Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1101

52% of America Wants to Legalize Weed

More than five months after two states voted to legalize marijuana — and as a host of other states consider the same — a majority of Americans now say pot should be legal to consume. That's according to a new survey published Thursday by Pew Research, which reports that 52 percent of people polled by the firm indicated support for legalization, with 45 percent who think it should remain illegal for people to manufacture, sell, and smoke marijuana. Now, that might sound like a swelling victory for pro-legalization advocates — and to a certain degree, it is — but these numbers are part of a fairly steady (if recently accelerating) historical trend, as evidenced by prior polls on the same question:

Today's poll is a fresh reminder of how, in many states, marijuana is already installed in people's lives, whether it's legally grown and sold as a medicine (as it is in Arizona, Delaware, D.C., Hawaii, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont), decriminalized for small amounts (as it is in Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, and Ohio), or both (in Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington State). Not all of these are recent developments: Alaska legalized the personal growing and consumption of weed in 1975. And then there's the fact that, regardless of regulation, people continue to smoke weed — often with impunity. "There is no significant difference," the Pew study notes, "in lifetime or recent use [of marijuana] between people in states with some form of legalized marijuana and those in other states."

Such familiarity — legal or otherwise — seems to have occasioned a shift in the way people think about the morality of smoking. According to Pew, only a third of Americans consider the activity immoral, down from half in 2006. (Today, 50 percent consider it "not a moral issue," up from 35 percent in 2006. The number of Americans who think smoking weed is totally morally sound, on the other hand, has crept up only a little bit, from 10 percent to 12 percent.) 

All of which puts even more pressure on lawmakers in states like Oregon (which borders the vanguard state of Washington), where legalization advocates are pushing to reform the state's drug laws to allow for recreational consumption of marijuana. Oregon, of course, has a lot of company in that regard. A dossier compiled by Rolling Stone portends that full legalization is likely to be voted on at least six other states, including California, Nevada, Rhode Island, Maine, Alaska, and Vermont.

The Pew poll had a sampling error of plus or minus 2.9 percent.

       

The GOP's Pursuit of BuzzFeed-Style Memes Is Suicidal

A Republican Party website is going to try to reach young people by stealing the jokey lists and memes from BuzzFeed. While it's funny to imagine "stuffy white men" (the RNC's words!) brainstorm OMG LOL listicles, this is not cosnervatives' first attempt to tap the power of social media to make their ideas go viral. There were tons of conservative memes in the 2012 election, and Mitt Romney himself was a fan of several. One in particular — "We Are the 53%" — helped cost him the election. Instead of learning their lesson in 2012, Republicans are doubling down.

National Journal's Brian Fung reports that the National Republican Congressional Committee is redesigning NRCC.org to include BuzzFeed-style likes like "10 Easter Bunnies Straight From Hell" and "14 Photos Of George W. Bush Touching Bald Men's Heads." It's not the Fung noticed the redesign just so happens to look like BuzzFeed. The NRCC is explicitly saying it's stealing from the site. "BuzzFeed's eating everyone's lunch," NRCC spokesman Gerrit Lansing told Fung. "They're making people want to read and be cognizant of politics in a different way." The NRCC studied BuzzFeed's layout and traffic and tone, and hired 20 writers to ape it.

Republican officials have clearly been thinking hard about how to reach out to young people, who voted for President Obama over Romney by 60 percent to 36 percent. Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee hired Raffi Williams, the 24-year-old son of Fox News' Juan Williams, to run the RNC's outreach to young people and African-Americans. "You can't just Google 'young outlets' or 'youth outlets,'" Williams told BuzzFeed's Even McMorris-Santoro. "You have to go and kind figure out, well, where are they going? What are they interested in? A lot [of youth-centric media] has nothing to do with politics and doesn't cover politics."

The selection of Williams gets at why the GOP's pursuit of memes is dangerous. His dad, Juan Williams, became a hero on the right after he was fired from NPR in 2010 for saying that he got scared when people on planes were dressed in "Mulsim garb." A fixation among some conservatives is the idea that liberals falsely accuse them of racism — it was a major theme at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, for example, and Rush Limbaugh talks about it all the time. There is a segment of conservatives who do not want to be called racist but also do not want to let go of certain prejudices. They prefer the term "not P.C." Juan Williams is a conservative icon for being not P.C. and being punished by public radio for it. Raffi Williams is probably a smart, capable guy, but he's 24 years old, meaning the flashiest thing on his resume is being his dad's son.

