Global

Another terrorist slips into the classroom, into the news.

Does anyone understand this? Even if guns are easily, readily available, why, why, why? I find it impossible even to be angry — it’s hard to be angry under incomprehensible circumstances.

Instead, I find myself imagining George W. Bush giving a speech in which he condemns the latest horrific murders at . . . but instead of saying Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, he blurts out “Iraq.”

Israel’s coalition government of right-wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is on the verge of collapse, which is unsurprising. Israeli politics, after all, is among the most fractious in the world, and this particular coalition was born out of the obsessive desire to dethrone Israel’s former leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.

While Netanyahu was successfully ousted in June 2021, Bennett’s coalition has been left to contend with the painful reality that its odd political components have very little in common. 

On April 6, Israeli lawmaker Ildit Salman defected from the coalition, leaving Bennett and his temporary allies wrangling with the fact that their Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) coalition no longer has a majority. Now that the Knesset count stands at 60-60, a single defection could potentially send Israelis back to the voting booth, which has been quite habitual recently. 

The real Founders of American society were not the 55 rich white male interlopers who staged a coup d’etat in 1787-9 … and whose misogynist progeny have always wanted to ban abortion.

Our true Original Founders were the Indigenous matriarchs who ran most of America for thousands of years before the first whites set foot here.

For tens of centuries they controlled their pregnancies by herbal means. The idea that any government (tribal or otherwise) could rule a woman’s uterus would evoke disbelief and contempt from men and women alike.

In fact most North American tribes were run by women. The chieftains were commonly male. But they were chosen and could be removed at will by the matriarchs, who ran the homes and gardens, raised the children and made the major decisions about the future of the tribe.

As one Indigenous matriarch has explained, the men were allowed to be chiefs because “it makes them feel important and it gives them something to do.”

There were indeed tribes where men dominated. For many white “Christian” historians, the idea that females ran any society remains impossible to comprehend.

Three years ago, we helped write a report for RootsAction.org targeting 15 corporate Democrats in Congress who deserved to be “primaried.” We called the report “Bad Blues.” A common reaction back then was that those establishment pols were too strong and entrenched to be defeated.

On Tuesday, yet another “Bad Blue” apparently went down to defeat – with seven-term Congressman Kurt Schrader of Oregon running way behind community activist Jamie McLeod-Skinner in the slowly tallied Democratic primary.

Schrader is not the first “Bad Blue” on our list to face defeat by a progressive challenger. And he’s unlikely to be the last.

The incumbent heavily outspent McLeod-Skinner – thanks to lavish funding from big pharma and other corporate PACs – but Schrader was out-organized on the ground. McLeod-Skinner called him “the Joe Manchin of the House.”

They’re coming for me!

Sounds like a horror movie on permanent rewind through the brain, through the soul. Catch your breath, buy a gun. What other choice do you have? It’s called, among other things, “white replacement theory” — but my sense is that the fear itself (fear of God-knows-what) comes first. When it finds a name, what a sense of relief that must be: knowing who the enemy is, where the enemy lives. Now you can go to war.

Killing ten people at a grocery store — killing fifty people at two mosques—isn’t murder. It’s healing.

I take a deep breath. Violence is situation normal, not just in the United States but across much of the planet. Often the violence is simply an abstraction, a.k.a., war, which is always, always necessary when we’re the ones who wage it, and the people we kill, including the children, are simply collateral damage. But war always comes home, where the victims are fully human . . . if they actually make the news.

Sixteen-year-old Olivia Kurtz wanted to leave Bicentennial Park on the night of May 22, 2021, but then the DJ began playing her favorite song. She convinced her twin sister to return so they could dance just one last time.

It was an impromptu spring night party that had not been authorized by the City of Columbus, but scores of young people were finally having a good time as the pandemic was still refusing to loosen its grip.

Yes, it was late at night and the twin sisters, as close as twins can be, needed to get home. But they were having fun in Columbus. A chance to escape the soul-crushing boredom. To let go of the monotony of school and their over-serious teachers.

