Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 973

The NSA's Stymied Plan to Touch It All

"Snowden’s biggest single victim," a senior intelligence official told The New York Times, isn't his revelation of the National Security Agency's existing surveillance system. Instead, it's the NSA's push to broaden that ability to cover all of the scannable traffic on the internet. The public relations damage done to the agency has made an expansion of its ability to read data a non-starter. For now, anyway.

In a document released to coincide with the president's press conference last Friday, the NSA described the breadth of its existing data-scanning ability. As has been documented extensively, the agency monitors traffic on fiber-optic cables entering the United States (and elsewhere), monitoring it in near-real time for indicators of terror activity. But, it insists, it doesn't actually monitor that much.

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So by its own assessment, the NSA can access ("touch") about 29.2 petabytes of traffic a day, reviewing about seven terabytes of that data. As author and professor Jeff Jarvis notes, this probably isn't just the NSA stumbling around, reviewing content. "Keep in mind that most of the data passing on the net is not email or web pages," he writes. "It's media." That media — videos and photos — isn't reviewed by the NSA. Messages and web traffic, text content, is. And a lot more text (and metadata) fits into that seven terabytes than photos. Seven terabytes is over a third of the contents of the Library of Congress, according to WolframAlpha.

But as The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald noted last month, the informal mantra at the NSA is "collect it all." Greenwald quotes the Washington Post:

[A]s he did in Iraq, [NSA head Keith] Alexander has pushed hard for everything he can get: tools, resources and the legal authority to collect and store vast quantities of raw information on American and foreign communications.

That has included an apparent push to expand the 1.6 percent to something more like 100 percent — in other words, to touch it all. The Times reports that the effort is central to Alexander's cyberwarfare efforts. To stop hostile attacks from hackers or foreign governments, the NSA wants to be able to see everything that's coming into the United States. The most generous analogy would be anti-virus software on your computer; by acting as a gateway to internet communication, it is meant to prevent any damage from being done. If you computer only checked a fraction of the traffic, it would be much less successful.

Under this proposal, the government would latch into the giant “data pipes” that feed the largest Internet service providers in the United States, companies like A.T.&T. and Verizon. The huge volume of traffic that runs through those pipes, particularly e-mails, would be scanned for signs of anything from computer servers known for attacks on the United States or for stealing information from American companies. Other “metadata” would be inspected for evidence of malicious software.

“It’s defense at network speed,” General Alexander told a Washington security-research group recently, according to participants. “Because you have only milliseconds.”

In the new political environment prompted by the Edward Snowden leaks, getting the infrastructure in place to do that analysis has become far less likely. Because, extending the analogy, it's as though your anti-virus software also had the power to tell the FBI when it found an email suspicious.

"But this summer," The Times notes, "the mood in Congress has changed." At this point, the NSA's push to become our national cyberwatchdog isn't likely to happen. At least until Congress is more confident we're not the ones who will be bitten.

       

The Play You Didn't Know Shakespeare Helped Write

If you've read every Shakespeare play from King Lear to All's Well That Ends Well and are dying to get your hands on some more Bard, you're in luck. New evidence suggests that Shakespeare helped out Thomas Kyd with the play The Spanish Tragedy, a revenge tragedy from the late 16th century that is believed to have served as the basis for Hamlet. 

Douglas Bruster, a professor at the University of Texas, studied Shakespeare's handwriting and found that Shakespeare's sometimes inventive spellings made their way into the original print version of The Spanish Tragedy. Another Shakespeare scholar, Eric Rasmussen, told The New York Times, “I think we can now say with some authority that, yes, this is Shakespeare. It has his fingerprints all over it.”

According to Bruster, Shakespeare's "bad handwriting" and 24 broad spelling patterns affected the way The Spanish Tragedy was printed, and illustrate that Shakespeare authored part of it — specifically, the so-called "Additional Passages" of 1602. Last year, British scholar Brian Vickers also argued the passages were written by Shakespeare, but his evidence came from computer analysis. Now with Bruster's added handwriting analysis, scholars are pretty much in agreement that Shakespeare assisted Kyd, who has in turn been credited by some with influencing Hamlet.

