While escorting a convoy of U.S. State Department vehicles to Baghdad, Blackwater guards opened fire without provocation, according to U.S. military reports, killing 17 Iraqis.

Iraqi authorities, at the time, demanded that all contracts with Blackwater be severed by the U.S. government within six months, and that $8 million in compensation be paid to each of the 17 people killed in this apparent slaughter.

Iraqis were incensed by these killings, speaking of haughty, trigger-happy guards terrorizing ordinary citizens.
Of course, this little incident only further strained Iraqi sentiment toward American intervention in Iraq, and also set up a more dangerous work environment for our American soldiers.

Since 2004, private contractors in Iraq have been granted immunity under Iraqi law by U.S. authorities. Not until this incident did the Iraqi government speak up, hitting on the fact that Blackwater’s license to operate in Iraq expired in June 2006, and that only through Iraqi courts should charges against these operatives be reviewed.

The year 2007 saw 56 shooting incidents, alone, involving Blackwater, and another report accounted for 27 deaths and 21 wounded Iraqi civilians. With that in mind, surely, American authorities went ahead and passed an amendment to the defense authorization bill last November, which places private contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, exposing them to a court martial just like any other American solider.

Although these privately subcontracted military companies supply much of the man-power required to fight such a large-scale war, it only takes a small portion to shift progress and provide hugely damaging set-backs.

Okay, so this is all well and good, right? It’s so funny that just two years ago, when Blackwater was in just about every daily newspaper that the group’s gone completely out of the news as of late. What happened to Blackwater? Let me tell you.

It was announced in back in February of this year that the company would change its name to “Xe.” (Kind of interesting, or funny, depending on your perspective, that this new name shares the same characters with a popular foreign exchange site.) The company’s president, Gary Jackson, wrote in a memo to employees that the new name “reflects the change in company focus away from the business of providing private security.” Translation: We’re changing the name to shed some of that bad rap from the incident that brought so much controversy two years ago.

Currently, Blackwater, ahem, Xe, no longer has a license to operate in Iraq, seeing as how the new Iraqi government made several attempts to get them out of their country, and denied its application for an operating license back in January of this year. BUT, the company is still under contract with the State Department and some of the company personnel will likely remain in Iraq at least until September.

I say that these private contractors, essentially, serve a purpose in war time, such as it is. Just as long as they keep things quiet.

Overall, I found the film to be long and disengaging with respect to the characters, especially regarding Mr. Charles Foster Kane. I simply didn’t feel the story enough behind Kane, didn’t really build up the sympathy required by an audience member to put myself fully into it, which produced a lacking force when it comes to my opinion on it. In the end (literally), I just didn’t feel sorry for Kane. If I did, I think I would have enjoyed the film more.

However, with regard to the production aspects of the film (the plethora), I believe this to be one excellent example of film history. I loved the use of flashbacks to tell the story, the fading out of the pictures and scenes from focusing on whatever person was telling that portion of the story at the time. And of course the angles that were shot, many of which never attempted before, also made for a much more interesting and memorable movie-watching experience. I particularly liked how the interviewer, known as Thompson, his face was always hidden in the interview shots, at least until the end when he interviewed one of Kane’s butlers at Xanadu. The camera always shot from behind Thompson’s head to make the focus of the scene about the interviewee telling his or her story, their little contributing tidbit that would hopefully help spell out the life of C.F. Kane.

I also enjoyed the fact that Orson Welles starred, co-wrote and directed this film. That’s not often done in Hollywood and I have to give this film and Mr. Welles a great deal of respect for that. It made the film seem all the more real, I think, knowing this as I went into it.

In regard to the word that sums this film up in two syllables, “Rosebud,” I thought this was a wonderful addition to the film, and especially the plot. It carried the story, really, keeping your interest, even if only for the fact of figuring out in the end what the word meant, why this word meant so much to Kane that he would make it his last dying breath. Of course, in the end when the viewer finally seems to get an answer, one that ties the word to Kane’s childhood – specifically his childhood sled – that’s all cast aside when Thompson makes a note that “Rosebud” might not mean anything at all, at least not in a life as deep and as strange as C.F. Kane’s. So, in essence, “Rosebud” is explained, but at the same time, it is not, which, in my opinion, makes for a much more impactful story than most.

