Global

July 19-22
Renaissance Columbus downtown hotel
The heart of the annual GeeklyCon is the board game room, Dungeons and Dragons is just one of the dozens of board games available to play with new geekly friends. But there are panel discussions, contests and lots more! Tickets are $90, which includes:

A ticket to the kickoff party (+ drink ticket & food, live show entrance, karaoke, and farewell party)

Hang out in the Game Room with a board game library featuring approx.100+ boardgames

Sign up for a tabletop RPG, or run your own

Access to the Live Show including Drunks & Dragons & More

Access to Panels and Talks throughout the day

Outings including Brewery tours, Boardgame Bars + more

GeeklyCon-wide House Cup games to help you to get to know people.

https://geeklycon.com/collections/tickets/products/geeklycon-2018-basic-ticket

It never fails to amaze (and amuse) me how movies mirror reality and are emanations of the collective psyche and/or motion picture prophecies. Just days after the premiere of The First Purge, about a race war aimed at exterminating African Americans in Staten Island, a Black Staten Island resident - Congolese immigrant Patricia Okoumou - heroically climbed the Statue of Liberty on July 4 to protest the racist Trump regime’s cruel purging of refugees, seekers of asylum and other immigrants.

JULY 10, 2018


The eternal question of U.S. politics rears its ugly ass again: “Why in the hell does anyone ever listen to Alan Dershowitz?”

No court can overturn a Congressional impeachment and conviction. Will somebody at Fox and CNN page the nearest genocidal torture-defending lawyer, who is either Alan Dershowitz or someone joining him on a search for the real O.J. Simpson killer at a five-star restaurant for lunch today, and get Dershowitz a copy of the United States Constitution?

The Constitution gives impeachment to the House and the trial to the Senate with the Chief Justice presiding. It gives the House the “sole” power of impeachment, and the Senate the “sole” power to try all impeachments. That means nobody else, least of all a different branch of government, gets to say anything at all.

The Constitution, pace Dershowitz, does not list all specific offenses that qualify for impeachment.

The weekend of July 7th and 8th witnessed the European peace movement come together in Brussels, Belgium to send a clear message to the world community, “No to war – No to NATO!”

The mass demonstration on Saturday and the No-to NATO counter summit on Sundayrejected American calls for all 29 NATO member states to increase military expenditures to 2% of GDP. Currently, the US spends 3.57% for military programs while European nations average 1.46 percent. President Trump is pressuring NATO members to spends hundreds of billions of additional Euros annually on various military programs, many which involve the purchase of American weapons and the expansion of military bases.

NATO members will meet in Brussels on July 11th and 12th. President Trump is expected to come down strongly on the Europeans while most member states are hesitant to increase military spending.

Remarks Delivered by Pat Elder for World BEYOND War at the No to War No to NATO Summit, Brussels, July 8, 2018

Aren’t there any American flags flying here? Are we going to salute the troops? Pledge allegiance to the flag? No? What kind of empire is this?

A largely ignorant American public is the propane that fires the stove of Trump’s brand of fascism.

An overwhelming majority of the American public is convinced that Trump is a liar who does not “share their values” or “care about people like them.” At the same time, many believe that he can “get things done.”

The neo-liberal order we loathe involves dumbing down the American public to accept 18th century notions of unbridled capitalism. The high school textbooks glorify war and empire. God and the flag and the church and the military and Jesus and America and mom and apple pie are mixed in a kind of patriotic pablum that is fed daily to the masses.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

– William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

pocalyptic thinking has been with us for a long time, and it sometimes ushers in actual apocalypses, albeit at human scale, without biblical finality. For a century now, the Yeats poem above has served as an increasingly common reference point for those who fear apocalyptic events approaching. Today such fears are varied, the threats are real, and reactions range from crisis-mongering to self-serving denial, making any rational, coherent societal response almost impossible.

Geoengineering, according to the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, is defined as "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic (man-made or corporate-caused)climate change" and divides methods into two types: carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, and solar radiation management aimed at reducing heat coming in (from the sun)or reflecting more of it out.

I write this week’s Duty to Warn column the day after the biannual Duluthairshow.com (July 7-8, 2018). Sunday evening, over 8 hours after the last the last plane touched down, a heavy thunderstorm partially cleansed the area of some of the toxic aviation fuel residue that contaminated the air, soil and water in the area. The weather during the previous 72 hours however, was perfect, with clear blue skies and 80 degree temps that have persisted now for nearly 4 days. Today, Monday, July 9, the skies continue to be deep blue and clear with actual cumulous clouds.

While the world watched and waited with bated breath for the outcome of the substantial global effort – involving over 100 cave divers from various countries, 1,000 members of the Thai Army and 10,000 others in various roles – to rescue a team of 12 young football players and their coach, who were trapped inside a flooded cave in Thailand for 17 days, 850,000 children were killed by human adults in other parts of the world, many of them simply starved to death in Yemen or other parts of Africa, Asia and Central/South America.

Trivia Pursuit Question of the Review: What great film director tried to adapt Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” in the early 1930s?

One of the best things that theater and film can do is take us long and ago and far away to experience actual historical events and figures. An excellent case in point is William Manus’ WWII-era set Their Finest Hour: Churchill and Murrow, which co-stars Michael Karm as the Prime Minister, Tyler Cook as the CBS broadcaster and Chantelle Albers as Pamela Churchill Harriman. This drama, which brings alive the Battle of Britain and real life personages, is on the boards in L.A. at the Brickhouse Theatre through July 22.

C.J. Hinke has produced probably the best collection I’ve read of writings by and about conscientious objectors and war refusers behind bars. It’s called Free Radicals: War Resisters in Prison.