Global
Calcutta-born playwright Dipika Guha’s comedy Yoga Play is the latest installment in the tradition of works about and interactions between “mystical” Easterners encountering Westerners living in the material world who seek enlightenment. As Yoga Play drolly dramatizes, sometimes those partaking of this spiritual quest in our corporeal realm get their wires crossed. The search for inner illumination can be monetized in a society dominated not by piety but by materialism, turning serenity into obscenity and putting the nasty into “Namaste.”
In Guha’s two-acter Jojomon is a multi-national corporation manufacturing garb used by practitioners that is rocked by a scandalous revelation. To counter what could be a monsoon of bad PR Jojomon executive Joan (Susi Damilano, an Off-Broadway and award winning actress from San Francisco, where Yoga Play had premiered), a beleaguered woman competing in the male-dominated corporate world, decides to take desperate measures to save the image conscious company’s reputation (and stock prices).
Sine Nomine Patri is a U.S. citizen who believes in law and order.
Since the Democrats formally launched an impeachment inquiry, tweet-head Donald Trump, who is as of this writing still the Electoral College-appointed U.S. President, tweeted Sept. 29: “I want [Democratic Rep. Adam] Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.....” At 5:12 a.m. the following day the sleep-deprived commando-in-chief tweeted this regarding the Chairman of the House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee’s: “Arrest for Treason?
On Sept. 27, at a private breakfast at the Intercontinental Hotel in Manhattan - where Trump was due to annual U.N. General Assembly meetings - the enraged president squealed about the alleged squealer: “I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”
Italy Should Make Friends with the US Public and the World By Kicking Out the US Military
By David Swanson
In the late 1980s when I was a teenager and an exchange student in Bassano del Grappa I loved Italy for the same reasons. I found Italians on average to be friendly, kind, generous, loving, fun-loving, humble, self-critical, and intelligent. It was also very cool when I told other young people that I was from the US. Older people told me that the United States had saved Italy from Nazism.
The debate over what actually occurred on 9/11 and, more to the point, who might have been behind it, continues to preoccupy many observers worldwide. There is considerable legitimate concern that the commission that reviewed the incident engaged in a cover-up designed either to excuse a catastrophic failure on the part of the United States’ national security apparatus, or even connivance of federal agencies in the attack itself. And then there is the issue of possible foreign government involvement. The roles of the Saudi Arabian, Israeli and Pakistani governments and security services has never been adequately investigated in spite of the fact that all three countries had clear involvement with the mostly Saudi individuals who have been identified as the attackers. Beyond that, Israel had intelligence operatives that appeared to be celebrating the fall of the twin towers in real time, an involvement in what took place that has never been comprehensively looked at by .law enforcement due to unwillingness to offend the Israelis.
Trump with Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Aka, the Likud Party Half of the “US/Israeli Wannabe Authoritarian Tag-team”)
Israel’s influential center-left newspaper, Haaretz, commented recently on the Netanyahu/Trump relationship:
“The historically deep ties that bind the United States and Israel were profoundly damaged Thursday when the government of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu succumbed to pressure from the Trump Administration…’
“The ‘wannabe authoritarian tag-team’ (ie, ‘Trump and Netanyahu’) has committed a reckless, racist, contemptible act driven by stunningly short-sighted political calculations by barring [US House of Representatives members] Omar and Tlaib from visiting Israel. The action will have fateful repercussions…”
It is instructive to recall that in the 1995 campaign for Israeli Prime Minister, a number of violent hate-group protests were organized by Netanyahu’s Likud Party which caused serious divisions in the state of Israel – quite similar to the divisions that have occurred in the US since the campaign for president by Donald Trump.
In the last decade, MoveOn—which says it has an email list of 8 million "members"—has refused to do any campaigns to help Manning, Drake, Snowden, Kiriakou, or Sterling.
All of a sudden, MoveOn wants to help "national security" whistleblowers.Well, some of them, anyway.
After many years of carefully refusing to launch a single campaign in support of brave whistleblowers who faced vicious prosecution during the Obama administration—including Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Edward Snowden, and CIA whistleblowers John Kiriakou and Jeffrey Sterling—MoveOn.org has just cherrypicked a whistleblowing hero it can support.
"What about Manning, Drake, Snowden, Kiriakou, and Sterling, who also took great personal risks on behalf of democracy? With its digital finger to the wind, MoveOn refused to engage in a campaign to help any of them."
The Left Coast Forum/Solartopia Congress scheduled for Occidental College Oct. 11-13 has been postponed. Stay tuned!
The Greta/AOC generation is marching for our place on this planet.
We can all turn off lights, get off plastic, go vegan, ride bikes, sail the Atlantic, demand eco-straws, solarize our homes.
But four gorillas block our way to survival. They demand a next step of mass action far beyond anything we can do as individuals:
Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 La Bohème is the beloved archetypal opera about Parisian artistes and their lovers set in mid-19th century France. Based on Henri Murger’s semi-autobiographical 1851 book, with a libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, this musical masterpiece opens in the attic of an apartment house in Paris that serves as the studio and living space of four young struggling starving artistes.
Rodolfo (Albanian tenor Saimur Pirgu) is a wannabe poet. Marcello (South Korean baritone Kihun Yoon) is a striving painter, although in this production helmed by Australian Barrie Kosky the dauber also dabbles in daguerreotypes, the then-emerging new photographic medium. Philosopher Colline (Alabama bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee) and musician Schaunard (New York baritone Michael J. Hawk) complete the foursome. The relationship of these artsy friends living an unconventional bohemian lifestyle is characterized by great bonhomie, camaraderie and good humor. Indeed, this inseparable
garret quartet could be called “Les Bro-hèmes.”
The Greta/AOC generation is marching for our place on this planet.
We can all turn off lights, get off plastic, go vegan, ride bikes, sail the Atlantic, demand eco-straws, solarize our homes.
But four gorillas block our way to survival. They demand a next step of mass action far beyond anything we can do as individuals:
ELECTION PROTECTION: Big corporations have stolen our democracy When Jeb Bush ripped Florida 2000 for brother W, the corporate Democrats did nothing but rant at Ralph Nader. But Jeb was ALWAYS going to get George exactly the votes as he needed. Trumputin did it in 2016. In 2020, stripped voter rolls and flipped vote counts could again steal the Electoral College. Our Mother Earth DEMANDS universal hand-counted paper ballots, easy and open registration, fair access to the polls and much more. This year Al Gore should shift his climate organizing to election protection—-and do it with Ralph.