I discovered The Losers a couple of years ago while writing a piece comparing Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan movies. The plot of the movie is essentially as follows: a group of violent bikers get dropped into Vietnam to do a covert mission the military apparently can’t, in its official capacity, carry out. They soup up their bikes with ridiculous killing machinery, wreck dive bars in Saigon, plot to get their Vietnamese girlfriends home, and behave with honor after serving time for rape. Eventually, they’re sold out and killed by the C.I.A. after they succeed in rescuing a captured officer in Cambodia—it turns out, they were meant to fail, and their failure was supposed to be a pretext for expanding the war into yet another country.

The movie’s a total mess, but it’s entirely comfortable with the idea that you can separate out the government’s interests from the interests of the men in its service. It’s unfortunate that it takes a B movie to embrace what should be an obvious principal, and one that, if it was championed by slicker, more high-profile movies wouldn’t be so easy to marginalize.

Christopher Plummer, who could walk away with the first Oscar of his long career in just a few weeks, has closed a deal to star in HBO Films’ Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, which is being directed by Stephen Frears. Frank Langella also is coming on board the movie, which details the legal fight between Ali and the U.S. government when the fighter became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Ali was drafted into the Army in 1966 but declined to serve, citing his belief that the war was against the teachings of the Koran. When he appeared at an armed services induction in 1967 and refused to step forward when his name was called, he was arrested. After being found guilty, a series of appeals were fought and the case wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971 (Clay v United States). Ali persevered, mainly due to the prevailing anti-Vietnam winds, and also managed to throw out provocative lines into the mainstream such as “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me N—–.”

Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan are obviously not perfectly parallel wars, whether it’s the way and the reasons we got into each conflict or the abolition of the draft. But finding an alternate way to discuss the question of Muslim loyalty to the United States and the role of Islam in public life is a really smart thing to do right now. I’ll be fascinated to see how it turns out.

It’s not just that we know them fairly well already, and what the new books would be filling in is psychology and peripheral adventures rather than character details. It’s that I think it would be much more interesting to tell this backstory through structure rather than through characters, looking at a government that first institutionalized superheroes and then banished them to quiet retirements with the Kane Act. This is one of the reasons the Agent Colson moments and continuity in the Avengers movies and peripheral material have been so much fun. These are supposed to be projects that are reasonably thoughtful about what it would be like to have superheroed people in our midst, and folks like Colson, or regular liaisons to the Watchmen are so useful: they’re a way in to the idea not of having powers, but of reconciling yourself to people having powers around you that you don’t have access to and that you hope won’t be turned against you.

Watchmen told us something about ourselves or who we could have been: the forgiveness of Nixon, the decisive victory rather than the slow dissolution in the Cold War, the continuation of a high crime rate, the hypercorporatization of our country and our culture. Fleshing out the Comedian’s role as a sanctioned superhero, and the decisions that lead to his assassination of President Kennedy or his role in Vietnam, would be more interesting than explaining why Nite Owl is depressed because it’s about us, not about them.

But I think the counterfactual question that stood out at me most when reading the book is what it would have meant if Schulz or Peanuts had spoken out against the war in Vietnam. Michaelis writes in particular about Snoopy. In one strip, “Snoopy, invited to make a distinguished-grad speech at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, finds himself caught up in a riot protesting the drafting of dogs to serve in Vietnam…Snoopy, at the podium, his hit with a dog dish, then teargassed.” He writes “One of the few ‘enemies’ that Americans could agree on in those years was the Red Baron…From 1966 to 1969, Snoopy could be found pursuing—or being pursued by—the Red Baron wherever American explained itself to itself.”

The answer as to why Schulz didn’t come out against the war lies in this observation: “His opinions on subjects ranging from the miniskirt to the sexualizations of Peanuts were surprisingly tolerant, indeed hospitable.” You don’t get to be a national sage without being largely agreeable. But that quality also denies you your ability to speak forcefully and decisively on divisive issues without alienating somebody. It’s the same thing as perpetual reelection to Congress: if staying the nation’s tolerant Grandpa, or staying a member of the House becomes more important than anything you actually do with the position, you’ve got to start wondering what the point is.

Rains wreak havoc across Southeast Asia

More than 100 people have died and tens of thousands of others have been displaced as monsoon rains continue to wreak havoc across Southeast Asia.

In Cambodia and southern Vietnam, more than a 100 people have died this week in the worst flooding along the Mekong River in 11 years. Heavy rain swamped homes, washed away bridges and forced thousands of people to evacuate.

