Interesting little interview out from the producers of the cable TV mega-hit “The Bible”. The filmakers appear convinced that the during filming, they weren’t the only ones helping to bring the stories of the Bible to life for a new generation of viewers…
EXCERPT (via EW.com)
Mark Burnett says ‘weird things happened’ on ‘The Bible’ set
At the time, Burnett gushed about shooting the series. “I really believe what I’m going to tell you right now,” he said. “The hand of God was on this…. the edit came together perfectly, the actors came together perfectly, it just comes to life.” But Burnett wasn’t just speaking about how well the practicalities of production had gone. “Weird things happened during filming,” he said. “Everybody would look at each other like, “Whoa.”
Here are a few of the “weird things” he was talking about:
A mighty desert wind “There’s a scene with Jesus and Nicodemus, when Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the night. It’s a very still night, not a breath of wind, and we’re on the edge of the Sahara desert in a palm grove in an oasis… Jesus says, ‘The Holy Spirit is like the wind.’ At that moment, a wind, like as if a 747 was taking off, blew his hair, almost blew the set over and sustained for 20 seconds across the desert, and the actors didn’t break — they kept going. And everything stopped. Everyone just looked at everyone like, ‘What just happened?’”
The missing frock “We had hundreds of craftsmen working [on making costumes], and the most important costume was Jesus’ costume. Every time, at the end of the day, the costume’s got to be taken away to be maintained. So when we were doing the baptism scenes, it’s completely immersed in water. During it, a portion of the costume came away. We shot this in a giant reservoir on the edge of the Sahara desert, so we’re never going to find this again. It’s really bad. Every time you lose something, you’ve got five months ahead, and you can’t replicate these costumes. Four days later, a kid showed up from many, many, many miles away, who had been seeking us through the desert to return this to us. He didn’t know what it was why he should seek us, but he felt he had to return it.”
Cobras at the cross “We had a snake wrangler every day on the set. I mean, we’ve got a couple hundred people shooting, and we can’t afford to have people getting bitten by snakes. Every day, this guy would find a snake or maybe two snakes, and remove them. On the day of the crucifixion, a lot of people prayed. The cross was a huge thing. They prayed [for safety], ‘Imagine if this cross fell. The actor playing Jesus could be killed or badly injured.’ The snake man came to work that day — he’d gotten there early on the mountain playing Golgotha, and the bag of snakes [he was carrying] was the biggest bag I’d ever seen. He came to my wife and said, ‘Miss Roma, there were 48 snakes.’ He found 48 cobras and vipers hidden within the rocks around the cross.” LINK
This is scathing…earth shattering …can we say treason…
by Barry Rubin
The Secret Document That Set Obama’s Middle East Policy
March 14th, 2013 – 9:42 am
“… we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms. … America is not — and never will be — at war with Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security — because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children. And it is my first duty as president to protect the American people.” – President Barack Obama, Cairo, June 2009
“The United States is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise. … Resistance is the only solution. [Today the United States] is withdrawing from Iraq, defeated and wounded, and it is also on the verge of withdrawing from Afghanistan. [All] its warplanes, missiles, and modern military technology were defeated by the will of the peoples, as long as [these peoples] insisted on resistance.” – Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad al-Badri, Cairo, September 2010
What did the president know, and when did he know it? That’s a question made classic by the Watergate scandal. Now, it is possible to trace precisely what Obama knew and when he knew it. And it proves that the installment of power of the Muslim Brotherhood was a conscious and deliberate strategy of the Obama administration, developed before the “Arab Spring” began.
In February 2011, the New York Times ran an extremely complimentary article on President Obama by Mark Landler, who some observers say is the biggest apologist for Obama on the newspaper. That’s quite an achievement. Landler praised Obama for having tremendous foresight, in effect predicting the “Arab Spring.” According to Landler:
President Obama ordered his advisers last August [2010] to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.
Which advisors? The then counter-terrorism advisor and now designated CIA chief John Brennan? National Security Council senior staffer Samantha Power? If it was done by Obama’s own staff, rather than State and Defense, it’s likely that these people were the key authors. Or at least one of them was.
So should U.S. policy help allies avoid such sweeping change by standing firm or by helping them make adjustments? No, explained the report, it should get on the side of history and wield a broom to do the sweeping. The article continued:
Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, [emphasis added] these officials said.
The 18-page classified report, they said, grapples with a problem that has bedeviled the White House’s approach toward Egypt and other countries in recent days: how to balance American strategic interests and the desire to avert broader instability against the democratic demands of the protesters.
As I noted, the article was quite explicitly complimentary (and that’s an understatement) about how Obama knew what was likely to happen and was well prepared for it.
But that’s precisely the problem. It wasn’t trying to deal with change, but was pushing for it; it wasn’t asserting U.S. interests but balancing them off against other factors. In the process, U.S. interests were forgotten.
