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Congress Members Jones and Garamendi are going to screen and discuss a hilarious movie mockery of militarism. They’re going to do it in the U.S. Capitol. They’re going to go right on funding the war madness, sanctioning possible new enemies, and risking all of our lives. But for a moment, they’re going to open a window and let a bit of sanity in.

French filmmakers Thibout Bertrand, Guillaume Lebeau and Benjamin Clavel have flown from Paris to L.A. to present the American debut of their just released documentary Red In Blue at the Left Coast Forum. The 57 minute film is especially timely as the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution is this Nov. 7.

Red In Blue includes clips from American movies about the Bolshevik uprising going back to silent movies and includes scenes from David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago, Warren Beatty’s Reds, the animated feature Anastasia and more. The documentary also features archival footage and original interviews with Warren Beatty, a U.S. Red plus French and American film historians, including Ed Rampell, co-founder of Hollywood Progressive, author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States.

Columbus Crew SC fans can only wonder. What team was Anthony Precourt rooting for when the Portland Timbers upset the Crew at Mapre Stadium for the 2015 Major League Soccer Cup?

In 2016 he traded star striker Kei Kamara to New England. Kamara was a fan favorite even with the fringiest of local Crew fans. Fast forward to the summer of 2017 and the Crew has the worst attendance in the MLS.

Again, something he was rooting for?

Another red flag was flashed in 2013 when Precourt bought the team from the Hunt family, the original owners. Precourt insisted on being the principle owner even though the Hunt family at first tried to offer him minority investment. Precourt then pledged to Columbus he would keep the Crew here.

My family moved to Columbus in 1994 so my mom could pursue her doctorate, carried to Ohio in a swarm of uncertainty. I was five. I knew nothing of the city that would come to shape my identity in fundamental ways, and up until I left for college, I still didn’t. Columbus was nothing, not even a place. Just a holding pattern. Ohio is a great place to be from, I was told in California, and this might be true. But it did nothing to inspire civic pride. And neither, really, did the Crew, when it was first showed up, two years later.

For the last several decades, since we got enough distance between us and World War II for them to be a hypothetical threat rather than an active one, Nazis have been stock villains. And so normally no one would think it controversial to use them as cannon fodder in a video game. That was certainly not the controversial thing about any of the previous games in the Wolfenstein series – they were part of the whole fuss over video game violence, but no one singled out the Nazis as unfair targets.

But we don’t live in sensible times anymore. No, this is 2017, and Bethesda’s decision to go all-in on the Nazi-killing aspect of the new Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has brought all the worst people out of the woodwork to complain.
 

The swampish saga would be hard to invent. In early October, Puerto Rico’s Energy Power Authority awarded a $300 million tax-funded contract to reconstruct the island’s hurricane devastated power grid to a two-person, two-year-old firm based in the small Montana hometown of Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The company is financially backed by a major donor to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

About eighty percent of Puerto Rico is still without power. Many hospitals are still dark. Local citizens needing medical treatments such as surgeries or dialysis have been forced to flee to places where electric power is available.

on October 24 was a seventeen-minute Senate floor speech to announce that he would not run for re-election, all gussied up with at least implied imprecations against a president and administration he could not bring himself to call by name. In seventeen minutes, Flake managed to find fault with nothing more specific in the world today than “our disunion … the indecency of our discourse … the coarseness of our leadership … the compromise of our moral authority.”

http://davidswanson.org/u-s-empire-not-fade-away/

I wanna tell you how it’s gonna be.

But I really cannot. Prediction is just vastly more difficult than action, which makes it even odder that so much of the former goes on, and so little of the latter.

I just read In The Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power by Alfred McCoy. It’s one of the better books I’ve read in a long time on the history and current state of U.S. militarism. It’s excellent on the truly ridiculous (my word, not the book’s) chess analogy that has driven imperialist thinking, on the outcomes of backing dictators as puppets, and on the abuses of secret agencies — including their role in the drug trade in places like Nicaragua and Afghanistan.

Despite the twitter promise of Tyrant Trump to release the remaining files on the JFK assassination as prescribed by law made 25 years ago, evidently the CIA got to him at the 11th hour, causing him to accede to their demand to keep the incriminating documents secret for another 6 months while they are scrubbed and redacted. With varying degrees of certainty the community of scholars who have spent years studying the facts around the political assassinations of the 1960's have long ago come to the conclusion that JFK was killed by the National Security State (CIA and the Military).