Hitler in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” (1935), a “documentary” largely staged. Credit: The Film Preserve
Uh huh…a major buzzkill. But, it happened. Uh huh…yeah. Translation not necessary. Only the stamped memory and awareness of what followed. The 4:43 trailer is all but enough to watch, but there’s nearly two hours more of it in the finished film, reflecting the near decade of real life horror. A cold look at history would show this is just another serving of humanity’s dark side, spanning nothing less than centuries more of equal atrocities. What do we do with that, then?
Critics Consensus: Triumph of the Will is impossible to separate from its repugnant political context — and impossible to deny as a powerfully made piece of cinematic propaganda.
Understanding Iran and global relations is not a laughing matter, and should never be reduced to a series of smarmy jokes and cheap laughs, but, if your attention span is not geared to digging into the history and politics of this region and U.S. behavior towards it, at least invest twenty minutes in John Oliver’s take.
Still, the best thing on comedy commentary TV. John Oliver stands alone in providing vigorously instructive, educational and funny content on national and world affairs.
A crowd in central Damascus waves flags and portraits in support of President Bashar Assad on Monday, two days after the U.S., Britain and France carried out airstrikes. The photo was released by the official Syrian news agency SANA.-AP
Dear Greg Myre of NPR:
Your article has a good headline, but you write almost nothing that actually answers the question you posed. It’s very difficult to do, but you could’ve tried. You did not, and that’s the problem with current mainstream journalism. It does not provide depth of analysis to complicated world problems. Even respectable outlets like NPR, apparently, are not raising the bar on their writers to go deeper.
Good news sources exist that do provide viable explanations and historical perspective of the Middle East quagmires, and other intractable conflicts around the globe, as well as, complicated national issues, but too many people never read those sources, because they are not deeply interested enough. So, it’s left to mainstream disseminators to inform most of the public what’s going on around them. Unfortunately, they don’t do a good enough job, and that is yet another topic that needs deeper discussion.
President Trump called Syrian leader Bashar Assad a “monster” on Friday night as he announced airstrikes to punish Assad for an apparent chemical weapons attack against Syrian civilians.
On Saturday morning, a tweet by the Syrian Presidency account showed a video of Assad walking into the presidential palace in Damascus wearing a dark suit and tie, briefcase in hand — business as usual.
By Sunday night, the White House issued a statement stressing that the U.S. would not be drawn into the wider war.
“The U.S. mission has not changed — the president has been clear that he wants U.S. forces to come home as quickly as possible,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said.
This past weekend was emblematic of the way the U.S. and much of the world have dealt with Assad since Syria’s devastating civil war erupted in 2011: harsh criticism and occasional action, but no sustained effort that’s come close to ousting him.
“Given that the Western strikes in Syria were about chemical weapons and nothing more, it is no surprise that Syria’s President Assad was reported to be in a good mood,” Middle East analyst Robert Danin wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations. “Assad now has further reason to feel confident that the United States will not work to topple his regime.”
I have lots of company joining me, exhausted with the ongoing news cycles for the last year and a half. It’s not subsiding any time soon. I’m thinking years. Given the American culture, and habits of, news reporting, its consumption, buying it, selling it, sponsoring it, and distributing it, I see an almost constant peaking of news events on any, and every, level and scale, offered up almost daily, with no breather.
The comic parodies mocking the overwrought “Breaking News” interruption on cable news have long lost their humor yield. In real life, it’s exhausting, and almost surreal. There literally has not been a break from “breaking news.”
Maybe I’m just feeling vulnerable, but it feels like events are getting really serious now. There’s a convergence of multiple news happenings, any one of which alone, has global implications, coming up in days, or weeks, maybe a month, that’s going to put a collective hurt on the people, the governments, and the infrastructure in this country. It feels party-less, like, what could be about to happen, is about to mutate into a life of its own, with tentacles, and reach beyond where any forces fighting it, on either side of the oceans, can ever extend. A soulless enemy of cancerous mistrust that we made together as humanity into an incurable disease.
The U.S. power grid has been targeted before by hackers. Assessing the risk is years old, but now they’re officially in, and we’re sitting ducks. It is already known, that the level of consequence to the U.S. today, right now, would be colossal. Based on that fact alone, we are in big, big trouble. Grand-spectacle-wise, we lose any war before it even starts. Period. Done. Well-Done.
Three articles below. All chilling. Make special note of the Vocative article, from April 2017.
China’s ban means recycling is piling up at Rogue Waste System in southern Oregon. Employees Scott Fowler, Laura Leebrick and Garry Penning say their only option for now is to send it to a landfill. > Jes Burns/OPB/EarthFix
How ironic, that China, who has been caught red handed tainting everything from pet food to pharmaceuticals, and vitamin and herb supplements, has become oh-so-picky about its recycled imports.
American households, businesses, municipalities do not do a good enough job recycling. Whether its by using outdated inefficient methods for separating, or, by not doing it anywhere near the volume we could be with real dedication. Here in Hamden, there are large communities that do single stream recycling. All kinds of crap thrown in the supposed recycling dumpsters. Really pathetic. Nobody cares. Nobody’s fined. Nobody’s accountable. There’s no excuse for towns to allow single stream recycling anymore. This is a lazy and wasteful cop-out approach to recycling.
Garbage is a daunting issue awaiting us that will eventually cause major global eco stress. Meantime, here’s an impressive video on robotics tackling the sorting challenge…
Recycling Chaos In U.S. As China Bans ‘Foreign Waste’
Like many Portland residents, Satish and Arlene Palshikar are serious recyclers. Their house is coated with recycled bluish-white paint. They recycle their rainwater, compost their food waste and carefully separate the paper and plastic they toss out. But recently, after loading up their Prius and driving to a sorting facility, they got a shock.
