Let Guillermo Del Toro finally make ‘At the Mountains of Madness’

Culture

After winning big at the Oscars, Del Toro should get to revive his most ambitious project.

H.P. Lovecraft was a bitter racist and reactionary, but nonetheless, his stories of cosmic horror and characters like the eldritch god Cthulhu have imprinted on the literary consciousness for nearly a century. That's a testament to the power of his unsettling imagination, in which a primordial, ageless darkness lies just underneath humanity. Somewhat surprisingly, a cinematic adaptation of Lovecraft's work has never really broken through to the mainstream — there have been plenty of B-movie and smaller films based off his stories, but the intellectual property has remained relatively unmined, even in this era of endless conceptual recycling.

The most cherished attempt to bring Lovecraft to the big screen is a movie that was never even made: Guillermo Del Toro's long-developed, eventually-abandoned take on "At the Mountains of Madness", one of Lovecraft's most iconic stories. In the story, an expedition to Antarctica finds an ancient, undisturbed city filled with alien life forms, suggesting a stranger precedent to humanity. The expedition goes… not well, as you might imagine. People die, and are driven insane. Horrific monsters emerge from the abyss, ready to conquer life on Earth. Is there a happy ending? Of course not!
The frozen landscape, the alien biology, the daunting architecture — all of this was fertile territory for Del Toro's strengths as a director who can convincingly give fantastical concepts the dramatic heft they deserved. In 2006, he wrote a script, and proposed it to Warner Bros. as an R-rated horror movie with a giant budget, which received moral and financial support from Tom Cruise and James Cameron. His ideas were incredibly detailed and ambitious, prompting salivation from Lovecraft readers who knew from movies like Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy how Del Toro had the right sensibility to bring Lovecraft's daunting concepts to life.

Unfortunately, Hollywood interfered. First, the rating was too severe. "It's very difficult for a studio to take the step of doing an R-rated tentpole movie with a tough ending and no love story, set in period, from a writer, Lovecraft, who has a readership as big as any bestseller but cannot be quantified because his works are in the public domain," Del Toro said. (Later: "If Mountains had been PG-13, or I had said PG-13 … I'm too much of a Boy Scout, I should have lied, but I didn't.") Then, the budget — somewhere around $150 million — was too much. And it also bore too many similarities to Ridley Scott's Prometheus, another R-rated cosmic-ish horror movie, which ended up underperforming at the box office. (Meanwhile, Del Toro's Pacific Rim was a mild box office disappointment.)

The dreaded Cthulhu, ready to infect a screen near you. Shutterstock.com

Eventually, the movie was called off altogether, despite the success of conceptually unfamiliar, R-rated movies like Deadpool. (Del Toro: "We all think, from the outside, that studios are going to learn this or that, but studios don't think that way.") But now, Del Toro is the man of the moment, having scored Best Picture and Best Director wins at last night's Academy Awards for The Shape of Water — another conceptually unfamiliar, R-rated movie filled with creature horror and unsettling imagery. There's literally no better time than now to give the man a pile of cash and let him cook.
Del Toro, too, has always been open to the possibility that the movie could come back, given his years-long passion for making this work. The Oscars are silly, but their utility is giving creators the momentum they need to bring their more niche ideas to live. Pumping $150 million into this story, brought to life by one of the best directors around — come on, that's a much better use of cash than King Arthur: The Last Sword.

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The Powerful Global Spy Alliance You Never Knew Existed

It is one of the world's most powerful alliances. And yet most people have probably never heard of it, because its existence is a closely guarded government secret.
The "SIGINT Seniors" is a spy agency coalition that meets annually to collaborate on global security issues. It has two divisions, each focusing on different parts of the world: SIGINT Seniors Europe and SIGINT Seniors Pacific. Both are led by the U.S. National Security Agency, and together they include representatives from at least 17 other countries. Members of the group are from spy agencies that eavesdrop on communications – a practice known as "signals intelligence," or SIGINT.
Details about the meetings of the SIGINT Seniors are disclosed in a batch of classified documents from the NSA's internal newsletter SIDToday, provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published today by The Intercept. The documents shine light on the secret history of the coalition, the issues that the participating agencies have focused on in recent years, and the systems that allow allied countries to share sensitive surveillance data with each other.
The SIGINT Seniors Europe was formed in 1982, amid the Cold War. Back then, the alliance had nine members, whose primary focus was on uncovering information about the Soviet Union's military. Following the attacks on the U.S. in September 2001, the group grew to 14 and began focusing its efforts on counterterrorism.
The core participants of the Seniors Europe are the surveillance agencies from the so-called Five Eyes: the NSA and its counterparts from the U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. As of April 2013, the other members were intelligence agencies from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden.
The alliance – which the NSA sometimes refers to as the "14 Eyes" – has collaborated to monitor communications during major European events, such as the Olympics in 2004 (hosted in Greece), the Winter Olympics in 2006 (hosted in Italy), and the soccer World Cup in summer 2006 (hosted in Germany). Between 2006 and 2007, as part of a counterterrorism operation, the agencies began working on "exploitation of the Internet," which was described by the NSA as a "huge step forward" for the group, because some members of the alliance had previously been "reluctant to acknowledge there was such a thing as the Internet."