And this is the problem with the GOP's pursuit of memes, which is that it risks playing to its base instead of attracting new people. The genius of BuzzFeed's lists is the way they play on common experience and pop culture nostalgia. Take, for example, this subgenre: "26 Signs You Grew Up In NYC In The '90s," "The Sad Saga Of '90s Inflatable Furniture," "Why The '90s Was The Golden Age Of Magazines." Lots of them are about creating a community about people who felt alienated and excluded from mainstream culture: "29 Amazing Punk Flyers From The 80s," "A Day In The Life Of A Mall Goth," "20 Status Symbols Gen Y Girls Grew Up With," "12 Signs You Were A 'Gwenabee.'"

The popular memes on the conservative Internet are the opposite — the old mainstream freaked out by change, a revulsion at pop culture — "telling it like it is" with respect to stereotypes about minorities, in Williams' case. When viral conservative memes erupt in public once a politician says them, it is rarely a positive development for the GOP. Think of Wisconsin Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner mocking about Michelle Obama's "fat butt." Think of Mitt Romney bashing the 47 percent — that was based on a whole Tumblr meme created by RedState editor Erick Erickson. For more extreme examples, think of the many minor local Republican officials who got in trouble for forwarding emails of Obama getting lured by watermelon or in a monkey family or dressed like a witch doctor. Nobody thinks the NRCC would post anything racist. But conservatives and young people are not nostalgic about the same things. What will go viral in one community will repel the other.

       

Can More Tweets Save the Stock Market from Real-Time Twitter Scheming?

Bloomberg (not the man) has added tweets to Bloomberg Terminal, its Wall Street information machine, hoping to fix, in one fell swoop and in a week when the SEC stepped in on social media, all of the headaches that Twitter has been giving the markets. Although it wasn't institutionalized, traders already checked the real-time news platform on their phones, according to DealBook's William Alden, which, because of all the unvetted information flying around the network, hasn't always worked out so well. There was the time that a fake tweet about the Syrian president's death cause caused a spike in crude. Or that other time when someone impersonated David Einhorn. These Twitter "pump and dumps," as they're called, aren't uncommon, in part, because its hard for people to tell what's real and what's not — and once something spreads, it has a social-media life of its own. And things may only get crazier with the Securities and Exchange Commission now officially allowing companies to make announcements on the network. Bloomberg's Twitter integration, however, hopes to add a little legitimacy to Twitter by only showing tweets from legitimate sources, as Bloomberg's Brian Rooney explained to DealBook. 

Specifically, the terminal will show tweets only from specific, vetted sources, such as companies, CEOs, and other "news-makers." Rooney offered the NYU economist Nouriel Roubini and investor Paul Kedrosky as examples. And then traders can sift through it by company, industry, markets, or people, as you can see in the screen grab from Bloomberg's Jared Keller:

It's unclear how Bloomberg has vetted the people on the terminal for their accuracy. Perhaps Twitter's own verification process has to do with it. But the SEC's new policy should help a bit, too.

       

How the T. Rex in 'Jurassic Park' Came to Life

Friday marks the re-release of Jurassic Park in 3D—a worthy use of the form—and in honor of the film's 20th anniversary Entertainment Weekly has put together a fun oral history of Steven Spielberg's classic blockbuster, which reveals that the iconic puppet playing the iconic T. Rex had something of a mind of its own. 

You see, the rain in the iconic scene where the T. Rex attacks the Ford Explorer made the T. Rex puppet kind of freak out, puppeteer John Rosengrant explained: 

The T. rex was 36 feet long and 18 feet tall. We’re talking about a hydraulically powered creature that felt like a bus going by you when it would move. We found out not long before we were going to shoot that it was going to be raining [in the scene]. So it went from this beautifully tuned machine that worked fantastically to… suddenly the foam-rubber skin started absorbing water, and now all of the calculations were off and it started to shudder. We went out and bought tons of towels and started putting big blowers, dryers, on it to dry it out.

