Opinion

Alabama and Argentina. Cleveland, Columbus, Cuba, and Czechoslovakia. Guinea, Haiti, and Kent. Mauritania and Mexico. New Jersey, New York, and Romania. Sierra Leone and South Sudan. Youngstown and Vietnam. 

What do these places have in common?

Find out as you read Far From Their Eyes, Ohio Migration Anthology (Volume I). Each story, essay, painting, and poem in this anthology is rooted in at least two worlds – the physical place where its creator lives, today, and the place from which they and their ancestors came.

Sign up here to get first notice and please share and support this work: https://bit.ly/OMAVolumeOne.

“I don’t take people seriously anymore if I find out they believe the official 9/11 conspiracy theory.” -- Gadfly Bites

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” – Carl Sagan

“It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them.” -- Adolf Hitler

By trade, I’m a full-time film historian/critic who has authored/co-authored four movie history books. I say this because at one point in the new play Taming the Lion Joan Crawford (as depicted by Marie Broderick) tells William Haines (Landon Beatty) he’s the top box office movie star on Earth. Yet until I was invited to cover Taming the Lion this reviewer had never even heard of Haines, who also is not listed in David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. The world premiere of playwright Jack Rushen’s two-act dramatization of real-life Hollywood history and personalities explains why.

Throughout the 1920s and until the mid-1930s Haines was a leading man in Tinseltown, appearing in about 50 flicks. In 1929 he starred in the ironically entitled A Man’s Man, which Greta Garbo and John Gilbert are also in, and played the title character in 1931’s Just a Gigolo. A number of Haines’ pictures were military-themed, such as 1926’s Tell It to the Marines, 1929’s Navy Blues, 1934’s The Marines are Coming.

Another football ‘controversy’ has started when football players participating in the ongoing ‘UEFA Euro 2020’, kneeled down during national anthems to protest racism, a serious problem that has plagued football stadiums for many years. 

Here’s what happened at the July Free Press Second Saturday Cyber-Salon on July 10.

Watch the recording here.

Cyber salon host and Free Press Board member Mark Stansbery introduced speaker Dr. Fadhel Kaboub, who spoke about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Fadhel is an Associate Professor of economics at Denison and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.

Below are the lyrics to four powerful anti-establishment songs that were performed and recorded by the song-writing/singing duo, Ethan Miller and Kate Boverman, back in 2005. The pair were “Back to the Land Movement” advocates/activists from Maine. Miller and Boverman are currently part of a farm collective in a rural part of the state (for more info, click on https://www.landincommon.org/board-of-directors/ ). The album was titled “If All the Land Would Rise”, a devastating expose of some of the worst corporate/government corruption in America, corruption that was just raising its ugly head. Miller and Boverman very accurately identified some of the culprits – and named some of them.

For decades I — and, no doubt, everybody else who points out the power and effectiveness of nonviolent action — have had the endlessly recurring experience of being asked “But shouldn’t people defend themselves with wars rather than do nothing?”

How did wars get to be the only alternative to nothing? If I were to run around shouting “Will you deny people the right to stick slugs up their noses rather than do NOTHING?” approximately 100% of people would think that was a crazier thing to say than that the only responses to violence are (1) mass murder, and (2) nothing. Here‘s a supposed peace activist last week hoping that if Canada manages to get itself attacked the U.S. will jump into the war.

An end to war? It’s certainly necessary, but is it politically possible?

The fate of House Resolution 476, introduced by Rep. Barbara Lee, will give us a clue how close “we,” by which I mean the leading military power on the planet, are to transcending our suicidal certainties.

The wording of this bill concludes thus: “Congress supports moves to reduce the priority given to war in our foreign policy and our current war-based national economy by using significant cuts, up to $350,000,000,000 as detailed above, from current budget plans, while using the funds to increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.”

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No one was talking, and that pissed Jefferson off.

Torture was needed.

He was already being tortured, torn asunder by love and duty. He dialed O’Grady, to pass it on.

“You wanted to dust those bills? Where do I go?”

“Forget that. Something’s happened. Hang on,” O’Grady said. She put the phone down on her desk and began speaking to those around her.

“When was this supposed to have happened? Police radio, right? Let’s make sure we get an accurate report log time. We need a copy of that call,” she said, picking up the phone.

“Your buddy got shot and killed.”

“Who?”

“Edgar Smith Wilson. That’s right, that’s the photo I want,” she said to someone else on her end.

“Okay,” a voice in the background said.

“Now. Yeah, what’s her name’s Dad. He was coming out of a restaurant Downtown. Got killed a few minutes ago in a drive-by. Broad daylight, right on the sidewalk.”

“Damn! Anybody else get killed?” Jefferson said.

“Nope. Turn on channel 6, they got a news break. I gotta go,” and she hung up.