A Canadian Navy sailor on board a helicopter patrols the waters off the coast of Somalia as they escort a World Food Program ship on Sept. 17, 2008, providing an anti-pirate escort for the ship taking food aid to Somalia.
Photo: Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images

As of 2010, the agencies were focused on targeting suspected terrorists, sharing intelligence related to piracy in the Horn of Africa, and they were collaborating on the development of new surveillance tools and techniques. According to the documents, the Seniors Europe had its own dedicated communication network called SIGDASYS, through which each agency can share copies of intercepted communications. The group also used a system called CENTER ICE to share intelligence about the war in Afghanistan.
The documents indicate that the Seniors Europe hold an annual conference, each time in a different location. In 2013, for instance, the group gathered in Sweden; in 2011, it met in the U.K; in 2010, in Germany; and in 2009, in Canada. In 2013, the NSA expressed an interest in creating a permanent facility that would host representatives from the Seniors Europe in a joint collaborative space. The NSA discussed the idea with its U.K. counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The British were "all in" on the proposal, according to the NSA. However, from some unnamed members of the SIGINT Seniors, there was "persistent pushback" on the plan.
The NSA thought the facility would be best hosted in the U.K., as this would "be optimal in terms of having the most flexibility in tuning the operation to benefit the Five Eyes." The agency also suggested the idea of France potentially hosting the unit, but outlined its reservations about setting up the spy hub in continental Europe. "Some European nations may be leery about hosting a facility in their nation," the NSA noted, partly due to "associated concerns for European human rights laws." (Both NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, declined to answer questions for this story. GCHQ issued a statement asserting that it adheres to "a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate.")
The Pacific division of the SIGINT Seniors is younger than the European branch. The NSA formed it in 2005, with the aim of "establishing a collaborative effort to fight terrorism in the Asia-Pacific region." In March 2007, the NSA said that it was in the process of "raising ideas for expanding [SIGINT Seniors Pacific's] intelligence focus beyond counterterrorism."

The NSA was passing the Indians selected top-secret material, and India began leaking some of the intelligence.

The founder members of the Pacific alliance were the spy agencies from the Five Eyes, as well as South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand. By 2013, France and India had joined the Pacific group. The NSA was particularly keen on having India on board as part of a broader U.S. government effort to improve relations with the country, and "felt strongly that India's participation in multilateral intelligence sharing would help mature its Indian SIGINT agencies as well as provide regional [counterterrorism] expertise." In March 2008, then-NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander led a delegation of officials – including representatives from Singapore and New Zealand – to New Delhi, where he asked India's spy agencies if they would like to join forces. Three months later, the Indians accepted.
The Pacific group used a system called CRUSHED ICE to share information. According to an NSA document dated from November 2007, CRUSHED ICE is a secure network that enables sharing of secret intelligence, collected from intercepted communications, about counterterrorism. "The system allows for collaboration by way of voice, binary-file/email exchanges, analysis and reporting, graphics and mapping, communities of interest, collection management, and other applications as needed," the November 2007 document stated.
For the countries invited to participate in the SIGINT Seniors, there are obvious benefits. They can learn new surveillance techniques from the world's most powerful spy agencies and at the same time, obtain information about their own countries or regions that they otherwise may have been unable to access. But not all nations who have been invited to join the alliance have jumped on board. According to an NSA document from March 2007, Japan refused to sign up to the Pacific group, expressing concerns that "unintended disclosure of its participation would be too high a risk."
A downside of SIGINT Seniors is the risk that a partner will mishandle sensitive information. This happened on at least one occasion with India. By the time terrorists had struck Mumbai in a series of attacks in November 2008, the country had been admitted to the Pacific group. The NSA was passing the Indians selected top-secret material, such as interrogation reports and recordings of intercepted phone calls. In the weeks following the Mumbai incident, India began leaking some of the intelligence — "at times it seemed a daily occurrence," the NSA's country desk officer complained. The NSA limited the provisioning of top-secret information to India after repeated warnings and meetings left it dissatisfied. Still, the NSA, which had deployed analysts to India, remained hopeful Indian intelligence agencies would "mature … into the partners NSA needs in South Asia."
The SIGINT Seniors likely remains active today and has probably grown its capabilities in recent years. According to the 2013 "black budget" – a portion of the U.S. federal budget dedicated to secret intelligence-gathering work – the NSA was that year working to bolster both the European and Pacific branches of the SIGINT Seniors, and planned to "expand the level of cooperation on [counterterrorism] and explore other potential areas of collaboration."
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Documents published with this article:
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Top photo: Australian Defense Facilities Pine Gap, Feb. 19, 2016.

