Global
The city of Dayton confirmed yesterday in a press conference that the police will restrict the public from entering Courthouse Square in downtown Dayton when the KKK affiliated Honorable Sacred Knights 311 (HSK) holds their permitted rally titled Members and Supporters Only Rally, Saturday 25 May, just over a week away.
The city also confirmed HSK, which claims to be a Christian organization, intends to be armed, and have their faces covered at the 25 May event advertised online with the image of an American flag wrapped around a thumbs up, and the word “Trump”.
Dayton City Attorney Barbara Doseck, who led the press conference, announced a consent decree that concluded a lawsuit regarding the event which the city brought against HSK. Doseck touted the agreement as preventing “the group from acting as a paramilitary organization” by restricting “rifles, long guns, shot guns, assault rifles, knives, bats, or shields to its rally. Also they agreed to not wear tactical gear during the rally.”
They say the last sip of a drink is mostly backwash. The last understanding of a war should be that every speck of it is backwash in the sense used by Ellen N. La Motte in her 1916 book The Backwash of War. La Motte was a U.S. nurse who worked at a French hospital in Belgium not far from a semi-permanent front line at which men slaughtered each other for no discernable purpose for months on end, and the mangled bodies from one side, plus the occasional civilian, were brought into the hospital to die or to be kept alive and — if possible — patched up and sent back into it, or, in some cases, patched back together well enough to be shot for desertion.
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
11 May 19
s the nuke power industry slumps toward oblivion, two huge reactors are shutting in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
The shutdowns are a body blow to atomic energy. The soaring costs of the decayed US reactor fleet have forced them to beg gerrymandered state legislatures for huge bailouts.
Just two US reactors are still being built. Stuffed with $12 billion in interest-free federal loans, Georgia’s Vogtle is nearing a staggering $30 billion in cost. Years behind schedule, the lowest possible costs of whatever electricity the two reactors there might produce already far exceed wind and solar.
Virtually none of the 98 US reactors now operating can compete with wind, solar, or methane. All but one are more than twenty years old, with serious issues of obsolescence and decay; some are more than forty, operating far behind their original design life.
The United States is moving dangerously forward in what appears to be a deliberate attempt to provoke a war with Iran, apparently based on threat intelligence provided by Israel. The claims made by National Security Advisor John Bolton and by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that there is solid evidence of Iran’s intention to attack US forces in the Persian Gulf region is almost certainly a fabrication, possibly deliberately contrived by Bolton and company in collaboration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It will be used to justify sending bombers and additional naval air resources to confront any possible moves by Tehran to maintain its oil exports, which were blocked by Washington last week. If the US Navy tries to board ships carrying Iranian oil it will undoubtedly, and justifiably, provoke a violent response from Iran, which is precisely what Bolton, Pompeo and Netanyahu are seeking.
MERATA: HOW MUM DECOLONIZED THE SCREEN
Merata: How Mum Decolonized the Screen is a terrific biopic about Maori moviemaker Merata Mita, the first Pacific Islander woman to direct a feature film (1988’s Mauri, which means “Life Force” and Mita also wrote). This 95 minute documentary includes extensive interviews with Mita plus her relatives, colleagues and those she mentored such as Taika Waititi (What We Do in the Shadows). There are also clips from the nonfiction films she made and the fiction movies she acted in and helmed. In the process we learn much about this Polynesian woman and the worldview she expressed onscreen, which aimed at debunking South Seas Cinema’s celluloid stereotypes by “decolonizing” and “indigen-izing” motion pictures. As Merata told me when I interviewed her for the July 22, 1992 Honolulu Weekly:
Domestic violence victim Diona Clark gave testimony Wednesday at a sentencing hearing for her ex-boyfriend. Drying tears with a tissue, she said she would like her ex-boyfriend to serve prison time for having shot her twice. The first bullet entered under her left arm, the second bullet entered the left breast, went inches from her heart, after grazing her hand which required microsurgery, collapsed her lung, and chipped her rib.
But the Judge, Stephen McIntosh, extended the final sentencing for three weeks until Wednesday 29 May, so he can determine whether the defendant, Larry Belcher, can be housed in prison, since he shot himself in the head after shooting her, and remains in a wheelchair 14 years later with other associated medical conditions.
Clark told the court, “My desire is for him to serve prison time...I don’t think he is remorseful for what he has done to me. I would like him to be judged according to what he has done to me.”
Like you, I’ve had countless experiences of pointing out a new fact to someone, and seeing them acknowledge it and incorporate it into their thinking and their talking from that point forward. I’ve even had this experience with public petitions pushed on powerful people. But, I’ve also had a different experience. There are some facts that some people just will not accept, and for some of them I have a very hard time understanding why. Can you help me understand?
Ethics classes in U.S. philosophy departments are pathologically obsessed with imaginary scenarios, often involving trollies, that purport to demonstrate some people’s greater acceptance of causing death or suffering if they don’t have to physically, directly, immediately cause it. Some people would supposedly pull a switch so that a trolley killed one person rather than staying on another track and killing five people, but wouldn’t push one person onto a track to save five people.
I say “supposedly” because, luckily, nobody’s gotten the funding to actually try out an experiment (as far as we know, I can’t speak for DARPA).
The purpose of all this imaginary murdering is unclear for two major reasons. First, some professors will simply conclude that people are weak and ought to know better (which they could have told you to begin with), while other professors will tell you that whatever people imagine they would do simply is what they should do because their inner whatchamawhoochie is intuitively in touch with the great cosmic whatchamacoochie. So, what have we learned?
If “audacity in cinema” is the theme of this year’s South East European Film Festival, then the Serbian documentary Occupied Cinema is among the 14th annual SEEfest’s most audacious films. Following the circa 1990 collapse of a form of socialism in former Yugoslavia, along with civil wars a wave of privatization swept Serbia, et al. State-owned, nationalized property were sold off to private owners (often, according to the film, at pennies on the dollar), including a chain of movie theaters in Belgrade.