The hitch in the system made the T. Rex have what producer Kathleen Kennedy described as, well, its own new life:

The T. rex went into the heebie-jeebies sometimes. Scared the crap out of us. We’d be, like, eating lunch, and all of a sudden a T. rex would come alive. At first we didn’t know what was happening, and then we realized it was the rain. You’d hear people start screaming.

Um, yeah. Considering that thing plays a role in one of the most terrifying scenes in movie history, we'd scream, too.

Read the rest of the oral history here, and go ahead and watch that scene, why don't you. We know you want to: 

       

Michelle Malkin and Sean Hannity Are the Defenders Mike Rice Didn't Ask For

Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice was fired Wednesday after a violent, expletive-laden video of his behavior at practice surfaced Tuesday. Everyone from Governor Chris Christie to LeBron James refused to defend his actions, and Rice himself said outside his house after the termination that "There is no excuse — I was wrong." But that hasn't stopped Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin from making excuses and saying that the coach's treatment of his student-athletes wasn't that​ bad. 

Rice's former players have not been speaking publicly, and so the list of Rice defenders is not long — one of his former players did tell Piers Morgan that it was all "very passionate" but ultimately kind of motivational "joking." Enter Hannity and Malkin on Fox News's Hannity last night, calling us all a bunch of wimps: 

Let's break down the Rice defenders, blow-by-blow:

Malkin: "The problem isn't so much that there are consequences for hate speech... the problem is that the left is so very, very, very selective about when it chooses to manufacture outrage and when it doesn't ... I certainly agree that political correctness has run amuck."

The video aired on ESPN, which, last time we checked, is not politically biased — except maybe when it comes Dick Vitale and Duke. And Christie voiced his disapproval. The outrage is national. But Malkin is targeting not so much politics as political correctness — and seems to be implying that throwing around anti-gay slurs and getting punished for it represents something more than a university saving face, that there is some other standard of gay slurs and violence when it comes to mentors of young student-athletes. And so it should be noted that Malkin herself has spoken up in some of her various feuds to voice her opinion that being called bitch, hoe [sic], and cunt crosses her red line of inappropriate language in public or private. 

Hannity: "He's trying to bring the best out of them, put discipline in that team, raise their game, force them to focus, push them become champions and that takes intensity."

Rutgers finished 15-16 overall this season and 5-13 in the Big East, which nabbed them 12th place in the conference. The Scarlet Knights didn't make the NCAA tournament. The team, according to ESPN, finished 225th in the country in points per game, 188th in rebounds per game, 178th in assists per game, and 119th in field goal percentage. So, essentially, 11 teams in the Big East with coaches who don't have any evidence of physically kicking and leveling slurs upon their players finished better than Rutgers; 224 teams in the country without evidence of an abusive coach scored more points than them, 187 grabbed more boards, 177 passed better, and 118 shot better — according to Hannity, this greatness might never been achieved without Rice's behavior. 

Hannity: "These are adults, they don't want to play for that team, they can leave."

This is technically true. Players can ask to leave the team and transfer, but the school has the ultimate say on where you go [via the NCAA's transfer rulebook]:

Students can transfer without the written permission to contact, but then have to pay for one academic year:

Hannity: "My father hit me with a belt, I turned out okay!... Except in the minds of liberals."

Malkin: "Same here! ...Oh, I certainly did. And with more than a belt. I’m sure the left thinks we are warped minds." 

For the record, we're not sure if condone anyone hitting Hannity or Malkin. We're just not sure. Nor do we know if there's an argument to be made that corporal punishment of children will turn anyone into Sean Hannity. 

       

Who Should Play Cinderella?

Today in show business news: Disney is looking for the perfect Cinderella, Warner Bros. assesses the Giant damage, and Matthew McConaughey is a go for Christopher Nolan.