Vickers claims that: 

Shakespeare wasn’t a solitary genius, flying above everyone else. He was a working man of the theater. If his company needed a new play, he’d get together with someone else and get it done.

Vickers has also controversially argued that Shakespeare didn't write all of his own plays. The evidence for The Spanish Tragedy, however, appears solid. Another scholar, Tiffany Stern, told The Times, “The arguments for The Spanish Tragedy are better than for most.” Considering that centuries have passed since the purported collaboration, that may be as close as we ever get to certainty.

Photo: A rare copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet, via Reuters. 

       

Gwyneth Paltrow Terrorized by 'Stinky' Meats

Today in celebrity gossip: A fellow author was not very happy about Gwyneth Paltrow's presence at a book signing, Kanye West wants to be in magazines, and Liam Gallagher has secrets. 

Yesterday we mentioned briefly that Gwyneth Paltrow, the answer to a mourning dove's riddle, did a book signing in the Hamptons. But there is more to this story than it initially seemed. You see, there were other authors at this event, and some felt slighted by the big hubbub over Gwyneth's arrival. Specifically, an author named Christina Oxenberg wrote a blog post about the event, detailing how she fought back against Gwyneth's rude security team and the star's general presence. I could paraphrase, but I think we should let Ms. Oxenberg's words stand on their own. Here we go:

Then the divinity in question arrived with hubby, children and a couple of massive bodyguards. The worshippers blocked my view of the whole world, abusing my tiny territory upon which to abandon their trash or lean their sorry asses. So I abandoned my post and took that opportunity to roam the great tent and greet my fellow authors. Which is when I saw the food table, and suddenly I knew what needed doing. I made a plate of miniature sloppy hamburgers, stinky steak sandwiches, and the like and hauled it back to my piece of table.

Gwyneth’s bodyguards blocked my re-entry despite my assurance I was a just an author and pointing at my name tag, “No!” they growled, body blocking me. So I was forced to crawl under the table. And there I sat with my meat products, wafting the excellent smells toward my sleek vegan neighbor. She ignored the siren smells of protein. We never did say hello, although I did try to sell my book to her sleek vegan children. No bites.

So... There's a lot there. And that isn't even the whole blog post. But let's just tackle this part. Mostly, I'd like to talk about the phrase "stinky steak sandwiches." Or more specifically "stinky steak." I'm not sure there is a more repulsive phrase in the English language? I also have no idea what it means. Madame, if the steak is "stinky," if the meat is malodorous, may I gently suggest you not eat it? I don't know about you all out there in your cubicles or at your open-plan tables, but ain't no way I'm eating no stinky steak. That's horrible. Horrible! What's even more horrible is that of course she didn't actually mean that the steak sandwiches stank. She was trying to, y'know, be descriptive. In the worst possible way. "Stinky steak sandwiches." I just... Absolutely not. Moving on, if anyone ever describes children as "sleek" I'm sorry but that's immediate jail. Jail, right away. No judge, no jury, just jail. "Excuse me m'am, did you just describe those two small children as 'sleek'?" "Yes, but I was just trying to sell them my—" "Nope, I'm sorry, jail." That is terrible. That is one of the world's worst things. At least today. Look, I get that being at a book signing and no one paying attention to you because Gwyneth Paltrow, lucite case full of moonlight that she is, is there is frustrating. But if you go and write about stinky steak sandwiches and sleek children, then you are at fault. It's like car accidents. If you hit someone from behind it is always your fault. It doesn't matter if they stopped suddenly or were driving otherwise recklessly. It's your fault. It doesn't matter if they were attention hogging or their security was rude or you felt slighted. If you write "stinky steak sandwiches" and describe young children as "sleek," then it's all you, lady. It's all you. Man oh man. What a world we live in. What a place full of awful, awful words. [Page Six, Wool Domination]

