Global

Director/co-playwright/red diaper baby (of sorts) Mark Lonow’s semi-autobiographical Jews, Christians and Screwing Stalin cleverly interweaves the comic and the tragic, the personal and the political. Lonow claims that his grand-uncle Yakov Sverdlov had the distinct honor and pleasure of shooting Czar Nicholas II, and this two-acter has leftwing allusions galore, amidst Turgenev caliber father-son conflicts. Borscht Belt banter is interspersed with socialist shtick.

Co-written with his wife, comedy veteran Jo Anne Astrow, their turf deals with members of Mark’s Marxist meshugenah family, including his grandmother Minka Grazonsky (Cathy Ladman who, appropriately appeared on TV’s Scandal and Mad Men series), who purports to have schtupped Joseph Stalin during the heady days of the Bolshevik Revolution. 

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The Pentagon has conducted its first army-to-army
exercise in Brunei along the strategic, contested South China Sea
after the U.S. State Department suggested obedience to the sultanate's
Islamic Shariah laws which punish offenders, including homosexuals and
Christians.

The main job of Brunei's small army is to protect the country's
petroleum and natural gas fields.

The August 6-16 Pahlawan Warrior exercise included 33 U.S. Army and
Indiana Army National Guard soldiers under the U.S. Indo-Pacific
Command (USINDOPACOM) partnered with Royal Brunei Land Forces on
jungle warfare operations, urban terrain tactics and other practice.

They "spent four nights located deep within the nation's southwest
rainforest" in operations observed by Hawaii-based members of the 25th
Infantry Division Lighting Academy, according to the U.S. Army Pacific
Public Affairs Office.

"Bruneian Soldiers taught classes on jungle survival, movement to
contact, land navigation and ambush techniques. The training
culminated in a bilateral attack," the Army said.

In June of 2014, the ACLU and the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School filed complaints with the Department of Homeland Security. And the complaints documented the cases of 116 unaccompanied children, ranging in age from 5 years old to 17. According to these organizations, a quarter of the children said they were physically or sexually abused. They said they’d been placed in so-called stress positions and were at times subjected to beatings by Customs officials. More than half of the kids reported receiving death threats from U.S. government agents.

— Reporter Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept podcast, Intercepted, May 30, 2018

Bob Koehler <koehlercw@gmail.com>

By Robert C. Koehler

The science gets ever more dire. The politics runs the other way.

We’ve claimed hold of the planet, but cluelessly, like the sorcerer’s apprentice. Welcomed to the Anthropocene: the age of humanity intertwined with nature.

Gary Kohls

Duty to Warn

A Warning to Wannabe Pro-violence Fascist Tyrants (and Their Cult Followers): Don’t Disregard the “Living by the Sword – Dying by the Sword” Admonition

By Gary G. Kohls, MD – (8-21-2018)

"Put up your sword; for those who take up the sword will surely die by the sword”: Matthew 26:52

In Norm Foster’s Screwball Comedy the Canadian playwright emulates movies of the film genre of the same name that had their heyday during the Depression. These breezy pictures were known for their clever, rapid fire patter and word play, with droll dialogue and plots penned by witty wags such as Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman.

In We’re In the Money author Andrew Bergman described screen Screwballs as “comedy at once warm and healing, yet off-beat and airy… [Their] overwhelming attractiveness… had to do with the effort they made at reconciling the irreconcilable. They created an America of perfect unity: all classes as one” at a time when capitalism was in deep crisis. Prime examples of Screwballs include Frank Capra’s 1934 It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert and 1938’s You Can’t Take It With You starring Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur plus Leo McCarey’s 1937 The Awful Truth featuring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.

Movie star Eric Roberts has joined the cast of TOWARDS THE MOUNTAINTOP: COMMEMORATING DR. KING and the 55th ANNIVERSARY OF THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON to re-enact Senator Bobby Kennedy.

Mississippi-born actor Eric Roberts has been nominated for an Oscar and three Golden Globes. His big and little screen credits are far too long to list here, but during the 1980s alone, they included “Star 80”, “The Pope of Greenwich Village”, “The Coca-Cola Kid”, “Runaway Train” and “Blood Red” - the only movie Eric acted in with his kid sister, Julia Roberts. More recently, Eric Roberts appeared in “The Dark Knight”, “Entourage”, “The Young and the Restless”, “Glee”, “Hawaii Five-O”, “CSI”, “Suits” and “Grey’s Anatomy” - to name just a few.

Rashida Tlaib has nothing about war or peace on her website. And she’s going to be elected to the seat held by Congressman John Conyers, famous for giving speeches for things like impeaching George W. Bush while telling reporters and colleagues that impeaching Bush needed to be avoided. So, take statements for what they’re worth (very little until followed by action).

Fascism is a disease, a delusion, a toxic worldview. It’s encouraged and manipulated by propaganda. Its characteristics are numerous and to various degrees widespread and long-lasting. At what point their combination in sufficiently extreme degree rises to the level of fascism, as opposed to moderately fascistic tendencies I’m happy to leave to others to decide.

Fascism is not a tendency born into subhuman monsters who threaten the purity of our anti-fascist homeland, as one might suspect when reading posters like “The only good fascist is a dead fascist” at anti-fascist rallies.

Fascism is not easily eliminated and not best eliminated by simply any random opposition to it, even opposition that much resembles it. Eliminating fascism and how best to do it is a reasonable topic of discussion which necessarily involves opposing some tactics as less effective than others. This means that it is possible to oppose an anti-fascist act without being a fascist — although not without getting called a fascist.

A few days after an over-hyped white supremacist rally in Washington, D.C., was massively outnumbered by people opposed to racism, and one day after 187 organizations (more than that now) publicly committed to turning out people to counter Donald Trump’s planned weapons parade with a parade for peace in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, and less than a day after the U.S.