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Study reveals the similarity between psychedelic states and dreaming

February 16, 2018

(Photo credit: agsandrew)

The altered states of consciousness produced by psychedelic drugs are very similar to dreams, according to new research published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

"I am puzzled about the range of different experiences a human being can have throughout his or her lifetime. Here I mean qualitatively different experiences, this is not eating two different ice-cream flavours, but being in very different states such as awake, dreaming, deep sleep, coma, deep meditation, and under the influence of different psychoactive drugs," said study author Enzo Tagliazucchi of the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris.
"My hypothesis is that there is a reduced number of these states, much lower than what many neuroscientists think, so that some states we label as different are in fact very close in terms of 'what they feel like' and in terms of the underlying brain physiology — you simply don't recognise this fact because you reach those places coming from different routes.
"Since many authors have assigned a 'dreamlike quality' to the psychedelic experience, I thought this was a good place to start, and I decided to perform a formal comparison of how these two brain states 'feel like'."
The researchers collected descriptions of drug experiences from the website Erowid.org, which contains about 20,000 first-person articles outlining the effects of more than 100 psychoactive substances. Using a language processing technique known as latent semantic analysis, these drug reports were compared to dream reports obtained from the website DreamJournal.net.
Tagliazucchi and his colleague, Camila Sanz of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, found that psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybe mushrooms produced experiences that were the most similar to experiences reported during dreaming.
On the other hand, sedatives, stimulants, antipsychotics, and antidepressants lead to experiences that were the least similar to those reported during dreaming.
"The average law-abiding citizen in the industrialised Western society does not know what the psychedelic experience feels like," Tagliazucchi told PsyPost. "Most people are aware that a molecule called 'LSD' had a profound impact in the society, culture and politics of USA and the world at large during the '60s. And even if they have read detailed descriptions of what happens after ingesting LSD, in spite of these theoretical knowledge, the first-hand experience is unknown to most of society.
"LSD and other similar psychedelics have been illegal since the late 60s, so this experience is basically outside the law. I would like people to realise that they know much about the psychedelic state, in fact more than what they believe they do, because most people dream frequently. People have been scared of 'bad LSD trips' by the media for decades, but those bad trips could amount to an experience similar to an intense nightmare – and in both cases no permanent psychological trauma is caused."
"In general, there is strong evidence that LSD is a very safe drug both from the psychological and physical perspective, and many scientists and medical doctors worldwide are proposing a change in the current legislation," Tagliazucchi said. "Perhaps if we acknowledge that psychedelics lead to an experience similar to dreaming, this transition can be accelerated. Since the government is not going to outlaw dreaming, then maybe the ban on psychedelics has to be-reconsidered."
The study, like all research, has limitations.
"Other drugs were similar to dreams, including dissociative anesthetics such as ketamine, PCP ('angel dust') and the toxic deliriant plants of the Solanacea family (Datura, Brugmansia)," Tagliazucchi explained. "There are many reasons for this and I think the conclusion is that no psychoactive substance yields an experience exactly like that of dreams.
"However, I do believe that lucid dreams are extremely close to the experience elicited by LSD and other psychedelics. Lucidity is key to the psychedelic experience: users do not lose track of undergoing an altered state of consciousness. However, this can happen with deliriant plants such as those I mentioned above."
"Also, there are difficulties in using self-reported narratives coming from a large database of reports," Tagliazucchi added. "People may fail to properly identify the drug they have ingested or its identity might be elusive even to themselves. Since there is no 'placebo', expectation effects can happen, e.g. imagine I have read in the past that LSD results in a dreamlike experience, so then I write a report about my LSD experience and I exaggerate this dreamlike character.
"These limitations can be overcome using more careful experimental designs. The advantage of using data from webpages such as Erowid is the sheer amount of information that can be downloaded – thousands of reports of hundreds of substances. This information is impossible to obtain in a controlled laboratory setting."
"This study is the first but others will come in the future in which we will examine different conscious states (what I call 'comparative phenomenology')," Tagliazucchi concluded. "I am interested, for instance, in whether psychotic episodes in patients resemble the experiences elicited by certain drugs and what that can tells us about the underlying neurochemical causes of those episodes. We have many hypothesis and data and at this point this is open doors for us – we need to get to work and perform the studies. I hope I can come back to you soon with exciting and novel results."

The study was titled: "The Experience Elicited by Hallucinogens Presents the Highest Similarity to Dreaming within a Large Database of Psychoactive Substance Reports".

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Scooby Doo!

