Stand in Arlington when you make your pitch for war

My Sunday “movie” was the Oscar ceremony. It was sufficiently entertaining – Conan O’Brien did a decent job and there was some good banter by the presenters. But there were only two performances of the nominated songs and I haven’t watched and don’t intend to watch most of the films nominated for Best Picture, especially Sinners and One Battle After Another, both of which got several awards (I did see and enjoy Hamnet and pleased Jessie Buckley won Best Actress). I did enjoy seeing Koreans take the Best Song, though I pay little attention to K-Pop. In all, a decent evening. Jessica Kutz, in an article for The 19th posted on Daily Kos, discussed several ways women are pushing the movie industry to be more sustainable. Sheila Morovati is pushing the studios to modify scripts to promote sustainable behaviors, such as having characters carrying reusable water bottles, taking reusable bags into a store, having characters walk or carpool instead of drive alone, have characters eat a vegan meal, or just put a vegan restaurant in the background. Morovati has worked through Universal to do such things as use hybrid and electric vehicles to transport cast and crew (and show EVs on screen) and donate materials, such as wood and costume fabric, when shooting is done. Allison Begalman started the Hollywood Climate Summit to help the industry learn how to be part of the climate crisis solution. The inaugural program took place online and attracted 15,000 people. The summit is now a place where climate people and entertainment people can mix. One result is a Grey’s Anatomy episode that demonstrated how extreme heat could strain a hospital. Idea placement has worked before, such s Mothers Against Drunk Driving getting shows to feature designated drivers, which was credited with reducing traffic fatalities in the 1990s. Hillary Cohen was shocked at the food waste at some shows, so created an organization to take unused food to organizations that help people facing food insecurity. Last year they moved 140,000 of food. She has added picking up things like furniture and kitchen appliances bought for commercial shoots but not needed after two or three days. The war in Iran rages on. Hannah Allam, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos, reported on the civilian casualties of the war, especially the bombing of the elementary school in Minab where the death toll has passed 165. And...

[Air Force combat veteran Wes J.] Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack. Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator. Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.

Threadreader has a thread by Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut on four current crises: First, The nasty guy believed Iran would not close the Strait of Hormuz, stopping the flow of oil, though Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told him the closure was possible. Second, a conventional war might destroy all of Iran’s missiles, but this is a drone war and there is no way to destroy all of those. The drones are quite effective. Third, Iranian proxies are attacking Israel. This has prompted Israel to attack Lebanon. An attack on Syria could cause it to explode again. Four, the nasty guy has no endgame. Escalate and there will be thousands of dead Americans. Declare victory and go home and the Iranian hardliners simply rebuild. NPR host Mary Louise Kelly spoke to NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre and White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez. The nasty guy has been calling on other countries to help the US to open the Strait of Hormuz and get oil flowing again. They are declining to assist, giving a blend of reasons: It’s not their war. It is a dangerous mission. The nasty guy didn’t consult with them before he started the war. European leaders are concentrating on the war in Ukraine. And he has been insulting them regularly. Back in the 1980s the US did escort ships out through the Strait of Hormuz. But warfare is different now, mostly because of drones. Escort ships just become another target. Also, 20 US ships would need a long time to escort the more than 1,000 ships in the Gulf. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted ABC News:

Oil is a leading cause of modern-day war—with between one-quarter and one-half of interstate wars between 1973 and 2007 linked to oil, an analysis published in the journal International Security said.

I don’t know why the report stopped at 2007. A lot of wars since then have also been over oil. More of the quote:

The war with Iran, and the disruption to energy markets caused by the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, should trigger nations to a swifter exit from fossil fuel dependence, Simon ⁠Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told Reuters in an interview on Monday. "If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, ​breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time," Stiell said.

In last Friday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer discussing the North Vietnamese taking over Saigon, ending a war that had caused 58,000 American troop deaths.

The legendary then-NBC newsman David Brinkley wrote a commentary on what had just happened, and then went with a camera crew to the rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery where so many of the war dead were buried. “When some future politician, for some reason, feels the need to drag this country into a war, he might come out to Arlington and stand right over there somewhere to make his announcement and to tell what he has in mind,” Brinkley said. “If he can attract public support speaking from a place like this, then his reasons for starting a new war would have to be good ones.”