Worse could be in store if Typhoon Nesat, which killed at least 39 people in China this week and is expected to pound northern Vietnam on Friday, dumps rain deep enough inland to further swell the Mekong.

Floods are affecting hundreds of thousands of people throughout India, the Philippines, and now Thailand. One-third of Thailand was deluged and Chiang Mai, one of the largest cities was being prepared for evacuation.

China issued its first red alert weather warning of the year as Typhoon Nesat moved closer. In Guangdong province, waves damaged a seawall, causing serious disruption to transport and about 300,000 people fled from their homes there and in Hainan province.

Rice prices

Flooding across the fertile Mekong Delta helped drive rice prices to a three-year high in Vietnam this week, traders said, which will add to inflation problems. The delta produces more than half of Vietnam’s rice and 90 per cent of its exportable grain.

In Cambodia, 97 people have died in weeks of flooding.

“Now, more than 200,000 hectares of our rice paddies are under water but we don’t yet know the full extent of the damage,” said Keo Vy, deputy information director at the National Disaster Management Committee.

Cambodia is a rice exporter, but Vietnam is the world’s second-biggest exporter behind Thailand.

In 2000, the worst flooding in decades killed more than 480 people across the Delta region. The following year, more than 300 people died when the Mekong, which flows 4,350km from the glaciers of Tibet to the rice-rich Delta of southern Vietnam, overflowed its banks.

Some 150,000 families had been affected by the flooding in Cambodia this year and another 15,000 evacuated to higher ground, said Men Neary Sopheak, deputy secretary general of Cambodia’s Red Cross.

Vietnam floods

… Water had reached 4.76m early on Friday at Vietnam’s Tan Chau gauging station, above Alarm Level Three, the most dangerous flood condition at which inundation is widespread and dykes are in jeopardy.It was forecast to peak at 4.9m by Sunday, the government said. Water five metres deep can submerge one-storey houses, which are common in the Delta in southern Vietnam.

Evacuations urged

Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai urged the provincial authorities to evacuate people from dangerous areas, speed up the rice harvest and close more schools to prevent deaths.

Around 5,000 hectares of the Delta’s third rice crop have been inundated as floods broke through dyke sections in the provinces of Dong Thap and An Giang, and another 90,000 hectares were under threat.

The region has planted nearly 600,000 hectares for the current crop, which is mainly for domestic consumption, and only 5 per cent has been harvested, the agriculture ministry said.

In Thailand, the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation said 180 people had died in flooding since mid-July caused by tropical storms and seasonal monsoons.

Two million people in 23 provinces have been affected, with 2.4 million acres of farmland under water. Officials say rice has been harvested early in some areas, which may cut yields.

Asia reels from floods; Vietnam braces for storm

A tropical storm whacked into Vietnam on Friday, forcing 20,000 people to be evacuated, as the Philippines braced for a new typhoon and several Asian countries reeled under floods after some of the wildest weather this summer.Prolonged monsoon flooding, typhoons and storms have wreaked untold havoc in the region, leaving more than 600 people dead or missing in India, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, China, Pakistan and Vietnam in the last four months. In India alone, the damage is estimated to be worth $1 billion, with the worst-hit state of Orissa accounting for $726 million.

Several studies suggest an intensification of the Asian summer monsoon rainfall with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, the state-run Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology said. Still, it is not clear that this is entirely because of climate change, especially in India, it said.

After pummeling the Philippines and China this week, Typhoon Nesat was downgraded to a tropical storm just before churning into northern Vietnam on Friday afternoon with sustained wind speeds of up to 73 mph (118 kph), according to the national weather forecasting center.

Heavy rains were reported in northern and central areas. Warnings were issued for flash floods and landslides in mountainous regions, and for flooding in low-lying areas. High winds whipped through the streets of the capital, Hanoi.

California Supreme Court denies request to halt cap-and-trade work

The California Supreme Court Wednesday declined to order state regulators to halt work on a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program while a lower court considers legal challenges filed by environment groups.

The California Air Resource Board is scheduled to adopt a final rules on October 21 implementing the nation’s first economy-wide cap-and-trade plan. While the program is scheduled to start in January, CARB has decided to delay enforcement until January 2013.

While the court’s ruling does not end legal challenges to the cap-and-trade program, it does represent a setback for Communities for a Better Environment and other groups that had sued CARB, arguing that the agency had failed to consider alternatives before it adopted a cap-and-trade implementation plan.

