Global
It’s hard to know where to begin. Last Friday’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was detailed in a 37 page document that provided a great deal of specific evidence claiming that a company based in St. Petersburg, starting in 2014, was using social media to assess American attitudes. Using that assessment, the company inter alia allegedly later ran a clandestine operation seeking to influence opinion in the United States regarding the candidates in the 2016 election in which it favored Donald Trump and denigrated Hillary Clinton. The Russians identified by name are all back in Russia and cannot be extradited to the U.S., so the indictment is, to a certain extent, political theater as the accused’s defense will never be heard.
The cries of terror and disbelief continue. Teenagers lie down in front of the White House to protest the nation’s tepid, stalled gun-control legislation. Parents grieve for their children and stare at the wound carved into the American soul. Assault rifles have more rights than schoolchildren.
A movement simmers, or so it seems, a week after the latest deadly school shooting: seventeen people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, many more injured. A disturbed loner — yet another one — is arrested.
It’s not simply violence, but wildly profound violation, yet again, yet again, of the deepest of human values: Life is sacred.
Isn’t it?
How can this keep happening?
The Feb. 8-19 Pan African Film Festival’s 26th annual extravaganza of Black-themed fiction, documentary, animated and short productions, workshops, panels and art expo was arguably one of its best fetes. Once again, PAFF presented Angelenos and aficionados with the opportunity to see on the big screen at Cinemark Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza movies that most film fans may otherwise not get a chance to watch. At the same time, filmmakers from around the world had the opportunity for their films to be shown in L.A., arguably the capital of world cinema.
Here’s a wrap up of the other works I saw at PAFF 2018:
It’s sort of silly that it matters. The United States bombed North Korea flat with ordinary, non-bioweapons bombs. It ran out of standing structures to bomb. People lived in caves, if they lived. Millions died, most of them from regular old non-scandalous but mass-murderous bombs (including, of course, Napalm which melts people but doesn’t give them exotic diseases). North Koreans to this day live in such terror of a repetition of history that their behavior is sometimes inexplicable and bewildering to Americans whose knowledge of history comes from watching game shows.
Haitian director/co-writer Raoul Peck’s well-made The Young Karl Marx is one of the most significant biopics in cinema history and arguably among the genre’s best. As the 200th anniversary of the birth of communism’s co-founder approaches, Peck has beautifully dramatized Marx’s life during the 1840s as a 20-something lover, writer, husband, philosopher, father, journalist, friend and above all, revolutionary. Berlin-born actor August Diehl (Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds) delivers a moving, truthful performance as the thinker whom - as this movie reveals - was also a man of action.
If you had just asked me if peace needed a “business plan,” I’d have replied, “Sure! Just like it needs a toupeed golfing fascist reality-TV creep in the White House! That’ll just about fix everything! War is over! Thanks!”
But after reading Scilla Elworthy’s book The Business Plan for Peace, I say, “Yeah, OK, that sounds pretty good, actually. Here, let me tweak it some!” In fact, I’ve added this book, despite some quibbles, to my bookshelf of war abolition advocacy. (Read em all! Send me others!)
Bob talks about Trump's latest desire for a military parade, his immigration policies and about Edith Espinal, the Mexican woman currently in sanctuary in Columbus. The last 15 minutes are from a recent fundraiser for Edith.
http://www.wcrsfm.org/content/other-side-news-feb0918-fascistic-trump-a…
Nikolas Cruz, the south Florida shooter, was enrolled in the Army’s Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) program as a 9th grader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The Army taught Cruz to shoot lethal weapons at a very young and impressionable age.
Few in America have connected the dots between military indoctrination and firearms instruction on the one hand, and the propensity for training mass killers, whether their crimes are committed as enlisted soldiers in atrocities overseas or in American high schools.
Let’s examine the JROTC program and the militarization of Florida’s schools as a contributing factor to the Parkland massacre. When Cruz was apprehended he was wearing his JROTC polo shirt, sending a message to the world of his affiliation with the military program.
Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School practice in the school’s firing range.