The nasty guy didn’t bother with public support. For my friend and debate partner is a little bit from Quanta magazine. Georg Cantor is famous for an 1874 paper discussing different sizes of infinity. It seems in the year before Cantor had corresponded with Richard Dedekind who had helped Cantor understand infinity. So did Cantor plagiarize Dedekind? In the comments is a cartoon by Drew Sheneman showing a military ops room where a soldier tells a superior, “We tried recruiting ICE agents to fight in Iran but all 20,000 came down with a wicked case of sudden onset bone spurs.” Another reason I heard is that Iran shoots back. A cartoon by Clay Bennett shows a man filling up his gas tank and glancing at the sign by the street that says, “Prices Don’t Ask.” In Saturday’s roundup Dworkin quoted a tweet by First Squawk:

TRUMP SAYS ON IRANIAN SLEEPER CELLS: THERE COULD BE MORE THAN 1,700

Jon Aguiar responded:

We spent the last 9 months raiding Home Depot parking lots instead of arresting anyone from the massive network of Iranian terrorist cells?

Daniel Dale of CNN discussed a Republican release of an AI deepfake of Texas Democratic candidate for Senate James Talarico that is quite good.

The use of AI deepfakes in campaign advertising raises a host of ethical questions. It has also prompted some bipartisan calls for federal legislation or regulation on the practice, though those ideas have also faced pushback on First Amendment grounds.

An article on Reuters reported that Pope Leo has been calling for an end to the violence in Iran and also saying Christians who start wars should go to confession. Leo didn’t name anyone, but several in the nasty guy’s administration, including the vice nasty and Sec. of State Marco Rubio, are Catholic. In the comments is a cartoon by Toonerman:

Sen. Lindsey Graham: “I go back to South Carolina, I’m askin’ them to sen their sons and daughters to the Mideast.” Make Trump Proud! A woman: Or, Lindsey, why don’t you and the rest of the Washington War Pigs go and fight your own damn war.

The Wolfpack posted a meme showing a lion, elephant, giraffe, zebra, and two green skin aliens watching planes shoot missiles at buildings. One of the aliens says, “Humans are really stupid.” In the comments of Monday’s roundup exlrrp posted a tweet by BBC Breaking News:

US President Donald Trump urges UK and other nations to send ships to help secure key Strait of Hormuz oil trade route

Jamie Carroll of Canada responded:

The owner of the largest Navy in the history of the world would like sailors from other countries to die in a war he started without consulting anyone. Pass, thanks.

A story that’s been going around and getting a lot of lampooning is of the nasty guy giving many of the men of his administration a pair of his favorite Florsheim shoes – without asking for shoe size. Rubio has been seen wearing shoes too big for him because none of them men want to displease the nasty guy by not wearing his gift. In among the created images spoofing Rubio’s shoes and clothes is one posted by exlrrp. It is an AI generated meme of Rubio steering a pirate ship that looks like a shoe. The caption says, “Breaking News. Captain Marco Littlefoot volunteers to lead oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Convoys instructed to maintain heel-to-toe formation.” Emily Singer of Kos reported on Monday that the nasty guy is realizing the Iran war won’t be the quick venture he had assumed and is now lashing out. This post has details of his request to NATO for assistance and being rebuffed. There are also details of the nasty guy’s attempts to silence any media that doesn’t report on the war in glowing terms. Perhaps media companies learned from extensive reporting of Bush II lies for invading Iraq? Now many outlets are reporting the nasty guy’s miscalculations.

Every warship launched signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed

