Our world is combustible’: Kathryn Bigelow on AI, Andy Warhol and nuclear Armageddon

Danny Leigh Guardian, 18 Oct 25

‘Our world is combustible’: Kathryn Bigelow on AI, Andy Warhol and nuclear Armageddon

The record-breaking Oscar winner explains how her new film, A House of Dynamite – starring Idris Elba as the US president – is rooted in her cold war childhood and the urgent threats we all face todayFri 17 Oct 2025 15.00 AEDTShare

Kathryn Bigelow has been thinking about death: hers, and mine, and yours as well. History will always remember her as the first woman to win a best director Oscar, which she did in 2010 for The Hurt Locker. But in her new film, A House of Dynamite, history may not have long to run. It is the story of a nuclear missile, launched at an American city. The rest is about what happens next. Bigelow would like you to consider Armageddon.

“Someone I know said the bomb for the audience is realising this is possible,” she says. She smiles. “I’m glad if people come away from the movie as concerned as I am.”

Today, though, her bearing is Zen. Almost six feet and wearing tinted sunglasses, she looks like a rock star, and younger than 73. Her own memories of the nuclear era stretch back to the early 1960s, and a cold-war childhood in California. School involved “duck and cover” drills, teaching kids to stay safe in a nuclear attack. “I grew up hiding under my desk. Of course, I was too young to understand what I was doing down there.”

A House of Dynamite is a belated answer. Bigelow’s previous movie, Detroit, was a 60s true story, an account of racist police violence. Now she is back in the period she most likes making films about: right now. It is an age of ironies. On our phones, nothing is beyond the pale, and everything makes us furious. And all, she says, while ignoring a nuclear stockpile able to render our online dramas irrelevant. “It’s the one thing we never mention, much less question. It’s crickets out there. It isn’t on TikTok, so it doesn’t exist.”

The movie, then, reminds us of a terrifying fact of life. “Our world is combustible. And it’s extraordinary to me how that ever became normalised.”

The cast includes Rebecca Ferguson as a White House security analyst and Idris Elba as the US president. Rich with closely researched detail, the film shows us the same nightmare experienced by multiple characters. Who fired the missile is never clear. Retaliatory strikes are still prepared. The film does exactly what its director intends. It makes everything else you might be thinking about feel absolutely trivial……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

She says she sees a clear relationship between her hot potato films of the past 20 years and her new one. K-19 left her haunted by nuclear ghosts. Then, while others had their say about her, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty sharpened her self-image as a film-maker adjacent to journalism. “The films start with my own curiosity, and then there’s a desire to provide access to information the public doesn’t have that I think might be important.”

The other link, of course, is the military. A retired three-star general acted as a consultant on A House of Dynamite. She points out she has never sought endorsement from the Pentagon. Indeed, the story is more than sceptical about the accepted wisdom of mutually assured destruction – and the billions spent maintaining it. “Our nuclear armoury is a fallible structure,” Bigelow says. “Within it are men and women working thanklessly behind the scenes, whose competence means you and I can sit and have this conversation. But competence doesn’t mean they’re infallible.”……………………………………………………………………… https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oct/17/kathryn-bigelow-ai-andy-warhol-nuclear-armageddon-a-house-of-dynamite

October 19, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

Palestinians’ Fate: Victims of Genocide While Alive, Vastly Uncounted By the Media When They Are Killed.

By Ralph Nader, October 10, 2025, https://nader.org/2025/10/10/palestinians-fate-victims-of-genocide-while-alive-vastly-uncounted-by-the-media-when-they-are-killed/

Ben Hubbard, the long-time Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, is known for his high standards. So too is Karen DeYoung, the long-time reporter and foreign affairs editor for the Washington Post.

Yet they, and their editors, share a common, recurring failure by misleading their readers about the serious undercount of Palestinian deaths during the Israeli regime’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.

How so? By repeating in article after article the Hamas claim of 67,000 deaths since October 2023. The real death toll estimate is probably around 600,000. Unlike Israeli and American cultures, which do not under-estimate their fatalities in conflicts, Hamas sees the awful death toll as a reflection of their not protecting their people and a measure of Israeli military might against Hamas’ limited small arms and weapons. Both Hubbard and DeYoung, of course, know better. They know the daily bombardment of tiny Gaza, the geographical size of Philadelphia, with 2.3 million humans, is without precedent in Israel’s targeting of civilians andcivilian infrastructure. The blockade of “food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity,” along with the concentrated destruction of health care facilities have been condemned by human rights groups in Israel and International humanitarian organizations.

 Reporters and editors are quite aware of more accurate casualty estimates appearing in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, and estimates provided by other academic and prominent international relief organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, UN World Food Programme and others experienced in assessing the human toll of military devastations.

