A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Is Osama bin Laden really dead, and if so, what proof shows it? He hasn’t made any videos or recorded statements since May 2011. As the charismatic leader of a large terrorist organization which uses propaganda and psychological warfare, bin Laden’s silence (which has gone on for over seven and a half years and is not going to break any time soon) is a dead giveaway. Al-Qaeda, the group of radical Islamists Osama bin Laden led for more than 20 years, named a successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, on June 16, 2011. The terrorists themselves said their “Sheikh” was dead. The CIA, the Special Operations Command, and the U.S. Navy SEALs, as well as then-President Barack Obama, confirmed Osama bin Laden was dead. 

© 1994 Houghton Mifflin/© 2006 Mariner Books. Cover design by Clifford Stoltze Design, Cover image: Photodisc In October of 1994, New York-based Houghton Mifflin published the first edition of Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. Written by retired Navy Captain Jim Lovell and science beat journalist Jeffrey Kluger, the book tells the story of Lovell's final - and star-crossed - space flight in April 1970: Apollo 13. Shortly after its publication, Imagine Entertainment founders Brian Grazer and Ron Howard bought the film rights and adapted the book as the 1995 movie Apollo 13.  As a result of the film's success, Houghton Mifflin changed the title from Lost Moon to Apollo 13 when it released the paperback edition to coincide with the film's theatrical premiere. Lovell, a Naval Aviator and test pilot before joining NASA as a member of the agency's Astronaut Group II - "the New Nine" - in 1962. As a result, Lovell and his eight colleagues (which i...

Would Star Wars: The Last Jedi have been way better if Luke actually was there for the fight, instead of just a Force projection of him?  A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack. -  Yoda to Luke Skywalker,  Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back Questions like this, quite frankly, leave me cold. They reflect only the barest understanding of  Star Wars,  its mythos, its themes, and its character arcs. They also reinforce my opinion that the Expanded Universe (now called Legends) has an unhealthy grip on many  Star Wars  fans’ minds that makes them unable to understand the dynamics of the saga. Contrary to the oft-seen complaint that Kathleen Kennedy, Rian Johnson, and J.J. Abrams ruined  Star Wars  and that Luke Skywalker’s character was not written in a way that fits the “lore,”  Star Wars: The Last Jedi  did a great job at depicting a very human Luke who, despite his failure to proper...

Restrepo (2010) Produced and Directed by: Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington Cinematography by: Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington Starring: The men of Battle Company, 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade One platoon, one valley, one year © 2010 Outpost Films/National Geographic Entertainment The war in Afghanistan is the longest conflict in U.S, history. It has been going on for so long that it has had two distinct phases: Operation Enduring Freedom (2001-2014) and Operation Freedom's Sentinel (2015-present). Launched on October 7, 2001 as a response to the September 11 attacks on the U.S. by Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda terror group, its stated goals were to topple the harsh ultra-conservative Islamic regime known as the Taliban, capture or kill Bin Laden and his cohorts, and deny Al Qaeda a secure base of operations. It has been the largest military operation carried out by the NATO alliance (the 9/11 attacks activated t...

Why did James Alex Fields from the Charlottesville protests get recommended 419 years in prison for killing one person? If he were a liberal and rammed his car into Trump supporters and killed people, would he get the same harsh sentence? I really hate questions written by “conservative” zealots that seek to demonize fellow Americans who happen to hold different views on how the country should be governed. Not only are they insincere (not seeking real answers but, rather, making a political statement instead), but they are not well thought-out. Still, I’ll answer it, even though I seriously doubt it will enlighten the dude that wrote this, ahem, question. Firstly, James Allen Fields, Jr.  deserves  what he got for driving his car into a crowd of people who were counter-protesting a  Neo-Nazi rally  and killed a young woman, Heather Heyer. A life sentence in prison is far better than he deserves, actually, seeing as to how Ms. Heyer is dead and Mr. Neo-Na...

Fox News seems not to dissect and interpret current developments in the Russia Probe like other channels do. Why? Are they intentionally limiting the information that their viewers receive? As I’ve said in my previous answers to questions about Fox “News” Channel, the reason for this is simple: Fox News Channel is  not  a dedicated newsgathering organization. It might have a news division with real journalists for “breaking news” or their off-peak hour news programming, but in reality, Fox News is a propaganda outlet for the post-Reagan Republican Party. For this reason, thoughtful, dispassionate, and honest dissection of such news stories as the Trump Organization’s connections to Russia and the conspiracy to basically use the Internet as a Psychological Operations (PsyOps) weapon to give Donald Trump an edge during the Presidential election in 2016 goes against Fox News Channel’s ethos. I mean, think about it. Fox News is a  propaganda  machine that would...