And of course we can’t forget about the Citizen Kane controversy, among the most intriguing aspects of the film. Though it was never explicitly stated that “Citizen Kane” was written and produced to model the crazy and controversial life of our famous Yellow Press man himself, Mr. William Randolph Hearst, it’s hard to deny the blaring similarities. Some of these include how the character of Kane worked for The New York Inquirer and Hearts for the San Francisco Examiner and New York Journal; that Kane was a multi-millionaire newspaper publisher, and wielder of public opinion dubbed “Kubla Khan” and Hearst was also a press lord, “yellow journalist,” and influential political figure, and that Kane built the extravagantly palatial Florida mansion he named Xanadu, which he filled with priceless art objects and Hearst built “The Ranch,” a palace in San Simeon, Calif., where he stored his own expensive art collection… and the list could go on and on. In my opinion, it is this controversy surrounding the film that won it such fame and a a place in the running for the title of best picture of all time.

Overall, the Citizen Kane film was a good one, just one I wish I could have had more feeling for. I would definitely recommend it to others, even if only for the brilliant production aspects and the fact that this film is undeniably a classic.

Like many children, when I was younger I dreamed of being an astronaut. The thought of flying into “outer space” to see all kinds of planets and moons was the coolest thing to me in the world and, honestly, it’s still pretty much the coolest thing to me in the world. As I got older, I began to learn more about the solar system and became especially fixated on something called black holes.

Black holes basically rule out everything that we could learn from physics. They are formed from the cores of supermassive stars once they collapse. And there’s something called escape velocity, which means that the larger the mass, the faster you have to travel to escape its pull. With that in mind, this means that black holes are so massive that nothing can escape them, including light. (To make this even more intense, please don’t forget how fast the speed of light is at 186,000 miles per second.)

To further understand black holes, we can look at dear Mr. Einstein who developed the general theory of relativity. This theory states that gravity affects time, which means that the more massive an object (a.k.a. has a greater gravitational pull), the more it can slow down time. So, obviously, since black holes have the highest gravitational pulse, the concept of time is completely diminished. Essentially, there’s no time.

Crazy, huh?

According to Science News, astronomers just announced that the biggest “supermassive black holes in nearby galaxies are at least twice and possibly four times as heavy as previously estimated.” This means if we apply what we learned earlier, that the gravitational pull of black holes is even more intense than we had suspected.

Does this really matter?

Well actually, yes. Scientists are using these reports to determine whether the growth of these black holes has anything to do with the maximum growth of their respective galaxies. Scientists are continuously trying to figure out why black holes in nearby galaxies and galaxies far, far away (i.e. where “Star Wars” took place) differ in size so greatly.

The problem scientists are looking to fix has to do with quasars. According to Space.com, quasars are bright, quickly-forming galaxies characterized by vast star formation. Because of all the developing stars, many become black holes, which, in turn, greatly affect the mass of their galaxy. Scientists have the capability to measure many of these galaxies but were finding that many of their measurements were off.

Due to this new finding, scientists believe many of their calculations were wrong and must be multiplied accordingly. The heaviest supermassive black hole to date is weighs 6.4 billion times what Earth’s sun weighs. It’s in a galaxy named M87, which is 50 million light-years away.

Galaxy M87 has been the topic of discussion for many decades. According to Space.com about three decades ago it was one of the only galaxies believed to have a black hole at its center. Now astronomers believe that our Milky Way galaxy may center around a black hole. M87 was one of the galaxies with an incorrect mass measurement, but once it recalculated for the new development, everything lined up.

Not to say that any of these findings will greatly affect the general public, but learning about other galaxies always brings me back to my childhood…or it makes me want to watch “Star Wars.” And who knows, maybe one day we’ll be able to travel deep into the Milky Way. But we don’t want to get sucked into a big black hole!