Dmitri Babich has worked as a journalist in Russia since 1989, for newspapers, news agencies, radio, and television. He says that he used to always interview people, while lately people interview him. According to Babich, myths about Russian media, such as that one cannot criticize the president in Russia, can be dispelled simply by visiting Russian news websites and using Google Translator. More newspapers in Russia oppose Putin than support him, Babich says. If Russian news is propaganda, Babich asks, why are people so afraid of it? Was anyone ever afraid of Brezhnev’s propaganda? (One might reply that it wasn’t available on the internet or television.) In Babich’s view the threat of Russian news lies in its accuracy, not in its falsehood. In the 1930s, he says, French and British media, in good “objective” style, suggested that Hitler wasn’t anything much to worry about. But the Soviet media had Hitler right. (On Stalin perhaps not so much.) Today, Babich suggests, people are making the same mistake that the British and French media made back then, failing to appropriately stand up to a dangerous ideology. What ideology? That of neoliberal militarism.

Sunday, May 14, 3-6pm
The Vanderelli Room, 218 McDowell St.
Dance Lesson begins at 3:00 and the square dance will start at 3:30.
-$5 cover at the door
-Moms get in for free
- Ice Cream
-Live String Band
-No partner necessary and no experience needed
Calling by Joe Burdock
Music by the Little Pal String Band
Don't bore your mom with flowers and cards this mothers day. Take her to the ice cream social.

Set against the backdrop of the United Farm Workers’ struggle, the best thing about playwright/director Diane Rodriquez’s The Sweetheart Deal is its dramatization of how being a part of a movement affects a couple. Mari (Ruth Livier) and Will (Geoffrey Rivas) are middle-aged married Chicanos originally from California’s agricultural region who long ago moved to the big city of San Jose. Using the G.I. Bill, Will parlayed his service as a lackey of U.S. imperialism during the Korean War into earning a B.A. This enabled the college grad to get a decent job editing a mediocre newspaper and raise his family with a comfortable middle class lifestyle. (Of course, for many university graduates drowning in student loan debt today, the notion of getting a well paying job upon earning one’s diploma is a quaint fairy tale.)

We have no evidence at this point that the Russians, or global hackers, hacked our electronic voting machines to put Donald Trump in the White House.

But we are 100% certain our electronic voting machines have been hacked by many many others, and could be in the future by virtually anybody with entry-level computing capabilities. As the New York Times and others have reported, cyberattacks have now become an integral part of the modern landscape.   A tool stolen from the very National Security Agency meant to protect us has been used to perpetrate more than 75,000 recent hacks—-and those are just the ones being reported. 

The evidence that our electronics-based election system is particularly vulnerable to such attacks has long been well-established.  It ranges from a wide range of public vote flipping demonstrations to a computing professor using a voting machine to play the University of Michigan fight song. 

The REDCAT revival of Wallace Shawn’s 1996 The Designated Mourner is eerily timely, opening amidst the tyrannical Trump regime’s ongoing attack on its critics, ranging from el presidente’s firing of the FBI chief for his investigation of a citizen above suspicion (but beneath contempt) and the May 10 arrest of a reporter in West Virginia for the heinous thought crime of trying to ask “Health” Secretary Tom Price a question.

In Mourner, Larry Pine (a veteran of the big and little screen and stage with endless credits, including House of Cards and Dead Man Walking) portrays the poet Howard, a scion of the ruling class who turns against them and champions the "dirt people" (working class) in opposing the "rats" (elite). Daughter Judy (writer Deborah Eisenberg) is among Howard’s literary and political acolytes. As opposition to the rulers mounts leftist intellectuals are arrested and executed by the oligarchy.