Disney's doing this live-action Cinderella movie that's being directed by Kenneth Branagh, right? Right. And they've got Cate Blanchett to play the Wicked Stepmother. So now they really need to find their Cindy. They asked Emma Watson a while back but she said no, probably because she'll never trust that Gilderoy Lockhart ever again, so it's back to the drawing board. Well, not completely. They have some ideas. Bella Heathcote, from Dark Shadows and In Time (whatta resume!) is in the running. As is Lily James, who plays Lady Rose on Downton Abbey. And then there's Margot Robbie, who's set to appear in The Wolf of Wall Street and is said to maybe be dating her costar in that film, Leonardo DiCaprio. So those could all work, I guess. Though who knows how serious these choices really are. Remember when Jessica Biel was "up for" Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises? Like that was ever actually going to happen. I think they probably have a lot of actors come in for big roles like this, just in case. Just so they don't miss someone. (Or to humor agents?) Who do you think should play Cinderella? It looks like they're going the British/Australian route, so I'll say, if it can't be Drew Barrymore again... maybe Imogen Poots? She seems like she'd be good at that, right? I dunno. We can think outside the box, too! What's the Greyson Chance kid up to these days? That could be interesting! I mean, why not? It's the '90s! Anything goes. So, I ask again: Who do you think should be Cinderella?? [Deadline]

Hopefully for Disney this Cinderella movie does well, because if a fairy tale movie goes badly, it can go very badly. Just ask Warner Bros., which may lose upwards of $140 million on the badly marketed (but actually not so bad) flop Jack the Giant Slayer. Well, they'll share the loss with producing partner Legendary Pictures. On the flop scale, Jack is apparently more of a disaster than Battleship and less of a catastrophe than John Carter. Man, there have been a lot of big, big flops recently! I guess that's what happens when studios start regularly spending $300 million to put a movie in theaters. Some of them are gonna epically blow up in your face. Guys, just make a bunch of $50 million movies that make you $100 million and call it a damn day, huh? Sheesh. [The Hollywood Reporter]

As rumored, Matthew McConaughey will be playing the lead role in Christopher Nolan's next film, Interstellar. So, that's great. And that's all there really is to say about that at this point. What's really worth talking about today, though, is that on Deadline this post is labeled with the infamous "Toldja!" and includes a (justified) rant about how other sites are stealing Deadline's stuff and treating it like their own, instead of doing any real reporting. Uh oh, you think. Nikki Finke's in one of her moods again! Except, no! It's not Nikki Finke who wrote the post, it was Mike Fleming! Ahh, she has trained him well. The pupil has become the master. Or something. He's no longer a padawan, he is now a full... Hollywood trade gossip. Which is fine! Deadline gets lots of good stories and they are well within reason to be upset that people are stealing their stuff without any credit or anything. It's just funny that this is a really Finke-ian post that was not written by Finke. Children will listen, I suppose. [Deadline]

Star Trek and Avatar star Zoe Saldana is in talks to appear in yet another space epic. This time it's Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, the one starring Chris Pratt that's about people and aliens who, uh, guard the galaxy. Saldana would play Gamora, "the green-skinned humanoid who is the last of a species that was exterminated by a race known as the Badoon. She also happens to be a skilled assassin." Green-skinned! How interesting. That would be a nice change of pace from playing a blue-skinned character, y'know? Something different. And she hasn't played an assassin since 2011's Colombiana! So, should she take it? The paycheck's probably pretty good, so that's worth something. But, then again, she is running the risk of getting pegged as solely a sci-fi/action babe. Sure she did that indie Nina Simone biopic that's yet to come out and there was The Words, but other than that... I dunno. Sigourney Weaver made her mark with Aliens and whatnot, but then she branched out. Maybe Saldana should consider doing the same. Who knows what scripts are coming in, but maybe she could reach out a little more. And if she's going to do another movie featuring guns, maybe make it like a James Gray movie or something. Or do a comedy! Or another ballet movie? Actually, yeah, that's what needs happening. Center Stage: Some Enchanted Eva. I think everyone in America would watch the hell out of that, right? [The Hollywood Reporter]