I watched the Oscars last evening. I was delighted to see the movie CODA won in all three categories for which it had been nominated. These were Troy Kotsur for best supporting actor, Siân Heder for best adapted screenplay, and best picture. I quite enjoyed the movie when I saw it and pleased a movie about deaf people and one of its deaf actors were so highly honored. Best supporting actress went to Ariana Debose who played Anita in the new version of West Side Story. She is a lesbian. A lot of posts on Daily Kos are about how bad the Russian army has been in its invasion of Ukraine. Mark Sumner discussed the 1962 book The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. It won a Pulitzer Prize. The general idea that Sumner pulled from the book is that the Russian army has always been terrible. As for their victories... In the case of Napoleon it was the weather. In many other cases it is because Russia is willing to put up with losing a much higher number of soldiers. They keep piling up the Russian dead until the other side quits. An autocratic ruler can feed intolerable numbers to the meat grinder without political consequences. Sumner included a tweet by Jack Detsch about another Russian general killed in the war. Detsch wrote that the generals are closer to the front because of the challenges in issuing order, challenges of both technology and discipline. Western estimates say nearly 35% of the generals first sent to the war have been killed. Kos of Kos discussed the importance of rivers in the defense of Ukraine. The cities that Russia hasn’t been able to surround are all next to rivers. And the one that is surrounded, Mariupol, is not near a river. As Ukraine switches to offense those rivers will be more of a hindrance than an asset. Sumner provided an update though a tweet from Dr. Sarah Taber. A lot of people have bee reporting that Ukraine and Russia grow 25% of the world’s wheat exports. What will be missing because of the war will be only 1% of the world’s wheat crop. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed an interview between Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent and historian Timothy Snyder. Wrote Dartagnan:

Snyder believes one of the primary reasons Putin launched this ill-conceived war was a perception that the West—and particularly the U.S.—would fold under the weight of its own internal discord and divisions. The Trump-inspired insurrection that occurred in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021—and the subsequent efforts by Republicans to ignore, sanitize, and whitewash it—provided Putin with the confidence that any U.S. response to his war would simply underscore its innate weakness and impotence.

And Snyder wrote:

But the deeper point is that Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election on Jan. 6 made the American system look fragile. They think, “One more Trump and the Americans are done.” In invading Ukraine, they think they’re putting huge pressure on the Biden administration. They’re going to make Biden look weak. That probably was their deep fantasy about the West: Successful military occupation in Ukraine; the Biden administration is totally impotent; we humiliate them; Trump comes back; this is a big strategic victory for us.

Dartagnan concluded

Trump’s Big Lie and the subsequent lies that have now metastasized through the entire Republican party quite literally provided aid and comfort to Vladimir Putin, bolstering his confidence that he could start an unprovoked war without any serious consequences to himself or his own country. The refusal by Republicans to take responsibility for those events and own up to Trump’s lies gave him all the motivation he needed.

Hunter of Kos discussed another possible reason why Russia seems to be doing little more than reducing cities to rubble.

It is not necessarily that Russian generals are itching, on each battlefield, to turn to war crimes. It's more likely a symptom of entrenched military cowardice. Why are Russian generals firing into Ukrainian cities, at targets that can't and won't fire back? Because it's one of the few logistical operations the grift-riddled, impossibly corrupt military infrastructure can still execute. If you're a Russian general looking to show that you're working hard to achieve implausible Kremlin objectives, parking yourself outside Mariupol or Kharkiv and shelling neighborhoods into wastelands of broken concrete is a no-muss path to, if not glory, at least not being called back to Russia in preparation for your fatal “heart attack.”

Dmitry Muratov of Russia won the Nobel Peace Prize (along with Maria Ressa of the Philippines) in 2021. Both are investigative journalists working to uncover the corruption of their governments. Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote about a couple things related to Muratov. Muratov said he will donate his Nobel medal to the Ukrainian refugee fund so that it can be auctioned off to raise money to help refugees. There have been previous auctions of Nobel medals raising ¾ million to 4¾ million so it could raise a good chunk of money. Muratov founded the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta back in 1993. When Russia invaded Ukraine Muratov and his newspaper were highly critical. Then a new censorship law was passed on March 4. Muratov polled the staff and readers, who wanted him to stay open. A WaPo article reported:

Novaya Gazeta is technically complying with Russia’s new law, but is far from cowed — relying on visual storytelling, firsthand testimony, transparency about omissions, and implied meaning to convey the horror of the war to a Russian readership that can read between the lines. “Listen, I am not going to shoot myself in the foot just to walk away from this information battle,” Muratov said in a telephone interview from Moscow. “When the government wants to shut us down, they’ll shut us down. But I am not going to go against the will of our journalists and our readers and turn the lights off here on my own.”