So they returned to the dance area and that’s when Olivia got caught in the crossfire of what many believe was beef between rivals, most likely gang-related.  

Her twin may have witnessed Olivia take her last breath. She was pronounced dead two hours later at Grant Medical. Several others were wounded in the shootout, but they survived.

Her mom, as detailed to the Free Press by a friend of the paper, had tears streaming down her face when she retold this story.

State and nationally recognized election transparency and integrity advocates were threatened with arrest and prevented from observing routine election administration activities by Wake County election administrator Gary Sims, in violation of North Carolina State Election Law. North Carolina’s 2005 “Confidence in ElectionsAct”1 protects the rights of the public to observe election counting, stating: “Any member of the public wishing to witness the vote count at any level shall be allowed to do so.”

On May 14, Sims directed law enforcement to cite Lynn Bernstein, the founder of Transparent Elections North Carolina, and John Brakey, director of AUDIT USA, with trespassing. Sims threatened Bernstein and Brakey with arrest if they attended the public meeting at the Board of Elections on May 17. Bernstein was told by the law enforcement officer that she was banned from the premises “forever.” (Hear audio of the conversation with the law enforcement officials at this link: https://bit.ly/3LoclIU)

There have been countless productions of William Shakespeare’s masterpiece King Lear, since it premiered circa 1606 at London’s Globe Theatre. The Bard reportedly wrote the lead role for his troupe’s top tragedian, Richard Burbage, but since then many stage and screen stalwarts have portrayed the title character, including Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellan, Al Pacino and but of course, Orson Welles. The first motion picture iteration was lensed by 1909, a 16-minute silent film starring William V. Ranous.

A variety of countries and ethnicities have tackled Lear. The veteran Soviet helmer Grigoriy Kozintsev’s (who co-directed the 1926 adaptation of Gogol’s novel The Overcoat, 1929’s Paris Commune drama The New Babylon and 1964’s Hamlet) final film was a version of Lear made in 1970. In 1974 African American actor James Earl Jones starred in a small screen version that was broadcast by PBS’ Great Performances series. In 2018 the TV movie The Yiddish King Lear was aired, and so on.

So what’s left to say about this oft-produced Shakespearian tragedy?

Our brilliant, intense, path-breaking hour-long exploration of the imminent demise of Roe v. Wade is led by the great Christian Nunes, President of the National Organization for Women.  

Christian’s incisive, uncompromising view of this latest Puritan attack on women sets the tone for an important examination of Calvinist fascism and its heartless autocracy, especially as they come with the race-based slaughter of 10 African-Americans in Buffalo.

As this 95th Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection (GREE-GREE) zoom unfolds, we also discuss the INDIGENOUS ORIGINALISM of thousands of years of tribal law in which a woman’s ability to control her own body was never questioned.

In the course of our discussion we hear further from MARY BUTLER-STONEWALL, CHARLOTTE DENNETT, DENNIS BERNSTEIN, JOEL SEGAL, NEIL PENN, DR. RUTH STRAUSS, MICHAEL BRACKNEY and many more.

JULIE WEINER tells us about the fight over voting machines in New York, which has also had big news about Gerrymandering.

If it’s true, as General William Tecumseh Sherman reputedly observed during America’s Civil War, that “war is hell,” according to Kyiv-born Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike, the “hottest seat in hell” (to paraphrase Dante) seems reserved for those ensnared in the civil war in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. One of the grimmest films I’ve ever seen, Klondike is so bleak in its realistic depiction of warfare that it almost makes two antiwar classics that won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars – Lewis Milestone’s1930 All Quiet on the Western Front and Oliver Stone’s 1986 Platoon – look like musical comedies in comparison.

As Oksana Cherkashyna, who stars as Irka, told the audience after a SEEfest screening at the Lumiere Cinema in Beverly Hills, Klondike dramatizes actual events that took place when the war between Russia and Ukraine really “started eight years ago” in 2014, with armed conflict in the Donbas, while what we’re witnessing now is “a full-scale invasion” by the Russian Federation of Ukraine.