Global

or decades, The New Yorker has set a high bar for journalistic excellence.

Graced by its signature brand of droll, sophisticated cartooning, the magazine’s exquisitely edited screeds have reliably delivered profound analyses of the world’s most pressing issues.

But in a breathless, amateurish pursuit of atomic energy, the editorial staff has leapt into a sad sinkhole of radioactive mediocracy.

The latest is Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s shallow, shoddy “Activists Who Embrace Nuclear Power,” yet another tedious plea that we learn to love the Peaceful Atom.

For at least a century, countless scientific pioneers have exposed the murderous realities of nuclear radiation. Legendary researchers like Marie Curie, Alice Stewart, Rosalie Bertell, Helen Caldicott, John Gofman, Ernest Sternglass, Thomas Mancuso, Karl Z. Morgan, Samuel Epstein, Robert Alvarez, Arnie Gundersen, Amory Lovins, and others have issued vital warnings.

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best yearly Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

The sixties cliché that “the personal is political” is strikingly true in Tamara Mariam Dawit’s Finding Sally. When the Ethiopian-Canadian director/writer stumbles – at the ripe old age of 30! – upon the fact that her father and his siblings had another sister she’d never even heard of, Tamara sets out to piece together the puzzle to find out why her Aunt Sally had been missing from the picture for decades. The documentarian’s filmic voyage of discovery turns out to be much more than a merely personal journey, as Sally’s disappearance from the scene takes Tamara down the path to the revolutionary politics that engulfed Ethiopia in the 1970s.

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best yearly Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best yearly Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

Director/co-writer Lazaro Ramos’ award winning Executive Order exemplifies what I love most about PAFF: This festival gives movie buffs the opportunity to see films – often from far-flung destinations around the globe – that we might otherwise never have the chance to watch. Often these are worthy, well-made productions that PAFF is also giving access and a foothold to at Los Angeles, arguably the world’s capital of cinema (although not necessarily the capital of “world cinema” per se).

A report advocating rocket propulsion by nuclear power for U.S. missions to Mars, written by a committee packed with individuals deeply involved in nuclear power, was issued last week by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

The 104-page report also lays out “synergies” in space nuclear activities between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. military, something not advanced explicitly since the founding of NASA as supposedly a civilian agency in 1958.

The report states: “Space nuclear propulsion and power systems have the potential to provide the United States with military advantages…NASA could benefit programmatically by working with a DoD [Department of Defense] program having national security objectives.”’

The report was produced “by contract” with NASA, it states.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) describe

themselves as having been “created to advise the nation” with “independent, objective advice to inform policy.”

https://www.nationalacademies.org/about

Collated by Gary G. Kohls, MD for Research Purposes – February 17, 2021 (1917 words)

1.  Safety and Efficacy of the BNY162b2 Covid-19 Vaccine (hizer-BioNTech's mRNA vaccine)

N Engl J MedDecember 20, 2020; 383:2603-2615

By Fernando P. Polack, M.D., Stephen J. Thomas, M.D., Nicholas Kitchin, M.D., Judith Absalon, M.D., Alejandra Gurtman, M.D., Stephen Lockhart, D.M., John L. Perez, M.D., 

Gonzalo Pérez Marc, M.D., Edson D. Moreira, M.D., Cristiano Zerbini, M.D., Ruth Bailey, B.Sc., Kena A. Swanson, Ph.D., et al., for the C4591001 Clinical Trial Group*

This column was published as a Duty to Warn column in the Duluth Reader on April 17, 2014. I came across a copy of it recently and thought, given the impeachment trial of the demagogue Donald J. Trump and the frequent mention of Big Lies in the press, that it should be re-published.

The information has a lot to say about America’s on-going right-wing extremism and the repeated attempts of these groups to usurp American democracy. Examples include the Ku Klux Klan and the related White Supremacist groups that include Anti-Semitic, Racist, Anti-immigrant and Homophobic groups, all entities that have never really disappeared from the scene.

Motivated by their justifiable aversion to former US President Donald Trump, many analysts have rashly painted a rosy picture of how Democrats could quickly erase the bleak trajectory of the previous Republican administration. This naivety is particularly pronounced in the current spin on the Palestinian-Israeli discourse, which is promoting, again, the illusion that Democrats will succeed where their political rivals have failed.

 There are obvious differences in the Democrats’ approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but only in semantics and political jingoism, not policy. This assertion can be justified if the Democratic administration’s official language on Palestine and Israel is examined, and such language considered within the context of practical policies on the ground. 

Pardon me while I break the fourth wall.

I’m in the human stew right now, you might say: drowning in politics, technology, the weather and my own crazy ego. I’m trying to write a column.

What makes this one different . . .well, I’ve been forced today to set aside my certainties, norms and expectations — virtually all of them. Certainty number one: that my computer will keep functioning as I write.

This morning — a dozen or so hours ago — I sat at my machine and it was working fine except for one thing: letters didn’t appear on my screen when I hit the keys. This is called writing. I’m an excellent writer, or so I tell myself, but my computer pointed out to me that if I can’t create letters and form them into words, then I can’t write. This was certainly an infuriating mystery, but I still had a few possibilities I could access to maintain situation normal. Well, I had one possibility. Call Geek Squad.

The governors of New York and California—the most populous states led by Democrats—now symbolize how slick liberal images are no substitute for genuinely progressive priorities.

After 10 years as New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo is facing an uproar over revelations that his administration intentionally and drastically undercounted the deaths from COVID in nursing homes. Meanwhile, in California, the once-bright political glow of Gavin Newsom has dimmed, in large part because of personally hypocritical elitism and a zig-zag "middle ground" approach to public-health safeguards during the pandemic, unduly deferring to business interests.