If you understand just a tiny bit about Brexit, you know its parallel to what’s happening politically in the U.S. Beyond that, trying to dissect the impact, now, and going forward, is a long, certainly stressful, and perhaps unnecessary conversation, until effective UK leadership develops and shows their hand.
I’ve lived through enough profoundly radical events in my life, on our national, and global stages, that witnessing yet another, doesn’t cut much deeper to my bone than any of the others. Not anymore.
What I do feel, is that political and economic systems around the world need to be re-worked to effectively address a global reality that cannot be set aside while constitutional, or parliamentary debates slog along with nothing to show. This imperative doesn’t even include a plan on how to deal (or not deal) with repressive authoritarian regimes, and war torn theocracies. That is another conversation, but no less important.
In relative terms, the world’s more stable governments, and peoples, have a big task on their hands, and lots of work to do. The only way they can do this work, is with unity and a sense of shared mission. The supposed goal of the EU.
I can sit here and paint a bleak picture for the world, or even a single government to start holding hands. It certainly has no hopeful signs from the past. Maybe the process of getting there is exactly what Brexit will turn out to be, what the current craziness in the U.S., and in other countries could turn out to be. I could make this case. I’m not sure I want to make any other.
Tony Blair’s Op-ed below is a good read.
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Tony Blair: Brexit’s Stunning Coup
By Tony Blair
June 24, 2016
10 Downing Street on Friday morning.
I was a British prime minister who believed completely that Britain’s future lay in Europe. I was the prime minister responsible for legislating substantial self-rule in Scotland so that it would remain part of the United Kingdom. I negotiated the Good Friday Agreement so that Northern Ireland could be at peace within Britain. Because the result of the referendum has put so much of this at risk, Friday became a day of great personal, as well as political, sadness.
The immediate impact of the Brexit vote is economic. The fallout has been as swift as it was predictable. At one point on Friday, the pound hit a 30-year low against the dollar, and a leading British stock index had dropped more than 8 percent. The nation’s credit rating is under threat.
The lasting effect, however, may be political, and with global implications. If the economic shocks continue, then the British experiment will serve as a warning. But if they abate, then populist movements in other countries will gain momentum.
How did this happen? The right in British politics found an issue that’s causing palpitations in the body politic the world over: immigration. Part of the Conservative Party, allied with the far-right U.K. Independence Party, took this issue and focused its campaign to leave Europe on it. This strategy could not have succeeded, though, without finding common cause with a significant segment of Labour voters.
These Labour supporters did not get a clear message from their own party, whose leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was lukewarm about remaining in the union. They were drawn by the Leavers’ promise that Brexit would bring an end to the country’s perceived immigration problems. And, worried about their flatlining incomes and cuts in public spending, these Labour voters saw this vote as an opportunity to register an anti-government protest.
The strains within Britain that led to this referendum result are universal, at least in the West. Insurgent movements of left and right, posing as standard-bearers of a popular revolt against the political establishment, can spread and grow at scale and speed. Today’s polarized and fragmented news coverage only encourages such insurgencies — an effect magnified many times by the social media revolution.
It was already clear before the Brexit vote that modern populist movements could take control of political parties. What wasn’t clear was whether they could take over a country like Britain. Now we know they can.
Those in the political center were demonized as out-of-touch elites, as though the people leading the insurgency were ordinary folks — which, in the case of the Brexit campaign, is a laughable proposition. The campaign made the word “expert” virtually a term of abuse, and when experts warned of the economic harm that would follow Brexit, they were castigated as “scaremongers.” Immigrants were described as a bunch of scroungers coming to grab Britons’ jobs and benefits when, in reality, the recent migrants from Eastern Europe contribute far more in taxes than they take in welfare payments. And besides, immigration to Britain from outside the European Union will not be affected by the referendum decision.
The political center has lost its power to persuade and its essential means of connection to the people it seeks to represent. Instead, we are seeing a convergence of the far left and far right. The right attacks immigrants while the left rails at bankers, but the spirit of insurgency, the venting of anger at those in power and the addiction to simple, demagogic answers to complex problems are the same for both extremes. Underlying it all is a shared hostility to globalization.
Britain and Europe now face a protracted period of economic and political uncertainty, as the British government tries to negotiate a future outside the single market where half of Britain’s goods and services are traded. These new arrangements — to be clear about the scale of the challenge — must be negotiated with all the other 27 countries, their individual parliaments and the European Parliament. Some governments may be cooperative; others won’t want to make leaving easy for Britain, in order to discourage similar movements.
Britain is a strong country, with a resilient people and energy and creativity in abundance. I don’t doubt Britons’ capacity to come through, whatever the cost. But the stress on the United Kingdom is already apparent.
Voters in Scotland chose by a large margin to remain in Europe, with the result that there are renewed calls for another referendum on Scottish independence. Northern Ireland has benefited from virtually open borders with the Republic of Ireland. That freedom is at risk because the North’s border with the South now becomes the European Union’s border, a potential threat to the Northern Ireland peace process.
If the people — usually a repository of common sense and practicality — do something that appears neither sensible nor practical, then it forces a period of long and hard reflection. My own politics is waking to this new political landscape. The same dangerous impulses are visible, too, in American politics, but the challenges of globalization cannot be met by isolationism or shutting borders.
The center must regain its political traction, rediscover its capacity to analyze the problems we all face and find solutions that rise above the populist anger. If we do not succeed in beating back the far left and far right before they take the nations of Europe on this reckless experiment, it will end the way such rash action always does in history: at best, in disillusion; at worst, in rancorous division. The center must hold.
Tony Blair was the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from 1997 to 2007.