The Euthanasia Coaster

Jordan Peterson’s Bullshit

Jordan Peterson's thought is filled with pseudo-science, bad pop psychology, and deep irrationalism. In other words, he's full of shit.

Jordan Peterson, 2017. jordanbpeterson.com

With his recent book's success and with over 40 million views on YouTube, Jordan Peterson's star is on the rise. His conservative and alt-right fan base is heralding his interview with Channel 4 News' Cathy Newman as a victory against "PC Culture." Newman's attempt to refute Peterson through cordial debate failed after she conceded to elements of his worldview, including the need for corporate hierarchy and an ethos of competition. In response to Newman's statistics about the wage gap, Peterson argued that this inequality was a necessary part of the capitalist dynamic. He even complimented Newman on securing a high-paying job thanks to what some people would consider "masculine" characteristics. Despite Newman's relatively polite behavior, she soon faced a misogynistic backlash.
Peterson is often portrayed as an enigma. Those on both the Right and Left defend him against charges of fascism and membership in the alt-right. Mainstream pundits admire his so-called consistency and coherence — some even praise him as a great philosopher. This is certainly true of David Brooks's recent New York Times op-ed, which extols Peterson as a public intellectual for the YouTube age.
Peterson's fans argue that he is not a fascist, just a classical liberal; not a racist, just someone who acknowledges "ethnic differences"; not a misogynist, just honest about the real differences between men and women. Many of his fans see his arguments not only as commonsensical but also scientifically accurate, a belief supported by Peterson's credentials as a professor of psychology and a clinical psychologist.
With all of the focus on issues of free speech and how the Left allegedly has turned authoritarian, there is something missing in discussions of Peterson. Rather than being an "enlightened" and "scientific" critic of postmodernism, Peterson's critique of the Left is fundamentally Nietzschean.

Consider the Lobster

Peterson's empirical observations, which range from zoology to pop psychology, all share an aristocratic disdain for modernity. His worldview aligns with classical liberalism's elitist and antidemocratic tendencies, as epitomized by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek's respective praise for Benito Mussolini and Augusto Pinochet.
But Peterson adds something to his predecessors' economic liberalism: a tragic conception of Being (which he capitalizes, after Heidegger) in which the world is divided between winners and losers. This authoritarian worldview naturalizes domination, weaving hierarchy into the very fabric of existence.
Critics often mock Peterson for his comparison of lobsters and human beings. According to his most recent book, 12 Rules for Life, the sea creatures' life-and-death struggle is a model of human society. Following battle, the combatants experience a chemical effect: the superior lobster begins to secrete more serotonin, while the weaker, or inferior, lobster is deprived of these happy chemicals. Echoing the worst features of nineteenth-century social Darwinism, Peterson uses this example of lobster hierarchy to analyze human society.
He reduces class conflict to a natural and eternal struggle for existence that no political or economic revolution could ameliorate. The individual lobster — sorry, human — must develop an aggressive, alpha-male attitude in order to climb the social ladder. Peterson bases his worldview on one example from the animal kingdom — an example belied by other instances in which animals engage in mutual aid and cooperation.
Peterson's writings are a hodgepodge of Christian existentialism, Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal, and E. O. Wilson. But the main philosophical issue is his Nietzschean conception of power. Only a strong will, exercising itself against a contingent and meaningless world — and against the weak — can ever hope to flourish.
Peterson's philosophy presupposes a stark division between an atomized world of facts and a transcendent realm of meaning — what he describes as the tension between chaos and order. Peterson gives these principles of order and chaos Jungian significance as masculine and feminine archetypes. This is the dualism of existence that gives life meaning. But it is the rationalist tendency, starting with René Descartes and ending with Karl Marx, which denies the mystery of existence to forge a rational utopia. For Peterson, this rationalism is responsible for the horrors of the twentieth century and culminates not in an emancipated future, but in the gulag and Auschwitz.
After Stalinism crumbled, the old Marxism continued in the guise of what Peterson calls "neo-Marxist postmodernism." Like Nietzsche before him, Peterson sees the metaphysics of reason, as embodied in the Enlightenment project and modern socialism, leading inexorably toward relativistic nihilism. Nietzsche called this condition "passive nihilism" and argued that it could only be overcome with an "active nihilism" that would create a new system of values based on new modes of slavery and mastery. When Peterson criticizes "neo-Marxist postmodernism," he is merely repeating Nietzsche's diagnosis of passive nihilism — that is, the slavish revolt of the masses.
Peterson's positivism — the dualism between descriptive facts and values — makes his Nietzscheanism possible. If the world is an atomized chaos of facts, it needs a strong will to define it and impose order. In Peterson's need for something that transcends this chaotic reality, he subjectively imposes a mystical solution for the alienation and suffering of humanity, grounded in a Nietzschean version of Christianity and original sin. The strong will inherit the kingdom of heaven, while the weak are destined to fail.
When we theoretically confront Peterson, we need to do more than refute his pseudo-scientific claims, his bad pop psychology, and his Cold War–inflected version of history. The real challenge is overcoming his fundamental irrationalism.