A leaf that could power the future: Silicon strip developed at MIT might be key to inexpensive fuel cells

The thumb-size black strip looks like a thin magnet. But in reality, it is an artificial leaf, made of silicon and capable of using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen that can be fed into fuel cells to make power.

“You drop it in a glass of water and you walk outside and hold it in the sun, and you’ll start to see bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen,’’ explained Daniel Nocera, an MIT professor who led the team that invented the device.

The next step, he said, is to make the technology work on a large scale to produce enough hydrogen and oxygen for a fuel cell to power a car or home.

The leaf, which Nocera has worked on for about three years, has the potential to solve one of the most pressing challenges facing solar power: how to store energy produced by the sun so it can be used on cloudy day.

A round-up of climate and energy news. Please post other stories below. Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Vietnam Era Weapon Being Used to Clear the Amazon

Agent Orange is one of the most devastating weapons of modern warfare, a chemical which killed or injured an estimated 400,000 people during the Vietnam War — and now it’s being used against the Amazon rainforest. According to officials, ranchers in Brazil have begun spraying the highly toxic herbicide over patches of forest as a covert method to illegally clear foliage, more difficult to detect that chainsaws and tractors. In recent weeks, an aerial survey detected some 440 acres of rainforest that had been sprayed with the compound — poisoning thousands of trees and an untold number of animals, potentially for generations.

Officials from Brazil’s environmental agency IBAMA were first tipped to the illegal clearing by satellite images of the forest in Amazonia; a helicopter flyover in the region later revealed thousands of trees left ash-colored and defoliated by toxic chemicals. IBAMA says that Agent Orange was likely dispersed by aircraft by a yet unidentified rancher to clear the land for pasture because it is more difficult to detect than traditional operations that require chainsaws and tractors.

Last week, in another part of the Amazon, an investigation conducted by the agency uncovered approximately four tons of the highly toxic herbal pesticides hidden in the forest awaiting dispension. If released, the chemicals could have potentially decimated some 7,500 acres of rainforest, killing all the wildlife that resides there and contaminating groundwater. In this case, the individual responsible was identified and now faces fines nearing $1.3 million.

EU votes against reducing carbon emissions by 30%

European Green MEPs’ carbon emissions ambitions downgraded as Conservatives dilute proposals.

The European parliament on Tuesday rejected a key report that would have toughened the EU stance on greenhouse gas emissions, after political wrangling that wrecked hopes of a compromise.

A rebellion by the UK’s Tory MEPs helped to swing the vote against a tougher target on how much carbon emissions should be cut by 2020, but was not decisive, according to insiders.

The vote does not put an end to green campaigners’ hopes of a more ambitious emissions reduction target – a higher cut of 30% by 2020 on 1990 levels rather than 20% – as the issue will continue to be debated, but is a setback.

The political wrangling involved a series of amendments, proposed by Conservative groupings of MEPs, that would have weakened the resulting resolution to an extent that was not acceptable to the Green MEP grouping.

1) The U.S. will go back in time, tough it out, and win the Vietnam War through musical theater:

2) Education professionals will be highly respected, even school bus drivers — especially if they can beat trains in cross-country races:

3) The FBI will vigorously protect Hawaii from the scourge of Communism and loose women:

4) Rich industrialists who want to pursue dangerous construction projects because they’re more expensive will be regarded as scoundrels.

5) The war on drugs will continue:

I met McNamara once, at a conference. He was self-effacing, and breathtakingly concise. I understand the charm. But there is something wrong with a culture in which a McNamara is feted for his “guts” while George McGovern and Gene McCarthy, who opposed McNamara’s mistakes, are regarded as nobodies. In one of the uglier passages of In Retrospect, McNamara sneers at the antiwar protesters who marched on the Pentagon in 1967. If they had been more “disciplined” and “Gandhi-like,” he says, “they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down.” Instead they were “troublemakers” who “threw mud balls” and “even unzipped [soldiers'] flies.” This is contrition? Shouldn’t McNamara be admitting that the mudball-throwers, after all, had been right?

That’s Mickey Kaus, being a liberal, back in 1995 writing for The New Republic. Way more surprisingly, though-provoking, and interesting than any quantity of tired “contrarianism” about how conservatives are always right about everything.

But being the target of unfair criticism does not, on its own, exonerate a person. And Ayers’ odd little New York Times op-ed only re-enforces one’s sense that unfair criticism can certainly be directed at a guy who very much deserves to be the target of criticism. An inability, down to the present day, to see that what the Weather Underground was up to was wrong, counterproductive, and insane is really hard to grasp.

