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Putin, Trump and a Sydney love-child

Oliver Stone is an American film and documentary director, producer and screenwriter. His work includes Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, JFK and Any Given Sunday. I spoke with him on Thursday.

Fitz: Mr Stone, I’m not going to waste too much of your time by burbling compliments. Let me just record my deepest admiration for almost your entire body of work.

OS: Thank you, Peter.

Fitz: In your long and storied career, have you had much to do with Australia or Australians?

OS: I’ve been there, I don’t know, a dozen times, often to open my films. Before that, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, I would go to Sydney on R&Rs, which were quite exciting.

Fitz: In that case, you must know Kings Cross and our once-famous Bourbon & Beefsteak bar?

OS: [Pause.] Yes. I had a whole story at that bar with a charming hostess later claiming she was having my child. I sent some support. She never really followed up, and I assumed it wasn’t true. Thirty years went by, and one fine day in Sydney, it was quite some shock for me to answer the door to my hotel and see an attractive, young, tall woman saying, “Hello, I’m your daughter.” That turned into some few days, naturally, trying to get to know this sincere young woman who’d lost touch with her mother. Eventually, we sorted it out with a DNA test, and she was not my daughter.

Fitz: Moving on! Having watched all 12 episodes of your documentary Untold American History, I was absorbed by your theme that what we think is actually happening in the world isn’t what’s really happening – a theme that runs through all your work. Is it fair to say that it was specifically your experience in the Vietnam War that made you see the world entirely differently?

OS: The Vietnam War was certainly a strong influence. The world seemed to be full of lies, and going into Vietnam – serving and seeing the way we were lied to – was formative. They tell you that this is the truth and it’s not. So my military experience pretty much started to repeat itself. I would get into a subject matter, such as a JFK film, and the deeper I went, the more it became apparent that there was a lot of lying going on. So yeah, I had a deep suspicion, a deep distrust of the official narrative. We all should know by now that governments often lie to cover their arse.

Fitz: I loved your film on JFK and your documentary on his assassination asserting it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald who shot him. But given your experience with Australia, I’m hoping you won’t mind if I put this next question in Australian vernacular?

OS: Go on.

Fitz: So who the f--- did kill JFK?

OS: [Pause.] I don’t know, but you can start with the CIA and its great interest in Kennedy in the Cuban operations, and how Kennedy – by not going through with the desire of the warrior class to attack Cuba in 1962, after the Bay of Pigs debacle – really made serious enemies. There were people who really thought he was a traitor. We kept hearing the word “traitor” used by certain of these people, some of whom worked with the CIA; in fact, there are several suspects inside that agency who we’d like to know more about.

We can start at the top with Allen Dulles, the CIA director who was fired by Kennedy. And there are other suspects from the CIA, but it’s certainly not the whole organisation. No, it’s always about some key men who operated on their own terms because they had been given so much leeway by president Eisenhower over the previous eight years. They had operated “off the shelf” – that was part of their charter. In 1947, under the National Security Act, they were given that vague right to do so on a covert basis as the president saw fit. That part of their charter was a huge mistake. Hundreds of covert operations have followed.

Fitz: Through your whole career, you’ve taken turns that nobody saw coming, with one of your most recent being your advocacy of nuclear power in your documentary Nuclear Now. I would have positioned you as a strong liberal, but the position you take in this documentary is we need to go back to nuclear which, at least here in Australia, aligns with some notably shrill conservative voices.

OS: Nuclear energy was one of the great discoveries of the last century, actually the late 19th century, and it was developed. Of course, it was given a stimulus by WWII and the chase for the atomic bomb, but people have not understood and they haven’t distinguished between a bomb and the uses of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. To make nuclear energy, you only need approximately 2 per cent enriched uranium, as opposed to approximately 95 per cent enriched for a bomb; there’s a huge difference in making and producing that kind of energy. So nuclear energy is very usable, it’s been proven safe for many usages over the years, and we should be employing more and more of it in the mix with hydro and renewable energy to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

Fitz: We both hope you live for another 30 years and can keep working for 27 of them. But is it fair to say you’d rather live, surely, next to a wind farm than even a small nuclear facility in your backyard?