If Landler was right, then Obama did have a sense of what was going to happen, and prepared. It cannot be said that he was caught unaware. This view would suggest, then, that he thought American strategic interests could be protected, and broader instability avoided by overthrowing U.S. allies as fast as possible and by showing the oppositions that he was on their side. Presumably the paper pointed out the strength of Islamist forces and the Muslim Brotherhood factor, and then discounted any dangers from this quarter.
One could have imagined how other U.S. governments would have dealt with this situation. Here is my imagined passage from a high-level government document:
In light of the likelihood of sweeping political changes, with countries from Bahrain to Yemen ripe for popular revolt, U.S. policy should either help friendly governments retain control or encourage them to make reforms that would increase the scope of freedom in a way that would satisfy popular desires without endangering U.S. interests and long-term stability. In the event that the fall of any given regime seemed likely, U.S. policy should work both publicly and behind the scenes to try to ensure the triumph of moderate, pro-democratic forces that would be able to prevent the formation of radical Islamist dictatorships inimical to U.S. interests, regional peace, and the well-being of the local population.
(Note: again, that is my reconstruction and not a quote from the document.)
Such an approach would have been easy, and in line with historic U.S. policy. We have every reason to believe that the State Department and the Defense Department favored such an approach.
But let’s look at precisely how the White House described the U.S. policy it wanted:
… how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States.
In other words, a popular revolt was going to happen (I’ve seen the cables from the U.S. embassy in Tunisia that accurately predicted an upheaval), but would it succeed or fail? The Obama administration concluded that the revolt should succeed and set out to help make sure that it did so. As for who won, it favored not just moderate Islamic forces — which hardly existed as such — but moderate Islamist forces.
Which didn’t exist at all.
Anyone who says that the United States did not have a lot of influence in these crises doesn’t know what they are talking about. Of course the U.S. government didn’t control the outcome; its leverage was limited. But there’s a big difference between telling the Egyptian army to stay in control, dump Mubarak, and make a mild transition, and we, the United States, will back you — and telling them that Washington wanted the generals to stand aside, let Mubarak be overthrown, and have a thorough regime change. A fundamental transformation, to coin a phrase.
So the Obama administration did not stand beside friendly regimes or help to manage a limited transition with more democracy and reforms. No, it actively pushed to bring down at least four governments — Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen.
It did not push for the overthrow of two anti-American regimes — Iran and Syria — but on the contrary was still striving for good relations with those two dictatorships.
Equally, it did not push for the fall of radical anti-American governments in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
No, it only pushed for the fall of “valuable allies.”
There was no increase in support for dissidents in Iran despite, as we will see in a moment, internal administration predictions of unrest there, too. As for Syria, strong administration support for the dictatorship there continued for months until it was clear that the regime was in serious trouble. It seems reasonable to say that the paper did not predict the Syrian civil war.
Want more evidence about the internal administration document? Here’s another article from the time, which explains:
The White House had been debating the likelihood of a domino effect since youth-driven revolts had toppled President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, even though the American intelligence community and Israel’s intelligence services had estimated that the risk to President Mubarak was low — less than 20 percent, some officials said.
According to senior officials who participated in Mr. Obama’s policy debates, the president took a different view. He made the point early on, a senior official said, that “this was a trend” that could spread to other authoritarian governments in the region, including in Iran. By the end of the 18-day uprising, by a White House count, there were 38 meetings with the president about Egypt. Mr. Obama said that this was a chance to create an alternative to “the al-Qaeda narrative” of Western interference.
Notice that while this suggests the debate began after the unrest started, full credit is given to Obama personally, not to U.S. intelligence agencies, for grasping the truth. This is like the appropriation by the White House of all the credit for getting Osama bin Laden, sort of a cult of personality thing.
We know for a fact that the State Department predicted significant problems arising in Tunisia (from the Wikileaks documents), and perhaps that is true for other countries as well. But if Obama wants to take personal credit for the new U.S. policy that means he also has to take personal blame for the damage it does.
Now I assume what I’m about to say isn’t going to be too popular, but I’ll also bet that history will prove it correct: the revolution in Egypt was not inevitable, and Obama’s position was a self-fulfilling prophecy. And judging from what happened at the time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton agrees with me.
The idea of an “alternative to the al-Qaeda narrative” of Western interference is straight John Brennan. What Obama was really saying: So al-Qaeda claims we interfere to put reactionary pro-Western dictators in power just because they’re siding with us? We’ll show them we can put popular Islamist dictators in power, even though they are against us!
If I’m writing this somewhat facetiously, I mean it very seriously.