Consider Humanity

Our tragedy as human beings is much more banal than Peterson's romanticism would have it. We do contend with a fundamental irrationalism, but it doesn't come from an inherently unknowable and mysterious world. Rather, it comes from capitalism.
Peterson's philosophy reflects the brutal nature of capitalism's irrational demand that we sacrifice human beings for profit, which he transforms into a call for individuals to sacrifice themselves for something transcendent and holy. In other words, Peterson tries to Latinize the bourgeois kitsch with mediocre calls of self-actualization. But the self is not actualized: it is told to kill or be killed in capitalism's endless competition.
Ironically, Peterson's critique of postmodernism is itself very postmodern. His description of postmodernism as a new form of "dialectical materialism" that exercises totalitarian thought control not only echoes Cold War polemics against Marxism but also certain tendencies within French postmodernism. These accounts, such as Lyotard's, accuse the Enlightenment, Hegelian dialectics, and Marx of constructing "metanarratives" on top of an irreducibly complex reality. Peterson shares the French post-structuralists' fear that reason lends itself to a logic of domination. Indeed, Peterson recapitulates Heidegger's own influential rejection of the "Cartesian Self" as the launch of a new stage of civilizational nihilism.
Any attempt to confront Peterson's worldview must deploy the legacy of reason within Marxism's own commitments to dialectical logic and human freedom. But we cannot limit ourselves to composing philosophical polemics or debunking Peterson's many scientific and historical errors. The fight against reaction does not start in the liberal editorial office but in organizing concrete struggle.
Peterson's narrative reduces leftist sentiment to resentment, envy, and anger among society's "losers." This echoes George Orwell's dismissal of British socialists as merely filled with spleen and bile against the rich; Peterson compares the analysis of the Left in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier to Nietzsche's critique of slave morality. Orwell rejected socialist "cranks," a category that included feminists, in favor of a commonsense approach that appealed to the educated middle class, an analysis that pushed him rightward toward the end of his life.
We must reject the characterization of Peterson's fan base as normal people who are sick and tired of the politically correct left; this assumption simply repeats Nietzsche's disdain for the common struggles of the oppressed, including the struggles of racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. It accepts a standard of normal as defined by the mainstream media or, worse, by the alt-right themselves. For instance, Peterson's refusal to respect people who use different pronouns to express their identity is no small issue, but a central one for recognizing the humanity of transgender people.
Peterson does not speak for what is "normal." His jargon of authenticity — that he is just a simple academic fighting for truth amid so much political correctness and censorship — masks his authoritarian ideas. He calls Marxism a "murderous ideology," but his paranoid and conspiratorial politics are hard to distinguish from the alt-right's denunciations of cultural Marxism. Indeed, the line between Peterson's authoritarianism and Richard Spencer's paleo-Nazism is a blurry one. In their appeal to middle-class liberals, the reactionary's best alibi has always been militant anti-communism.

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Evangelical Buddhist

Nine Notorious Dictators, Nine Shout-Outs From Donald Trump

The president of the United States continues to heap praise on the world's most reviled rulers.

Thomas Peter / Reuters

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The Chinese Communist Party's attempt to allow President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely set off harsh criticism in China, as well as international opprobrium. But the power grab appears to have at least one fan: Donald Trump.
"He's now president for life. President for life. No, he's great," Trump said of Xi at a lunch and fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago estate, according to CNN, which obtained a recording of the remarks. "And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot some day."
Context, of course, is everything. Trump may well have been joking (CNN hasn't yet released the audio of the remarks), but his comments about Xi's hold on power in China, a Communist dictatorship, add to Trump's long history of offering support or even outright praise for dictators and strongmen the world over. 

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Russian President Vladimir Putin

What Trump said about him: "If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him. I've already said, he is really very much of a leader. I mean, you can say, 'Oh, isn't that a terrible thing'—the man has very strong control over a country. Now, it's a very different system, and I don't happen to like the system. But certainly, in that system, he's been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader."

When: September 2016
Context: The remarks weren't the first time Trump expressed his admiration for the Russian leader. He'd done it well before he announced was running for president, and before interference in the U.S. election system was a glint in Putin's eye—as well as many times afterward. But praising Putin's strong leadership in a country where the Russian leader's political opponents are harassed, jailed, or simply disappear is a bit like praising the punctuality of the railways in a fascist regime. The U.S. State Department, in its most recent human-rights report, described restrictions in Russia on political participation; the suppression of civil society; and allegations of torture. Human Rights Watch said that the government had "tightened control over the already-shrinking space for free expression, association, and assembly and intensified persecution of independent critics." The Russian presidential elections later this month, which are expected to result in another term for Putin, all but ensures that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future. 

