First, the story. From Daniela Altimari of the Hartford Courant:
FOX CT apologized Wednesday for airing what it called “inappropriate file footage” of women during a Morning News report on Women’s Day at the state Capitol.
“The video should never have aired,” the company said in a statement. “FOX CT will publicly apologize on today’s newscasts, as well as through our social media platforms. We are also implementing procedures to keep this from happening in the future.”
The footage, of fully clothed women, focused on their breasts and drew immediate criticism on Facebook, Twitter and other online news sites.
Australian comedians John Clarke and Brian Dawe [previously] explain some of the history of the ins and outs of today’s today’s European political game:
UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST (2011)
Detourned by The Anti-Banality Union. 65 mins. U.SS.A.
Amerikan with some Arabic.
Unclear Holocaust is a feature-length autopsy of Hollywood’s New York-destruction fantasy, gleaned from over fifty major studio event-movies and detourned into one relentless orgy of representational genocide. It is the unrivaled assembly of the greatest amount of capital and private property heretofore captured in one frame, that, with unfathomable narrative efficacy, suicides itself in an annihilatory flux of fire, water, and aeronautics.
“A Terrorist film collective hijacks the U.S. propaganda apparatus and detonates it over New York. Everything is obliterated and the world celebrates. Through fifty studio event-movies abstracted of all demokratic variation, we see the Cinema as it really is; an unequivocal annihilation, the auto-genocidal mass fantasy of a megalomaniacally depressed First World. Every screen is lifted and bares the obscene underside of all these images. Movements of character and narrative burst into pure and mechanically perfect propulsions of a psychotic camera from which all this violence emanates. The Mise-En-Scene becomes an inventory of the dominant visual-auditory arsenal, enumerating and measuring the power of every weapon available to the Spectacle. Utilizing them all with paradigmatic rigor, the Hollywood-Military complex launches an endless pre-emptive attack on its own shadow, the Terrorist. And, as in all encounters between doubles, the former ends up joyously suiciding itself.” -A.B.U. Communique #1
“When I first heard of Unclear Holocaust, the debut project of nebulous situationist art collective The Anti-Banality Union, my initial impression was that these impious troublemakers would fully deserve the inevitable fatwa that will be vexed upon them. However, after viewing part of the work, which reconstitutes scenes from over 50 Hollywood New York City disaster porn films into a more or less coherent narrative, I am pleased to report it is a rather damning yet thoughtful–and dare I say hilarious and enjoyable?–reminder of how bad Hollywood had pushed this scenario. (In cinematic terms, what is 9/11, after all, other than all three* Die Hard movies–exploding tower, exploding airplane, exploding New York City–rolled into one?) “The Spectacle of Terrorism forces the Terrorism of Spectacle upon us…” the ABU wrote me in this mysterious, Frankfurt School-inspired communique. I’m reminded of the remarks Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw shared on 9/11 the other day:
‘Perhaps the whole point of 9/11 was that it could never be represented on the cinema screen. The diabolic, situationist genius of the kamikaze attacks was that they were themselves a kind of counter-cinema, a spectacle very possibly inspired by the art-form, but rendering obsolete any comparable fictions it had to offer. The 9/11 attacks smashed Hollywood’s monopoly on myth-making and image production, and inspiring as they did only horror and revenge, aimed a devastating blow at imagination, and maybe for a while enfeebled the reputation of cinema and all the arts.’
Thankfully for the ABU, Hollywood pulled its shit together and made Nicolas Cage apocalypse thriller Knowing, providing Unclear Holocaust about half its runtime.” -ScreenSlate.com
A stunning documentary from The Guardian about the secret presence behind reigns of violence in Latin America and Iraq:
The program notes:
A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services.
From Britain’s Channel 4, a short, disturbing portrait of the neo-Nazi party that has gained in popularity in Greece as the economic crisis deepens:
The program notes:
Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn is increasingly influential among members of the country’s political mainstream. Student Konstantinos Georgousis filmed party members on the streets of Athens.ational Film and Television School student Konstantinos Georgousis spent a month with the organisation last summer, as Greece hovered on the abyss, for his documentary film The Cleaners.Writing about his experience of making the film, Mr Georgousis says: “I walked through every nook and cranny in the centre of Athens to find these Golden Dawn members.
