That Bourne Picture

I didn't like The Bourne Ultimatum, other than a fight scene between the Matt Damon character and some assassin who just isn't quite good enough at his job to stay alive. Stephen Hunter, my favorite film critic, didn't like it either. He explains the plot like this:

Jason Bourne, who two movies ago awoke with no memory while floating face-down in the sea but with a great number of alarming, unexplained skills (he can start any motor vehicle with his fingernails and flip any 10th-dan black belt into the balcony), is closing in on the puppet masters who vacuumed his brain and turned him into an assassin automaton. (Clearly, I have failed in my attempt to convince the American people that "amnesiac superagents" should be banned from the movies.)

In any event, after the movie's dim opening (to connect it to the last one, which ended in a car chase in Moscow), Bourne is headed to England to link up with a British reporter who has knowledge of the black op that programmed Jason, while the agency is politicized (Allen is the liberal exec, Strathairn the conservative) by the crisis and tries to either kill him (the con position) or bring him in (the lib).

One of my quarrels with the entire Bourne storyline is that a paranoid picture is painted of a CIA which is ruthless and all-knowing, yet simultaneously totally incompetent, unable to achieve the tiniest of goals. Why should I the audience member fear the film's antagonist, which (1) can't even prevent unauthorized persons from entering its headquarters (and 2) whose employees handle classified material before wide-open windows (and 3) is so sloppy in its super-malevolent assassinations of, among others, newspaper reporters who have just written damaging stories about it that those assassinations can be easily inferred as to have been carried out by it?

Hilarious! Unfastened Coins: Titanic Conspiracy

Is 2008 the new 1964?

John Derbyshire posts an email about the Dream of Ron Paul. The more I learn about the other Republican candidates, the more I find myself coming around to Paul's side.

It's MADDness

If Stalin had designed an automobile, it would be the Nissan Fuga sedan.

At least Bush waited...

... until he was president before he started alienating other countries. From the Times of India:

Pakistan accused Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama of "sheer ignorance" on Thursday for threatening to launch US military strikes against Al-Qaida on Pakistani soil.

Obama warned on Wednesday that if he is elected president, he would order US forces to hit extremist targets on Pakistan's frontier with Afghanistan if embattled military ruler President Pervez Musharraf failed to act.

"Such statements are being made out of sheer ignorance," Pakistan's Minister of State for Information, Tariq Azeem, said.

Of course Pakistan's gov isn't doing as much as we want them to - the place is a wreck. But this Obama is a reckless buffoon; he has no idea what he's doing, no idea about international diplomacy or how to handle American foreign policy, and apparently no understanding of how to navigate the tenuous relationship we have with Pakistan. The guy is a joke - he makes Hillary Clinton look measured and responsible by comparison, and I don't much care for her at all.

Intelligence agency websites

Just for the hell of it, compare the websites for the Central Intelligence Agency, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and the French Directorate of External Security. Notice that they all have diagonal corners all over the place; what's up with that? Also, the differences in general appearance - the abundance or scarcity of graphics, for example - of each website suggests to me something about the nature of each of the services. Note the top graphic of each page; the British are so smug with their big building at Vauxhall Cross; the CIA has shadows cast on the famous seal - a pretense of a secret organization that also, by the way, continually promotes a massive, high profile (the CIA's old office building has a gift shop for God's sake); and the French with two transparent eyes staring at you, and virtually nothing behind them.

The US-India Nuclear Deal

The circa 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) is designed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. 189 countries have signed it, including 5 nuclear powers - the US, UK, France, China, and Russia. All the signatories agree to not spread nuclear technology to non-nuclear states and states that haven't signed the NPT. So, hypothetically, a nuclear state such as the US can't provide nuclear technology to, for example, India, because India hasn't signed the NPT. To do so violates "international law".

Question: Who cares about international law? The only reason that laws as such mean anything is because there are consequences for violating them. There are no such consequences for violating "international law" because there is no international legal authority, just as there should not be.

A better question: How exactly does this nuclear deal between the US and India benefit the US? Other than perhaps creating a stronger bond between us and the "world's largest democracy", it doesn't benefit us at all. It does, on the other hand, create ill-will for us in places like Western Europe because we are at least violating the spirit of the NPT, and it does harm our relationship with Pakistan, India's adversary.