OS: I’d have no fear. Because there’s going to be a lot of new small SMRs – small modular reactors – built for many purposes, and with updated safety measures. It’s the next step, especially for the Americans who are developing that form of it. The Russians and Chinese are way ahead of us in nuclear development. They’ve been doing it consistently, whereas we stopped building in the 1970s after the Three Mile Island supposed disaster. No one died, and no serious radiation was released. This was a shame because it was so misunderstood and hyped as a disaster. America can’t build a nuclear reactor any more on that scale as we did from the 1950s to the ’70s. We gave up, but now we’ve started building again to some degree with scientists and researchers, with more than 50 different companies pursuing original research, including small divisions at Westinghouse and General Electric. But these are smaller reactors. Meanwhile, the world, especially the less developed regions, are going to need a lot of nuclear energy, a lot. We’re going to need not just a little, we need a lot.

Fitz: Another surprising turn that you took, at least for me, were your interviews with Vladimir Putin, in The Putin Interviews. I take your point that he’s not just a cartoon character dictator, but a man of flesh and blood beset by forces that are around him, navigating the best he can. Nevertheless, are you shocked, as I’m shocked, by the brutality in the invasion of Ukraine, with Putin at the base of it?

OS: I’m sorry, there has been a great deal of awful new propaganda about Russia ever since the turn of this century. It’s coming from a neoconservative Washington, which is seeking to destroy the so-called Russian Empire and use it as a rich base of natural resources to be exploited by the West. We’ve made Putin into the major villain of our time because he’s invaded Ukraine, whereas the United States – with NATO – illegally invaded Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria with impunity. This is a war that’s been very misunderstood, especially the stakes. If you remember correctly, the United States staged a coup in Ukraine in 2014, which exiled the elected president and brought in a vehement and strongly anti-Russian government. They have a long history in Eastern Europe of fighting Russia. Donbas, which is the eastern, Russian-minority part of Ukraine, never joined this new government, nor did Crimea, and they were identified as “terrorists” by the government. The Russians, however, saw them as “separatists” who wanted no part of this unelected government.

While pretending to follow a peace process in Minsk I and Minsk II, the US and European Union betrayed Russia, significantly building up the Ukrainian army from 2016 on. One hundred thousand of these troops were poised to retake Donbas in February 2022. At the same time, the Ukrainian government was making quite a bit of noise about getting nuclear weapons into Ukraine. This was a huge issue for the Russians because, as you may remember, Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush negotiated in the 1980s and ’90s for a new, peaceful Europe. East Germany was reunited with West Germany on the basis that NATO would not move beyond Germany one inch to the east. That vow was broken repeatedly by the United States. NATO, with our blessing, added 13 countries to its treaty, and grew into a monster on the borders of Russia in a major movement to supposedly “contain” Russia.

There’s no point going into the history of this enormous violation to Russian national security, but it would be similar to Mexico or Canada suddenly declaring they have put a hostile army on the Mexican or Canadian border of the United States, and were, with nuclear weapons, minutes from all our major industrial centres. Nor should it be forgotten that it was the United States who reignited the Cold War in 2002 when Bush abruptly abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. So, between using NATO to expand and breaking several other nuclear agreements, the United States and NATO began the process of encircling Russia, which became increasingly suspicious of the motives of the West.