Ha. Apparently Kanye West desperately wants Vogue to publish the first official photos of baby North West, but Anna Wintour is saying no. Oh man. That's great. Kanye West, ladies and gentlemen. Literally the silliest person alive right now. Is there a sillier person? He's also a very talented, possibly brilliant, person, but is nonetheless very, very silly. He really wants to be in the fancy fashion magazine but the mean wig-lady who runs it says no. But he's gonna keep trying, because he really wants to be in the fancy fashion magazine. Let me remind you that Kanye West is a 36-year-old adult. A 36-year-old adult is trying to convince a 3,000-year-old beauty-goblin who runs all of fashion to put his baby in her magazine. What a silly thing! I'm sure we'd all love to have Kanye's riches and would perhaps enjoy the widespread acclaim he's received for his creative endeavors, but to be Kanye West you'd also have to deal with the part of you that begs Anna Wintour to put your photos in her magazine. That's the trade-off. You are rich and famous and people hang on your every word, but you also embarrass yourself to Vogue because you want to be in their magazine. I don't know. Is it an even trade? I'm not sure it is. Really, I'm not. [Radar Online, via Jezebel]

Liam Gallagher, from Oasis (ask your 30-year-old cousin, kids), has ongoing baby mama drama. (Also ask your 30-year-old cousin about the phrase "baby mama drama," because it's an old one and I shouldn't have used it because it is not 2003 anymore. If it was 2003, you kids would probably still be in middle school or some nonsense. So let's just pretend I didn't say it and move on.) He fostered a so-called "love child" with an American woman who is suing for child support but now he's thrown a wrench in the gears. He wants her to sign an agreement that she will, and I'm quoting Page Six here, "never reveal any of his secrets." !!!!!! Is that allowed? Are you legally allowed to have someone sign an agreement that they will never reveal your secrets? Like, just a vague blanket ban of all secrets? "I have so many secrets!" Liam Gallagher cries to his lawyer. "So many secrets." I mean, look, we all have secrets, humans are mostly secrets and bones. But do we have such secrets that we'd make someone sign a legal agreement saying "No secret telling!"? I just don't know that most of us do. What, then, are Liam Gallagher's secrets? Bodies buried? Nights best forgotten? Private wishes murmured in the dark? This is the Streisand Effect of legal agreements. The more Liam Gallagher tries to hide his secrets, the more I want to know them. What did happen that night on that lonely road all those years ago? What did Lucy Wilkinson whisper in his ear in the schoolyard when they were 13? What did he see that day when his parents didn't know he was home? These are all good secrets, and now that he really, legally, doesn't want us to know them, I want them so bad. I want your secrets so much, Liam Gallagher. Give them to me. To us. Divulge yourself. Transcend. Release. [Page Six]

[image error]Ummm... Actress Famke Janssen apparently came home to her New York City apartment recently and found a copy of the children's book The Lonely Doll in her bedroom. She doesn't own a copy of The Lonely Doll. She called the police and they are investigating, but let's also hope that she packed up and moved to a cabin in Nova Scotia because good grief wouldn't you want to hide forever if you came home and this book was mysteriously in your bedroom. Hatchi matchi that is scary. Yipes. Shivers. Eek. [TMZ]

Ali Lohan, sister of Lindsay and Michael, daughter of Dina and Michael, friend of the world, has a new apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village. She moved in there last week, fresh-faced and smiling. That's all. Us Weekly used the photo of her moving as an excuse to talk about how skinny she is, about her "drastic new look," but I don't know. She mostly looks like a 19-year-old doing a thing on a summer afternoon. She's not wearing makeup, Us Weekly remarks. Well of course she's not wearing makeup. Who would wear makeup while moving into an apartment? What a silly observation. "Lohan wasn't wearing a ball gown while she moved into her Greenwich Village apartment." "Lohan was visibly not wearing jewels as she carried her futon up the stairs." Get outta here with that, Us Weekly. Pfft. Enjoy the new place, young Lohan. Treat it well. Let it treat you well. See you at Milady's. When you're old enough. [Us Weekly]

