documentary films

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm utterly fascinated by nuclear weapons, my brain just can't seem to process the magnitude of their destructive power.

Same here.

What's incredible is that the jump in destructive power between the early weapons of the '40s and the H-bombs of the '50s was of a similar magnitude to the jump from common-or-garden high explosives to Little Boy and Fat Man. The Soviets tested a bomb in 1961 that had about three thousand times the yield of the Hiroshima weapon.

The history of their development is full of weird shit, too - you had people like John von Neumann (one of the last century's greatest scientists and mathematicians, said by some to leave Einstein in the dust for sheer brain power) advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR in the late '40s before they developed their own bomb...Edward Teller led a campaign during the Manhattan Project to skip fission devices altogether and go straight to a fusion bomb, and later testified against the Project's leader Oppenheimer during the latter's security clearance hearing. Seems he was also instrumental in kick-starting Israel's nuclear programme. Crazy times.
 
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vimothy

yurp
Watched the Enron doc, Smartest Guys in the Room, last week. Pretty cool film. My favourite bit was a clip of an advert featuring one of the top execs at Enron. IIRC, in the advert, he was explaining to some (I guess) prospective investors. "Next year, we will increase primary revenue by $20 billion, and trading revenue by $40 billion. And how will we accomplish this? By moving from fair-value accounting to something I call HVA – hypothetical value accounting…”

Ha – dems some smart guys alright – that’s fucking genius!
 

luka

Well-known member
oh fir sure the fela doc is deeeep makes me want to live in a commune with 50 wives and lounge around in the sun wearing nothing but a pair of red briefs and smoking turbo zoots.
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
i myself thought the teal pants were special.

if anyone ever needs to keep there ego in check then it serves as an apt antidote.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
oh fir sure the fela doc is deeeep makes me want to live in a commune with 50 wives and lounge around in the sun wearing nothing but a pair of red briefs and smoking turbo zoots.

At what misguided point in your life did you not want to do this?
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Watched '102 Minutes That Changed America' last night on Channel 4.

I saw that too, it was AMAZING.

Don't know about the military, or the air force, but somebody or something was enforcing a five mile air exclusion zone around the towers, stopping the CBS choppers getting real close in and zapping jumpers.

If anyone didn't see this, it was a consummately edited home movie version of this.

I'm still transfixed by the whole thing, I admit.
 

vimothy

yurp
It was a very powerful film.

Re the US military, I know that it is very difficult, for balance of power reasons, to legally deploy troops on American soil -- this was a factor contributing to the debacle of Katrina, e.g.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
102 minutes isn't very long to organise a large troop deployment into Lower Manhattan with all the roads filled with terrified people fleeing and the Pentagon knocked out, if you think about it.
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
It was a very powerful film.

Re the US military, I know that it is very difficult, for balance of power reasons, to legally deploy troops on American soil -- this was a factor contributing to the debacle of Katrina, e.g.

could you point me towards any info regarding this? sounds crazy.

re - 102 minutes

fascinating watch, really liked this the idea of not having any host narration. other than Zidane i wonder if there are any other docs that use this idea?
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
I saw that too, it was AMAZING.

Don't know about the military, or the air force, but somebody or something was enforcing a five mile air exclusion zone around the towers, stopping the CBS choppers getting real close in and zapping jumpers.


yes i wonder how they imposed this rule. i could easily imagine any news network disregarding such rules in order to gain next level news exclusives.
 

massrock

Well-known member
yes i wonder how they imposed this rule. i could easily imagine any news network disregarding such rules in order to gain next level news exclusives.
I would guess most helicopter pilots don't want to lose their licenses? Also I imagine there would have been rather strong warnings to any aircraft about being shot down.

That film was very well done. Appalling and horribly fascinating, as the events were, at least for most watching on television.

I think there are constitutional safeguards (3rd amendment?) against federal armies being deployed on US soil in times of peace without special emergency declarations or the consent of congress. Civil war and all that. But I believe there are still state militias under the control of state governors? According to this the New York Guard were activated then but the wording is a bit unclear as to how soon.

Not sure if the Pentagon was knocked out exactly, or if that in itself would mean that military command was offline.
 
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vimothy

yurp
IIRC, a state of martial law needs to be declared to deploy US military forces on US soil in an "operational" manner.
 

mms

sometimes
watched gime shelter tonight which came out on criterion recently
another maysles bros film, about the altamont stones concert if you didn't know - perhaps the best documentary i've seen, it's hell on earth, absolute hell, wretched.
 
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