Global
This February, two major film institutions – the Pan African Film Festival and a movie museum – in Los Angeles, the world capital of cinema, honored Black History Month through the medium of moving images with screenings, presentations, panel discussions and more. Here’s the second of a two-part series.
THE ACADEMY MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES
Regeneration Summit
Though it has been argued that the so-called American dream is long dead, Nikki Haley is proof that the dream is still alive. Unfortunately, the ‘dream’ is hers alone.
Until recently, a close confidante of former US President Donald Trump and his pro-Israel circle, Haley wants to be the next United States president. On February 14, she officially declared her candidacy and, starting February next year, she will be officially competing against her former bosses in the Republican primaries.
Seismic shocks such as those devastating Turkey and Syria could be turning California into a radioactive wasteland as you read this.
They could shake the two decrepit atomic reactors at Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, into mega-lethal rubble. Their fallout’s incalculable health, ecological and economic devastation could render the region uninhabitable for centuries to come.
Diablo’s two outdated nukes are surrounded by seismic faults. In 2013 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s senior resident site inspector, Dr. Michael Peck, warned that some critical instrumentation might not survive potential shocks, leading to a major catastrophe. .
Peck’s warning was ignored. He was transferred to a training site in Tennessee and has since retired.
In February, 2019, more than 2500 Californians asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to back an independent study of the two Diablo Units, now nearly 40 years old. Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen, Lily Tomlin, Eric Roberts, Jodie Evans and Graham Nash were among the Hollywood signatories.
Confession: I have a few books out there that no one knows about because I haven’t written them . . . well, finished them.
I’ve talked in previous columns about “wrestling with infinity” — the match I always lose — by which I mean, picking a subject too large to reduce to words and eventually getting hopelessly lost in it, e.g.: shifting human consciousness, transcending what we think we know, truly creating peace (whatever that is).
So welcome to my latest attempt to circumvent infinity. The book I’m aiming at is a collection of the poetry I’ve written over the past two decades, but not exactly. It’s not really a “collection” of anything — art objects on display in glass cases, meant to be admired — and the poetry (and other stuff) I would include I think of essentially as “soul fragments”: bleeding pieces of personal truth.
And the point of the book is to enter the present moment with the reader, to revere life together, to tremble at its wonder, to look into the eyes the unknown . . . with the help of something I call the Blue Pearl.
We live in an uncertain age wherein the very essence of truth is not only being questioned, but is literally under assault. Not one but two screen versions of the classic fable Pinocchio were produced in 2022. Books, including history texts, are being hysterically banned in Florida and elsewhere. Fox “News” (now there’s an oxymoron!) is embroiled in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, while its smug prig Fucker Carlson reportedly demanded the firing of a Fox staffer for fact-checking its 2020 election lies and telling the truth. Journalism has been decried as “fake news” – by a U.S. president who, in turn-around-fair-play, was accused of making “false or misleading claims” 30,573 times by The Washington Post’s fact checking team during Trump’s misbegotten presidency.
On February 7, a funeral was held in the northern Syrian town of Jinderis. It was one of numerous such funerals to be held on that day across Syria and Türkiye, following a devastating earthquake that killed and injured thousands.
Each one of these funerals represented two seemingly opposite notions: collective grief and collective hope. The Jinderis funeral was a stark representation of this dichotomy.
A week from today the Florida Democratic Party is going to choose its new Chair. A few years ago, Florida like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania was considered a purple state. No more.
What caused Florida’s deviation? Faulty Democratic Party leadership. Like it or not to counteract the abundant right-wing forces that make Florida their home, the main force of opposition is the State’s Democratic Party. But what hindered the Democratic Party from being a force to counteract the rapidly increasing rightwing volume of the Republican Party? Very simple, the Florida Democratic Party failed to distinguish itself politically from a Republican Party that every day gives thinking Floridians a view of what Fascism would look like.
The governor of the State, Ron DeSantis, who has presidential ambitions is using Florida as a laboratory to promote his Fascist ideas, and the Democratic Party, instead of focusing in combating those ideas it engaged in a coco maniac battle with the Republican Party meant to show Floridians that they are more anti-socialist than the Republicans, as if many people cared.