Journalists know the estimate last April by Professor Emeritus Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford in the UK, an expert in the power of aerial bombs and missiles, who wrote that the TNT equivalent of six Hiroshima atomic bombs has been delivered to these totally defenseless Palestinians, almost all of whom are without housing or air raid shelters.

Netanyahu’s American-made missiles and bombs continue to produce deadly bloodshed.  The waves of death from starvation, untreated, weaponry-caused infectious diseases, the cutoff of medicines treating cancer, respiratory ailments, and diabetes are still mounting.

What readers do not know is how much of the use of Hamas’s undercount is mandated by news editors, and why.  Because intense Netanyahu propaganda has declared the estimates of Hamas, based on real names (excluding many thousands under the rubble and the collateral damage to civilians that in such conflicts exceed direct fatalities from the bombing by 3 to 13-fold), are an exaggeration, the mainstream media is wary of being accused of even worse fabrications than those of Hamas.

Speaking to many reporters and editors about this huge undercount phenomenon, not prevalent in other violent arenas of war, they all agree that the real count is much higher, but they do not have a number to use that is deemed credible. But they do have casualty experts who can be interviewed, such as the chair of the Global Health Department at Edinburgh University or a foremost missile technology specialist, MIT Professor Emeritus Theodore Postol, who said on our radio/podcast recently, “I would say that 200, 300, or 400,000 people [Palestinian] are dead easily.”

The least the journalists could do is say “the real count may be much higher.” The other alternative is to do their own investigation, piecing together the empirical and clinical evidence (See, Gaza Healthcare Letter to President Trump, October 1, 2025) and citing prominent Israelis who have said that the IDF has always targeted Palestinian civilians from 1948 on. (See my column March 28, 2025 – The Vast Gaza Death Undercount – Undermines Civic, Diplomatic and Political Pressures.)

The other alternative is to do a “news analysis,” which allows for evaluations, short of editorializing. For instance, a “news analysis” could point out that conveying the impression that the Hamas figures are the true count means that 97 out of 100 Palestinians in Gaza are still living. This is not remotely credible. Yet that is essentially what Ben Hubbard’s October 7th Times article stated, “with more than 67,000 killed, or one in every 34 Gazans, according to local health officials.”  It is more like one in every four Gazans killed.

Nor is it true that the “local health officials” are confirming this, because on further inquiry, they admit their definition of the fatality toll excludes those under the rubble and those who die from the massive collateral casualty toll. This reality is well known to scores of American physicians back from Gaza who say that a majority of those killed are children and women and that the survivors are almost all injured, sick, or dying.

There are esteemed reporters like Gideon Levy of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who claim that the Hamas figures are horrible enough that they meet the test of genocide, implying that a higher count would not make any more of a moral or political difference.

I disagree. “Horror” does not have finite limits. It makes a difference in driving the greater intensity of political, diplomatic, and civic pressures to have a count of 600,000 rather than 67,000 or 200,000 children rather than 20,000 children murdered. Do we need to refer to other genocides in the 20^th century to show how much a difference it would have made if the official count were one tenth of the real count?

The editors of the Post, especially, and of the Times are not keeping up with the reporting of DeYoung and Hubbard et al., about the scenes of death, dying, and horrendous agony in Gaza. The editorial management of reporters and the editorials fail to hold Netanyahu and his terroristic mass-slaughtering cabinet accountable. They allow the publication of realistic reports, features, and sometimes even give voice to Palestinians, as the Times did with several pages and pictures recently. But the long-time omnipresent shadow of AIPAC et al. darkens the editorial and opinion pages more than do the illuminations of their own reporters.

October 17, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

The LAST American President. Got democracy?

Hartmann’s new book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink, is one giant fact check on the Whopper-in-Chief, and much more — a disturbing dive into the roiling miasma of self-aggrandizing, self-deluding, psychologically shattered, wailing man-child who is Commander-in-Chief.

by Greg Palast, for RawStory, October 9, 2025, https://www.gregpalast.com/the-last-american-president/?mc_cid=1390b5d94c&mc_eid=5e93be363b

Pay attention to this professional liar:

“I’m the only president in modern history who left office with a smaller national debt than when I came into office.”

That’s quite a whopper. Fact check: “During Trump’s presidency, the national debt actually increased by $7.8 trillion, nearly 40 percent and more than any president in history.”

The fact check is courtesy of Thom Hartmann. Indeed, Hartmann’s new book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink, is one giant fact check on the Whopper-in-Chief, and much more — a disturbing dive into the roiling miasma of self-aggrandizing, self-deluding, psychologically shattered, wailing man-child who is Commander-in-Chief.