To put it in another way, if Putin had not reacted to the build-up on his borders by invading Donbas and annexing Crimea (which occurred, interestingly, without violence, because most of the population was pro-Russian), he would have lost the trust of the Russian people, who were not blind to what was going on. That’s when Putin, after giving us several warnings about the West crossing Russian red lines, reacted and sent some 120,000 Russian troops into Donbas, which had already become a bloody war by 2022 with some 7000 to 8000 “separatists” murdered by the illegal Kyiv gangster government. It was certainly not in Putin’s interest to destroy the Donbas. To the contrary, he wants to have it back in the Russian sphere of interest and keep it productive, which it once was. So one wonders where all this alleged brutality propaganda is coming from? Motive is necessary, and perhaps when this war is over, there’ll be a more rational reporting of the news.

Fitz: We can talk about this one for three hours, and I’d love to, but I’m aware of your time restrictions. Do you just despair for the current state of the movie industry with the endless Marvel franchise stuff?

OS: I don’t despair because there’s always good movies made, and there are ways to make them. I despair at the lack of depth of the theatrical movie in the United States, because the distribution system rewards essentially only blockbusters and crucifies the less lucrative releases. As a result, it’s very hard for independent and less popular productions to get made and distributed, which is a great loss to the art of cinema. It’s not just a circus business.

Fitz: Of all your movies, the scene that I most loved is in Any Given Sunday, with Al Pacino’s as the ageing Coach D’Amato talking to his team before the big NFL match: “We’re in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me. And we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell, one inch at a time. Now I can’t do it for you. I’m too old … but the inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch!” It’s a classic. When you shot it, and Al Pacino delivered it, did you recognise it at the time as that, or only when you saw it at the cinema?

OS: We never know what’s going to hit or not, or connect with an audience. You never know. Yes, that happened to be taken up, and it’s been used by numerous coaches across the country, and possibly on some Australian rugby teams, as a model for rah-rah speeches.

But, nonetheless, that movie called for it, not only because the team was losing, but also because the actor, Al Pacino, was in a mental hole too. He was having problems with ageing. If you remember, the movie is based on his being edged out of his NFL club, which goes on all the time. People get too old. So there was a lot of personal identification with it. At that point, I had been in the movie business a long time. And there were new executives coming in and a lot of them were women. And so that Cameron Diaz character, the team owner, was based in large part on a couple of the cut-throat executives I met in the film business who were young women in their 20s and 30s. That’s not to say there weren’t cut-throat young men also emerging from colleges and entering the film business without much love or understanding of cinema.

Fitz: But did you have any experience in a dressing room with a coach saying stuff like that in your background? Or anything where a coach had spoken like that?

OS: I played tackle football in elementary school, but the speech was created for the film.

Fitz: You wrote that?

OS: Yeah. Because I believe football most embodies warfare – you win or you lose. It’s tough, gritty, people get hurt, and key decisions have to be made. And you have to recognise that, often, the outcome is a matter of inches.

Fitz: Allow me to say, as somebody who was sort of raised in dressing rooms like that, across several countries, it is extraordinary to me how well you captured it. We’ve all heard the theme of that speech a hundred times, except our coaches were never quite so eloquent as that. I mean, that was extraordinary!

OS: Thank you, that’s what movies are made for, I believe. Movies are bigger than life. And those are the kinds of movies that I especially like. Unfortunately, so many movies now are smaller than life. Times change. I miss the old movies, the spectacular shows.

Fitz: Last question, if I may. Most of us in Australia don’t understand Trump. We sort of understand how he might have been elected once, but after everything that happened, finishing with January 6, we cannot understand how Americans could look at him and go, “Yeah, let’s have four more years of that.”

OS: And if you look at the Biden administration, you can say the same thing. It has gotten America into three wars, if you really think about it: (1) Ukraine, which is really a proxy war to weaken or destroy Russia, which is the most extreme strategy any American president has ever attempted; (2) the Middle East war continued in Israel, with America’s full support of Israel; and (3) now we’re bombing Yemen ourselves.