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, took the anniversary of the death of President Dwight Eisenhower (he died in 1969) to include a quote of his “The Chance for Peace” address of 1953 as posted near his grave:

Every gun made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed... This is not a way of life at all... Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

We’ve seen over and over, and definitely in the last year, Republicans pass a gigantic defense budget, then claim there isn’t enough money to feed, clothe, and shelter the poor. They certainly claim there isn’t enough money to help the poor out of poverty. I’m glad to see Eisenhower figured that out in 1953. With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, Andrej tweeted new words to a G&S song. Here’s the first of three verses:

I am the very model of a Russian Major General My standing in the battlefield is growing quite untenable My forces, though equipped and given orders unequivocal Did not expect the fight to be remotely this reciprocal

Laura Clawson of Kos discussed why Clarence Thomas should resign or be impeached. As I mentioned a couple days ago his wife Ginni Thomas had been exchanging text messages with the White House Chief of Staff discussing how to overturn the 2020 election. A bit more than a year later Clarence Thomas was the only Supreme Court Justice to vote on the side of the nasty guy when he tried to shield documents from the January 6 committee. All the other justices said the nasty guy no longer had executive privilege. Which raises the question – did Clarence vote that way to protect his wife? That’s definitely a conflict of interest. This batch of texts from Ginni were not in the batch of documents that Clarence voted on. But this won’t be the last batch of documents requested by the Jan 6 Committee. And Clarence doesn’t recuse himself from cases were there is a conflict of interest. In one of Greg Dworkin’s pundit roundups for Kos, he quoted Josh Marshall of TPM. It summarizes to: Of course Ginni talked to Clarence about this. Claiming she didn’t is absurd. Rico of the Kos community discussed map projections – some of the ways we project the spherical (mostly) earth onto flat maps. All of these ways distort something, such as shape or size. For example, in many maps Greenland is shown 14 times larger than it really is. These distortions affect how we look at the world. Then Rico presented data I’ve seen before, though it is good to see some of it again. He explained the world population as if there were 100 people in the entire world: 5 would live in North America. 9 would live in in Central and South America. 11 would live in Europe. 15 would live in Africa. 60 would live in Asia. 6 men would not be able to read. 11 women would not be able to read. 15 would be undernourished. Almost half would live on less than $2 a day. 26 are children younger than 15. 13 of those children would live in poverty.

Justice is removing the conditions that allow cops to kill

Over the last two evenings I watched the nominees for Oscars in the category of Animated Short Films. The whole show is 95 minutes. I needed two evenings because the video didn’t start and I needed help through a very slow live chat. The shorts was available as one long video through Detroit Film Theater. I could also watch the live action short films, though in the last few years those have tended to include a couple that are brutal. So I didn’t this year. Also available are the documentary shorts, which I don’t bothered with. Here are the nominated short animated films: Burrow – USA. Rabbit can't build his burrow because of all the other underground critters and their burrows. Genius Loci – France. More abstract. I wasn’t sure there is an actual plot. Opera – from South Korea. A large pyramid shape showing dozens of little repeating scenes. It was hard to know where to look. If Anything Happens I love You – USA, A couple tries to heal after a tragedy. Yes-People – Iceland. Simple scenes of life, though all they say is yes (and occasionally no). This video also included honorable mentions, though they were not nominated. Kapaemahu – USA. A legend of Hawaii about healers who were both male and female. The Snail and the Whale – UK/Germany. A snail hitches a ride on the tail of a whale to explore the wide ocean. This one would be a delight for children. To Gerard – USA. A young boy helps a magician and is given a coin. He finds a way to pass it on. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Zack Stanton of Politico, who wrote about the growing rift between corporate America and the GOP:

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a legendary business professor and associate dean at the Yale School of Management, has watched this split grow in recent years, and has heard it from CEOs he knows and works with. What the GOP cares about and what major businesses care about are, increasingly incompatible, he says. “The political desire to use wedge issues to divide—which used to be fringe in the GOP—has become mainstream,” Sonnenfeld says. “That is 100 percent at variance with what the business community wants. And that is a million times more important to them than how many dollars of taxes are paid here or there.”