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Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte

What Trump said about him: "I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem."
When: April 2017
Context: The Philippines president has boasted about killing suspected drug dealers when he was a local mayor. Extrajudicial killings of drugs suspects have risen since Duterte became president in June 2016. Trump reportedly favors the death penalty for drug dealers—presumably ones who have been convicted.  The U.S. State Department noted last year that "police and unknown vigilantes have killed more than 6,000 suspected drug dealers and users as the government pursued a policy aimed at eliminating illegal drug activity in the country by the end of the year." Human Rights Watch said "Duterte has plunged the Philippines into its worst human rights crisis since the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and 1980s." It added that Duterte's most prominent critic was detained on "politically motivated drug charges."

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

What Trump said about him: "Frankly, he's getting very high marks. He's also been working with the United States. We have a great friendship and the countries—I think we're right now as close as we've ever been … a lot of that has to do with a personal relationship."
When: September 2017
Context: The president's remarks came shortly after Erdogan cracked down on Turkish civil society, the media, and his opponents. Erdogan accused members of democratic institutions of being part of a failed coup attempt against him the previous year. Trump even congratulated Erdogan after last year's referendum that gave him—and subsequent presidents—more power.  The U.S. State Department has cited "inconsistent access to due process" in Erdogan's Turkey, along with other abuses against civil society. Human Rights Watch called the new presidential system "a setback for human rights and the rule of law." Trump's "personal relationship" with Erdogan appears to have its limits, however. Turkish forces are pounding a Kurdish-controlled Syrian town despite pleas from the U.S. to obey a 30-day UN-mandated ceasefire.

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Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

What Trump said about him: "We agree on so many things. I just want to let everybody know in case there was any doubt that we are very much behind President el-Sisi. He's done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation. We are very much behind Egypt and the people of Egypt. The United States has, believe me, backing, and we have strong backing."

When: April 2017
Context: Sisi, who seized power in a coup, has cracked down in Egypt, where a brief flirtation with democracy during the Arab Spring resulted in a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government (which Sisi ousted). The U.S. State Department says the most serious human-rights problems there involve "excessive use of force by security forces, deficiencies in due process, and the suppression of civil liberties." Human Rights Watch says Sisi's government "maintained its zero-tolerance policy towards dissent… and [continued] near-absolute impunity for abuses by security forces under the pretext of fighting 'terrorism.'"
Trump's fondness for authoritarians may have more to do with how power is wielded than those who exercise it. It just so happens that Western governments have, for the past seven decades, mostly adhered to a system of the rule of law, which empowers institutions rather than individuals. Trump's apparent preference is for a system in which one individual, presumably him, wields that power.
Indeed, his fondness for strongmen and dictators isn't limited to Xi Jinping or any other individual in power now. He has praised Iraq's Saddam Hussein (while also criticizing him as "a bad guy") for killing terrorists. "He did that so good," Trump said in July 2016. "They didn't read them the rights. They didn't talk. They were terrorists. Over."
Trump also said in 2016 that Libya would be better off "if [Moammar] Gaddafi were in charge right now." He once tweeted a quote from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader, and later defended the tweet, saying: "Mussolini was Mussolini ... It's a very good quote. It's a very interesting quote... what difference does it make whether it's Mussolini or somebody else?"
Trump even said China's brutal crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989 "shows you the power of strength," contrasting the Communist Party's action with the United States, which he said "is right now perceived as weak." Trump made those comments in 1990. When asked about the remarks during the presidential debate in 2016, Trump defended himself and appeared to take the Chinese Communist Party's view of the events at Tiananmen. He dismissed the deadly military response as a "riot."

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Wonder Woman

Courtesy of Brad Jackson / Posted on Taino101

When they see that she has her own car, place, clothes and job ... Her children are well taken care of ... She keeps herself well kept and elegant ... She wants the best for her family so she works hard for it. They think it's easy. They think it's normal just because she's a Modern day WONDER WOMAN. But when she goes home and figuratively undresses ... there are bruises and scars and pain she endured through that day just to provide those essential needs to herself and everyone else. No one really understands that part. Just because she can do it by herself does not mean she should have to ... Appreciate WONDER WOMAN because she's just that....
Wonder Women.

#WONDERWOMEN #SingleMoms
RESPECT HER !!!!

To Boldly Stay: How Deep Space Nine Upended Star Trek by Exposing Utopia's Dark Side

Image: StarTrek.com

"I wanted Section 31, the Federation itself, to be the villain. It was this idea that paradise is just a small piece of the puzzle."