       

How Hillary Clinton Will Not Run for President Before She Runs for President

Hillary isn't officially running for president (yet). But the outlines of her technically-not-a-presidential-campaign over the next few years are becoming more clear, thanks to, of all people, Anthony Weiner.  At an event with BuzzFeed on Monday night, Weiner not only confirmed Clinton is running for president in 2016 on Monday night, but said he also knows what role his wife, Huma Abedin, will play in the campaign.  When BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith asked if Weiner knows Abedin's plans for 2016, Weiner answered, "I do... I'm not telling you." Those comments offer some fresh grist for our speculation that his mayoral campaign was always intended more as a political bloodletting by getting his sexting news out before his wife faces the scrutiny of working for a presidential campaign than a serious comeback for the disgraced former Congressman. At least, Weiner sounded apologetica about it. "I feel that what I have done has hurt her. Hurt her professionally, hurt her personally," Weiner said. 

The confessions of Weiner's latest sexting partner have brought Abedin her first bad press in pretty much her whole career. "The only way out for Abedin, as I see it, is to give up being the 'Good Wife,' dump Weiner and run for office on her own," Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn argued in July. But perhaps that was the point all along: If Weiner hadn't run for mayor, and become one of the summer news obsessions of 2013, it would have been Abedin who would be forced to face sexting questions on the campaign trail in 2015 – as a top aide to Clinton — or even later as a candidate herself. The professional damage she suffered would have come at the worst possible moment for her career. Instead, thanks to Weiner's mayoral campaign, by the time Hillary is stomping through state fairs in Iowa with Abedin by her side, Weiner's sexts will be old news.

[image error]While Weiner wouldn't say what Abedin is doing for Clinton in 2016, we have some clues already. Abedin has been running Clinton's transition team, which helped her move from the State Department to private life at the Clinton Foundation, now renamed the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The genius of Hillary's move to the foundation is that it will give her a platform to address the topical issues she wants, and a cause to campaign for, without forcing her to get sucked into dumb Washington fights, Politico's Maggie Haberman explains. Each Clinton has a chief of staff, and all three chiefs meet daily in the organization that is transitioning from "start-up" mode into something that will last after Bill Clinton dies. The foundation will act as "an organizational buffer from the press and the daily grind of politics" while giving her something more substantial to do with her time than what other unemployed presidential candidates, like Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, have done: give paid speeches. 

Not that she won't be giving speeches! Clinton announced on Monday night that she will give a series of speeches over the next few months on the controversial issues of national security and transparency. The next one will be in Philadelphia in September. Clinton made the announcement while attacking "the phantom epidemic of 'voter fraud'" at the American Bar Association's conference in San Francisco.

In his Washington Post column on Tuesday, Richard Cohen says Clinton's embryonic campaign is has no message. "Will she say she’s been to where no secretary of state had ever been before — the Cook Islands, for instance?" he asks. "Will she echo the constant refrain from her State Department tenure — that she traveled more than any secretary of state in history, an astounding 956,733 miles, which is 38.42 times around the world and which, you have to concede, is a lot?" Her speech schedule and organization suggests this will not be the focus of Clinton's unofficial presidential campaign. The new Clinton infrastructure looks set up to avoid precisely that problem.

(Photos via Associated Press.)

       

Tomorrow's Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talk Don't Look Promising

The latest round of peace negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinian governments is set to begin on Wednesday, but the Israelis continue to push forward on the one idea that seems destined to scuttle the whole process. The government signed off on 900 new housing units in the territory of East Jerusalem on Monday, which is on top of the 1,000 new settlement units they approved on Sunday. Despite claims from both the United States and the United Nations that such settlements are illegal — and threats from the Palestinian negotiators to not even show up on Wednesday because of it — the country is going forward with the one thing their opponents least want to see happen.

