|
|
May 14th, 2013, By Jeff Zavadil 
Our dominant cultural image of barbarians is of filthy, illiterate, bloodthirsty brutes: imagine a fur-clad, lice-infested savage ferociously raiding a village, axe in one hand and torch in the other, who then heartily celebrates with a flagon of ale and a giant roasted leg of some animal or another. Barbarians are noted for their contempt for and domination of the weak, yet barbarians are also admired for their brawn and tenacity: think of Conan the Barbarian and other pop-culture images of warrior-heros who spurn the refinements and discourse of civilized culture and deal with problems through the sword and conquest.
Continue reading “We Have Met the Barbarians, and They Is Us” »
May 10th, 2013, By Ed Rampell 
It was “Hooray for Hollywood!” as the TCM Classic Film Festival held its 4th annual filmfest in the heart of Tinseltown. From April 25 through April 28 thousands of fans attended screenings of vintage films, discussions with and personal appearances by movie talents, dressed in period garb (Film Noir attire being a favorite), partied like it was 1929 and witnessed an Academy Award winner’s footprints and handprints immortalized in cement at the fabled Chinese Theatre. Most of the movies were presented the way they were intended to — projected on the big screen, many of them in glorious black and white, including silent films such as Buster Keaton’s The General and Clara Bow’s It, accompanied by live orchestras in Hollywood’s movie palaces, the Chinese and Egyptian theatres.
Continue reading “4th Annual TCM Classic Film Festival Features Vintage Films and Stars Galore From Movies of Yore” »
|
May 8th, 2013, By Sebastian Bennett 
I got a job out of college at a think tank that had as its deputy director a twenty-something wunderkind. I had met many intelligent people before, but he was in a class of his own. The Ivy League-educated dynamo could quote at length Shakespeare and Thucydides, and uncannily rattle off relevant statistics to drive home a point. He was ludicrously precocious. He was also an asshole. His extraordinary intellect was not unaffected but rather the opposite, a cudgel that he’d use to bludgeon those mere mortals in his company. He made sure you didn’t forget that he was brighter than you—ever.
Continue reading “Upwardly Mobile Assholes” »
|
May 5th, 2013, By David Gottfried 
I knew an ignorant woman, a self-described devotee of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, who contended that we had to assume a fierce and aggressive stance against the “Muslim world” lest they destroy the West. For her there was only one Muslim world. She was blind to the numerous divisions among the followers of Islam, between Iraq and Iran, between Shiites and Sunnis, etc. It never occurred to her that if we failed to distinguish between Muslims and were to blindly strike out against Muslims in general, we only strengthen their animus towards us.
Continue reading “If We Were to exit from Iraq & Afghanistan” »
|
May 2nd, 2013, By Ed Rampell 
Following the Boston Marathon bombing the new rightwing mantra is “radicalization.” French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ new feature Something in the Air is about the process of radicalization — but by revolution, not religion. Set shortly after France’s historic worker-student mass strike of May 1968 Air’s politicized protagonists encounter anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists and the counterculture as the young militants come of age when, as Assayas says, “everything was political” and many of his generation felt that world revolution was imminent. With this film and his 2010 epic Carlos — about the Venezuelan terrorist known as “Carlo the Jackal” — Assayas shows he is one of the planet’s top political directors. Ed Rampell interviewed Assayas at, of all places, Beverly Hills after an advance screening of Something in the Air which — appropriately — opens after May Day on May 3.
Continue reading “Olivier Assayas Interview: Changing the World Through Cinema” »
|
|
|
April 25th, 2013, By Matthew Callahan 
My generation has many labels: Millennial. Generation Y. The Internet Generation. While not particularly creative or descriptive, these monikers at least fare better than my favorite (worst) sobriquet:
The Entitled Generation.
As if our parents all collectively woke up one day, sipped on their morning mugs of coffee, turned to us and said, "Be good at school today, learn as much as you can, and oh, by the way, the world owes you something. Expect it to be bountiful, and handed to you with zero effort on your part."
Continue reading “Entitled” »
|
April 22nd, 2013, By Sebastian Bennett 
Anthony Weiner is back. The voluble former New York congressman and notorious crotch-texter is plotting his political comeback. “I don’t have this burning, overriding desire to go out and run for office,” he told the New York Times. “It’s not the single animating force in my life as it was for quite some time. But I do recognize, to some degree,” he added in a veritable declaration of his candidacy, “it’s now or maybe never for me, in terms of running for something.”
Weiner may be a nasty piece of work—his own brother calls out his “douchiness”— but he’s not nuts for envisioning himself in Gracie Mansion, the seat of New York’s Mayor. He’s got a good shot at electoral redemption less than two years after “Weinergate.” A recent poll of registered Democrats conducted by Marist College/NBC News found Weiner running second in the mayoral race.
Continue reading “No More Second Acts!” »
|
April 19th, 2013, By C. Mark Walker 
According to the Mayo Clinic, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is “a combination of problems, such as difficulty sustaining attention, hyperactivity and impulsive behavior.” Boys are most frequently targeted with the diagnosis. What we need to do is evaluate what constitutes a diagnosis, and what its ramifications are.
Our education system treats children’s innately energetic nature as a behavior that requires modification. ADHD is defined by a series of ten personality characteristics that, more or less, are entirely subjective. That’s not to say ADHD isn’t real, but maybe it’s not as prevalent as we think. Is it impossible to imagine dealing differently with what in most cases is an “exercise” problem rather than a mental pathology?
Continue reading “ADHD Nation” »
|
April 15th, 2013, By Jeff Zavadil 
I'm a liberal, a progressive, some would even call me a socialist. And I don't stay awake at night thinking of ways to take your freedom.
I don't stay awake planning a war on Christmas. Or Easter, either.
I don't stay awake thinking of ways to give your money to lazy people.
I don't stay awake plotting how to ruin families.
I don't stay awake thinking of how to drive the country into bankruptcy.
Continue reading “Dear Conservative” »
|
|
April 9th, 2013, By David Gottfried 
Conservatives never tire of telling us that this country needs more tax cuts. They speak to us as if we were in grammar school, advising us that if a business taxes were cut the private sector would invest more, build things, hire people, and we’d all be better off.
Continue reading “Why Not Raise Business Taxes?” »
|
April 4th, 2013, By Sebastian Bennett 
Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on same-sex marriage in the coming months, it’s clear that gays and lesbians in America will inevitably enjoy complete spousal rights. The arc of the country’s history bends towards the full enfranchisement of one and all. Equality is a truth we hold to be self-evident—eventually.
Continue reading “Our Brand is “Freedom”” »
|
|
|
March 28th, 2013, By C. Mark Walker 
It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. – Abraham Lincoln, 1858
Continue reading “Slavery by any Other Name” »
|
|
From Facebook
- 4 days ago
- 2 weeks ago
- 2 weeks ago
3 weeks ago - 3 weeks ago
- 4 weeks ago
- 1 month ago
- 1 month ago
The Daily ‘Dis
Here's some thoughts on the ghastly British class system by Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, a labor leader in Israel who served in a POW camp in WWII with Britons from the upper crust of that society:
"They [regular Brits] were almost of a different nation [than the Oxbridge set with whom he was incarcerated]. My estimation of them was the same as that of the British themselves: They were colonial elements no one had any use for, trash with which England filled the empty spaces of the world. But there are two Englands.” There still is, though to a lesser degree.
|
Loading ...
Recent Comments