Biden is a simple-minded, old-fashioned Cold Warrior of the first degree. As mad as [WWII US Air Force] General Curtis LeMay was in his way. He’s extremely dangerous. Trump might not be a solution to this madness, but he’s nothing compared to Biden or to the damage that George W. Bush did to my country by declaring the “War on Terror”, which was wholly unnecessary. He provoked this new world that we’re living in of extreme violence and militarism.

From Bush, it grows to where we are now in a most dangerous position. Obama, then Trump, now Biden, have provoked China as well by declaring a “pivot to Asia” and sending American marines and so forth to Australia, building up the Pacific Fleet … The US is brokering a major war in the Pacific. This is a very incendiary position. I hardly see what’s so wonderful about Biden.

Fitz: He is not Trump, is the first thing that’s wonderful about Biden!

OS: That’s your way of putting it, but I don’t think you fully understand that Biden has truly split the world into two scared camps and abides by the outdated imperial notion that the US can still dominate the world. It cannot. It must accept a multipolar world that can exist economically without war.

Fitz: OK, thanks. It has been one of the privileges of my professional life to speak to you and I seriously thank you.

-Peter FitzSimmons, "Trump, Putin and a Sydney ‘love-child’ … I’d chat to Oliver Stone on any given Sunday," WAToday, Feb 11 2024

#oliver stone #australia #sydney #watoday #peter fitzsimmons #trump #biden #putin #ukraine #israel #gaza

[thewtcho]

Why Is Gareth Parker Leaving 6PR Morning? WAtoday Columnist And Award Winner Journalist Today The Talks Today

Why Is Gareth Parker Leaving 6PR Morning? WAtoday Columnist And Award Winner Journalist Today The Talks Today

Why Is Gareth Parker Leaving 6PR Morning? WAtoday Columnist And Award Winner Journalist Today Gareth Parker, a journalist from Western Australia and the host of Radio 6PR’s Breakfast show, said on Monday, August 8, that he was leaving 6PR Morning. The well-known and well-liked Australian commentator has worked in media and journalism for a long time. Parker has come a long way since he worked at…

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#6PR #award #Columnist #Gareth #Journalist #Leaving #Morning #Parker #talks #Today #WAtoday #Winner

[crossdreamers]

BBC defends playing queer punk song with "kick TERFs" lyrics

Pink News reports that the BBC has doubled down on playing a queer punk song with "kick TERFs" lyrics.

London DIY punk/riot grrl band Dream Nails’ track “They/Them” features lyrics including “my gender’s not your business”, “non-binary resistance” and “kick TERFs all day / don’t break a sweat”.

A TERF is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, also knows as a "gender critical" transphobe. Most feminists are pro-trans.

According to WAToday the BBC has dismissed criticism, suggesting that the lyrics are ambiguous: “People will interpret songs with any element of nuance or ambiguity differently.”

Here are the lyrics:

Call me a girl again Not asking for the hell of it Call me a girl again My gender’s not your business Call me a girl again Not asking for the hell of it Call me a girl again Non-binary resistance!

Woah-oh They them, they them! x 3 Not asking for a friend Woah-oh They them, they them! x 3 Not asking for a friend

Call me a girl again Kick terfs all day, don’t break a sweat Call me a girl again Trans power is forever Call me a girl again My gender’s not your business Call me a girl again Non-binary resistance!

Photo from Dream Nail's Instagram.

#transgender #trans #lgbt #queer #nonbinary #lgbtq #terf #gender critical #transphobia #punk #Youtube

[findlocalonlinedating-com]

What's the secret to success on dating apps? Economics - WAtoday

What's the secret to success on dating apps? Economics  WAtoday http://dlvr.it/T5ZYn0

[nathanmonjko]

Brooksvale: Sea Eagles and cool-handed Luke channel 2011 in Roosters win

The Age · Brisbane Times · WAtoday · The Australian ... Even the 21-14 end result did not fully represent Manly's superiority in the battle of brutality ...