Even members of the Israeli opposition party are accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of trying to "undermine" any chance of an agreement, before the talks can even start.

Secretary of State John Kerry tried to assure everyone that the talks will go forward as planned and that settlements should be part of the negotiations. But it makes it hard to negotiate when one side won't even dangle the possibility that they could back off on a key demand.

Meanwhile, some Israelis are still upset about a different Palestinian demand that was agreed to: the release of nearly 100 prisoners, many of whom were convicted of killing Israeli citizens. Relatives of some of the prisoners' victims appealed the decision to release the convicts ahead of the talks, but were rejected by the Supreme Court on Tuesday. While the release was meant to be a goodwill gesture, it's being offset by the announcement of the settlements while still angering many Israelis who will now demand that negotiators drive a harder bargain.

And if all that wasn't enough, Israel had to shoot down a rocket that was launched at the town of Eilat on the Red Sea earlier today. The rocket came from Egypt, not the Palestinian territories, and has more to with the Islamist conflict in that country than it does the cause of Gaza and the West Bank. But it does reminds Israelis of the precarious position they find themselves, making hardliners even more determined not to give in. While Secretary Kerry's work to get the two sides back to the negotiating table was encouraging, almost nothing that's happened since then has been.

       

Dry Humping and Cat Kicking: Your Guide to This Summer's Most Offensive Vines

Let's be clear right now and preface that what you're about to see will, if you're human, make your blood boil. And that the next few images require a trigger warning. I tried to write this story without the images and vines they're referencing, and I'm not sure if it'd be possible to convey the impact without them. 

Vine is a spectacular social media platform. Yet, it also has a way of spurring awful people to record awful things like the young man who thought the Internet would appreciate a six-minute video of him kicking a tiny cat like it were a football. As The Daily Dot pointed out, that really happened and the man in question is named Walter Easley, a guy who they say is threatening to kick more kittens. Easley deleted his Vine, but the Daily Dot's Fidel Martinez (again, WARNING) made a GIF of Easley's video:

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Pretty gross. Internet hubs like Reddit and 4Chan have already tried to gather as much information they can about Easley, and there's a frantic search for his personal information. That said, Easley seems unfazed. "Lol now I got somthing to laugh at all day," he tweeted (his tweets are protected). And Martinez adds: 

He also posted another video on Vine in which he threatened to kick another cat, but that clip has since been taken down.

Easley isn't the first person to post something offensive on Vine, will not be the last, and is probably not even the worst thing we've seen on social media. Currently, the worst occurrence of social media meeting real-life terribleness happened last week when a man posted a photo of the corpse of his wife, who he allegedly murdered, on Facebook.

But Easley's video punctuates Vine's first summer as a Twitter app, and its first few months of massive popularity. With that, come the same questions that have plagued Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms: exactly how do you determine what's offensive and what isn't, what needs to be kept up or taken down, and how much free speech you allow on the app. Twitter, as we know, is a staunch defender of the First Amendment and it is currently struggling with the amount of violent threats its users like to send out.

While we can agree that unleashing on a tiny cat and then uploading it to the Internet so everyone can see is reprehensible, that becomes a little less clear when you deal with other vine trends like the "smack cam" where boys are filmed hitting girls in the face for funsies. That didn't spur as much initial outrage as Easley's video. But after those videos hit mainstream sites, a majority we originally wrote about were taken down. And then there's the equally puzzling #strokecam where it's apparently "fun" to dryhump unsuspecting women (again, Warning) : 

Some of these videos unlike the cat video, could involve completely willing participants (some of the women who are the target of the dry humping in the stroke cam don't seem like they are in on the joke) and that perhaps changes some of the meaning behind these things and perhaps turns them into an inside joke. But that isn't clear. What's to stop people from mimicking this "joke" and copycat vines proliferating? As episodes like Steubenville showed us this year, kids are capable of laughing off rape. And, as of now, there are few consequences dissuading people from continuing to disseminate this type of "joke."