Dworkin quoted a bit of another article that I thought I should read in full. It is Republicans and the Great Replacement by Noah Smith. Over the last few years there is increasing talk of American conservatives being “replaced.” It seems to increasingly be a central idea of their beliefs. But what is actually being replaced? Smith has a few ideas. The obvious answer is white people are being replaced. By 2042 whites will no longer be a majority in America. A second answer is political replacement. This is discussed as “Every time they import a new voter ... I have less political power.” Both of those are quite old. The first had a role in the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. The worry of being outvoted extends back into the 19th century. Smith suggests a third answer, one that extends back just a couple decades. There are broad declines in the percent of people identifying as Christian. That strong pillar of American society is not so strong these days. All three of those reasons mean conservatives are saying they are the one dispossessed, and thus oppressed. I think they only thing they are dispossessed from is commanding the top spot in the social hierarchy. Many of us function quite well in lower rungs of the hierarchy and want the whole concept of social hierarchy abolished. In another pundit roundup, Georgia Logothetis quoted Ibram Kendi writing for The Atlantic. One of the refrains from the defense in Derek Chauvin’s trial was that George Floyd would be alive if he had complied with officers. Kendi wrote:

Police officers do risk their lives. But do I risk my life every time I pull over for an armed police officer? When I don’t have my documents in my hand on the steering wheel and I comply and reach for them, an officer can shoot me dead like one did Philando Castile. Compliance is not a lifesaver. When I comply completely, like Toledo did, I feel lucky to survive police encounters.

Too many black people are killed even when they do comply. I’ve written a few times about one should not confuse correlation with causation. As a reminder, correlation is when two things that are measured tend to rise and fall together. The higher the correlation value the more closely they move together. No correlation means the two values do not rise and fall together at all. There is a mathematical formula that can determine a number for correlation. I’m about to make a statement that logic tells me must be true (though I’ll hear from my friend and debate partner if I’m wrong). While high correlation one might want to claim causation (though one shouldn’t), but with low correlation one definitely can’t claim causation. With that in mind AntifacistF12 tweeted a chart that compared police killing rates and violent crime rates. The two values do not at all move together. AntifacistF12 wrote:

There is no correlation to violent crime rates, and police killings. It's a far-right pro-police talking point.

The two items above is from before the verdict was announced this afternoon – Chauvin was declared guilty on all three charges in the death of George Floyd. Here are a couple things written after the announcement. Olayemi Olurin, a public defender, tweeted:

If the police still have the power to kill us, nothing has changed. Justice isn’t whether we convict a cop, it’s removing the conditions that allows cops to kill. The system that killed George Floyd is the same system that killed Daunte Wright, we need to end it.

Leah McElrath tweeted:

PLEASE TAKE CARE OUT THERE. Police all across the country are going to be feeling aggrieved and looking to lash out.

Oscar consolation prize

Since I last wrote…

Saturday evening I attended the LGBT Comedyfest in Dearborn. It was put on by the same organization that puts on Motor City Pride in June. Four comedians each did a set of at least a half hour for a show 3 hours long (an intermission and raffle also in the mix). Two of them were gay, one a lesbian, and one a transgender woman. They gay guys were only mildly funny. The lesbian at the end of the program and the transgender at the start were hilarious!

I’ll only share one joke – many of the rest were decidedly purple – and this one isn’t LGBT specific: When I was young I told my Sunday School teachers I was sure Jesus and Frosty the Snowman were the same person. I even had proof! They were both born in winter. They both died gruesome deaths. They both said they would come back.



Last night I watched the Oscars. I managed to do live-stream it, though at times the image froze. I sometimes missed a joke. Full list of winners here. My thoughts:

* The gay love story Call Me By Your Name won for best adapted screenplay. It didn’t get Best Picture (Shape of Water did, a good choice). It didn’t get Leading Actor (Gary Oldman did). It didn’t get Original Song (Coco did, though I thought a couple of the other nominees were better). So four nominations, one win (the consolation prize).

* Frances McDormand got Leading Actress and did a wonderful acceptance speech.

* I had written that of the five live action short films three were quite violent. None of them won. The award went to The Silent Child, the sweet film about trying to get a deaf girl into school. The producer, who was also the star, signed as she said her acceptance speech.

* The animated short film went to Kobe Bryant for a film about his love for basketball. I had dismissed this one as a puff piece with all the others much more innovative and interesting.



Since streaming went fairly well I now face a question. Do I keep my TV? I bought it in 1982. If the TV goes, so do the VCR tapes. Many of those were recorded for me when I lived in Germany 27 years ago.



