1) If you kill combatants in combat, on either side, the rules are and always have been that this is unfortunate but acceptable behavior.

2) If the enemy surrenders or you capture them injured, then you have to go by the rules of behavior laid out in the law as it applies to you (Geneva Convention, etc.). If these rules are broken, the way the Japanese did in WWII, then you have every right to punish those people as war criminals. If your people break these rules you are duty and honor bound to prosecute and punish them, too.

3) If a terrorist is captured or arrested anywhere, then they must be held, tried, and punished in the jurisdiction in which the crime took place, or a neutral site like The Hague.

to the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The initial reports and news stories put the blame for the mayhem squarely on Daly's cops (where it largely rested). But the news editors at the networks (remember the Big Three) and the big city papers discovered within 24 hours that millions of Americans were thrilled by the spectacle of the cops enforcing "law and order" on the longhairs, and they immediately started backtracking and hunting for neutral or euphamistic ways of describing what happened thereby exonerating the cops. The "media elite" suddenly realized that they were out of synch with their audience (or a huge hunk of it), and they were determined that they would never make such a mistake again.

They rarely have since.

Vietnam is the cherry-picking scholars war par excellence. Want evidence of commie perfidy? It's there. Want evidence of American homicidal brutality? It's there. What Lind, because he is extremely guilty of this crime, can never admit is that cherry picking will not answer our questions, and that a perponderance of evidence might point in a certain direction. So long as he and others can keep the ball in the air, they can make their representation sound plausible.

Lind believes that Vietnam was worth all the death, destruction, and brutality because it maintained American "credibility" and kept the commies at bay. He has a theory that our relatively open and free American society is an abberation, and that the only way to make the world "safe" for our free (and free market) society is to hammer down any threats before they grow to the extent that we really do have to militarize and collectivize society for our survival. As a movie reviewer of my youth used to say, "buy the premiss, buy the flick." I, for one, don't buy it.

was the scene at the burning of the witch. Totally mesmerized me. Because Block and his Squire realize that it's all a sham, that she's not a witch, that the devil doesn't exisit, and then Block and a whole lot of us (I was a fairly religious Catholic at that time) get the jab from the Squire: what does it mean, that witches aren't real and there is no Devil? The pain on von Sydow's face, as he both fights and confronts the awful fact that God ain't there, either.

Wow.

Once, it was regularly on Sight and Sound's list of the Ten Greatest Films of all time. It fell off the list around 1990. Bergman in general seems to be in eclipse, as young film people get their clues on who to admire from Quentin Tarantino. I hope that this new release helps people remember just how great a film maker Bergman was.

First, he doubts that climate change exists (he made a fool of himself in the NYRB stating blandly that polar bears, despite all the evidence, are doing just fine) for reasons obscure, much as he hates the atheistic implications of Evolution and never misses a chance to take a shot at Dennet or Dawkins. Also, he's a physicist, a very old physicist, who did his best work in the period 1948-58, and not an expert on the atmosphere. He is an excellent product of the post-1945 handiman reductionist school of scientific thinking, an approach that even in physics has hit a dead end. So, although he deserves a hearing, it would be a mistake to defer to him in an area outside his expertise.

Has the time come to start cultivating our own gardens, to quote Voltaire. My wife thinks that the stuggle is over, that the system cannot be changed other than through the total collapse of the economic and military/police structures that keep it in place, and it is past time that we move to a very rural area and get as much off the grid as possible. Or, as the character of Andre in My Dinner with Andre says, get out before it is too late.

Anyone want to comment on this, because I'm damned if I know whether or not it's time to stop fighting and start thinking about surviving in the emerging Total Surveillance State (Britain, where I earned my Ph.D. and which I love, likely already is one, so I can't flee there).