       

Katy Perry's New Song Sounds Like Another Song

It's barely been 12 hours since its release, and already Katy Perry's new wannabe anthem "Roar" is causing problems for the frequently bewigged singer. See, parts of "Roar" sound a little bit like the relatively new song, "Brave," by romcom chanteuse Sara Bareilles. Well, that's what some people are saying, anyway. And since Perry's song came out second (though not by much), she's the one catching heat for it.

The comparisons popped up on the web early this morning, suspicious listeners layering "Roar" over "Brave" and noting similarities in the melodies, the placement of builds, etc. It's not a completely convincing case, especially when you consider we're talking about carefully manufactured pop music, which all sounds the same, all the time. But there are definitely similarities. For her part, Bareilles has been diplomatic while the "controversy" rages around her.

The real offensive thing about "Roar," other than its corny lyrics ("Now I’m floating like a butterfly / Stinging like a bee I earned my stripes / I went from zero, to my own hero"), is the lyrics video, which was also released today. In the video, the lyrics are largely spelled out in Emoji on what is, presumably, Perry's cellphone. It's all very now and very teen, which is good marketing I'm sure, but boy is it... Well, something. It's just something that means that it's 2013 and a new generation of children runs the world, one that talks in cellphone hieroglyphics and needs inspirational self-empowerment pop songs that aren't "I Believe I Can Fly." Oh well.

If you don't like Perry's new song, there's always Lady Gaga's. Quite a day for pop divas of the moment! If you have any gay friends (or a particular kind of gay friend, anyway), you might want to call them to make sure they're still breathing.

       

Congress Too Gridlocked to Impeach Obama, Complains G.O.P. Congressman

Rep. Blake Farenthold was forced to explain to voters back home in Texas district that while he thinks there's enough votes in the House of Representatives to impeach President Obama, there's no chance it'll happen because Democrats and Republicans can't get along well enough to get anything done. Yes, if not for the partisan gridlock in D.C., Farenthold, a Republican, assured his constituents that the president would be put on trial over his birth certificate. 

In the exchange, which was caught on smartphone and posted Monday morning by BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski, Farenthold explained, "if we were to impeach the president tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it. But it would go to the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted." Just as gridlock has doomed a grand bargain on taxes and maybe an immigration bill, what would undoubtedly be a wildly partisan trial of the president just can't get done because of partisan bickering.

Farenthold made the comments on Saturday during an open house at a civic center in Luling, Texas in answer to a constituent who acknowledged that she was presenting him with a "not very popular issue" — Obama's "fraudulent" birth certificate. The congressman explained, “I think unfortunately the horse is already out of the barn on this, on the whole birth certificate issue. The original Congress when his eligibility came up should have looked into it and they didn’t. I’m not sure how we fix it." The constituent, who's off camera but has a female voice, said she was holding proof that a felony had been committed. How could we let Obama get away with it? That's what lead to Farenthold's comments about impeachment. "You tie into a question I get a lot, if everyone’s so unhappy with the president’s done, why don’t you impeach him?" Farenthold told a constituent, before giving a "real frank answer" that the House and Senate would never come together to get impeachment done.

Talking to constituents is tough. A member of Congress must treat even the most far-out conspiracy theorist with respect. Mitt Romney got tripped up in the 2012 election while fielding donors' wacky ideas about how to fix the country. However, Farenthold doesn't seem to think this conspiracy theorist is that far out. Likewise, neither did Michele Bachmann when she said in May, "I will tell you, as I have been home in my district, in the sixth district of Minnesota, there isn't a weekend that hasn't gone by that someone says to me, 'Michelle, what in the world are you all waiting for in Congress? Why aren't you impeaching the president?  He's been making unconstitutional actions since he came into office.'"