On to other little things:

When I lived in Cologne, Germany I saw the Carnival Parade. It is held just before the start of Lent, which is supposed to be somber. But before Lent starts Germany has a five day party and the parade is a part of it. Some of the floats in the parade were quite political and heavy on the satire.

The Carnival Parade in Düsseldorf rivals the one in Cologne for political commentary. This year it included a float featuring the nasty guy and the Russian bear that is decidedly X-rated. But I’m sure you’ll want to see that for yourself, so click here. The link also has floats satirizing Angela Merkel and Theresa May.


Amy Ludwig VanDerwater wrote a poem about what would happen if teachers carried guns. Jyn Erso included it in her Twitter feed.

Fairy tale mashup

A week ago I wrote that I wasn’t going to see any movies for a while, after seeing eight since the start of the year. I wrote that based on knowing the schedule for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra French Festival (Thursday’s program of music by Maurice Ravel, including both piano concertos, was wonderful!). But I didn’t notice an item on my calendar about the Oscar Shorts. For most movies I drive to the theater, buy a ticket, and see the film. The Detroit Film Theater warned us this show tended to sell out so I bought ahead. I had a ticket for Friday evening. That was canceled due to snow. So Saturday I called to exchange dates and went that evening. When I arrived (ticket in hand) signs said the show was sold out.

The Oscar Shorts is a show of all five films nominated for Academy Awards in the category of short animation, followed by the five films nominated for short live action. The whole evening ran over three hours (including a 25 minute intermission).

In the animation category most were 5-7 minutes.

Dear Basketball, a puff piece by Kobe Bryant on his love for his sport. He now has a film company.

Negative Space, from a French team. The narrator talks about being taught how to pack a suitcase by his father, which leads to a wry comment at the father’s funeral.

Lou, by the marvelous Pixar team. All the stuff in a Lost and Found box at an elementary school assembles itself into a being that takes on a playground bully. This one was my favorite.

Revolting Rhymes from Britain. This one was a half-hour. A wolf meets up with a woman who is about to go to a babysitting job. The wolf is lamenting his nephews, one killed by Red Riding Hood, the other by the Three Little Pigs. Thrown into the mix is Ms. Hood’s friend Snow White who cares for seven short men who bet everything on the horse races. It was a fun mashup of several fairy tales.

Garden Party, also from France. The animation in this one was good enough that it looked like live action. Frogs do what they do amongst the remains of a garden party, though we see several of the windows of the house have bullet holes.

A big deal was made warning us of the “disturbing imagery” that would appear at the end of the last entry. I’m sure they did that because children tend to come for these animated short films.

I felt they should have made a bigger deal about the “disturbing imagery” of the live action films. The program (if one stopped to get it) said the section was rated R. Perhaps the DFT knows children don’t stay for the second half.

In the live action category most were about 20 minutes with one as short as 13 minutes. Three of the five had violent themes. It is important to tell the stories, but a lot of violence for 90 minutes.

DeKalb Elementary was based on real events. The story opens in the school’s office. A man walks in and pulls out a gun. At that point I stopped watching, though I couldn’t stop hearing (and I was too far from the aisle to leave). The receptionist talks him out of shooting anyone.

The Silent Child is from Britain. The youngest child of the family is deaf. A social worker starts teaching her sign language. The mother wants to get her into a regular school but thinks the school won’t accommodate a child who can’t lip-read. This one was my favorite, partly by default.

My Nephew Emmett is set in 1955. Emmett Till of Chicago visits family in the Deep South and looks at a white woman the wrong way. The men of the woman’s family want to teach the lad a lesson. This is the uncle’s story of how he tries to protect the lad. I didn’t watch the final big confrontation. Yes, this one really happened.

The Eleven O’Clock is from Australia. A psychiatrist’s 11:00 appointment is a man who has delusions of being a psychiatrist. The joke got old fast.

Watu Wote / All of Us is from Germany, though set in Africa. A woman buys a bus ticket for the 31 hour trip from Nairobi into Somalia. The bus company tells her about violence at the border, though assures her the bus will have police escort coming to the border. But at the critical time the police car has engine trouble. I didn’t watch the end of this one either.

The Oscar nominees have been announced. You can find the complete list here. I’ll mention only a few.