Don’t read Hartmann’s book twice, as I have. It’s not just the nightmares it induces; it’s the fact that you’ll wake up to the nightmare that is our new reality.

Hartmann is known as America’s number one progressive radio host. But he is also a certified psychotherapist, ordained theologian and noted historian who has brought his extraordinary bandolero of skills to an excavation of the dark regions of the president’s brain.

And dark it is. Trump grew up in an atmosphere of cruelty under the familial dictatorship of his daddy Fred Trump, whom the future president saw bully his older brother into an early alcoholic death. His mother emotionally checked out, leaving us with a president who needs a mother’s hug — and is taking it out on government employees.

Trump learned cruelty from his dad but learned how to weaponize it from his second daddy: Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s henchman, who taught Trump how to use fear and media manipulation to break your enemies — a group now encompassing most Americans.

Does Trump even believe his own bullshit? That’s not even a question for Trump, notes Hartmann. He quotes the master of prevarication himself:

“The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest. I call it ‘truthful hyperbole.” 

The ghost-writer of Trump’s The Art of The Deal says he made up the term “truthful hyperbole” to cover up the word, “lie.”

But it’s a lie we love. Or, at least a lot of Americans love it. Here is a photo [on original] of one of Trump’s acolytes at a Trump rally my team attended in rural Georgia. There’s her T-shirt of Trump and JD Vance as vigilantes, gunning down the bad guys. She had a Trump hat, Trump socks, and sported a red, white and blue Trump ballet tutu.

The biggest sellers were shirts announcing, with an armed Trump image, “Daddy’s home.” Our national father figure is coming back for a second term to spank us bad kiddies as Trump Sr. did to his son. The parental abuse goes on, but now as a policy of fear, repression, mass firings, race-baiting, Constitution-defying lawsuits ginned up “by cynical attorneys and billionaires’ checkbooks, riding the algorithms of outrage and our insatiable hunger for spectacle,” as Hartmann says.

As Hartmann warns, democracy in America won’t roll in on tanks, it will come “packaged as entertainment.” He notes, chillingly, that, “It wasn’t just Trump, it was the system that fed him.” Trump’s beguiling fibs, his mayhem-making, his troops-in-the-street diktats are all spectacle to satisfy the desire for retribution of America’s working class wounded.

Trump is a symptom, notes Hartmann, not a cause, of what I’d call the New Hate. We don’t want to win arguments anymore. We want to hurt those who don’t share our politics. Trump revels in it.

And Hartmann is not afraid to call out the racism that lubricates Trump’s resentment machine, a GOP line of ugly innuendoes that originated with Richard Nixon. Hartmann quotes Nixon’s political guru Kevin Phillips:

“The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

Trump didn’t introduce racism into the GOP campaign plan, he merely, as Hartmann says, “revealed it.”

And Trump’s apostles are never coy about using code words for space-laser armed Jewish “globalists,” a line which Trump finds usefully echoed by Democrats on the Left.

What do we do? I think of those old billboards on Highway 80 that flashed, “STAY AWAKE! STAY ALERT!” That’s not too much to ask.

Hartmann, a happy-ending kind of guy, throws out a bunch of good ideas to, “Reform, Resist and Remember,” beginning with our own “empathy deficit,” though he admits our best efforts could be undone by AI “techno-feudalism.”

“Democracy,” Hartmann concludes, “doesn’t announce its departure with trumpets. It slips away in silence, one institution at a time.” But we do have Hartmann’s bugle blast. Hopefully, it’s a wake-up reveille and not Taps for this fragile experiment called America.

Thom Hartmann and Greg Palast will be speaking in San Diego on Friday, October 17 and in Los Angeles on Saturday, October 18 at fundraisers for the Pacifica Radio Network.

Get a copy of Hartmann’s Last American President signed by the author for a tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund.  Only 14 signed copies available.

Greg Palast

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits and the book and documentary, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

October 11, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

The People versus Murdoch: the rise of independent media

Independent media has profoundly reshaped modern communication, much to the chagrin of traditional print media. The MSM often dismisses us as falling below their standards, but I disagree. Today’s news stories are frequently little more than opinion pieces, unchallenged and unaccountable. Citizen journalists, however, hold the MSM to account – a role that sits uneasily with the media establishment.

The MSM [Main Stream Media] claimed, “The great thing about newspapers is that, love us or hate us, we’re the voice of the people. We represent the community, their views, their aspirations, and their hopes.” Represent the community? Don’t they mean control the community?

8 October 2025 Michael Taylor, https://theaimn.net/the-people-versus-murdoch-the-rise-of-independent-media/

Over a decade ago, I wrote about a subject that remains as relevant today as ever. For nearly twenty years, I’ve been hammering away at the keyboard – a space where I could speak freely, defy control, and fight for democracy and truth. It was a place to be heard. But it wasn’t always this way. Before the rise of bloggers and independent media, we were limited to listening to those who controlled the narrative.