And indeed, there's a whole list of things some House Republicans want to impeach Obama for. In January, Texas Rep. Steve Stockman said he would do anything he could to stop Obama from using executive orders on gun control, including "even filing articles of impeachment." North Carolina Rep. Water Jones said in June, "If Congress sends one troop, if one of our troops goes to Syria and is killed, I will introduce articles of impeachment against the President." (A website called Birther Report claimed Texas Rep. Kenny Marchant endorsed impeaching in a July 8 letter to a constituent, but Marchant's staff told Watchdog.org that the letter was doctored.) In 2011, Florida Rep. Ted Yoho actually made a list. Yoho, who was elected to Congress in 2012, said on his campaign website:

Our President, Mr. Obama, should be impeached on the grounds of:

1.  Breaking his oath to uphold the Constitution.

2.  Attacking a non-threatening country.

3.  We are a sovereign Nation and do not take commands from the U.N. or  NATO.

4.  Not responding within the required 60 days to inform and justify to Congress why he used the War Powers Act  (which is reserved for National emergency and threats to our country by foreign invaders when Congress is convened).

5.  Creating and passage of the proven unconstitutional Affordable Patient Health Care Act.

6.  The unconstitutional Nationalization of GM and Chrysler.

But it seems the birther issue is still the most important to some conservative voters. On Sunday, three-time fake presidential candidate Donald Trump said on ABC's This Week, "Was there a birth certificate? You tell me. Some people say that was not his birth certificate. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows."

       

When Will We See 'Snowpiercer' in the US?

Bong Joon-ho's new sci-fi action/adventure film Snowpiercer features movie stars and Oscar winners, looks great, and is already a hit in Korea. But it's still unclear when we'll get to see it here in the U.S. and Harvey Weinstein may have something to do with that.

Variety's Patrick Frater reported this morning that the film—which tells the story of a class system on a train traveling around a dystopian world—won the South Korean box office for the second consecutive weekend. The film has passed 4 million ticket sales in record time for the country.

It's obviously not a given that a foreign hit will immediately translate to box office success in the U.S., but there's a catch with Snowpiercer. Though Bong is Korean, his film is an English-language one starring our very own Captain America, Chris Evans, alongside Oscar-winners Octavia Spencer and Tilda Swinton, who looks to be giving a fascinating performance, false teeth and all, as one of the leaders of the upper-class section of the train. Evans and Spencer are among the revolting members of the lower classes stuck on the train, which has perpetual motion engine that has kept members of the human race alive following a global warming experiment that caused an ice age. The film already got a fantastic review from The Hollywood Reporter's Clarence Tsui, who called it "an epic yet nuanced, contemplative yet entertaining vehicle that uses its titular locomotive as an allegory for human existence as we see it in the here and now." 

The film, Frater explains, was something of a risk. Though $40 million may seem like chump change to the U.S. film industry, that made Snowpiercer the "biggest budget Korean-made movie of all time," according to Frater. The fact that it was made in English made some feel it might fail in its home country, despite the pedigree of its director, who made the successful Mother and The Host. 

With the film's strong reception in Korea, importing it as-is would seem like a no-brainer. But as rumors would have it, the film is facing a Harvey Weinstein-shaped roadblock. Last week, Australia's Inside Film reported that Weinstein, whose company has distribution rights in the U.S. and elsewhere, wants to chop 20 minutes off of the 126 minute film. (Considering a number of this summer's blockbusters ran around two and a half hours, 126 minutes doesn't seem very long to us.) Inside Film sourced British film festival programmer Tony Rayns, who said the cuts would make the film a more traditional action movie that would appeal to the "presumed level of American mid-west hicks." Frater, however, implies that Weinstein actually may have Oscar gold in mind when considering a U.S. release.

For now we're left just wondering whether this film is the sci-fi social allegory that Elysium wasn't. And if we'll ever see it.

 

       

Would Marco Rubio Really Shut Down the Government Over Obamacare?