If you could condense Star Trek into one core principle, you'd probably choose "to boldly go," the grand quest that has been the mandate of all Star Trek TV shows—except one. Riding the warp-trail of the groundbreaking Next Generation, Deep Space Nine first premiered 25 years ago, and the new show chose not to boldly go, but to boldly stay, with the story focusing on life aboard a space station. For many fans this seemed far too static, and the show faced a lot of criticism during its time on air. Yet Deep Space Nine only becomes more relevant as the years go by, as the series had a lot to say about the complacency of utopia—and there are many lessons within the show's seven seasons that we still desperately need to learn, especially if we're ever going to seek out new life among the stars.

Home on the final frontier 

Deep Space Nine was never going to be a crowd-pleaser, though Paramount certainly wanted it to be. The show was conceived of during Star Trek's golden age: The Next Generation had rejuvenated the franchise while the stars of The Original Series graduated to the silver screen, and fans were eager to see more. Confident in this titan of pop culture, Paramount commissioned a new series to run for seven years. They wanted more of the same. But that's not what Deep Space Nine's writers wanted.
"My big thing was how to make it different, not only to The Next Generation but to The Original Series." Ira Steven Behr, Deep Space Nine's longest-running showrunner, is sitting in a small office on the Paramount lot as he tells me this, above the very soundstages where the show was made 25 years ago. He's working on a documentary that will look back on Deep Space Nine, and he's feeling nostalgic. "When the pilot was written and shot, I felt that Michael Piller had created this immense opportunity to really push the envelope."
"This wilderness is my home."
Underneath the complex socio-politics it would become known for, at its heart Deep Space Nine was a show about ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. Led by the then-Commander Sisko, a traumatized soldier who was a family man at heart, the main cast were far more "lower decks" than Starfleet's best and brightest. And crucially, with a colorful cast of aliens and humans alike, Deep Space Nine was the first Trek series to have non-Starfleet main characters, allowing the show to offer a unique perspective on the Federation—and that perspective was not always as shiny and optimistic as Gene Roddenberry would have wanted.
In fact, butting heads with Roddenberry was what inspired Ira Steven Behr to show another side of the Federation with Deep Space Nine. He reminisces about pitching a psychological episode of The Next Generation that examined Picard's fears of aging—and Roddenberry, insistent that Picard felt no such fear, replaced it with an episode about "getting the captain laid." At the time, this aggravated Behr, but it also gave him a great idea. "That's why I wanted to critique the Federation. Because to me, it all sounded like gobble-de-gook, this perfect 24th century… I just didn't understand how we reached that place where life was so damn good. Everything was a song, a beautiful song among the stars, but that's not how I saw it."

Utopia isn't the end of the story 

Over its seven years, Deep Space Nine conducted a thorough investigation of what the Federation really was, throwing its flaws into sharp relief, unearthing dark secrets, and revealing a Starfleet that was unafraid to fight dirty when threatened. This may seem contrary to Star Trek's values, but this critical outlook came from a place of love. Behr compares Deep Space Nine's relationship with The Next Generation to Mark Twain penning Huckleberry Finn after Tom Sawyer. "You can love that society but at the same time you critique that society. So I said okay, let's take this thing everyone loves, the Federation, let's see out how it works, what's strong about it, what are its weaknesses, and why it's worthwhile."
Behr and the other writers approached Star Trek with a grounded realism, looking back on The Next Generation's neat diplomatic solutions and asking themselves what would really happen. In one such plot, Behr found his "clarion call" for the show, as Deep Space Nine explored the rise of the Maquis—a group of settlers displaced in The Next Generation,who fought back when their homes wound up on the wrong side of a relocated border. In one oft-quoted scene, Sisko defends this rebel group, arguing that Starfleet can't understand the desperate actions of the Maquis because "It's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise."
But Deep Space Nine wasn't content with revisiting plot points from The Next Generation, and as tensions with the powerful Dominion continued to rise, the writers went where no Star Trek had gone before: They took the Federation to war.
The Dominion War arc was Star Trek's first truly serialized narrative, a six-parter born from five years of foreshadowing. But for Ronald D. Moore, co-showrunner who later created the hugely influential Battlestar Galactica, the Federation's path to war started long before Deep Space Nine began. "It felt like war had been talked about forever in the Star Trek universe. Literally since The Original Series there was always the threat of war—over and over again, the Federation was about to go to war but it never happened."
When season six of Deep Space Nine rolled around, happen it did, as the writers forged the most brutal and devastating conflict the Federation had ever known, resulting in the deaths of seven million officers and countless civilians. Although this call to arms demonstrated why the Federation was worth fighting for, it also exposed the heart of darkness lurking within. Such was the introduction of Section 31, a shady secret service dedicated to performing all kinds of necessary evils to ensure the apparently virtuous Federation could stay afloat. As Behr explains, "I wanted Section 31, the Federation itself, to be the villain. It was this idea that paradise is just a small piece of the puzzle."
Section 31's introduction.
With Section 31 never unveiled to the wider Federation, Deep Space Nine left audiences hanging on what this organization meant for Roddenberry's vision. As Moore puts it, "Utopia is an ideal, it's not achievable. There's an idea of humans striving towards perfection and never quite able to achieve it, and Section 31 is emblematic of that."
For such a franchise-shaking idea, it's a shame that Section 31 was introduced as an afterthought in the penultimate season—yet as unresolved as this plot point is, of all Deep Space Nine's commentary it is perhaps the most relevant to today. After The Next Generation preached about how humanity's problems were solved, Deep Space Nine argued that utopia is not the end of the story, that in order to achieve Roddenberry's humanitarian values we must be constantly vigilant, unafraid to challenge societies that seem perfect, especially if those societies offer us a comfortable life.
Yet while complex examinations of utopia might be perfect for today's prestige TV, this topic was harder to swallow in the '90s—and to say that Deep Space Nine was unappreciated in its time truly is an understatement.