[celatum-apis]

Plastic surgeon was at forefront of techniques in Australia - WAtoday

His career was of note for its variety – he worked in the fields of hand surgery and peripheral nerve injuries, burns, amputations and limb trauma ... from Google Alert - nerve surgery https://ift.tt/NOiWflU

#IFTTT #Google Alert - nerve surgery

[astrorego]

Ideas for number/licence plates (theoretical only, I can't afford custom plates and if I could I would not get any of these). Main inspiration is whatever would inflict the most psychic damage on people on the road (assuming they understand the reference if there is one) or make them laugh/groan/generally make their day a tiny bit more interesting.

I live in Western Australia, hence the style of plates used and the character limit of 9 including spaces and a single dot separator.

I use

And

To make these images. Credit to PlatesOfShame for my icon and WAToday for my header.

[melbournenewsvine]

Molly Schmidt Salt River Road won the TAG Hungerford Award

Coming of age story of small town life and the complexity of family and community relationships was based on Schmidt’s own experience growing up in Albany, a town in the Great Southern District of Washington, and losing her father to cancer. Schmidt was 15 when she first wrote the story idea in a notebook on a car trip from Albany to Perth. The Hungerford Prize has launched some jobs including that of the world’s best-selling author Natasha Lister. attributed to him: For a while it was “more of a therapeutic job” and it remained unchanged in my desk drawer while I got my degree in creative writing and started working in media. After three years as a journalist, she became “familiar with the ignoring and ignoring of Aboriginal stories and voices in the media in general” and it occurred to her that she was a writer in Western Australia with a responsibility to write in an inclusive manner. She decided to include Noongar characters in her book, but to avoid cultural appropriation, profiling, or symbolism, she did a college honors project in which she returned to Albany and consulted directly with the Noongar Elders. “In March of this year, when I presented salt river road To Hungerford, I have spent a few months in a six month period in Albany. I just started a new job in the ABC office there, and my partner, Pete, and I are still surrounded by packing boxes,” she told Fremantle Press at the time of her award nomination. “There was so much to do, a dog that needed a walk, and emails that needed checking, yet I wrote the ‘Hungerford Prize’ on the board in big red big letters. I never for a moment imagined I would be on the long list, let alone the list abbreviated, but it was my first time getting a full draft of my manuscript, and I had this nagging feeling of “If not now, when?” So she postponed her other jobs and spent weeks honing the manuscript for submission. “I thought it was the end of it. I was proud just to refine and submit the draft. Fremantle Press has always been my dream publisher salt river road; So, to be recognized by them? I’m still squeezing myself.” salt river road It will be published in November 2023. Follow WAtoday on InstagramAnd the LinkedInAnd the Facebook And the Twitter A handpicked selection of the biggest local, national and international news of the day. Source link Originally published at Melbourne News Vine

#Melbourne News Vine

[2wq7]

Perth socialite can keep Dalkeith mansion, High Court rules - WAtoday

Perth socialite can keep Dalkeith mansion, High Court rules - WAtoday Perth socialite can keep Dalkeith mansion, High Court rules  WAtodaySocialite keeps mansion in ATO court fight  news.com.auView Full coverage on Google News..

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Australia News LIVE: Queen’s Jubilee celebrations; Wong continues Pacific visits; Government faces energy crisis - WAtoday

Australia News LIVE: Queen’s Jubilee celebrations; Wong continues Pacific visits; Government faces energy crisis  WAtoday Originally Published here: Australia News LIVE: Queen’s Jubilee celebrations; Wong continues Pacific visits; Government faces energy crisis - WAtoday

#Spliced Feed 4 (Susan Minter) #Australia News LIVE: Queen’s Jubilee celebrations; Wong continues Pac

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Kelly, one of our brides from the weekend, looked stunning as she arrived at @cavershamhouse to say “I Do!” 👰🏻🤵🥂 . . #perthweddings #limohireperth #weddingcarsperth #weddingcarsofinstagram #perth #perthisok #justanotherdayinwa #swanvalleywedding #redcarpet #soperth #watoday #jeeplimousine https://www.instagram.com/p/B4cQadJD17S/?igshid=bb2ld86aq0o0

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Two-state solution won't deliver peace for Israel/Palestine. But this might

At the end of October, three weeks after the brutal Hamas attack on ... The Age · Brisbane Times · WAtoday · The Australian Financial Review · Domain ...