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida won praise from the Republican establishment and lost tea-party support by playing a lead role in this year's push for immigration reform. Now he's turned that dynamic on its head by joining Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky at the forefront of a drive to shut down the government unless Obamacare is defunded.

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Rubio's pendulum swing may or may not ultimately appease those angry about the pivotal help he provided to win passage of the Senate's comprehensive immigration bill, with its path to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants. What's already certain is that some establishment figures who applauded him on immigration, including Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, are now serving up disapproval. Other Republican critics of the shutdown threat include Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Richard Burr of North Carolina, as well as 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Business lobbyists are also dismissive, with several telling National Journal that Rubio & Co. are ignoring facts on the ground—to wit, a Democratic president and Senate. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called the defunding effort "nuts." Commentary writer Peter Wehner, a White House aide during the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations, got personal with a column headlined "Marco Rubio's Folly."

What's more, Rubio may be sowing confusion about his political identity as he heads toward a widely expected run for president in 2016. Would he be an establishment contender, along the lines of a Chris Christie, Scott Walker, or Jeb Bush, or an insurgent like Paul or Cruz? "It appears right now as if the path is not clear for Rubio. And sometimes if one foot is in each camp, neither camp adopts you as their own," says University of New Hampshire political scientist Dante Scala, an expert on the state's first-in-the-nation primary.

What set off Wehner was Rubio's assertion to radio host Mark Levin last week that "if you're willing to fund this thing, you can't possibly say you're against it." In other words, he'll vote against a bill to keep the government running unless the measure cuts off money for President Obama's health care law.

 "So is that the new Rubio standard?" Wehner asks. "Are we to believe he supported every item funded in every budget bill he voted for while serving in the Florida Legislature? Or that in the future he'll support every program of every budget he votes for in the United States Senate?"

Wehner also takes issue with Rubio's damn-the-politics attitude toward a government shutdown unless the president agrees to defund Obamacare, and questions whether Rubio and the other members of what he calls "the Suicide Caucus" are tethered to reality, given that Obama and the Democratic Senate will never "pull the plug" on that signature achievement.

Being a ringleader on the road to a government shutdown could well be riskier than being a cheerleader for a path to citizenship. There are plenty of GOP presidential prospects who share Rubio's views on immigration, or have similar views, or will by 2015, when the party's dire need for Hispanic outreach and votes in a national race becomes impossible to ignore. Furthermore, whether it succeeds or fails, immigration reform will be in the rearview mirror by then and not all that salient to the national conversation.

"Time would do the best for Marco Rubio, more than anything," says Craig Robinson, a GOP strategist in Iowa, home of the first caucuses of the primary season. And he'll need that time if he's going to bring conservatives back into his fold. "I think it is going to be a while before they're mesmerized by Marco Rubio again," says Robinson, who runs a website called The Iowa Republican.

Rubio ran against Obamacare in his 2010 campaign and has been a consistent opponent of the Affordable Care Act. Also, after voting once for a stopgap budget measure to keep the government running, he has since voted against all such measures, called continuing resolutions. He's now saying he will vote for a second CR, due next month, but only if it defunds Obamacare. "There's a lot of grassroots support for this position. You've seen most of the conservative organizations supporting this, as well as leading conservatives outside of Congress saying that this is the right approach," says Rubio spokesman Alex Conant. He also says of Rubio, "It would be weird if he wasn't fighting to repeal Obamacare."

But that misses the point. Pretty much all the Republicans in Congress oppose the health care law. It's the government-shutdown threat most of them are questioning, because, unlike the outside groups and individuals, they are worried about the real-world impact of such a drastic development—on Americans and on the GOP.

Veteran Republican strategist Rich Galen says Rubio, Cruz, and Paul are showing a lack of seasoning by inviting such a confrontation. "The ramifications of something like that are far broader than what it sounds like," Galen says. He should know. He experienced the 1995-96 shutdown, and the political damage it did to his party, as a top aide to then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich.