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Two movie reviews: Ohio State athlete thumbs nose at Hitler in ‘Race’ and Rolling Papers

Jesse Owens on a field

Speaking to a reporter before a screening of Race at OSU’s Mershon Auditorium, one of Jesse Owens’s daughters said several changes were made to the script for the sake of historical accuracy.

That’s nice to hear. The tale of Owens’s participation in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin is intrinsically so dramatic and inspiring that it would be a shame to sully it with blatant inaccuracies.

As you probably know, Owens was the African-American track and field star who symbolically thumbed his nose at Hitler’s theory of Aryan superiority at the pre-World War II Olympics. For Central Ohioans, he also was a hometown hero. After racking up an impressive record as a high school athlete in Cleveland, he came to Ohio State and fell under the tutelage of track coach Larry Snyder.

This is where director Stephen Hopkins’s film takes up the story. Snyder (Jason Sudeikis) calls Owens (Stephen James) into his office and demands to know whether he’s ready to work hard. He also begins plying him with the notion that track records are made to be broken, but medals are forever. In no time, it seems, the two are setting their sights on the 1936 Olympics.

Beached America

For at least the last four decades now I feel like I’ve been living in Beached America: a nation that has lost its values, even as it writhes in violent agitation, inflicting its military on the vulnerable regions of the planet.

It does so in the name of those lost values . . . democracy, freedom, equality. These are just dead words at this point, public relations blather, silently followed by a sigh: yada, yada, yada. Then we send in the drones.

This is the behavior of a nation that is spiritually beached. Ideas that could open up the future have long been gagged, mocked and marginalized, locked in a closet somewhere. No way can they be allowed to have political influence. Thanks, mainstream media.

Chomsky Wants You to Wake Up from the American Dream

Get Well, Michael Moore

 

Your new movie, Where to Invade Next, is very powerful, your best so far for certain.

Get well.

Fast.

We need you.

You've packed a great many issues into this film, with visuals, with personalities, with entertainment. If people will watch this, they'll learn what many of us have struggled to tell them and more, as there was plenty that I learned as well.

I must assume that when U.S. audiences watch scenes that dramatically clash with their world yet seem humane and reasonable they'll be brought to the point of thinking.

Military Exploits School Testing Opt Out Campaign


Enlistment exam provides alternate pathway to graduation

Thousands of New Jersey high school seniors may be taking the military’s enlistment exam to fulfill a graduation requirement because they opted out of the controversial PARCC tests when they were juniors.

Bill and Hillary

Deadpool is crude, violent, and surprisingly progressive

Spiderman lounging

Fans of Deadpool-the-character are an odd mix of fratbros and social justice types. He's a violent antihero mercenary straight from the Xtreme days of early 90s comics whose repartee tends toward adolescent humor, but he's also a mentally ill canon omnisexual whose superpower is also a disability. There was a concern that, with Hollywood involved, a Deadpool movie would pander too much to the former group at the expense of the latter.

Fortunately, that's not the case at all. While Deadpool-the-movie is even more full of filthy language, crude innuendos, and bloody violence than the comics – Parents, this is NOT Avengers! – most of its humor is as its own expense rather than punching down. It doesn't quite bat a thousand on social decency – there are a couple blink-and-you'll-miss-them trans jokes at the expense of a super-strong woman villain – but it comes a lot closer than one might expect from a Hollywood action movie, especially a hard-R one immersed in adolescent humor.

Confronting our Toxic Legacy

Maybe if we declared “war” on poison water, we’d find a way to invest money in its “defeat.”

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, writing at Tom Dispatch this week about what they called “The United States of Flint,” make this point: “The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive. In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable.”

I sit with these words: “No one knows where the money will come from.”

Bernie Sanders comic

Bernie Sanders comic

Critics Blast Obama for Inviting Thailand's Coup Leader to California



BANGKOK, Thailand -- Human Rights Watch, political analysts and others
are criticizing President Obama for inviting Bangkok's coup leader to
an ASEAN summit in California on February 15 amid expectations the
junta will display it as U.S. endorsement of the military regime.

Indicative of that support, the Pentagon will simultaneously train the
junta's troops for 11 days here in Thailand during February to ensure
"stability within the region."

All 10 leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -- which
includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the
Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam -- received invitations
to the February 15-16 U.S.-ASEAN Summit at Sunnylands in Rancho
Mirage, California.

Most of the leaders arrived alongside Prime Minister Prayuth
Chan-ocha, who seized power in a bloodless May 2014 coup.

"We advised the White House to rescind invitations to Prime Minister
Prayuth and [Cambodian] Prime Minister Hun Sen," said Human Rights

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