Brad Pitt has almost signed a deal to star in End of Watch director David Ayer's next film Fury, a WWII adventure about an American tank crew battling the German army at the tail end of the war. Ayer says of the film, "Fury is not your father’s WWII movie, it digs deep into the complexities of battlefield heroism." Hm. But is it my mother's WWII movie? What about my cousin's? I had a neighbor once who got real sick and died. Is it his WWII movie? My father doesn't even really watch WWII movies, so I don't even know what his WWII movie would look like in order to form an opposite picture of it in my head. So who the heck's WWII movie is this?? I'm very confused. Is it's my grammy's WWII movie? Is it hers? My old dog Walter's WWII movie? Whose is it, David Ayer? Whose movie WWII is it?? [Deadline]

Here is a trailer for the horror-thriller The Purge, starring Ethan Hawke (why, Ethan, why?) and Lena Headey (why, Cersei, why?). It is about... Well, here, let IMDb explain: "the U.S. government begins to allow 12-hour periods of time in which all illegal activity is legal. During one of these free-for-alls, a family must protect themselves from a home invasion." Ha. Hahahah. What?? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. In what recognizable world — I mean they have flatscreen TVs and their clothes are normal — would that be a thing? "The only way to stop crime is to allow all crime for twelve hours a year." Incorrect, screenwriter. Incorrect. Also, why not just call this Crime Night? That's way more direct. Just call your dumb movie Crime Night and be done with it, for heaven's sake.

The Way the Gun Fight Was Won in Colorado

President Obama's trip to Denver today to lift up Colorado as "a model of what's possible" on gun control in D.C. The interesting comparison, though, isn't why Congress won't stand up to the NRA — that answer is obvious — but what happened to the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, the state's gun lobby that is, if anything, more radical than the NRA. 

In its public statements in recent days, the group seems to be desperately trying to figure that out itself. On Wednesday morning, RMGO's Dudley Brown was on NPR promising to retaliate against gun grabbers. "I liken it to the proverbial hunting season," Brown says. "We tell gun owners, 'There's a time to hunt deer. And the next election is the time to hunt Democrats.'" That bravado, however, could mask panic because the group finds itself in an unfamiliar position: losing. 

After James Holmes massacred moviegoers at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, like the NRA after Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting, was confident that it could head off any call for new gun laws. Jim Merlino, who worked as Democratic policy director for the Colorado Senate minority in 2003, described the clout of the RMGO: "Out here in Colorado, the National Rifle Association is considered a left-wing Washington-based organization." He added, "In Colorado, our gun laws were written to work for the RMGO and given the force of law by the Republican Party."  Merlino predicted, "if you now think that meaningful gun control can emerge in Colorado – you’re dreaming." 

In a way, Merlino was right. New gun laws didn't pass after Aurora. But Colorado did pass 15-round limits on magazines and expand background checks in March after the Sandy Hook shootings. Obama hailed this in his Denver speech Wednesday, saying, "Colorado has already chosen to do something about" gun violence, and proven that "there doesn't have to be a conflict between protecting our citizens and protecting out Second Amendment rights." But the more important conflict is between public opinion and gun lobby groups' clout. RMGO promised to "fight tooth and nail" any new gun laws in December. Whether it can punish lawmakers for voting for the new laws by ousting them from office in 2014 has yet to be seen. But unlike many members of Congress, state lawmakers are willing to risk it.

RMGO is still trying to throw its weight around the Colorado statehouse. RMGO political director Joe Neville walked out of an ethics hearing Wednesday, declaring it unlawful. "I've decided not to be the model penitent for your unconstitutional tribunal,"  Neville said. He's facing an ethics charge because Republican state Rep. Cheri Gerou filed a complaint against him. She says she told Neville to "[bleep] off," and Neville told her, You just earned yourself another round of mailers in your district." Gerou says that remark violates Rule 36, which forbids lobbyists from trying to influence lawmakers "by means of deceit or threat," the Denver Post explains. Neville's walkout is pretty spectacular. But so is a Republican lawmaker telling a gun rights group to bleep off.