The gay love story Call Me By Your Name, which I saw, is nominated for best picture, for best adapted screenplay, and its young actor Timothee Chalamet was nominated for best actor in a leading role.

While a gay love story in the best picture category is wonderful, it isn’t the first gay story in the category. There was Brokeback Mountain, more about homophobia than love, and Moonlight, about growing up (with gay undertones) that won best picture last year.

Greta Gerwig is a female nominated for best director for Lady Bird, which is also up for best picture.

Jordan Peele is a black man nominated for best director for Get Out, which is also up for best picture. That movie also features Daniel Kaluuya, a black man, for best actor.

Rachel Morrison is the first female to be nominated for cinematography for Mudbound, a story about racism.

Tom of Finland, which I saw a couple days ago, is Finland’s submission for foreign language film, but did not make the final list.

Only two years ago people complained about Oscars So White.

Not by intent

Brittney Cooper wrote about the Oscar Best Picture mixup for Cosmopolitan. This is the incident where La La Land was announced as the winner of this Oscar when Moonlight was the actual winner. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting company that counts the ballots and handles the award envelopes, apologized for handing the wrong envelope to Warren Beatty.

Cooper understands no harm was intended, that everyone involved handled it gracefully. Even so, she says, the mess feeds the narrative that the white movie lost to the black movie, that gains in recognition of blacks comes at the expense of whites. Such a narrative wouldn’t be out there if Moonlight had been named properly from the start.

A great deal of racism happens not by intent. But it harms anyway.

Acceptance of diversity

I watched the Oscars last night, all the way to the crazy mix-up for Best Picture. I’m delighted to see the Academy got over the Oscars So White thing from the last couple years with Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay going to Moonlight, a film about a gay black kid (double bonus!); both supporting actor awards going to black actors; best feature documentary going to the story of a black man (though since it is O.J. Simpson that may or may not be good); and the Best Animated Feature going to Zootopia, which is about the acceptance of difference.

My favorite for animated short won (you can probably find Piper on You Tube) and Sing, my second-favorite live action short, won. It is good because it is about standing up to misused authority.



This blog is setting a new record in page views this month with more than 4600. Recent months were 1508 for January, 2008 for December, and 2113 in July. The previous all-time high was 2790 in September 2013. February got a big boost with 843 page views on the 3rd, 1103 in the 4th, and 1278 on the 8th. I’ve previously gotten big spikes near the beginning of the month, but not this big. These previous spikes came from Russia. This one came from the United States.

Of course, I won’t know for a while whether this is a one-time spike or a continuing surge in readers. I also don’t know how accurate Blogger’s readership stats are.



A personal milestone: I retired from the auto industry 10 years ago. In that time I’ve done a lot of composing and had a five-year career in teaching which, I hope, I can continue sometime soon.



The beginning of Dustin Lance Black’s documentary When We Rise, a reenactment of the LGBT civil rights movement is this evening on TV. Black is gay and a prominent screenwriter. He wrote the movie Milk about the life of Harvey Milk and won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. He said he made this new show specifically for people like his kin – a family that is Christian, Southern, and military. The whole thing is 8 hours, or 2 hours each evening. I’m set to record this evening’s episode.

The series was originally slated to run Monday-Thursday this week. But it switched to Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday because the nasty guy will be addressing members of Congress on Tuesday evening to urge them to pass a religious freedom protection act, recognized as a license to discriminate against LGBT people, though it also includes provisions to encourage discrimination against unwed mothers.

Pardon me while I go turn off the irony alarm.

Boogaloo

Yesterday I went with my friend and debate partner and his girlfriend to the Detroit Film Theater for the films nominated for an Oscar in the categories of Short Animation Films and Short Live Action Films. The five animated nominees, plus an honorable mention, were short enough to all fit within an hour. My favorite was "Feast" by Disney, in which we see the love life of of a man through what gets fed to his dog. Great fun!

The five live action films took two hours. I have a couple favorites. The most bizarre was "Yak Butter Lamp" in which an itinerant photographer and assistant takes portraits of Tibetan peasant families in front of various backdrops of Chinese and Tibetan scenes. Yes, that's the whole 15 minute movie.