Richard Holbrooke reviews a book on McGeorge Bundy and puts a liberal foot forward:

Bundy never believed in negotiations with the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese. This, coupled with his enduring faith in the value of military force in almost any terrain or circumstance, were his greatest errors. They contributed to a tragic failure. With the nation now about to inaugurate a new president committed to withdraw combat troops from Iraq and succeed in Afghanistan, the lessons of Vietnam are still relevant. McGeorge Bundy’s story, of early brilliance and a late-in-life search for the truth about himself and the war, is an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.

Seems sensible to me.

George STEPHANOPOULOS, on GMA, re the president-elect and the economy: “He’s already doing more than any incoming president has ever done this quickly … One Obama adviser told me what they’d like is a combination of ‘Team of Rivals’ and ‘The Best and the Brightest,’ which was the David Halberstam book about the incumbent Kennedy administration.

Maybe Obama ought to talk that idea over with Halberstam. I don’t recall that book as having had a happy ending.

UPDATE: I’d forgotten, but Halberstam passed away last year.

As I was saying yesterday, I think the conservative effort to demonize Bill Ayers as somehow the greatest monster of American history is absurd. He was involved in violent extremism amidst an era of extremism in American politics and plenty of his contemporaries did worse stuff in the name of upholding white supremacy or prosecuting the Vietnam War than anything Ayers did in opposition to it. That said, my former boss Mike Tomasky is sure right to call BS on this statement in support of Ayers:

The current characterizations of Professor Ayers—”unrepentant terrorist,” “lunatic leftist”—are unrecognizable to those who know or work with him. It’s true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Martin Luther King, Jr. participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements. And yet he never set bombs anywhere, nor advocated that anyone else set bombs anywhere. Ayers did. Was Ayers more passionate than King? No. Was Ayers more violent than King? Yes. And King was right and Ayers was wrong — that’s really all there is to it. Now and again you do see a strand of thought on the left that equates willingness to engage in violence with one’s level of passion and commitment. That was the Weather Underground in its day, and it also I think represents the thinking of some of the so-called “liberal hawks” of the 21st century. But the notion that passionate commitment to the cause of justice is best exemplified by killing people — and especially by a “tough-minded” willingness to contemplate killing innocent people — is ludicrous.

The “unrepentant terrorist” thing is a bit complicated. One thing you can say in Ayers’ defense is that it’s perfectly clear from his present-day conduct that he, in fact, realizes that unleashing a podunk domestic terrorism campaign would be a stupid and immoral thing to do. He could be going around setting off bombs. Instead, he’s a professor and a community activist. On the other hand, he seems sufficiently entrenched in egomania and self-righteousness that he can’t bring himself to actually admit that. And until he does admit that he was wrong, he’s hard to defend.

Jonah Goldberg throws down the gauntlet:

It seems to me the liberal left needs to decide, was Ayers a horrible figure to be ashamed of, or a hero? If you don’t like this choice, why?

This is baffling. Is Jonah Goldberg a horrible figure to be ashamed of, or a hero? You must choose! But he’s neither. He’s just a guy. What Ayers did was wrong, and it’s troubling that, unlike most 60s-era radicals, he can’t seem to see that even in retrospect. But I dare say he’s responsible for a good deal less violence, death, and destruction than is, say, Henry Kissinger. It’d be dumb to idolize Ayers’ actions from back in the day but he’s hardly history’s greatest monster or even the greatest monster involved in 1960s political controversies.

Walter Isaacson chats with John McCain about Abba:

Speaking to Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute in Colorado on Thursday, McCain found himself explaining a recent interview with Blender Magazine in which he selected ABBA’s 1976 track “Dancing Queen” as his favorite song.

“What were you thinking?,” Isaacson asked him, looking incredulous.

“If there is anything I am lacking in, I’ve got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life,” McCain joked. “I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again.”

Yes, yes, we get it — John McCain is so famously reluctant to discuss his POW experience or exploit it for political gain that he manages to bring it up in the context of wildly unrelated questions about his affection for 1970s-era Scandinavian pop acts. And wait a minute — Abba’s from the seventies! Spencer Ackerman notes:

What? McCain was shot down in 1967. ABBA began making music in 1972. Don’t try this shit on me, McCain! Your POW experience has nothing to do with your Partridgey musical taste.

Something to ponder over your weekend. This is really kind of a softball question, it should be possible for McCain to give a more normal answer.