Opinion
Note: With most movie theaters closed due to the pandemic, major Hollywood openings have been put on hold. One of the few silver linings of this is that it allows small and often worthy films—some of them directed by women—to debut without competing with the blockbusters. This is one of them.
Tough but touching, Bull is the story of a girl’s coming of age amid the direst of conditions. It’s also the story of her unlikely relationship with an aging rodeo performer, as well as a window into a subculture most of us know nothing about.
Kris (Amber Havard) is a 14-year-old living on the outskirts of Houston with her grandmother and younger sister while she waits for her mother to serve out a prison term. Mostly left on her own, she has a tendency to get into the kind of trouble that suggests she’ll eventually follow in her mom’s self-destructive footsteps.
Since the first Coronavirus cases in Ohio were confirmed in early March, events have been canceled left and right. Everything from small gatherings and weddings, to big city festivals and major international events have all been halted due to the pandemic.
However, it is not 100 percent doomy and gloomy while we are all in quarantine. Organizations and individuals alike have come up with alternative ways to have events virtually, to align with the social distancing guidelines that have been governed by our State leaders and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Virtual Events are not just a way to keep the masses entertained while the curve is being flattened, but virtual events have also boosted morale and raised awareness, and sometimes funds for organizations and individuals who need it the most during these times. We can’t be together physically for each other, but we have been there and shown our support virtually for each other. Businesses and local municipalities have all held meetings on Zoom since the pandemic shut down gatherings of more than ten people.
SHAME on these filmmakers for making a film like this, full of misinformation and disinformation, to intentionally depress audiences, and make them think there are no alternatives.
I am an award-winning documentary filmmaker making films on environmental issues and renewable energy for over 40 years, and from making these films became a leading activist in Nova Scotia on environmental issues, and also a renewable energy developer and advocate.
Let me make it absolutely clear that the new documentary, Planet of the Humans, by Jeff Gibbs — with executive producer Michael Moore, is inaccurate, misleading and designed to depress you into doing nothing.
Wind power and solar energy produce huge amounts of clean energy. Look up the environmental footprint of a modern wind turbine, or modern solar panel, and you will find that the embodied energy and emissions are offset within a year.
As of Friday, April 24, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released numbers that show 30% of known black patients tested positive for COVID-19. Conveniently or not, the report didn’t have any other racial information for 75% of all cases totaled. It also didn’t include any demographic breakdown of deaths. Yet this was a released federal report of case data by race. I’m confused and concerned as to why they released the numbers for the black race only.
Lets back up a little. On Monday, April 20, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine informed the public that he had formed a Minority Health Strike Force to study the problem in Ohio that the disease has “disproportionally” impacted blacks. This strike force is also supposed to study the implications on a national level. Some would say that they should just be focusing on Ohio at this time and after this pandemic is contained to then pool the information from the nation totals together to “study” the impact on blacks and all races of people.
Maybe you are out of work. Maybe you are like me, and have worked online for some time. Regardless of your situation, chances you are at least somewhat more homebound than you used to be. This month’s foray into nerdery dips into the realm of history. There are plenty of literary genres that could classify as “geeky,” and I very well may delve into a list of suggested scifi novels for our future months of quarantine. But for now, let’s stick with history.
I seriously love history. I started college as a history major, but I dropped it for sociology so that I could find a better job after college (HA HA HA HA … but, follow your bliss). I have read many history books, and I do teach a history class professionally, so I guess my recommendations in this regard might count for something. Each of the following books was chosen because I feel they have something to share for people in our quite strange moment in history.
(Of course, you shouldn’t be going to book stores right now. Each of these books is available online as an eBook.)
“A Peoples History of the United States” by Howard Zinn
Over the weekend, ten inmates at the Morrow County Jail tested positive for COVID-19. The jail is one of two ICE contracted detention centers in Ohio.
Most, if not all are immigrants held on civil immigration charges for ICE. On Friday night, the ACLU of Ohio sued ICE, demanding the release of medically-vulnerable immigrants currently detained in Butler and Morrow Counties.
Said Lynn Tramonte, Director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, “Doctors have been telling government officials to reduce jail populations to avoid mass outbreaks, and no one in charge in Ohio listened. For weeks, inmates at the Morrow County Jail have been warning family members and friends about the filthy conditions, lack of soap and PPE, and frequent transfers of people into and out of the jail. They felt like sitting ducks for the disease. And now their worst fears have come true.
Spitting at someone is a universal insult. In Israel, however, spitting at Palestinians is an entirely different story.
Now that we know that the deadly coronavirus can be transmitted through saliva droplets, Israeli soldiers and illegal Jewish settlers are working extra hard to spit at as many Palestinians, their cars, doorknobs, and so on, as possible.
If this sounds to you too surreal and repugnant, then you might not be as familiar with the particular breed of Israeli colonialism as you may think you are.
When Edward Bernays (the nephew of Sigmund Freud) wrote his famous 1928 book, Propaganda, he titled the first chapter of the book “Organizing Chaos”. The quotes below are taken directly from that chapter.
What was strikingly obvious to me in reading the book is that Bernays – in the year before the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 - wasn’t making any effort to sugar-coat the fact that he actually believes that propaganda is an essential and desirable fact of modern life.
(Propaganda, by the way, is the way the ruling classes get the working classes to march off to war and how the billionaire CEOs of the multinational Big Pharma, Big Medicine corporations (and Bill Gates, the CDC, the WHO, etc, etc) gets parents to willingly over-vaccinate their vulnerable, immune-compromised infants with vaccines that have never been subjected to FDA-approved, double-blind clinical trials to establish safety or efficacy, especially long-term!)
I suspect that every corrupt crony capitalist that was responsible for the soon-to-occur 1929 Stock Market Crash and subsequent Great Depression heartily agreed with him in 1928.
Did you know that the U.S. government has done something odd with your tax dollars? The ones you get so furious and indignant about when they’re used to feed anybody who’s hungry? It has given over 280 billion of those dollars to the government of Israel (not counting classified hush-hush super-secret amounts).
Israel is not a poor country. It is certainly not the poorest in the world. Why is it the top recipient of “aid.”
It isn’t. Its military is. Most of those billions of dollars are for weapons, and most of those weapons have to be bought from U.S. weapons dealers — you know, the ones crammed into close quarters risking the spread of a deadly disease because their jobs have been deemed “essential.”