

"I heard a mother had lost her son due to a suicide bomber, and she got up to speak, and she said a beautiful thing. She said, “Whether it’s a Talib who’s being killed, an Afghan policeman who’s being killed, or an international army military person who is being killed, he leaves behind a mother, a sister or a daughter and/or a wife who mourns for him.”

So that saying was quite powerful in saying that women have this inclusive idea of security and owning peace. Stopping the killing for all... is reason enough for them to wage peace. You know, mothers feel the pain of human beings, and they’re calling for and they want this killing to stop." Rangina Hamidi. ~ Kandahar Treasure

Iraq in Fragments

If you see one independent film this year, this should be it.
The three part documentary by Seattle's James Longley is clearly made by a filmmaker with a story to tell. Forgoing the role of the "neutral" participant observer, always a moral dilemma, Longley makes no bones about his intention to convey a very clear point-of-view. Whatever your perspective on that approach, it makes for a pretty powerful movie.

From Salon.com's Andrew O'Hehir: "Alone among the works I've seen and read about Iraq in the last three years, Iraq in Fragments captures the tremendous complexity and variability of the country, offering neither facile hope nor fashionable despair. It offers no prescriptions, and the ideology you bring to the film may well determine what you see in it. If it has a lesson for Americans, it might be: We bloodied our hands in this place. Before we try to wash them off and walk away, we owe these people the respect of seeing them as they are."

I Am Become Death

The number of nuclear warheads in the US, according to a 2002 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons Databook Project is 10,600 (7,982 deployed, 2,700 hedge/contingency stockpile). The amount of plutonium still in those weapons is 43 metric tons.

Watch The Day After Trinity and Kuroi Ame and then ask yourself why.

"I remember the line from the Hindu text, The Bhagavad Gita: Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
- Robert Oppenheimer, The Day After Trinity