Let’s revisit the days when we found our voice, thanks to the emergence of bloggers, citizen journalists and independent media.

Plato (428–348 BC) opposed the written word, arguing it would erode memory. He believed people would stop memorising facts or stories, and that spreading words indiscriminately was wasteful and untrustworthy. How prophetic. Spoken over two millennia ago, his words feel strikingly contemporary. Consider today’s mainstream media (MSM), which claims its journalists are reliable, truthful, and objective. Who do you believe – them or Plato?

In recent decades, the MSM has leaned toward stories that are trivial, narrow, shallow, and sensationalist – often at the expense of truth. As Plato might have lamented, the MSM spreads words indiscriminately, wastefully, and with questionable trustworthiness. Truth, it seems, doesn’t sell newspapers.

Some bloggers echoed Plato’s concerns, prompting a fierce backlash from the MSM. I recall reading articles from the Murdoch press that unleashed a near-xenophobic hatred toward the blogosphere, attacking it with more zeal than they ever directed at incompetent politicians. One such critique described the blogosphere as:

A small, incestuous clique of self-identified lefties, with readerships composed mostly of themselves… Naivety and self-righteousness define the vast majority of the Australian blogosphere, along with whining conspiracy theories. Those who hide under the veil of anonymity, taking cheap shots to satisfy their trendy social agenda.

The MSM claimed, “The great thing about newspapers is that, love us or hate us, we’re the voice of the people. We represent the community, their views, their aspirations, and their hopes.” Represent the community? Don’t they mean control the community?

Independent media has profoundly reshaped modern communication, much to the chagrin of traditional print media. The MSM often dismisses us as falling below their standards, but I disagree. Today’s news stories are frequently little more than opinion pieces, unchallenged and unaccountable. Citizen journalists, however, hold the MSM to account – a role that sits uneasily with the media establishment.

Many citizen journalists possess a natural gift for taking the day’s main story, transforming it into something worth reading, and fostering a range of opinions that the MSM often ignores. In just a few years, blogging – in particular- became a global phenomenon, reshaping journalism and unlocking publishing opportunities previously unimaginable. To me, blogging is journalism. While individual blogs may have limited readership, sites with aligned agendas often link together to amplify their impact. In contrast, MSM blog platforms typically filter out contributions that don’t fit their narrative, rendering them inaccessible to dissenting voices.

So, what impact have independent sites had? Their influence has been most profound in the political sphere.

In a March 2010 essay titled The Influence of Political Blog Sites on Democratic Participation, ShariVari wrote:

A computer-mediated environment makes it easier for citizens to express their feelings about political candidates and speak more candidly than in face-to-face settings. The internet’s diversity provides access to a wide range of opinions and information, potentially shaping or changing individuals’ political views. By disregarding blog sites with corporate or agenda-driven motives, political bloggers can foster peer-to-peer discussions of personal viewpoints.

This perspective was heartening for a then-blogger like me, who had lost faith in the MSM. It affirmed that independent voices could have an impact, however small at the time. If Australia followed the U.S. trend, a thriving blogging industry might one day emerge.

ShariVari concluded:

All research shows that increased opportunities for participation encourage democracy… Citizens are increasingly turning to and trusting the internet for accurate information, using it as a platform for participatory democracy, and becoming more knowledgeable about politics in the process. A Spiral of Silence – where people self-censor due to perceived minority views – is less likely in an online environment where citizens evaluate each other’s opinions without status cues like gender, race, or socioeconomic status. Blog sites are undeniably expanding the ways citizens participate in democracy.

Fifteen years ago, those in democratic societies seeking to share their ideas faced editorial gatekeepers whose policies often reflected their own ideologies or market-driven priorities. Today, this control is crumbling in the face of participatory media. Audiences no longer want to be passive consumers – they want to comment on and even create the news.

Citizen journalists believe they are better equipped to provide the diversity that modern democracies need, a diversity often ignored by traditional media. Independent platforms allow them to expose doctored or omitted facts, highlight biases, and give voice to alternate perspectives. These sites encourage readers to think critically, ask probing questions, and challenge the MSM’s hidden agendas. Independent media is awash with objective, fact-based analysis that counters the narratives of established outlets.

The explosion of independent sites isn’t merely an echo of dissenting voices – it’s a response to the MSM’s failure to provide objective, impartial reporting. If the MSM were truly committed to quality journalism, there might be no need for the millions of blogs and independent platforms that exist today to fill the gaps they’ve left.

In essence, it’s the People versus Murdoch… then and now.

October 10, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment