Global
By Nicolas J S Davies, World BEYOND War, November 29, 2019
This week on Talk Nation Radio: a rant on impeachment, in favor of doing it right or not doing it at all.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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In yesterday’s Duluth News-Tribune’s editorial page, the DNT’s regular ultra-conservative Sunday editorialist and reliable Trump administration defender Marc Thiessen made an interesting comment about his hero’s impeachment threat.
Before discussing the comment, I think that it is important to point out a few things about Thiessen that the DNT hasn’t mentioned.
Thiessen grew up on New York City’s East Side, the over-privileged son of two physicians. He went to an elite private high school, attended the equally elite Vassar College and then attended the Naval War College. Interestingly, he then worked for 5 years for Paul Manafort’s lobbying firm. After serving as a staffer for the notorious racist Senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, he worked in George W. Bush’s administration and then became a speechwriter for both Donald Rumsfeld and Bush. Thiessen is now a regular FOX News commentator anda “resident fellow” at both the conservative Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute.
Last week, the Democratic leadership put an extension of the Patriot Act into a “continuing resolution” that averted a government shutdown. More than 95 percent of the Democrats in the House went along with it by voting for the resolution. Both co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan, voted yes. So did all 11 of the CPC’s vice chairs.
It didn’t have to be that way. House progressives could have thrown a monkey wrench into the Orwellian machinery. Instead, the cave-in was another bow to normalizing the U.S. government’s mass surveillance powers.
Academy Award winning Australian filmmaker Eva Orner’s well-made documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator is an 86-minute creepfest perfect for the #MeToo Movement and moment. This no-punches-pulled nonfiction film purports to chronicle the career, life, lies, and sexual abuse of Bikram Choudhury, the main ballyhooer of Bikram or “Hot Yoga” in America and beyond. The ornery Orner goes after Choudhury with the same take-no-prisoners panache that Alex Gibney - with whom she shared (as producer) the Best Documentary Oscar for 2007’s Taxi to the Dark Side - took on another alleged cult in 2015’s Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief.
If you think you are seeing a lot of ads for sleep-related drugs lately you are right. Pharma is rolling out a banquet of "sleep disorders" like Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder, Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder, Non-24-hour Sleep-Wake Disorder, Irregular Sleep Wake Rhythm, Jet Lag Disorder and Shift Work Sleep Disorder. These are on top of the predecessor conditions of Chronic, Acute, Transient, Initial and Middle-Of-The-Night Insomnia, Early-Morning Wakening Disorder and Non-Restful Sleep Disorder.
The conditions constitute Pharma's global circadian rhythm sleep disorder market which wasvalued at $1.31 billion two years ago.
Noah Baumbach assembled an outstanding cast for Marriage Story, which was a last minute replacement for the scheduled screening of The Banker (maybe it was pulled for going bankrupt?) at AFI Fest. He and the wonderful Laura Dern (who was so good in the pro-union HBO series Enlightened and the original Jurassic Park), appeared to present the Netflix production Marriage Story at the TCL Chinese Theatre where Baumbach remarked on how long he’s been looking forward to the occasion - exactly “29 and a half hours” since AFI Fest presumably scrambled to find a substitute for the Festival’s grand finale.
Borderline: A Chip Off of Dusan Makavejev’s Cinematic Block
Serbian co-writer/director Ivana Mladenović’s Ivana the Terrible is many things, but one thing it most definitely is not is a sequel to Sergei Eisenstein’s 1940s Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II. The cinematic style of this funny semi-autobiographical film is interesting in that Ivana plays a version of herself, as do her mother, father, grandmother and others in a mostly nonprofessional cast. Ms. Mladenović also relates that most of the events depicted onscreen actually happened to her. So Terrible is a hybrid movie, combining elements of documentary and fiction filmmaking.
Onscreen (and I guess offscreen) Ivana is from Kladovo, a small town on the Serbian-Romanian border. She moves to Bucharest, where she studies filmmaking and becomes an actress and director. In doing so Ivana turns into a local celebrity, the most famous living person from her hometown. But suffering from some unknown, undiagnosed ailment, when she returns to where she grew up Ivana finds out, like Thomas Wolfe before her, that “You Can’t Go Home Again.”