Maybe Sandy Hook really did change everything, and empowered Colorado lawmakers to pass new gun rules. But it's more likely that Colorado itself has been slowly changing, despite Merlino's image of it as a cartoon Wild West. Colorado legalized marijuana in November. It voted for Barack Obama twice. Its speaker of the state House of Representatives is openly gay. And RMGO is on the wrong side of that cultural change. Two gay men have filed a federal lawsuit after a conservative group in Colorado lifted their wedding photo and used in campaign mailers to attack Republicans. On Wednesday, the men's lawyers filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Denver to add RMGO to the suit, after email records showed RMGO's Dudley Brown was involved in creating the mailers (pictured at right). According to the Denver Post, in one email, Brown told Public Advocate, the group that sent the mailers:

"[The] gay lobby smells blood in the water, and if some pro-gay legislators don't lose their primaries, I fear Colorado will tumble in the 2013 session... 

What I propose is that PA pay for mailing. ... My staff and I would do all the work, but we'd want PA to sign off, put its name on the dotted line, and pay for the mailings. I would counsel mailing slick and glossies, with the 'two men kissing' photo."

Brown's culture war seems doomed. He can be hopeful that the U.S. Congress has not changed as fast as Colorado. 

How Do You Solve a Problem Like North Korea?

The U.S. is deploying a new missile defense system in Guam to protect American forces from any potential North Korean attacks. It's the latest move in the ongoing chess battle between the Western powers and North Korea, and Chuck Hagel promises he's takings "seriously." But is he, really? 

Let's hope he is, for all our sakes, because the North Korean military released a statement through its Korean Central News Agency saying it has approval to launch a "merciless" strike on U.S. soil using "cutting-edge  smaller, lighter and diversified" nuclear weapons. "The merciless operation of (our) revolutionary armed forces in this regard has been finally examined and ratified," the statement said, according to the AFP. Now would be a very good time to remind everyone that North Korea has shown no sign of possessing a nuclear weapon that can travel far enough to reach U.S. soil. In fact, both long-range missile tests the country has attempted ended in spectacularly hilarious fashion. 

North Korea's latest threats seem to be in response to the U.S. announcing the deployment of a missile defense system to protect its interests in Guam. The Wall Street Journal reports the U.S. are deploying the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense battery, or THAAD for short, to protect its airbase in Guam from short and medium range attacks from North Korea. The battery will protect American bases in Guam and some of the surrounding area, but will not protect South Korea. Guam's THAAD defense system was supposed to be deployed in 2015, but they've bumped up the schedule because of the "real and clear" danger of a North Korean threat, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Wednesday. "We take those threats seriously," Hagel added.

Hagel's comments lined up fairly well with what Secretary of State John Kerry said yesterday after meeting with South Korean foreign minister Yun Byung-se. "The bottom line is very simply that what Kim Jong-un has been choosing to do is provocative, it is dangerous, reckless and the US will not accept the DPRK as a nuclear state," Kerry said. "And I reiterate again the US will do what is necessary to defend ourselves and defend our allies, Korea and Japan. We are fully prepared and capable of doing that and the DPRK understands that."

So if the U.S. doesn't want North Korea as a nuclear state why didn't they make a move when they had the chance to get the nuclear rods out of North Korea's control? Yesterday, North Korea announced it would restart its main nuclear processing facility at Yongbyon to beef up its nuclear arsenal and make itself into a small nuclear power. Experts are estimating it will take at least six months for North Korea to get the site back up and running for the first time since it was spectacularly shut down more than five years ago. Unless... well, unless they've been "doing much of the preparatory work quietly," Siegfried Hecker, a nuclear specialist who has visited the North’s nuclear facilities numerous times, told the Washington Post.

The existing fuel rods believed to be at Yongbyon could make up to eight more nuclear bombs, estimates say. The worst part is that this controversy could have been avoided. Joel Wit writes at Foreign Policy that North Korean officials made offers, starting in November 2010 through the end of 2011, that they were "willing to relinquish thousands of fuel rods" stored at Yongbyon to the U.S. or South Korea. Their price was high, though, and everyone missed a huge opportunity to shut that whole thing down:

The North Korean initiative was duly noted, but the United States and South Korea failed to take advantage of the opportunity to ensure that North Korea wasn't able to restart the reactor and turn the rods into new nuclear bombs. Some U.S. officials felt it wasn't worth the effort since the reactor was old and probably useless. Others believed that Washington should focus entirely on stopping Pyongyang's much more threatening program to enrich uranium, unveiled in late 2010, rather than putting the final nail in the coffin of the plutonium production program. Still others, infected by the Obama administration's policy of "strategic patience," did not want to do much of anything before the North demonstrated its willingness to reform and end its bad behavior

Of course, things were quieter then. Kim Jong-Il was still ruling North Korea and didn't pose very much of a threat. When he died, everyone thought Kim Jong-Un would be easier to work with. Except now we're here, with a reinvigorated, open nuclear program in North Korea and those lovely "bellicose threats" to wipe the U.S. off the map we hear so much about. 