The "dark" Star Trek

Deep Space Nine's unflinching examination of what was dear to fans' hearts earned it the moniker of "the dark Star Trek", and viewing figures dwindled throughout its original run. Looking back on playing Major Kira, a resistance fighter turned reluctant peacekeeper who would feel right at home on TV today, actor Nana Visitor told me why fans found it difficult to get into Deep Space Nine. "It was hard for people to catch up and understand what was happening; they were used to Star Trek being standalones." Back in the '90s most TV was watched live, and as Deep Space Nine got more complex, missing an episode meant losing track of the plot.
This was far from what Paramount had envisioned for the series, and as Ira Steven Behr reveals, there were many battles between the network and the writers. "We were told we were destroying the series by serialization, we were destroying Gene's future by introducing war and money, we were losing fans because they couldn't get into the show, we had no chance of getting new fans because they would watch one episode and give up. A lot of it was negative."

"We were told we were destroying the series by serialization, we were destroying Gene's future by introducing war and money..."

Yet there were those who deeply loved the show. Kira, in particular, became a symbol of hope, her survivor's story paralleling those of anyone who has been oppressed. Visitor reflects on a time when one such survivor spoke to her: "There was a much older woman who came to a convention once. She simply raised her sleeve and showed me the numbers tattooed on her arm, and said what my character meant to her. And that was overwhelming and a sock in the gut."
"What kind of people give those orders?"
Despite Paramount's misgivings, Deep Space Nine impressed not only fans of scifi, but also its creators, as Moore reveals: "When I'm working in the business and we're talking on other projects, Deep Space Nine comes up a lot in terms of influencing other writers and directors and their ideas of what you can do in science fiction and how you could take science fiction seriously." Considering the impact of Battlestar Galactica, which was conceived of during Moore's time on Deep Space Nine, it's easy to see how modern TV carries on the legacy of Star Trek's black sheep.
Thanks to being added to Netflix, Deep Space Nine is currently experiencing a renaissance. "Binge-watching is the best thing that ever happened to Deep Space Nine," Behr enthuses, "it's made the show accessible in the way it was meant to be seen." But beyond its binge-watch potential, Visitor has a different theory about the show's new heyday. "We might as well be on a space station now, with a bunch of aliens shoved together, and we all have opinions and problems, and everyone thinks they're right. I think it speaks to now."

There is pain, but suffering is optional

Although Deep Space Nine ventured to far darker corners of the Federation than any Star Trek had gone to before, Behr refutes the idea that it was a dark show. "I would like to think that it spoke to the better angels of our nature. That if you watch it with all the war and death and lies, it speaks to bringing us closer together rather than tearing us apart." In the end, Deep Space Nine is about endurance, and rebuilding after conflict. Visitor believes that choosing love over hate is the core message of the show: "sometimes all we need is time. Kira learns along the way that there is pain, but the suffering is optional." And what's more true to Star Trek's values than that?

"Everything was a song, a beautiful song among the stars, but that's not how I saw it."

When he first set out to create Star Trek, exploration was not what Gene Roddenberry envisioned as humanity's ultimate goal, and he said as much himself: "Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms." Yet, as with many of Roddenberry's ideals, this philosophy isn't quite so simple to put into action. For Moore, that is the core message of Deep Space Nine. "Diversity is complicated. It's complicated to put together a diverse group of people and have them get along. They all bring a lot of different cultures and values, and it's not so easy to say okay, we're all gonna have the same set of values and elevate this one set of ideas."
For Deep Space Nine, there was no need to no boldly go, no need to seek out new life and new civilizations, because they were all right here, living and working with Starfleet officers, sharing all their victories and defeats. Despite being seen as an outlier, this "dark" Star Trek might just be the most true to Roddenberry's vision because it challenges us not to be complacent in utopia, but to keep embracing diversity and broadening our perspectives—and if we do this, then we can build a better Federation.

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