Keep Talking Greece reports today on what happened next:
The tolerance towards the incredible racism expressed by members of extreme-right party Golden Dawn was of very short duration. Hours after the video started to flood Greek media and internet sites, police intervened and sent the excerpts from the documentary broadcast on UK Channel 4 News to the prosecutor.
The Department against Racial Violence of Greek Police sent some excerpts from the documentary to the prosecutor in Athens.
“In the excerpts sent to prosecutor, an MP candidate for the parliament elections on the list of Golden Dawn speaks about migrants with threatening expressions such as “We are ready to open the ovens. Because soaps are nice… “Soaps to wash the cars, soaps to clean the sidewalks…, “some table lamps out of their skin…”, “take some teeth…” (o Vima )
According to SKAI TV, authorities are seeking the MP-candidate, while the prosecutor asked to watch the whole documentary. The politician in spe could face felony charges for violating the racism law.
Greek student Konstantinos Georgousis filmed “The Cleaners -the true face of Golden Dawn” during summer 2012. He spent a month going through the streets of Athens.
The government’s announcement, from Venezuelan TV via Britain’s Channel 4:
From the BBC:
An emotional Nicolas Maduro made the announcement on Tuesday evening, flanked by leading Venezuelan political and military leaders.Earlier, he said the 58-year-old Venezuelan leader had a new, severe respiratory infection and had entered “his most difficult hours”.
He also announced the government had expelled two US diplomats from the country for spying on Venezuela’s military.
>snip<
He said he had no doubt that Mr Chavez’s cancer, first diagnosed in 2011, had been induced by foul play by Venezuela’s enemies.
Then consider this from the Chris Kraul and Mery Mogollon of the Los Angeles Times:
Chavez won the lower classes’ support by redistributing the nation’s vast oil wealth through welfare programs called missions, which set up medical clinics and schools, operated a chain of cut-rate grocery stores, and divvied up nationalized farms and ranches among cooperatives of the impoverished.
Daniel Hellinger, a political science professor at Webster University in St. Louis, said the welfare programs reduced Venezuela’s poverty rate from close to 80% in the 1990s to about 20%, and wiped out illiteracy.
“To millions of poor Venezuelans excluded from meaningful participation in politics, Chavez offered hope for a new kind of democracy that would open doors of government to them,” Hellinger said. “However much the system fell short of that aspiration, it was Chavez who gave voice to it.”
A report from The Real News Network featuring John Weeks, professor emeritus at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, and Jennifer Taub, associate professor of law at Vermont Law School.
From vlogger politizane, a stunning visualization of wealth inequality based on research by researchers Michael I. Norton [Harvard] and Dan Ariely [Duke] reported in “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” published in Perspectives on Psychological Science [PDF].
It doesn’t get much better than this: Glenn Gould on and Leonard Rose on cello offering a unique 1960 rendition of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major, Opus 69.
From The Truthseeker, a new feature from Russia’s RT, a distinctly downbeat and flagrantly factual account of America’s sad transformation into the basket case of the industrial West:
An amazing just-released video from NASA that offers both compelling imagery and a humbling reminder of our place in the scale of things. Click on the gear symbol, raise the quality level to 1080, then pop up to full screen for the full, majestic impact:
From NASA:
Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.
On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced all three. A moderately powerful solar flare exploded on the sun’s lower right hand limb, sending out light and radiation. Next came a CME, which shot off to the right out into space. And then, the sun treated viewers to one of its dazzling magnetic displays — a phenomenon known as coronal rain.
Over the course of the next day, hot plasma in the corona cooled and condensed along strong magnetic fields in the region. Magnetic fields, themselves, are invisible, but the charged plasma is forced to move along the lines, showing up brightly in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 304 Angstroms, which highlights material at a temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin. This plasma acts as a tracer, helping scientists watch the dance of magnetic fields on the sun, outlining the fields as it slowly falls back to the solar surface.