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WALUNCH

#wavinnies #watodays waspecials #wapizza

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200 followers!!

#ness chat #also first day of school watoday. it was fun lol

[melbournenewsvine]

McGowan rejects 10 per cent payment request from Western Australian nurses

McGowan suggested that the campaign was a factor in the enthusiasm of Jabhat al-Nusra. loading “These issues and the way things go in the midst of election campaigns of any kind are well known,” he said. Health Minister Amber Jade Sanderson told 6PR that the government was waiting for the elections to be over before they returned to the negotiating table. McGowan wouldn’t rule out coming to the negotiating table on nurse-to-patient ratios, which stipulate how many patients they are allowed to care for. Other states like Victoria already have a statutory ratio of one nurse to four patients during the day and one to eight at night. The ANF wants a ratio of one nurse to four patients in Washington. A report by Western Australia’s former Chief Nurses Philip Della, commissioned by WA Health to look at the current system of nurse staff management, recommended that the government look at the Victorian system. McGowan said the government has been negotiating with the nurses about proportions and another report is in the works on how they are working in Washington. However, he said there are complications presented by the state’s geography and small population that must be overcome. “You don’t want, for example, to have hundreds or thousands of nurses sick with respiratory illnesses in the midst of a pandemic, and therefore have to close wards and hospitals,” he said. loading “I don’t think anyone would want that, so you have to understand all of these issues and how you would work in practice in the largest jurisdiction in the world with some of the most remote hospitals in the world, in the context of Western Australia.” McGowan has not been able to determine whether negotiations over nurse-patient ratios will be completed before the ANF begins implementing the most dangerous industrial procedure threats. Olson denied suggestions that the election was affecting the union’s actions. “From the comments of the health ministers…it is clear that the government hopes to change the leadership in Jabhat al-Nusra before they make an offer,” he said. “I’m not sure what they think will change because the 20,000 nurses and midwives working in our public health system will be just as frustrated and angry as the 2,500 who attended the convention center yesterday and paid nurses and midwives in Western Australia remains the second lowest in the country. Olson also refuted McGowan’s claim that there are complications around pathogen-to-patient lineage. “They’re trying to make it difficult and complicated, it’s not,” he said. McGowan also rejected calls for a royal commission into the state’s health care system. The parents of Aishwarya Aswath, who died of sepsis at Perth Children’s Hospital in April 2021, launched a petition calling for a royal commission to be formed on Wednesday, backed by state opposition. McGowan said it wouldn’t be a reasonable use of state money. “Spending tens of millions of dollars on lawyers, when we try to spend more money on hospitals and nurses and health care, I don’t think it’s a rational use of public money,” he said. Follow WAtoday on InstagramAnd the LinkedInAnd the Facebook And the Twitter A handpicked selection of the biggest local, national and international news of the day. Source link Originally published at Melbourne News Vine

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[kesieuthivinatechjsc-blog]

Cash cow crisis: Supermarkets 'the lowest form of corporate in this country’, minister says via @ajastyles

Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud has lashed out at the supermarket giants after they continued to pass the buck as dairy farmers struggled to make a wage, let alone turn a profit. WAtoday revealed [...]

The post: Cash cow crisis: Supermarkets 'the lowest form of corporate in this country’, minister says via @ajastyles appeared first on https://www.watoday.com.au/ Theo dõi thêm thông tin tại: https://giakesieuthivinatech.blogspot.com/

#supermakets #vinatechjsc #giakesieuthivinatechjsc