Opinion

Director Emeritus, Kent R. Beittel, passed away October 16 at the age of 72. His efforts, passion and accomplishments in helping the homeless and marginally housed were unmatched and his legacy will live on at The Open Shelter. Kent and his wife Mary Beittel (who passed in 2017) were honored with community activism awards at the Free Press 2004 annual awards event as champions for the homeless. Often bucking the establishment coalitions in Columbus, Beittel was a strong and effective advocate for people caught up in societal injustice, addiction and poverty.

Friends of Kent and Mary Beittel told their stories about their relationships with Kent and Mary Beittel.

The nation has less than two weeks left to live in its comfort zone of platitudes. This is by far the most ominous election buildup of my (fairly lengthy at this point) lifetime. What will happen on Nov. 3 and thereafter? Will all the votes be counted? Presuming Trump loses, will he leave office?

Are we approaching the end of our . . . uh, democracy?

A real democracy, of course, has always been a terrible inconvenience to those in power, which is why, in the nearly two hundred and fifty years of the nation’s existence, voting — as well as acknowledgment of certain people’s humanity — has been endlessly gamed, suppressed and denied; and a fragile, racist status quo has managed to maintain itself, wrapped in the lie of “liberty and justice for all.” Perhaps it’s this status quo that’s really up for grabs.

I would like to announce the publication of a new book, which discusses the question of how oligarchs maintain their grasp on an excessive share of wealth and power when, as Shelley pointed out, the have-nots are many, while the power-holders are few.

http://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Ye-are-Many-They-are-Few-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf

The Peterloo Massacre

Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many, they are few!

n ordinary times, Ted Glick would hardly be someone you’d expect to hear urging fellow progressives to vote for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

During the first 18 years of this century, Glick was an active member of the Green Party. He ran for the U.S. Senate as the Green Party’s nominee in New Jersey and put in a long stint co-chairing a local branch of the party. In fact, he recalls, “I have been a member of organizations working to build a political alternative to the Democrats and Republicans since 1975.”

Now, Glick is more than two weeks into a water-and-vitamins-only fast that he plans to continue until voting ends on November 3. As a headline says over his daily postings, it’s all about “Fasting to Defeat Trump.”

The 34th annual AFI Fest is arguably Los Angeles’ biggest and best film festival and this year it is taking place virtually through Oct. 22 (see: https://fest.afi.com/). The closing world premiere of the American Film Institute’s yearly fete is the Showtime documentary My Psychedelic Love Story, wherein Timothy Leary - the High Priest of LSD – meets Errol Morris, the High Priest of documentaries. Their meeting of minds on celluloid is a collision of cosmic consciousness, as Morris is to nonfiction cinema what Leary was to mind expanding drugs.

Leary, of course, was the counterculture’s guru, a psychologist who went beyond Freudian boundaries by adding psychedelic drugs to the study of the brain as part of an elusive odyssey for enlightenment. The enormously famous – and infamous – elder statesman of the Flower Power generation urged American youth to: “Turn on, tune in and drop out.”

America is currently experiencing a historic surge of protests igniting a cultural awakening and racial reckoning. Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Pacific Islands’ indigenous peoples are being highlighted at the 36th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (https://festival.vcmedia.org/2020/). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented LAAPFF, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” This year due to the pandemic the Festival is online.

Remarks by phone on October 17, 2020, to Indigenous People’s Day event in Washington, D.C., delayed from October 12.

There may be no more important place to mark Indigenous People’s Day than Washington, D.C., the center of global weapons dealing, base building, and war making — the leading hub of nuclear weapons production and environmental destruction, the seat of a national and imperial government that overseas colonies of second-class citizens on Caribbean and Pacific islands as well as in Washington DC itself, while keeping nearly 1,000 major military bases in over 80 other countries, a government that continues to abuse the remaining native people of North America, exploit the land to destroy the sky and poison the water, in a city that after decades of protest is willing to rename its professional concussion-inducing team as long as it can name it for warmakers.

America is currently experiencing a historic surge of protests igniting a cultural awakening and racial reckoning. Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Pacific Islands’ indigenous peoples are being highlighted at the 36th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (https://festival.vcmedia.org/2020/). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented LAAPFF, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” This year due to the pandemic the Festival is online.

A megalomaniac is a pathological egotist, someone with a psychological disorder who exhibits symptoms like delusions of grandeur and an obsession with greatness, power or wealth.

A sociopath is a person whose behavior is antisocial, often criminally greedy, who lacks a sense of moral responsibility, empathy or social conscience. Sociopaths never sincerely apologize nor are they capable of exhibiting remorse for wrongs that they have committed.

A narcissist isperson who has an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration, sexual gratification, applause and a lack of empathy for others.

 A paranoid person or group exhibitsexcessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of other individuals or groups.

A xenophobe is aperson who is fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or of people from different countries or cultures.

Below is the abstract of a recently published Drug Safety article that came out of a HHS, NIH, NIAID-funded study that actually acknowledges – contrary to the Establishment-approved narrative - the existence of vaccine-induced neurotoxicity (especially vaccine-induced encephalopathy resulting in childhood seizure disorders) and other adverse toxic effects following the cocktails of vaccines that are injected during routine well child exams , vaccines that always contain numbers of toxic ingredients, which have never been studied for safety when given in cocktails.

The article appears in the October 2020 issue of Drug Safety.