Global
Analyses of Iran’s political system often emphasize overt coercion: imprisonment, torture, executions, and episodic violence against widespread protests. These instruments are real and consequential. Yet an exclusive focus on repression obscures a more pervasive and durable mechanism of rule: the sanctification of political authority. The Iranian regime does not govern by force alone. It has cultivated a political environment in which obedience is experienced as moral intuition rather than contingent political choice. Through a dense network of religious institutions, ritual practices, and managed historical memory, political power is rendered sacred, dissent morally suspect, and compliance endowed with spiritual significance.
After sweeping the Golden Globes and other awards, One Battle After Another has 13 Oscar nominations. Given the film’s clear relevance, if it does end up a winner, those who created it will probably do more than thank their agents, publicists, partners, and pets. They’ll likely talk about the times we’re living in, as every creative artist or public figure should, given the stakes. We hope they’ll present the film as a cautionary tale, not an endorsement of violent resistance.
It’s easy to see why One Battle has been so successful. It’s gripping, funny, and wonderfully acted. It’s a satire of political madness, left and right. But parts of it also feel real in ways that most movie satires or political thrillers don’t. Although it was completed before Donald Trump’s reelection, its images of vicious immigration raids and out-of-control police now echo America’s daily reality.
Ilse Koch loved to dress up in odd, fancy costumes while she pranced through the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald, Poland., in the early 1940s
As the wife of the Kommandant, she reportedly loved walking bare-breasted between lines of male inmates, ordering the death of any who might look at her in a way that displeased her. It was further said she loved fancy tattoos, and would kill those whose decorations she liked so she could strip their skins to use as lampshades and book covers.
Such stories have been widely questioned. But American Col. Richard Denson described this “Witch of Buchenwald” at one of her trials---where she was sentenced to life in prison---as "no woman in the usual sense but a creature from some other tortured world."[3]
Some MAGAs today deny the obvious parallels between Trump and the Nazis.
But when Vice President JD Vance called Donald “America’s Hitler” he may have meant it as wishful thinking.
We never shared a shift report in the early hours of the morning. If we passed each other in a hallway or stood in line for coffee in wrinkled, mismatched scrubs, I wouldn’t have known who you were.
But I knew you.
I knew you by the ache in your feet after twelve hours on the floor. I knew you by the weight you carried in your pocket and your heart. I grieve for you because you knew the cost of caring.
You knew the “nursing bladder” and the missed lunches. You knew the feeling of driving home in silence because the radio was too much noise after twelve hours of alarms and never having a break.
You knew the unique isolation of being surrounded by people all day but feeling entirely alone with the burden of their lives at the end of the day. Holding hands, holding breaths, holding the line between hope and loss, then being expected to clock out and return to the world as if nothing followed you home.
For God’s sake, let’s get to the REAL agenda behind Wednesday’s FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office. IT’S NOT ABOUT THE 2020 ELECTION. The warrant says the FBI wants the envelopes from the 2020 election to hunt for crimes. But that’s just the legal excuse for the storm trooping.
This is NOT, as the media seems to think, about Trump’s attempt to prove he won the 2020 race, as if he’s some political Captain Ahab trying to chase the Moby Dick of 2020 revenge.
This is all about 2026 and 2028. Look at a map. Fulton County is the heart of “Blacklanta.” And Atlanta is the electoral heart of Georgia. And Georgia is the swingiest of swing states. If Republicans don’t cut down the Black vote in Atlanta, they lose the crucial seat now held by Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff. And in 2028, the GOP, if they don’t suppress the vote in Fulton, they lose the White House. Fulton was the fulcrum of Trump’s loss in 2020 and could spell doomsday for Republicans in 2028.
Our Greep Zoom #254 opens with a first-person report from MYLA RESON on the beating of Mr. James, who’s since disappeared, to which she emphasizes the need to shut the Palo Verde atomic reactors.
Our esteemed US Representative ADELITA GRIJALVA updates us on the latest developments in the US Congress.
From DR. MELISSA BIRD we get an on-the-scene report from the streets of Oregon.
The great former Charlotte Mayor JENNIFER ROBERTS gives us a mind-bending view of the ICE attacks in North Carolina, and thanks the country as “it’s the people who’re going to safe us."
From HEDY TRIPP in St. Cloud tells us that the resistance in MN is holding strong and that she is facing personal danger of the first magnitude.
.From MICKIE LEADER we get an exhortation to study our history’s Underground Railroad for saving oppressed citizens.
Media mogul DAVID SALTMAN wonders why the government would shut in the middle of this crisis & why our Amendments—2, 4, 9 and others—are being ignored.
Solar owner PAUL NEWMAN demands the Democrats obstruct the Republican coup.
The history of American power is, in many ways, the history of reinventing rules—or designing new ones—to fit US strategic interests.
This may sound harsh, but it is a necessary realization, particularly in light of US President Donald Trump’s latest political invention: the so-called Board of Peace.