Global

Sanctions are economic warfare, pure and simple. As an alternative to a direct military attack on a country that is deemed to be misbehaving they are certainly preferable, but no one should be under any illusions regarding what they actually represent. They are war by other means and they are also illegal unless authorized by a supra-national authority like the United Nations Security Council, which was set up after World War II to create a framework that inter alia would enable putting pressure on a rogue regime without going to war. At least that was the idea, but the sanctions regimes recently put in place unilaterally and without any international authority by the United States have had a remarkable tendency to escalate several conflicts rather than providing the type of pressure that would lead to some kind of agreement.

Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum is a Shakespearean repository of culture, and with their delectable production of the Bard’s comedy Twelfth Night this Topanga troupe has outdone itself in letting its collective hair down. If WGTB’s version of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth borrows from burlesque’s conventions, Twelfth draws heavily from slapstick to produce a crowd-pleasing spectacle.

For some reason, hidden and mistaken identities are a long standing plot and character theatrical device dating back to the Greeks. Here, following a shipwreck the youthful Viola (Willow Geer) contrives to disguise herself as a eunuch, calling herself “Cesario.” Camouflaged as a male, she becomes an envoy for Duke Orsino (Max Lawrence, who was so great as Boxer in WGTB’s staging of Orwell’s Animal Farm a while back) in his campaign to woo Olivia (Christine Breihan), a countess.

Many decades ago, the great media critic George Seldes observed: “The most sacred cow of the press is the press itself.” That remains true today.

Bernie Sanders set off the latest round of outraged denial from elite media this week when he talked to a crowd in New Hampshire about the tax avoidance of Amazon (which did not pay any federal income taxlast year). Sanders went on to say: “I wonder why the Washington Post -- which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon -- doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why. But I guess maybe there’s a connection."

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Unwilling to allow the public to get zonked or
profit from recreational marijuana, Thailand has instead produced its
first pharmaceutical THC and CBD oils, tablets, oral sprays, chocolate
wafers and traditional potions after recently legalizing medical
cannabis.

This first line of weed-based products puts Thailand on the cutting
edge of Southeast Asia's legal marijuana industry, a lucrative
advantage if allowed to flourish.

If recreational marijuana is legalized and freely grown, it would
create an extremely profitable domestic and international market
possibly bigger than this mostly agricultural country's rice, sugar
cane, or tapioca crops.

South Korea is ahead of Thailand in producing legal medical cannabis
products for domestic use.

India offers relatively small, decades-old legal "bhang" sales for
recreational use solely within that country and made from otherwise
illegal marijuana.

Proud of the tiny amount they created, the government organized a
visit for journalists on August 2 to Rangsit University's new,

“Instead of demanding blue-ribbon safety science and encouraging honest, open and responsible debate on the science, liberal blogs shut down discussion on this key public health and civil rights issue, and silence critics, treating faith in vaccines as a religion; the heresy of questioning dogma meets with anathema and excommunication.”…”Many vaccines contain dangerous amounts of known neurotoxins like mercury and aluminum and carcinogens like formaldehyde, that are associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune problems, food allergies and cancers that might not be diagnosed for many years.”…“No matter how toxic the ingredients, how negligent the manufacturer or how grievous the harm, vaccine-injured children cannot sue a vaccine company!”….” Pervasive financial entanglements with vaccine makers and the other alchemies of agency capture have transformed the FDA and CDC into pharmaceutical industry sock puppets.” -- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr

Originality is among those attributes I admire and cherish most in the arts, and Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends is very singular on several fronts. First of all, the Cuban-born, Obie Award-winning playwright’s characters are all female, and this is far less common than mixed gender or all male casts, such as in Jason Miller’s That Championship Season, first produced in the 1970s, as was Fefu. This casting and the fact that the bard is a woman indelibly stamps Fefu with a distinctly feminist point of view. As such, Fefu deals with gender issues, sexual politics, as well as with same sex relationships.

There is a serious problem with diversity facing the cybersecurity field. While all minorities struggle to find a foothold in the world of cybersecurity, the dearth of African Americans is one of the most egregious with a mere 3% of the field being comprised of African Americans. This is an unacceptable figure in 2019, when there are more than enough qualified African Americans willing and able to fill the ever-expanding positions that the cybersecurity field generates.

While the lack of representation of African Americans in cybersecurity isn’t something to be explored on moral grounds, it is important that the exact methods of why underrepresentation continues to plague the cybersecurity field be understood. Qualified individuals of any background, creed, gender or race should get a fair shake when it comes to the hiring process, and unfortunately, that just doesn’t seem to be happening in the cybersecurity field.

The Jeffrey Epstein saga goes on even though convicted pedophile Epstein himself has been found hanged in his jail cell in Manhattan. One has to wonder how he managed to kill himself, if that is indeed the case, as he was reportedly on suicide watch at the prison and it is to be presumed that he had been stripped of any clothing or accoutrements that would have been usable to that end. So, he is dead but did he do it himself or was he helped? There are many prominent individuals and powerful government agencies that will be very pleased that he is gone as most of his secrets will have gone to the grave with him.

Rainforests are a crucial feature of Earth’s biosphere. Apart from being critical to Earth’s climate and vital carbon sinks, the major player in Earth’s hydrological (water) cycle, a massive producer of oxygen and home to most of the world’s species, rainforests are the home of a large indigenous human population. They are also the source of many vital resources, including medicines, used by humans around the world.

However, the vast range of ecological services that rainforests have provided ongoingly for the 400 million years of their existence, and which have been critical to the survival of homo sapiens since we first walked the Earth 200,000 years ago, are not measured and valued by accountants and economists: Have you ever seen a balance sheet or set of national accounts that includes an entry for ‘Value of ecological services taken from nature and on which life and our entire production of goods and services depend’?