The footage in this video was collected by the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s AIA instrument. SDO collected one frame every 12 seconds, and the movie plays at 30 frames per second, so each second in this video corresponds to 6 minutes of real time. The video covers 12:30 a.m. EDT to 10:00 p.m. EDT on July 19, 2012.
Music: “Thunderbolt” by Lars Leonhard, courtesy of artist.
From The Real News Network, a Paul Jay interview with Sasha Breger Bush, lecturer at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. She describes her specialty as “International political economy, development studies, global financial markets, food and farming, and political theory.
Perhaps the most brilliant guitarist ever, Django Reinhardt [previously] has proven an exemplar to many of today’s masters of the six-string. And he did it with a right left hand [see comments] with only three functional fingers [the ring and pinkie fingers were rendered immobile in his youth by a fire in his gypsy caravan].
His Quintette du Hot Club de France created some of the most memorable jazz and swing recordings of of the 1930s and 1940s, continuing even under the Nazi occupation of Paris, when “gypsies” [members of the Roma and Sinti peoples] along with Jews were marked for death.
The group consisted of Reinhardt as lead guitar, Eugène Vées as second guitar, Hubert Rostaing on clarinet, Emmanuel Soudieux on bass, and Pierre Fouad on drums. But a key player on many recordings was violinist Stéphane Grappelli, a man whose skills were almost as great as Reinhardt’s.
Struggling with the ongoing nausea of chemotherapy, we find solace in Reinhardt’s music, and we suspect his tunes will get your toes a-tappin’ as well.
So on with the show. . .
Charleston
Chicago
Ain’t Misbehavin’
The Sheik of Araby
Georgia On My Mind with vocal by Freddy Taylor
All of Me
Stardust
Improvisation on Bach with Grappelli and violinist Eddie South
A classic performed here in Demark in 1967 and written in 1965 — during another moment of crisis in the Catholic church — the song styling of Tom Lehrer, retired UC Santa Cruz mathematician and inventor of the Jello Shot:
First, a message seeming tailored just for esnl — and anyone else undergoing cisplatin chemotherapy:
We had our second Double Whammy session with the peculiarly nasty cisplatin and the less nasty gemcitabine last Tuesday [5 February], and it was a helluva lot worse than our first, with the worst side effects starting a day sooner and ending two days later than our first session.
We back for the first of two gemcitabine-only sessions yesterday [12 February], where we learned that cisplatin’s side effects tend to worsen with each new round.
Marty Robbins seems to be singing about our experience in a song we’ve loved since we first heard it in a trailer in Alamosa, Colorado, so many decades ago:
When the worst of its upon us, another Country song comes to mind.
From Hank Williams and The Drifting Cowboys:
But when the funk lifts, we’re reminded of another Country classic, from Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys:
We’ve got two more cisplatin and gemcitabine Double Whammy sessions coming up, and five more gemcitabine-only sessions.
After that, it’s periodic checkups for any recurrence of that nasty and very aggressive micropapillary carcinoma that cost us our bladder and spread to at least one lymph node. Our other cancer, adenoma of the prostate, hadn’t metastcized, and was resolved with the organ’s removal at the smae time the bladder went.
But what the hell. Let’s close on an upbeat tune, another Bob Wills classic recorded in 1936:
A 1979 documentary directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer features a remarkable series of interviews with veterans of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World — a remarkable and brutally suppressed effort to create a new form of union.
What’s especially delightful is the youthful, enduring spirit that shines through the aging faces and resonates through their voices as they recall their participation in a movement that had given them a vision of a brighter, more harmonious future:.
And note also that the movement was destroyed in an early 20th Century version of the war on terror in which the activists were portrayed as slaves of an alien ideology deserving of the application of extrajudicial military force and none of the constitutional rights that would apply did crisis not prevail.
The footage, of fully clothed women, focused on their breasts and drew immediate criticism on Facebook, Twitter and other online news sites.