And we can't do anything about it. A former U.S. official who has visited Yongbyon told the Washington Post this latest move is "very dangerous" because North Korea isn't watched by any international monitoring body. Even Iran gets occasional visits from U.N. sanctioned nuclear monitors. They're prickly and unwelcoming and barely cooperate, but the visits do happen. "They can get away with murder there, and we’re left on the outside jumping up and down," the official told the Post. 

So amid all of that nuclear armament speculation, let's take a quick look at what guns are being pointed where in this ongoing Mexican stand-off. North Korea has missiles pointed at Guam; it's making more nukes; on top of the nuclear weapons we're already fairly certain they have. The U.S. now has a missile defense system in Guam, or at least it will shortly, on top of:  the U.S.S. Decatur and the U.S.S. John McCain, a radar-equipped destroyer and one of the biggest warships in the American fleet, stationed off the pacific; some radar-dodging F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets stationed in South Korea; those B-2 Spirit bombers; along with another missile defense system stationed in Alaska to protect our domestic soil. So when it comes down to it, and this really should have been obvious, but the U.S. already has them out prepared and out gunned. 

For now, we wait to see what happens. It can be hard to forget that North Korea hasn't done much but blow hot air this whole time. Administration officials were quick to downplay the big "final battle" threats from North Korea on the morning after. The U.S. is obviously very prepared for North Korea to throw the first punch, but prepare is all you can do until that happens. There are still some experts who think the talk is all a ploy. "The possibility of war breaking out is still very low, although there is always the chance of smaller skirmishes. But ultimately the North Koreans don't want this to escalate out of control. They want a turning point in relations with the United States," Prof Shin Jong-dae of Seoul's University of North Korean Studies told the Guardian. "The North Korean regime indulges in this kind of behaviour all the time." 

Teasers for Teasers, You're Breaking Our Hearts

This afternoon we became excited because we heard some rumblings about a trailer for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. How exciting, we thought to ourselves. Might we get a peak at Katniss and Peeta's victory tour? At new characters Finnick Odair and Johanna Mason? At the arena for the Quarter Quell? Then a teaser for a teaser broke our hearts.

The thing, you see, that various entertainment outlets giddily reported was not really a new look at Catching Fire. It was a teaser for a teaser as Entertainment Weekly put it. So what does that mean? Well, other than being totally infuriating, it means that you get under ten seconds of footage which tells you something you already knew. (It tells you that Katniss and Peeta won the last Hunger Games. If that's a spoiler, you weren't going to watch the first movie anyway.) It then tells you to watch the MTV Movie Awards for a "teaser trailer first look." You can see for yourself here. 

We are big Hunger Games fans over here at the Atlantic Wire, but this is just darn tortuous and yet more evidence of the frustrating way studios are rolling out trailers for their films. Last week brought us the insufferable launch of footage from The Wolverine. First we got a teaser on Vine that was labeled a "tweaser"—God help us—then we got 20 seconds worth of footage, then, finally, we got not one but two full trailers. This needs to stop, but of course it won't. This is movie marketing for a viral age, and these glimpses of highly anticipated films accomplish exactly what the studios intend. The teasers, as short as they might be, create a buzz, spawn blog posts, and get publicity for the film. Just look at the spike in discussion about The Wolverine last week: 

Mini-trailers for that film, in fact, probably rolled out too quickly, seeing how buzz has subsided. 

There are ways to use the power of the Internet in movie marketing that don't make us want to rip all of our hair out. The fake college website that Pixar created for their Monsters University is one example. It makes us want to see the film, but it's also creative, clever, and let's face it, just darn adorable. Not so adorable but perhaps equally as cool, is the Pan Pacific Defense Corps site advertising Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim.  Catching Fire is clearly going to attempt a similar strategy in addition to teasing us with teases for teaser since they did so for the first film. For this second go-around The website "The Hunger Games Explorer" is set to launch and character portraits can be found at the "Capitol Couture" blog. It's all in good fun, but it still doesn't excuse the scourge that is the teaser for the teaser. 

