Global
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
15 May 19
hile the politicians dither over universal health care versus single payer versus the current Republican prescription for all non-millionaires (Get Sick & Die Quick), medical debt is still the number one cause of American family bankruptcies.
Throughout the US, people are forced every day to choose between medical care and food, shelter, and supporting their children.
At this point there’s no indication there’ll be an easy victory to bring the US in sync with the rest of the civilized world in providing decent health coverage.
Do you have a guilty pleasure? Mine is reading tabloidy tell-all books about the private lives of geniuses. Reading these literary invasions of privacy - such as Francoise Gilot’s blabby book about Picasso or May Pang’s salacious saga about John Lennon - helped pass the time while on long haul flights from Guam to New York or L.A. to Switzerland or Tahiti, etc. So when I heard about Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando I set out to Santa Monica Playhouse see this one-man show by Champ Clark ASAP (although by car, not jet).
Marlon Brando, the star of classics such as Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild One, Viva Zapata, On the Waterfront, Burn!, Last Tango in Paris, etc., is my favorite thespian. The Method actor’s life offstage and offscreen has been as colorful and dramatic as any of his plays or movies. What’s probably the most tragic part of Marlon’s life deals with his daughter Cheyenne and son, Christian, who is depicted by a smoldering John Mese in this one-act play, based on Clark’s audiotaped interviews with the eldest child of the star of The Godfather, who had about nine children from various marriages and liaisons.
Like many people who have struggled to understand why human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, which now threatens imminent human extinction as well, over many decades I have explored the research and efforts of a great many activists and scholars to secure this understanding. However, with many competing ideas from the fields of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, among others, this understanding has proved elusive. Nevertheless, I have reached an understanding that I find compelling: Human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history because of the disintegrated nature of the human mind.
While the expression ‘mental disintegration’ has been used in a number of contexts previously, for the purpose of my discussion in this article I am going to redefine it, explain how it originates, describe several ways in which it manifests behaviorally and the profoundly dysfunctional outcomes this generates, and suggest what we can do about it.
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.”