“At this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved.” Nina Simone American singer.Songwriter.Pianist...
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AirBeagleSeen on Reddit
What should we come to … if political denunciation is to be turned without check against art?
Here I Stand
What should we come to … if political denunciation is to be turned without check against art?
Denunciation
What should we come to … if political denunciation is to be turned without check against art?
You Get Out
“It’s all almost too stereotypical,” Shore reflects. “A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,” she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power...
Everything Old is New Again
Williams Shirer on editing his college newspaper. We’re still experiencing the same stuff today.
Nothing to Say
I'm a jack of all trades, master of none. It's my epitaph, along with "Yet Another Patron Saint of Mediocrity."
This. Is. Us. Part Two
We have ALWAYS been this. One example among countless: The Sand Creek Massacre: “An estimated 70 to 600 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho – about two-thirds of whom were women, children, and infants – were murdered...
This. Is. Us.
The following quote so accurately pegs the U.S. of the 2020s as it did the U.S. of the 1890s. Shirer writes of Upton Sinclair’s famous and seminal work, The Jungle, regarding the Chicago and U.S. in which he was...
On Courage to Stand Your Ground
Regarding < this interview in the New Yorker>: A response. As I know from being a reporter (and as opposed to the myth we all had agendas), all I had to do was let someone talk and then print a transcript. They...
198 Methods of Non-Violent Action
Use < this > as a guide for the next years of the collapse of the American republic, the destruction of which is fully underway.
Fatigue is Not Our Friend
We can’t afford it but it’s real. Don’t forget: Ignore outrages and DJT. Focus on Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, who remind me of Eichmann and Heydrich. Read the stories not only of Oskar Schindler and The Franks, but of...
What They Fought For is Not What’s Coming to us
If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition...
Beginning of the End Day—Year 80
"Instead of "Thank you for your service," try, "We're sorry you had to expend your blood, sweat, tears and toil to clean up our monumental failings." Every time you meet one of the dwindling numbers of WWII veterans...
Faces of War II
A member of the Honour Guard stands next to a coffin with the body of Ukrainian Armed Forces member Valerii, who was killed during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, during a funeral ceremony in Kyiv, Ukraine, March 8, 2022.
Whatta Rush
It’s always fun to get a phone call during morning meeting from your oncologist, who you just met yesterday, and who says, “You know last night when we thought a few zaps of radiation of your cancerous...
My Cancer Journey Begins
I called Monday morning and the news was what I thought—but with an unexpected twist
I have a malignant carcinoma on my toe…type is Kaposi’s Sarcoma.
What a Tangled Tweet We Weave When First We Practice to Get Outraged
A "good job" according to whom? May I ask when exactly was the last time you were in an elementary school and sat through an entire school day with first graders? I ask because my mother makes this same argument...
#EmptyThePews
"FRICKIN’ HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD! JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH! POPE PAUL VI AND ALL THE SAINTS! AND DEAR GOD WHY ARE ALL THESE WOMEN IN EXPENSIVE ULTRASUEDE DRESSES RUNNING UP AND DOWN THE AISLES SCREAMING THEIR FOOL HEADS...
It was a Cold and Boring Night
"To me, as a gay boy, hugging another boy was perfectly natural. It always has been, it always will be. I always felt instinctively somehow that people would disapprove and say I was naughty. And I always felt...
Bryan, Who I Totally Made Up
"I thanked him and then trailed off as I watched him reach inside his open shirt collar and took out a necklace with rainbow triangles on it."
I Resemble That Remark
From I Wake Up Screaming (1941) on TCM tonight comes a description so fitting for me:
“You’re an ink-stinking word slinger.”
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 So now that’s my Twitter handle. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
Movie Night: Red Dust
"The attraction here isn't really the cultural relic/curiousity value, it's the variation of the old man meets woman, they hate each other, they clash with sparkling dialogue and then end up together 'til death they do...
American Civil War Casus Belli: African Negro Slavery.
Let's be clear: The war was about slavery, from first to last. And after the gun stopped firing, the war continued in multiple ways that all-too-often includes violence and murder.
Movie Night: Born Yesterday
"Born Yesterday is pretty fabulous. At least until it sinks in that it's just as applicable today (especially today!) as it was in 1950. In that year, it could have been warning against the House Un-American Activities...
Donelson Renovates
Not much can be done about the traffic volume as long as Metro and the State are devoid of ideas or even the hint of wanting to think about possible solutions. Nashville is drowning in traffic, but no one has the will...
The Indictment
"Senate Republicans are setting a dangerous precedent that threatens the republic itself. I'm not naive enough to think they would hold Democratic presidents to the low standard they've applied to Trump, but all future...
What We Hath Wrought
RIP Amara Renas and all the other unknown women and men and children. May you haunt our collective memory forever.
Movie Night: The Big Clock
"Regardless of whether you saw it then as scandalous that such perversions were being exhibited in public theaters or whether you see it now as being stereotypical, offensive and overly focused on white, male, straight...
Movie Night: The Yellow Rolls Royce
"... this is probably the granddaddy of all product placement movies, far more egregious than even Joan Crawford's conspicuous scattering of Pepsi bottles in Strait Jacket ..."
Movie Night: Sweet Charity
"The songs and dances, Shirley MacLaine and Cita Rivera, et al, were great; it's just the stuff in between that is less than satisfying."
Movie Night: Strait Jacket
"The bonuses here are George Kennedy as a farmhand foreshadowing by 22 years Billy Bob Thornton in 1996's Swing Blade ("I like them French fried potaters."), all the Pepsi placement, and Lee Majors in pre-Six Million...
Movie Night: A Cry in the Night
"Whatever the novelty of seeing goodie two-shoes Perry Mason as a Peeping Tom/Kidnapper, it's Carol Veazie who is the standout."
Movie Night: The Ritz
"Regardless of whether you saw it then as scandalous that such perversions were being exhibited in public theaters or whether you see it now as being stereotypical, offensive and overly focused on white, male, straight...
Movie Night: An American Tragedy
"Basically, amoral social climber from poor background seduces poor factory girl, gets her pregnant, wants to marry a rich socialite and so kills poor factory girl by smashing her in the head with his tennis racket and...
Movie Night: Thieves’ Highway
"Thieves' Highway is a classic Noir tale of truckers and apples and greed and sex and San Francisco and California and highways and death."
Movie Night: Apollo 11
"It's a magnificent bit of cinema and well-worth watching, especially on this day. It freshly reminds you of just exactly how incredible the achievement of half-a-billion people, represented by three men, was, in an...
Movie Night: Desk Set
"Not only is it hilarious, it has fabulous midcentury (ugh, that word) interiors, jokes only librarian/book/research nerds understand, an awesome supporting cast including EMERAC and Kate gets to get blotto and talk...
Movie Night: Hot Millions
"There's a lot more than just smiles to recommend this one–ts droll English humor, its glimpse at fashions and designs and trends of 1968, the fantastic acting of everyone, including the performance of Bob Newhart...
Movie Night: Die Brücke
"It's hard to think of a better illustration of the end of the European theater of war free of the pernicious and ubiquitous American boo-yah of so many countless war films."
On Crime and Punishment This Fourth of July
"It's well worth a challenging read-and-think on everyone's part at this particular moment in the country and society."
Movie Night: Ich War Neunzehn
"Konrad Wolf's 1968 feels like a real 1945; he takes us back to his youth and we're submerged in the fog that he had to navigate through once upon a time."