If someone actually bought Star Wars from Disney, would Canon and other things change once again? Sure,  if  there was a company or individual with enough money to buy Lucasfilm Ltd. and the  Star Wars  franchise from The Walt Disney Company, and if  Bob Iger and the stockholders were willing to sell either the franchise or Lucasfilm. Whoever owned the  Star Wars  brand would then decide: What “canonicity” means under the new regime What new content would be created, in what format, and which venue (theaters, television, or Internet) Whether or not to re-release existing movies in their current form, or (in the case of the Original Trilogy) their original (as released) editions Which video game companies would get licenses to create new games Whether or not licensed printed media original works (novels, comics, anthologies) are canonical After all, that’s what ownership entails. If The Walt Di...

The question, as originally posted, is:  Do you feel as if the NFL’s updated national anthem policy is unfair? Several months ago,  when I answered a question on Quora regarding this topic, I erroneously said that forcing NFL players - who are all adults and have certain inalienable rights as citizens of this country - to stand during the playing of the National Anthem if  they choose to be on the field  at such time during a pro football game is unconstitutional. I was disabused of this belief by Quorans who pointed out that such a policy is only  unconstitutional  if it is foisted on the players by any government official at any level, be it local, state, or federal. It’s  not  unconstitutional, apparently, if a business owner (in this case, the National Football League’s owners) tells employees (aka the pro football players) that they can either stay in the locker room while  The Star Spangled Banner  plays or stand with the te...

Cover Design: Paul Smith. Photo Credit: © Lilly Library, Indiana University. © 2006 Simon & Schuster/Free Press On April 18, 1945, a 45-year-old war correspondent named Ernest Taylor Pyle was accompanying Lt. Col. Joseph B. Coolidge, commanding officer of the U.S. Army's 305th Infantry Regiment, part of the 77th Infantry Division, on a jeep with three other officers on the small island known as Ie Shima (now Iejima), off the coast of Okinawa. Pyle, who was better known to his readers and the U.S. service personnel he wrote about in a nationally-syndicated column as "Ernie," had landed ashore with the 77th Division just one day before. As the five men drove to Coolidge's new headquarters in an area that was not yet cleared of Japanese defenders, a lone enemy gunner fired his Nambu machine gun at the jeep, forcing its occupants to take cover in a nearby ditch. "After a moment," writes author James Tobin in Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitn...

USCG LT Christopher Hasson's cache of weapons. Photo credit: Associated Press via National Public Radio We have met the enemy, and he is us. -  Walt Kelly Dear friends , maybe that’s a bit of a misnomer. Acquaintances more likely. Hope this finds you well. I am dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth. - Christopher Hasson, in an email draft recovered by government investigators As the ongoing debate on President Donald Trump's pet project of the Great Border Wall on the border with Mexico continues, along comes a reminder that the greatest threat to Americans does not come from undocumented immigrants from Latin America, but rather from native-born Americans armed with enough weapons to equip your average Army or Marine Corps infantry squad. Per a report published last night (and updated this morning) by National Public Radio, Christopher Paul Hasson, a lieutenant on active duty in the U.S. Coast Guard, was arrested last week "on charges...

© 2011 Penguin Press On September 8, 2011, Penguin Press published the first edition of Sir Ian Kershaw's The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945. It is an in-depth scholarly look at the psychological, political, and socio-cultural factors that allowed Adolf Hitler's Third Reich to resist the Allied onslaughts on all fronts (the West, the East, and Italy) during the last 10 months of World War II in Europe. Written by the renowned author of a two-volume biography of Hitler and other books about Nazi Germany,  The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 tackles a subject that, at best, is only tangentially covered in other works that focus on the military campaigns that took place between July of 1944 and the spring of 1945 or, in Max Hastings' pithy phrase, "bunker porn" that describes in lurid details, the last 10 days of Hitler's wretched life in Berlin. In retrospect, it is amazing that a r...

Anonymous on Quora asked:  Why is  Saturday Night Live  so disrespectful to Donald Trump? Why isn't there a law making it illegal to slander the President of the United States? Political satire, which is the type of comedy practiced by Lorne Michaels’ long-running comedy-sketch series when it lampoons any sitting President, is one of the oldest forms of satirical comment in the humanities. As long as there have been kings, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, and other heads of state, there have always been comedians and/or political cartoonists who, in their routines or drawings, comment on the political realities of the day. To those diehard loyalists of those heads of state, who tend to see things in a different light as the opposition, any criticism of their nation-state’s leadership is often interpreted as an unwarranted attack. And because the satire is often a response to a policy or political philosophy that the head of state promotes, and the loy...