And here’s more proof from the Washington Post in March 2011, which seems to report on the implementation of the White House paper’s recommendations:
The administration is already taking steps to distinguish between various movements in the region that promote Islamic law in government. An internal assessment, ordered by the White House last month, identified large ideological differences between such movements as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al-Qaeda that will guide the U.S. approach to the region.
That says it all, doesn’t it?
The implication is that the U.S. government knew that the Brotherhood would take power — and thought this was a good thing.
It continued:
“If our policy can’t distinguish between al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, we won’t be able to adapt to this change,” the senior administration official said. “We’re also not going to allow ourselves to be driven by fear.”
Might that be John Brennan? I’d bet on it.
What did Obama and his advisors think would happen? That out of gratitude for America stopping its (alleged) bullying and imperialistic ways and getting on the (alleged) side of history, the new regimes would be friendly. The Muslim Brotherhood in particular would conclude that America was not its enemy.
You know, one Brotherhood leader would supposedly say to another: all of these years we thought the United States was against us, but now we see that they are really our friends. Remember Obama’s Cairo speech? He really gets us!
More likely he’d be saying: we don’t understand precisely what the Americans are up to but they are obviously weak, cowardly, and in decline.
In fact, that’s what they did say. Remember that President Jimmy Carter’s attempts to make friends with the new Islamist regime in Iran in 1979 fed a combination of Iranian suspicion and arrogance which led to the hostage crisis, and Tehran daring to take on the United States single-handed. America, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini said at the time, can’t do a damned thing against us.
Incidentally, everyone except the American public — which means people in the Middle East — knows that Obama cut the funding for real democratic groups. His Cairo speech was important not for the points so often discussed (Israel, for example) but because it heralded the age of political Islamism being dominant in the region. Indeed, Obama practically told those people that they should identify not as Arabs, but as Muslims.
In broader terms, what does Obama’s behavior remind me of? President Jimmy Carter pushing Iran’s shah for human rights and other reforms in 1977, and then standing aloof as the revolution unrolled — and went increasingly in the direction of radical Islamists — in 1978.
As noted above, that didn’t work out too well.
Incidentally, the State Department quite visibly did not support Obama’s policy in 2011. It wanted to stand with its traditional clients in the threatened Arab governments, just as presumably there were many in the Defense Department who wanted to help the imperiled militaries with whom they had cooperated for years. And that, by the way, includes the Turkish army, which was being visibly dismantled by the Islamist regime in Ankara.
While the State Department backed down on Egypt, it drew the line on Bahrain. Yes, there is a very unfair system there in which a small Sunni minority dominates a large Shia majority, and yes, too, some of the Shia opposition is moderate, but the assessment was that a revolution would probably bring to power an Iranian satellite government.
But the idea — that they’re going to be overthrown anyway so let’s give them a push — did not apply to Iran or Syria or Hamas-government Gaza or Hizballah-governed Lebanon and not at all to Islamist-governed Turkey.
It makes sense that this basic thinking also applied to Libya, where dictator Muammar al-Qadhafi was hardly a friend of the United States, but had been on better behavior lately. As for Syria, the U.S. government indifference to who actually wins leadership of the new regime seems to carry over from the earlier crises.
Credit should be given to the U.S. government in two specific cases. Once the decision to overthrow Qadhafi was made, the result was a relatively favorable regime in Libya. That was a gain. The problem is that this same philosophy and the fragility of the regime helped produce the Benghazi incident. The other relatively positive situation was Iraq’s post-Saddam government, to which most of the credit goes to Obama’s predecessor but some to his administration. Still, Iraq seems to be sliding — in terms of its regional strategic stance, not domestically — closer toward Iran.
At any rate, the evidence both public and behind the scenes seems to indicate that the Obama administration decided on two principles in early 2011.
– First, let’s help overthrow our friends before someone else does so, and somehow we will benefit from being on the winning side.
– Second, it doesn’t really matter too much who takes power, because somehow they will be better than their predecessors, somehow we will be more popular with them, and somehow U.S. interests will be preserved.
Landler definitely thought he was making Obama look good.
Instead, he was showing us that the bad thinking and disastrous policy was planned and purposeful.
ATB, it doesn’t take much to come to the conclusion that Obama worked to not only bring about the Arab Spring, but that he’s used the power of his office to ensure the ends he intended.
When one recognizes the threat that radicle islam poses to the rest of the world and compares that to the rather sudden move to “moderate” the true intent of the muslim brotherhood, the leap to recognize reality is but a small step. Add that reality to Obama’s call for Israel to revert to the mortal borders of pre 1969 and the leap of reality becomes an obvious conclusion.
Now he’s heading to Israel… he tried all he could to change the election outcomes in Israel and failed (thank goodness). He’s mentioned in the past that he did not wish to go to Israel unless he had a “constructive” outcome to work towards… well, here we go again… the campaigner in chief has a miserable 10% favorability poll to constructively work out with the Israeli population. I’m just thankful that the Israeli media isn’t invested in propping up this farce… hopefully the reality of extinction ensures that it stays that way too.
