Global

When Tierna Oxenreider of Reynoldsburg told her parents she wanted to take up a sport that allowed her to use a sword, her parents let her chase her dreams like any loving mom and dad would do.

And while they were surprised their daughter was eager to embrace a mano-a-mano sport, what was more startling was how old Tierna was when this combatant epiphany struck her.

She was just four at the time. “I want to do a sword sport,” she told her parents.

Eight years later, after her parents decided the sport of fencing was a perfect fit, the now 12-year-old Tierna has become one of the top-3 fencers nationally in her age group. She’s scheduled to compete at her fifth Arnold Classic where she’s won seven gold medals. In 2015 she won the North American Cup Tournament for her age group.

Family and coaches alike say Tierna is mature, humble and beyond determined. The future could be golden for this pre-teen who has set her sights on the ultimate fencing prize.

“That’s my goal right now, to compete in the Olympics eight years from now,” says Tierna, who incredibly is a first-generation fencer.

Liberals are supposed to be antiwar, right? I went to college in the 1960s, when students nationwide were rising up in opposition to the Vietnam War. I was a Young Republican back then and supported the war through sheer ignorance and dislike of the sanctimoniousness of the protesters, some of whom were surely making their way to Canada to live in exile on daddy’s money while I was on a bus going to Fort Leonard Wood for basic combat training. I can’t even claim that I had some grudging respect for the antiwar crowd because I didn’t, but I did believe that at least some of them who were not being motivated by being personally afraid of getting hurt were actually sincere in their opposition to the awful things that were happening in Southeast Asia.

The performances and much of the music in Richard Strauss’ Salome are the most melodramatic of any opera I’ve ever experienced. But this is to be expected since, as that old expression goes, “consider the source”: The New Testament. However, as with Mel Gibson’s dark, despicably dreary, sadistic 2004 The Passion of the Christ, the operatic version of John the Baptist’s (Icelandic baritone Tomas Tomasson plays the prophet called here Jochanaan) disastrous encounter with Salome (New Hampshire soprano Patricia Racette) is derived from brief Biblical passages.

enator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would do well to embrace our early American hero Pocahontas. She might even thank Donald Trump for making the link.

With his signature sneering, leering sexism and racism, Trump refers to the Massachusetts senator with the name of this real-life historic figure as if it were a put-down.

But Pocahontas is a true American icon. Unlike Trump, she was greatly loved by her people, and her character was impeccable. She was deeply admired in England, where she travelled with her husband and young son and then tragically passed away, having barely turned twenty.

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Dwight Eisenhower gave the world some extraordinary rhetoric — indeed, his words have the sting of ironic shrapnel, considering how little they have influenced the direction of the country and the world in the last six decades.

“These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953,” he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors nearly 64 years ago. “This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: Is there no other way the world may live?”

For years, Nintendo publicly dragged its feet about entering the mobile games market. It had dominated mobile gaming in its own way for decades, with the Game Boy and its descendants up to the current 3DS and the upcoming hybrid Switch, leaving a museum’s worth of failed competitors in its wake. (Including, notably, the Nokia N-Gage, which was a combination portable gaming console and cell phone. It seems ironic now that the thing failed.)

Why go through the trouble of entering another market when you define the one you’re in?

But two years ago, after years of investor pressure, Nintendo finally announced a partnership with Japanese mobile game giant DeNA to produce games for iOS and Android using its biggest names: Mario, Animal Crossing, and Fire Emblem. (The ridiculously popular Pokémon Go wasn’t part of this; it was developed by Niantec working directly with The Pokémon Company.)

Aside from some stunning cinematography, special effects and scenery, this U.S.-China co-production lensed, according to IMDB.com, on location in Qinqdao and New Zealand (!) is more about cashing in on the growing international audience of the PRC and USA. The use of Real 3D and IMAX 3D is what The Great Wall is really all about - not a story or, heavens’ forbid, character development - although to be sure, there is a hidden propagandistic message about Beijing’s military might and policies. Put your brains into neutral and the 3D glasses on to watch this vapid but eye-popping big budget picture which, at $135-150 million USD, is reportedly the most expensive movie ever made in what had once upon a time been the People’s Republic of China.

In 2017, what better way is there to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution than by screening the movies those momentous events inspired? For the next 10 months, the L.A. Workers Center and HollywoodProgressive.com are co-presenting a monthly series of classics by the giants of early Soviet cinema: Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, Dziga Vertov and Esther Shub. The monthly film series called “Ten Films That Shook the World” screens features and documentaries about Russia’s Revolutions in 1905 and in February and October 1917, culminates November 7th on the exact 100th anniversary of the storming of the Winter Palace.

The Soviet cinema of the 1920s and early 1930s arguably produced the greatest political films ever made. Indeed, as a cinematic trend these Red Russian reels are among moviedom’s leading trends and movements, such as German Expressionism, the French New Wave, Italian Neo-Realism, Hollywood’s Golden Age, etc. The fiction and nonfiction motion pictures screened in the “Ten Films That Shook the World” series are among the finest works of art created in all human history.

Those of us who consider it disgraceful to have a giant statue of Robert E. Lee on his horse in a park in the middle of Charlottesville, and another of Stonewall Jackson for that matter, should try to understand those who think removing one of these statues is an outrage.

I don't claim to understand them, and certainly don't suggest they all think alike. But there are certain recurring themes if you listen to or read the words of those who think Lee should stay. They're worth listening to. They're human. They mean well. They're not crazy.

First, let's set aside the arguments we're not trying to understand.

For the past decade, the standard procedure for big coalition rallies and marches in Washington D.C. has been to gather together organizations representing labor, the environment, women's rights, anti-racism, anti-bigotry of all sorts, and a wide array of liberal causes, including demands to fund this, that, and the other, and to halt the concentration of wealth.

At that point, some of us in the peace movement will generally begin lobbying the PEP (progressive except for peace) organizers to notice that the military is swallowing up enough money every month to fund all their wishes 100 times over for a year, that the biggest destroyer of the natural environment is the military, that war fuels and is fueled by racism while stripping our rights and militarizing our police and creating refugees.

When we give up on trying to explain the relevance of our society's biggest project to the work of reforming our society, we generally point out that peace is popular, that it adds a mere 5 characters to a thousand-word laundry list of causes, and that we can mobilize peace groups to take part if peace is included.