Word: stark
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...targets, be they cities or silos, is not a new idea. Every President from Eisenhower to Nixon considered some kind of terminal defense, said M.I.T. Engineering Professor Jack Ruina, who began advising on nuclear strategy during the Eisenhower Administration. Yet each of those Presidents was ultimately bedeviled by a stark truth about nuclear weapons: it has always been cheaper to build offensive weapons than defenses to stop them. Earlier Presidents, asserted Ruina, realized that by building defenses, they would just invite the Soviets to build more and different types of offenses, thus igniting a destabilizing new round in the arms...
...leech into your memory. Homer, a round-faced Freddy Fender type, and Tommy, the Valentino wannabe, and Yvonne, despair stamped on her prettiness. At the Ritz, bit players become stars for a second, like the toothless gent sucking on a beer bottle. Mackenzie's sense of portraiture is less stark and sensational than that of his contemporaries Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Weegie, less hagiographic than the work of his predecessor Edward Curtis (whose photographs of Amerindians provide the film's opening montage). He just knows how to choose faces, how long to leave them on screen...
...Betancourt's biggest problem ahead could be this: Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in jail in 1990 with his huge political movement intact and a nation to run. Mandela's leadership was unquestioned. In stark contrast Betancourt has emerged as a lone woman with no political constituency and no clear home, geographically or politically. (She has apparently also left her husband in Bogota, after giving him a perfunctory hug the day she was freed.) That outsider status is familiar ground for Betancourt, who was raised not among the poor masses, as Mandela was, but as an aristocratic expatriate...
...what waits for these troops after this story ends (the resistance, the IEDS), makes us fear for them. We get a few chilling glimpses, as when the unit finds a dead fighter carrying papers from Syria. Some of the men rejoice at killing a "terrorist," but Lieutenant Nate Fick (Stark Sands) asks, "Isn't that the exact opposite of what we wanted to have happen here? Two weeks ago, he was still a student in Syria...
...contrast is stark between the world's response to the plight of the Zimbabweans and its engagement in southern Africa's last great battle against tyranny - the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. From campuses and civil society groups to the corridors of power throughout the Western world, the pressure was on for divestment and economic sanctions against the white-minority regime. And that pressure paid dividends when financial sanctions at a critical moment denied the regime access to credit and loans it desperately needed, helping nudge it to concede to the principle of majority rule and a handover...