One that was merely strange was "Aya." She is waiting for someone at the airport in Tel Aviv. A driver is paged to move his car and hands her his sign identifying his passenger. When that passenger shows up she decides to pretend to be the driver and take him to Jerusalem. Along the way she wants him to talk to her rather than get some work done. I didn't care for this one.

Another I did enjoy was "Boogaloo and Graham" from Ireland. The father gives his young sons two chickens to raise. The boys give the chicks the names in the title, then overdo their tasks, taking the chickens to bed, declaring they'll grow up to be chicken farmers, and have become vegetarian (except for sausages and hamburgers). Quite cute.

That thing about insufficient funding for schools

Some of what I'm posting today was actually written on Sunday. I've had an ongoing problem of a few favorite blogs crashing Adobe Flash within my Firefox browser. Before it does it appears to suck up a lot of memory (a half gig at times), reducing my computer to a crawl. At times I mutter, "Crash already!" so I can have my computer back. Sometimes it isn't the page contents that use Flash, but the ads that dance to call my attention to them. I'm sure it doesn't help that I tend to leave several tabs open. If I find a blog posting worth writing about I'll leave it in an open tab and sometimes I don't get to it for several days as I accumulate more open tabs.

In an attempt to fix the problem I looked at Firefox help pages. They suggested I make sure I have all the latest versions of the various browser plugins, Adobe being one of the ones out of date. Another recommended for update was Quicktime (which, to my surprise, is supplied by Apple). Since I did this just before shutting down for the night it was the next day when I found several blogs weren't displaying properly. The reason turned out to be that Quicktime had declared itself to be the plugin of choice for several types of images, but the pages themselves were written for Flash. I installed the latest version of Flash, cleared cache and everything displays properly. And Flash still crashes.



I was down at the Detroit Institute of Arts Saturday evening for a showing of the short films nominated for Academy Awards. The auditorium was sold out (I bought my ticket the week before). The program was wonderful. It was very easy for me to choose a favorite of the animated shorts -- The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore was charming and I highly recommend it to my sister librarian. It was very difficult to choose a favorite of the live action shorts. It came to a tie between Time Freak and Tuba Atlantic (which is not about music). We'll see who wins next Sunday.



GOP candidates and House members have been fond of saying the Obama stimulus has made the economy worse. Dave Johnson of Campaign for America's Future, writing about the 3rd anniversary of that stimulus, supplies the graphs to show otherwise. Yeah, we know the people the candidates are speaking to are not the ones who read graphs.



Jeff Bryant, also of Campaign for America's Future, wrote about the Education Wars. He uses Cleveland, Ohio as an example. Mayor Frank Jackson and Gov. John Kasich are doing all they can to make sure Cleveland Public Schools are not sufficiently funded to properly teach poor kids. Teacher salaries are being slashed so that they will see Cleveland as a step to somewhere else and the city's schools will be roiled with turnover. The money is being diverted to charter schools, which are not better.

I wrote about this because it has been playing out in Alabama for more than a century. The GOP intentionally wants poor kids to be uneducated, a direct violation of the Christian ethics most of them profess.

I've been hearing some GOP hacks crowing about how various GOP governors around the country have balanced their state's budget. One of those is Gov. Snyder of Michigan. He balanced the budget all right -- by giving corporations a tax cut and slashing school spending. So my question for those proud of all those balanced budgets: At whose expense? Who is being denied a viable future because of all this intentional underfunding of schools?



The Occupy movement has hit the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC has posted new rules for bank regulations to allow public commentary. Banks, of course, are trying to throttle those rules and gut the laws behind them. The Occupy movement has delivered a comprehensive letter to the SEC explaining why the rules are important and should go into effect. The scruffy occupiers speak the language of the SEC? Yes. Occupy the SEC includes a "vast array of specialists" from inside the financial industry. Cool!

And just because they need all the linking possible, the Occupy Wall Street blog is here.

The Oscar goes to...

An important short documentary won an Oscar last night. The title is Freeheld and tells the story of a lesbian couple Laurel and Stacie of Orange County, NJ. Laurel worked as a prosecutor's investigator but dying of lung cancer. The county refused to give her partner the survivor's pension normally due to a spouse. This battle is the subject of the movie. Of course, the Right is going bonkers over the win.

Commentary here.

News article here.