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Bee Positive
Joined: 27 Oct 2005
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 Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 7:34 am Post subject: |
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| Homer wrote: |
trainer...that was the intent of my response to the Bee theory becomes reality post.
Bee..best I can do?
Well...why would I bother with my best when you provide such amusing self-parody? |
Ha, ha, bozo, your mother's a virgin, homer. Who could doubt it?
You see?: Two can play at this pointess game.
The sad thing is that you're operating on the same level of intellectual and emotional maturity as the dumb kid who says "babo teacher!" and thinks that he's ruining my whole day.
On the one hand, I'm not thrilled. I don't like snot-nosed kids, and I don't like a snot-nosed dingbat called "homer" posting intellect-devoid snickering responses to my attempts at semi-intelligent conversation here.
On the other hand, who really cares what the snot-nosed of the world think? Below a certain level of education, you're dealing with those who can't yet form a reasoned critique of anything. Which is not to say that you despise them or disregard them. You try TEACHING them, if they happen to be your students. You try reasoning with them, if they happen to be reasonable and open-minded peers. Otherwise, you cringe. Reasoning with orangutangs doesn't get you anywhere.
I'd add lots of emoticons here, and change my user name to honor a cartoon character, if I were about 20 years retarded.
BEE POSITIVE |
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SuperFly
Joined: 09 Jul 2003
Location: In the doghouse
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| Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 9:02 am Post subject: |
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Bee, Homie is just Homie. Most of us just let him be his homie self and move on with our lives.
I don't pretend to be an expert on oil and how it is or isn't running out. The film certianly sends that message. The Chinese factor brings a sense of urgency to the table, etc.
Bee, if it isn't running out, then why is everyone killing each other over it?
Why does Osama think they should be getting a 100 dollars a barrel for it?
Here's a link to The abiotic oil debate and "peak oil"
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Some "peak oil" writers have opined that the crisis of 1972-73 was a kind of "rehearsal" for what is supposedly in our very near future. It is startling to consider, in light of this, the evidence that that crisis was likely a completely contrived affair.
In "A Century of War -- Anglo American Oil Politics and the New World Order" (1992), petroleum industry expert and economist F. William Engdahl presents evidence that the 1973 OPEC "oil shock" and the accompanying oil "shortage" were secretly planned by the highest levels of the US and British elites, with Henry Kissinger playing a key role:
http://earth.prohosting.com/~jswift/engdahl.html
A concise summary of the entire book can be found here:
http://how-the-world-really-works.prosperitydoctor.com/a-century-of-war-5.html
Corroboration of Engdahl's account was provided a few years agb by Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, who was Saudi Arabia's OPEC minister at the time:
'I am 100 per cent sure that the Americans were behind the increase in the price of oil. The oil companies were in in real trouble at that time, they had borrowed a lot of money and they needed a high oil price to save them.'
He says he was convinced of this by the attitude of the Shah of Iran, who in one crucial day in 1974 moved from the Saudi view, that a hike would be dangerous to Opec because it would alienate the US, to advocating higher prices.
'King Faisal sent me to the Shah of Iran, who said: "Why are you against the increase in the price of oil? That is what they want? Ask Henry Kissinger - he is the one who wants a higher price".'
Yamani contends that proof of his long-held belief has recently emerged in the minutes of a secret meeting on a Swedish island, where UK and US officials determined to orchestrate a 400 per cent increase in the oil price. |
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Bo Peabody
Joined: 25 Aug 2005
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| Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 8:12 am Post subject: |
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[deleted]
Last edited by Bo Peabody on Thu May 02, 2013 1:55 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Homer
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 8:22 am Post subject: |
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Bee...thank you for making my point better than I ever could with your last post.
You are truly and utterly hopeless. |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 7:15 am Post subject: |
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Just saw it.
The good news is that it cost us $6 CDN to see it ($3 matinee prices).
The bad news is that it has left me in a deep funk.
I'm in the middle of Reading Baer's extremely pessimistic Sleeping with the Devil (and reading it will explain to bee why his/her point is irrelevant at best);
plus they've just announced over the weekend that the icecap is melting much faster than predicted and- due to heat absorbtion of more patches of open water- it will soon become an irreversible runaway process.
