Sunday, July 23, 2023

Oppenheimer and Barbie

If you miss the new Oppenheimer movie, you can watch excellent free YouTube videos on his work, here and .

Go to the movie theater if you want to see big explosions.

Oppenheimer really did try to poison an enemy as a student; his father was very rich; he was a Jewish Leftist Communist fellow traveler; he wanted to nuke Germany and Japan but not Russia; and he opposed the H-bomb. He is most famous for managing the A-bomb project, but it maight have been about the same with other managers.

There is a lot of drama about his security clearance. Everyone portrays this as some sort of injustice, but here are the facts. He had many Communist connections. He concealed and lied about them. Spies under him gave vital atomic secrets to the Russians. He was opposed to Cold War military programs for reasons that probably included Communist sympathies. He was not directly accused of being disloyal or a spy. Anyone else's clearance would have been revoked for these reasons.

The mystery is more why he had a clearance in the first place. Apparently it was only because General Groves pushed for it.

The Barbie movie is parody of feminism. Based on the preview, I thought that it would be a fun movie, but it is not. It is rated PG-13, meaning not appropriate for the 5-10 year old girls whom I expect to be the intended audience.

1 comment:

CFT said...

The Barbie movie is just weird. Why on earth would you produce a movie where the protagonist has a trophy boyfriend who is utterly without skills or talent or much intelligence due to his inherent 'masculinity', and then pivot Barbie to condemn the real world for supposedly being the mirror opposite of her own? She's fine with men being subservient sexual objects but god forbid it should happen to her? She sounds like a democrat. It would appear the real world makes the imaginary Barbie world view look far more shallow, sexist, and conformist in comparison.