Global
Last week, I attended Joe Biden’s first rally in California since he launched his presidential campaign more than six months ago.
It was revealing.
The Biden for President campaign had been using social media and its email list in the Los Angeles area to urge attendance. Under sunny skies, near abundant free parking, the outdoor rally on the campus of LA’s Trade-Technical College offered a chance to hear the man widely heralded as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
No more than 500 people showed up.
Admittedly, as an active Bernie Sanders supporter, I didn’t have high expectations. But what struck me about the rally went beyond the dismal turnout and the stale rhetoric from a corporate Democrat posing as a champion of working people.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- One of Indonesia's worst death squad leaders,
78-year-old Anwar Congo, has died decades after executing at least
1,000 suspected communists and others during a U.S.-backed purge which
killed more than 50,000 people during the 1960s.
Mr. Congo died in a hospital on Oct. 25 of undisclosed causes.
As a young man, he was hired as a deadly enforcer for a newspaper
publisher and paramilitary gang boss in Medan city, in the north of
Sumatra island.
In a 2012 documentary titled, "The Act of Killing," Mr. Congo proudly
re-enacted his favorite execution method -- strangling victims with a
wire.
In the non-fiction film by dual American and British citizen Joshua
Oppenheimer, Mr. Congo enthusiastically described hanging, strangling,
decapitating and driving automobiles over victims.
Mr. Congo also acted as an execution victim and let a wire be gently
laced around his neck to demonstrate garroting.
He and other death squad members said they believed torturing and
murdering suspects helped Indonesia's U.S.-backed military defeat
communism.
The American Film Institute’s annual film festival is arguably Los Angeles’ best and most comprehensive annual fete of feature, documentary, short, animated, domestic and foreign cinema, plus panels and parties, taking place in Hollywood from Nov. 14-21. Here are capsule reviews of some of AFI Fest 2019’s myriad productions.
CLEMENCY: Film Review
Dead Woman Walking: A Capital Film on Capital Punishment
[NOTE: This review may contain plot spoilers.]
With her first full-length feature film, Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency is a gripping death penalty drama. (Her 2012 Alaskaland was only 75 minutes long.) The movie opens and closes with a legally sanctioned execution that is botched at a prison (after a screening the writer/director told the AFI audience that Clemency was shot on location in a penitentiary no longer in use, which enhances and heightens the movie’s realism).
Part One:
Psych Drug-related Symptoms are Often Tragically Mis-diagnosed as “Mental Illnesses of Unknown Cause” (and Therefore Tragically Mistreated with More Brain-disabling Medications)
By Gary G. Kohls, MD – 11-18-2019 (Part 1 = 1287 words) (Part 1 and 2 = 2243) (Parts 1, 2 and 3 = 3360 words)
Catch 22 when it comes to taking psychiatric drugs there is a Catch 22, meaning that you may well be damned if you started taking psych drugs and damned if you stopped taking them (too suddenly). As Joseph Heller, author of the famous anti-war book by that name, wrote about the concept:
"Orr would be crazy to fly more (World War II bombing)missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and shouldn’t have to fly them; but if he didn't want to fly them he was sane and had to."
The American Film Institute’s annual film festival is arguably Los Angeles’ best and most comprehensive annual fete of feature, documentary, short, animated, domestic and foreign cinema, plus panels and parties, taking place in Hollywood from Nov. 14-21. Here are capsule reviews of some of AFI Fest 2019’s myriad productions.
DESERT ONE: Film Review
From Harlan to Hormel to Hemingway to Hostages, two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple is one of America’s preeminent documentarians. Her first nonfiction film, 1976’s Harlan County USA, as well as 1990’s American Dream were class struggle epics about Kentucky coalminers and striking workers at a Hormel factory in Minnesota that both won the Best Documentary Oscar. The insightful, incisive Kopple has also tackled our inner life and was Emmy co-nominated for 2013’s Running from Crazy, exploring mental illness largely through actress Mariel Hemingway, who grappled with her grandfather Ernest’s apparent suicide and her sister Margaux’s self-inflicted death.
AFI FEST 2018: CAPSULE REVIEWS
By Ed Rampell
The American Film Institute’s annual film festival is arguably Los Angeles’ best and most comprehensive annual fete of feature, documentary, short, animated, domestic and foreign cinema. Here are capsule reviews of some of AFI Fest 2019’s myriad productions.
THE IRISHMAN: Film Review
The portentous screening of The Irishman at the world’s most famous movie palace, Hollywood Blvd.’s capacious TCL Chinese Theatre, was preceded by an in person interview with one of the world’s greatest living directors, Martin Scorsese. Clips from his half century oeuvre were screened, reminding us of the cinematic realms Scorsese has unspooled, and his personal appearance was punctuated by sincere, enthusiastic applause. Interestingly, if I heard correctly, the loudest clapping was when Scorsese was lauded as a foremost film preservation advocate - but then again, what would you expect from a film festival audience packed with fervent cineastes like moi?
“Somebody ought to put a bullet in her skull. Back in the day, our forefathers would have put a bullet in her [expletive].”
These words, uttered by some lost soul, were directed at U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar earlier this year. He had called her office and talked to a staffer, calling the congresswoman a terrorist and spewing out his death threat on behalf of the fantasy Founding Fathers. He was later arrested.
An Israeli attack on Gaza was imminent, and not because of any provocations by Palestinian groups in the besieged, impoverished Gaza Strip. The Israeli military escalation was foreseeable because it factors neatly in Israel’s contentious political scene. The war was not a question of “if”, but “when”.
The answer came on November 12, when the Israeli military launched a major strike against Gaza, killing an Islamic Jihad Commander, Bahaa Abu al-Ata, along with his wife Asma.
Misneach (mish-nyuhkh) is an Irish word meaning something like bravery, courage, spirit.