The solution, according to the scientist they interviewed was "stop burning oil- immediately".
So we stay on fossil fuel driven economies and we die. But attempting to get off of a fossil fuel driven economy will probably end up killing us all anyway.
So the end of the world will come with the Saudis and other oil barons sitting on top of huge piles of all the world's money, which will be by that time utterly worthless. Let's all have another drink.
I found one throwaway line in the movie now seems to have much more weight behind it- when outling the merger of the oil companies we hear a soundbite from a CNN-style broadcast which points out that the GNP of the new company "will be even larger than some nations, like Pakistan and Denmark." |
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Kenny Kimchee
Joined: 12 May 2003
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| Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 3:13 pm Post subject: |
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I just watched it the other night and was not impressed. Maybe my hopes were too high (due in part to my reading of this thread some time ago), but I thought it lacked clarity. A political thriller or a Robert Altman-style series of character portraits - which one was it supposed to be?
SPOILER ALERT!!!!
-Did anybody else have difficulty following the whole lawyer/anti-collusion plot? Exactly who was he working for and going after? What was the whole bit with his alcholic father about? Was that supposed to give his character some kind of depth?
-The whole bit with the suicide bomber - while good - was extraneous. While the film tried to make connections between the other characters, I couldn't see where this part fit in. Was it supposed to show another facet of this struggle for oil? Were they just trying to fill up some film to make it the obligatory 2-hour Hollywood blockbuster.
-I don't know, I just thought it was poorly written, using the old trick of "throw a bunch of stuff at the viewer to make it look deep." I spent most of the movie confused and was still confused when it ended. I know this film has/had Academy Award buzz, but I would hardly rate it a second viewing. Anyone else feel the same way? |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 6:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Kenny Kimchee wrote: |
-The whole bit with the suicide bomber - while good - was extraneous. While the film tried to make connections between the other characters, I couldn't see where this part fit in. |
You're kidding, right? If you didn't catch how this part is connected to the rest then I'm not surprised you didn't like the movie. |
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Kenny Kimchee
Joined: 12 May 2003
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| Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 12:02 am Post subject: |
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SPOILER ALERT!!!
| Bulsajo wrote: |
| Kenny Kimchee wrote: |
-The whole bit with the suicide bomber - while good - was extraneous. While the film tried to make connections between the other characters, I couldn't see where this part fit in. |
You're kidding, right? If you didn't catch how this part is connected to the rest then I'm not surprised you didn't like the movie. |
The connection was tenuous. "Young Pakistani man is recruited by the House of Saud and Big Oil to go work in the oil fields. He loses his job and becomes desperate and disenchanted. He is approached by a radical from a madrassa who entices him to become a suicide bomber. He steers an explosive-laden boat into one of Big Oil's tankers."
That's the connection. The movie is about Big Oil and this is one story about a little guy who fought back. That would be alright if the other 80% of the movie wasn't trying (unsuccessfully) to tie together an oil merger, an anti-trust investigation, the succession of princes in the House of Saud, the CIA, and some firm in Switzerland. They go to great pains to try to weave all this other stuff together and just kind of throw in this "suicide bomber" filler that bore no relationship to the rest of the movie. It would be like if the movie Platoon threw in a 20 minute bit about the recruitment and death of a VC who gets killed by an airstrike on the other side of Vietnam. After all, stories about a platoon and stories about the VC are both about Vietnam, right? That makes them connected, right? |
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dulouz
Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Location: Uranus
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| Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 7:20 am Post subject: |
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| I liked seeing George Clooney's fat gut. The film didn't connect things together too well that were supposed to be connected. |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 7:40 am Post subject: |
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| Kenny Kimchee wrote: |
| Quote: |
| Quote: |
-The whole bit with the suicide bomber - while good - was extraneous. While the film tried to make connections between the other characters, I couldn't see where this part fit in. |
You're kidding, right? If you didn't catch how this part is connected to the rest then I'm not surprised you didn't like the movie. |
The connection was tenuous. "Young Pakistani man is recruited by the House of Saud and Big Oil to go work in the oil fields. He loses his job and becomes desperate and disenchanted. He is approached by a radical from a madrassa who entices him to become a suicide bomber. He steers an explosive-laden boat into one of Big Oil's tankers."