Why do we have such venom for this particular brand of advertisement? Well, not only is it annoying, we find it actually insulting. As movie fans we choose to buy into the hype when it comes to big blockbusters. Waiting for films is annoying, and trailers—even if they don't represent the movie 100 percent accurately—can tide us over, and sometimes delight us with more than we were expecting. With the perpetuation of these teasers for teasers for trailers we are so often teased and let down we feel betrayed. Studios are preying on our fandom. They are the Lucy to our Charlie Brown: holding out the football for us to kick and then swiping it away at the last moment.  

We will most certainly tune in to see what the MTV Movie Awards have to offer by way of Hunger Games footage. But we'll go begrudgingly, and we aren't expecting much. Just look what the last Hunger Games movie gave us at the VMAs. 

Welcome to Silicon Valley, Where All the Start-Ups Are Failures

A man who has made a ton of money selling tech start-ups to big companies — which is one of the main ways for start-ups make money — thinks "an acquisition is always a failure," which leaves a pretty narrow road to success in Silicon Valley. Jake Lodwick made a lot of money when Barry Diller bought up Connected Ventures—a sort of holding company that included College Humor, BustedTees, and Vimeo, the latter Lodwick created—for an undisclosed amount that some peg a little above $20 million. He admits that the move gave him a "fat bank account." And yet, he regards it as "the worst business decision of my life" because he lost all creative freedom when the big bad corporation paid him a bunch of money for a website that, as Gawker once uncharitably put it, "failed to become as popular or successful" as YouTube. Perhaps that is a sort of personal failure for Lodwick, but for most people running start-ups not dying a penniless death would be considered success, and rightfully so. 

Three out of four start-ups fail, in a business sense. If failure means "liquidating all assets," that number goes down to thirty or forty percent. If it means, "no return on investment" for investors that ticks up to 95 percent. However you want to define failure, it happens all the time, though we don't hear about them often because the world prefers to champion success, for obvious reasons. Here's a list of 16 German internet startups that went under last year. If offered money from a big tech company — even if that meant a start-up's creation would get killed right away like the Google acquisition of Sparrow — who could blame these people from taking it, if the other option means a much less lucrative business death? Selling out is usually a great business decision.

Lodwick, however, finds that decision reprehensible because: "Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or — far likelier — they failed to dream big enough." It's worth pointing out here that not "dreaming big" enough is the kind of failure that only people with money tend to encounter, as in: What have I done with all this money? People without money dream big all the time, mainly of having money. But by Lodwick's standards, then, Groupon is a success. It turned down $6 billion from Google because CEO Andrew Mason wanted the creative freedom Lodwick gave up. And look what happened to him and his company: his dreams turned out bigger than the business of selling deals online probably is and now he is gone.

Not all start-up CEOs get booted. By Lodwick's definition, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the ultimate successes since they dreamed big, didn't get bought up and now run their own companies. In addition to dreaming, Lodwick considers creating "a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders," another form of success. By some metrics those men did that. Though, Lodwick should note that once Zuckerberg took his company public he, too, lost that "mental freedom." Now beholden to shareholders, Zuck can only make his social network open and connected and full of ads. Google, like many other tech companies before it, has also made "moral" compromises for the sake of revenue. So, that's out. 

Perhaps, then, Twitter and Tumblr's founders fall into the "success" category. But the more these companies succeed and the bigger they grow, the more inevitable an IPO, the business types, the meetings, the people who Lodwick resented at IAC. Twitter and Tumblr both have rumored IPOs on the way at some point in the far away future, though Twitter at least has already largely lost all of its founders. 

So, that leaves what type of company then? It's hard to think of this ideal situation, other than a company started by someone who has unlimited capital to burn on their "mental freedom." And since that happens to be Lodwick's exact situation as a result of taking a nice pile of money from a corporation for a previous start-up, forgive us for not buying into his theory.