If you haven’t seen Frank Gaffney’s series muslim brotherhood in America… please do so… and hurry.
ATB, it would be useful to just give us a link to the article. This font size/color is hard to read and it’s also wasting bandwidth . . . just sayin. I do always appreciate all of the information ou provide.
http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2013/03/14/the-secret-document-that-set-obamas-middle-east-policy/
Before the Mubarak Regime fell, Obama was on the wrong side of history in Honduras during the coup de tate which Manuel Zelaya tried to to bring about in Honduras. However, the Hondurans stood up against Zelaya and the USA.
Although I am English descent from a small Bay Island off the Northern coast of Honduras, for once I was proud of that backwards country!
By the way, I suspect money is the motivating factor of the tumbling of peaceful allies. How so? Could it have to do with drugs? I am speculating, for the record. I ask about the motivation of the USA because Hugo Chevaz was backing Manuel Zelaya and Zelaya was pushing Honduras and The Bay Islands as the pit stop for planes hauling drugs from South America to the USA. (I don’t say this about the Bay Islands being the pit stop for refueling based on what I have read, but what I had witnessed in Honduras on The Bay Islands. Those drug planes landed like clock work every night at 9 PM CST without runway lights and then refueled. As a thank you, they’d pay off with drugs. If weather were too bad for them to land at night, I am sure they had an alternate route because Honduras is known as the country with more runways than you could ever imagine. Flying is quite common in that mountainous country. Being that country has been a great ally to the USA, the USA has built quite a few runways with lights in Honduras.)
Any way, I know why Obama supported Zelaya and Obama can’t weasel out of this one!
Back on topic~~
I believe everything stated above concerning the unusual events which took place during the making, filming of “The Bible” mini series. God is real and He is at work although many are much too busy to see or hear or feel Him. Looking back, as people grow older and wiser, they realize those coincidences couldn’t have been a coincidence after all…. and they are right!!
Again, God is real and He is at work! However, politically speaking, The USA is now in “The Wilderness” wandering so we should keep praying to Our Father… who art in heaven…
One must remember that on the ground in Egypt…before the (Marxist) revolution began… were Andy Stern, Richard Trumka and Globalist Union boss-Leo Gerard —fomenting….. Professional Communist Revolutionaries all …
With Facebook’s VP and ACORN founder Wade Rathke there for the assist…
Yet our complicit media ignores.
America the Beautiful, I’ve been wondering if you and others who quote very long passages from copyrighted material are aware of the ‘Fair Use’ doctrine (emphasis added):
. . . In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits LIMITED use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. . . .
There is much more to the doctrine. See especially Wikipedia’s section 1.3 Amount and substantiality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Use
And have you ever read of the fate of thousands of blogs that infringed copyright? Even if no one ever took down Ulsterman’s blog, what does extensive quoting add to his bandwidth expense? I don’t know the answer to that, but extensive quoting is redundant duplication. Plus, limited quoting allows Ulsterman’s readers to get to the next comments without scrolling for seemingly endless copy inches.
An excellent example of compliance with the fair use doctrine is the Lucianne news aggregation site. To keep from being sued by multiple publishers, Lucianne limits quoting to 100 words.
Added benefits of quoting briefly and providing a link are:
1. No ellipses; the complete, unexpurgated text is at the original source where readers themselves can decide what is important and what is not, what seems factual and what does not.
2. Photographs, diagrams, links to additional sources. Besides providing extra information, those interpolations break up the monotone text, which increases readers’ attention span.
3. Revenue for intellectual property is preserved for the OWNERS of it — for the creators and publishers of that property — who often have invested hours, months, even years of energy, expense, and sacrifice of personal time in their efforts.
Commenters here almost always provide significant information, and for that I am grateful. It’s why I read the comments in addition to Ulsterman’s main articles. I just would like to see the owners of extensively copied material receive their just due. Keeping eyeballs here, on illegally copied material, robs other sites of the eyeballs they need in order to continue publishing . . . i.e. in order to stay in business.
Thanks for ‘listening’. I do understand that the points I tried to make might never occur to people who have never produced a copyrighted work.
Thanks for reiterating my post above. I didn’t speak of the legal angle but that, too, is pertinent. See my post above – hit the wrong “reply” button for ATB, but just had to say it. ALWAYS give links to what you share because if you don’t it’s the same thing as: pla·gia·rizedpla·gia·riz·ing
Definition of PLAGIARIZE
transitive verb
: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : use (another’s production) without crediting the source
intransitive verb
: to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source
It’s also a waste of bandwidth as I said above.