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If you put it THAT way, then two-thirds of the movie extraneous. The young man wasn't fired from any big oil job but one of the companies in the merger. A company which had just inked a deal with the Chinese with the Emir's blessing (and backed by the oldest prince). The explosives came from the SA-7 that George Cloney lost track of in Tehran at the beginning of the movie. The tanker that was the target of the terrorist attack was the inaugural run by the newly merged Big Oil company. I.E. while the young guy was being used as pawn, he also thought he was a getting a bit of payback, not just at 'the system' in general, but at the company that laid him off in particular.
Your Vietnam comparison- well, I'd have to say that you're off-base based on the above.
So it's allegorical- you reap what you sow.
And if you've read Baer, he strongly believes 9/11 was part of the whole reap-sow chain. The confusion in the movie is deliberate- most people don't know what they're sowing so the reap part catches them by surprise (again a blatant tie to 9/11). Obvious stuff, or so I thought.
But of course I din't think the terrorist sub-plot was extraneous....
If you want to call that extraneous, well fine, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
As a plot thread it was certainly much less superfluous than the sub-sub-story of the lawyer's drunk Dad.
I think we can both agree on that.
Last edited by Bulsajo on Tue Feb 21, 2006 10:20 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 10:14 am Post subject: |
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| dulouz wrote: |
| I liked seeing George Clooney's fat gut. |
Yes, it was very impressive in a Robert DeNiro-Raging Bull-method acting way.
| Bulsajo wrote: |
| dulouz wrote: |
| The film didn't connect things together too well that were supposed to be connected. |
The confusion in the movie is deliberate- most people don't know what they're sowing so the reap part catches them by surprise (again a blatant tie to 9/11). Obvious stuff, or so I thought.
But of course I didn't think the terrorist sub-plot was extraneous.... |
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gypsyfish
Joined: 17 Jan 2003
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2006 4:30 am Post subject: |
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I wasn't crazy about Syriana, but I'm glad Clooney made it. He's a bit of a rabble rouser. I thought it too preachy and heavy handed. The acting was decent, even good, but the the story was too convoluted and far-fetched.
On the other hand, Clooney's other film from last year, Good Night and Good Luck, was very good. It wasn't the most accurate historically, but it caught the feel of what was going on and the acting was, again, good. |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2006 9:10 am Post subject: |
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| gypsyfish wrote: |
| I wasn't crazy about Syriana, but I'm glad Clooney made it. |
ditto. Given the subject and the source I think it was as about as good as you could hope for.
I can't say I enjoyed it or left feeling satisfied, yet I am glad that I saw it and would recommend it to others.
But it's certainly not for everyone.
| gypsyfish wrote: |
| I thought it too preachy and heavy handed. |
Yes but I think it comes with the territory. And the source (Baer) is very preachy and heavy-handed.
| Quote: |
| The acting was decent, even good, but the the story was too convoluted and far-fetched. |
They were trying an Altman or a "traffic" style of narrative (previously pointed out in this thread), and I agree- it was less than successful. Still, what an ambitious movie- compare to it to, say, "The Lord of War" for example.
| Quote: |
| On the other hand, Clooney's other film from last year, Good Night and Good Luck, was very good. It wasn't the most accurate historically, but it caught the feel of what was going on and the acting was, again, good. |
Haven't seen it (yet).
And yeah, the ending [BIG SPOILER]
-where Damon switches places, and George is approaching, just as the missle hits-
that was weak and far-fetched. |
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pompomouse
Joined: 21 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2006 7:24 pm Post subject: |
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opps
Last edited by pompomouse on Wed Feb 22, 2006 7:25 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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pompomouse
Joined: 21 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2006 7:24 pm Post subject: |
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| Regarding the GI comment earlier on in this thread, it might interest you to know that this film has been playing in AFFES theaters across Korea. |
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