film review

Two distinctly different Americans with distinctly similar, independent thinking and progressive values passed away last week. The great accounting professor Abraham Briloff (age 96) who relentlessly and brilliantly took apart the failures of his profession to insist on honest and ethical corporate accounting, and Tom Laughlin (age 82), the jolting producer and star of the Billy Jack films who broke the Hollywood industry’s rules with sagas of fighting for justice.

Peter O’Toole has died and I’d like to draw a little attention to three of his movies: The Ruling Class, The Stunt Man and My Favorite Year.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.
— Eduardo Galeano

What do you think of this as an argument to use when speaking to those who don’t accept the idea that extreme weather phenomena are man-made?
Well, we can proceed in one of two ways:

This documentary 9/11 in the Academic Community by the producer and filmmaker Adnan Zuberi was bestowed with the “Documentary Achievement Award” at this year’s University of Toronto Film Festival. The documentary focuses on the surprising reluctance of the academic community to examine the events of September 11, 2001. Virtually the entire academic community adopted immediately and uncritically the official narrative about these events. Academics did not ask some of the most elementary questions: What happened on that day?

It remains one of the most exquisite concerts ever filmed. My friend Rich and I fantasized about buying tickets when sales were announced in the early fall of 1976. We sat in his apartment near the University of Maryland’s College Park campus doing bong hits and running scenarios about getting to the show. Should we try and get a friend in San Francisco to buy us tickets, then buy a cheap plane ticket or should we just buy a beater car and drive across country hoping to find a reasonable scalper? There were no phone sales of tickets in those days, much less anything online.

The series Homeland is now in its third season. Apparently the once flagship drama for Showtime, has hit the ratings skids this season, but not critically, and that remains troubling. This is an overtly, nakedly, proudly, racist bit of police state propaganda. That’s in no way hyperbole. The show never misses a chance to stigmatize the standard villains of the day (as if Dick Cheney, Bibi Netanyahu, and Eric Holder were script advisers), while valorizing and justifying torture, entrapment, illegal surveillance (I know, quaint idea), and racial profiling.

People should oppose GMOs for a myriad of reasons based on:
1) the precautionary principle