Global
Remarks at Fellowship Hall at Berkeley, Calif., October 13, 2018.
Slogans and headlines and haikus and other short combinations of words are tricky things. I wrote a book looking at many of the themes in how people commonly talk about war, and I found them all without exception — and the marketing campaigns before, during, and after every past war without exception — to be dishonest. So I called the book War Is A Lie. And then people who misunderstood my meaning started insisting to me that I was wrong, that war really does exist.
1. What would you like the U.S. discretionary budget to look like? With 60% now going to militarism, what percentage would you like that to be?
2. What program of economic conversion to peaceful enterprises would you support?
3. Would you end, continue, or escalate U.S. war making in: Afghanistan? Iraq? Syria? Yemen? Pakistan? Libya? Somalia?
4. Would you end the exemption for militarism in Kyoto, Paris, and other climate agreements?
Remarks at the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, Calif., on October 12, 2018.
Video slowly uploading will be at https://youtu.be/jKhnteeo4k8
Exactly at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, in 1918, 100 years ago this coming November 11th, people across Europe suddenly stopped shooting guns at each other. Up until that moment, they were killing and taking bullets, falling and screaming, moaning and dying, from bullets and from poison gas.
Wilfred Owen put it this way:
There were two simultaneous Brett Kavanaugh stories. Together, as part of the confirmation process regarding his nomination as Supreme Court Justice, they revealed how political discourse in the United States has reached a new low, with debate over the man’s possible predilection to make judgments based on his own preferences rather than the US Constitution being ignored in favor of the politically motivated kabuki theater that was deliberately arranged to avoid that issue and instead go after his character.
Director Damien Chazelle has had a meteoric rise in the Hollywood firmament. His 2014 hit Whiplash had a $3.3 million production budget and earned more than $13 million at the box office, while 2016’s La La Land cost $30 million. Presumably because that musical scored five times its costs, Chazelle’s latest movie, First Man, almost doubled La La Land’s budget. I usually don’t dwell on film finances and focus instead on cinematic aesthetics, social commentary, film history and the like, but in the case of First Man the movie’s money matters have impacted upon its style - and in a mostly negative way.
The film’s title character is Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), the first man to step foot on the moon. Like Miles Teller’s wannabe drummer in Whiplash and Emma Stone’s aspiring actress and Gosling’s striving jazz pianist in La La Land, First Man’s protagonist is - in this case, literally - reaching for the stars, against impossible odds.
In Dubious Battle - More militant than and written before The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck depicted a bitter Red-led strike in California’s orchards in his 1936 novel. James Franco stars in and directed this neglected 2016 gem with Selena Gomez, Robert Duvall, Ed Harris, Bryan Cranston (who previously portrayed blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo), Vincent D’Onofrio.
WHAT: Screening of In Dubious Battle; 113 minutess. Film historian/critic Ed Rampell intros the film, followed by Q&A.
WHEN: Doors open 7:00 p.m., program starts by 7:30 p.m., on Thursday, Oct. 25.
Where: The L.A. Workers Center, 1251 S. St. Andrews Place, L.A., CA 90019. Refreshments served. Donations requested.
In the wake of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, as white male privilege reclaims its desperate grip on our future, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report comes out, informing us that we haven’t got much future left in which to avoid . . . I mean implement . . . serious change
Meanwhile, the midterm elections percolate.
Our quasi-democracy —rife as it is with voter suppression and mainstream media determination to trivialize the issues at stake —remains, nonetheless, the country’s primary means of manifesting public values. Inconvenient as it is to the powerful, this thing called voting is how collective humanity expresses its will —and I believe this will, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, bends toward sanity.
I hope so.
Are you ready to be a poll worker?
To stop Trump’s dictatorial rise, a real opposition party would be mobilizing Americans to vote AND to protect the right to cast verifiable ballots while making sure they’re actually counted.
That means becoming poll workers, registration protectors, vote count monitors and much more.
A real opposition party would now be organizing massive nationwide grassroots trainings for a reliable election. Are the Dems doing that?
Trump’s Republicans enter 2018 with a 5-10% structural advantage. They’ve stripped voter registration rolls and flipped electronic vote counts since at least 2000.
This year just voting will again not be enough.
Progressives MUST become poll workers, bring voters to the polls, monitor vote counts after the balloting, and refuse to concede close elections.
Strip/flip tactics gave Republicans the presidency in 2000, 2004 and 2016. In 2014 and 2016, they took six US Senate seats when their candidate trailed in the exit polls and/or “won” by less than five points.
Those six seats gave Trump control of US Supreme Court, his mega-tax cut for the super-rich, and much more.
“6000 to 32,000 hospital workers would need to be vaccinated (with an influenza vaccine)before a single patient death would be averted.” (That is, the Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNV) for hospital healthcare workers to prevent one patient from dying because of influenza contagion from an un-vaccinated worker is as high as 32,000!) -- https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0163586
"It is difficult to get a man to understandsomething, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" – Upton Sinclair