WSWS reposts a review of it from when the film came out and that review is problematic -- the comments are so much better.
Spielberg wastes time and film over and over. What he did to THE COLOR PURPLE should have ended his directing career.
He reduces everyone to a cartoon, a 7-year-old, Jewish boy's idea of life.
And I'm sorry, that doesn't fit with most of the films he makes.
Nor does it really fit with the world we live in.
He is the weakest 'name' director that we have.
By contrast, Peter Bogdanovich. I watched PAPER MOON with my daughter tonight. She'd never seen it. I've probably seen it at least 15 times. Tatum O'Neal. She is amazing as Addie and Ryan O'Neal is probably never as appealing as he is in this film. Madeline Kahn's Miss Trixie is unlike any other character she played in movies. P.J. Johnson, as Imogene, is amazing as well. And the film's visuals? The camera work is amazing. The details are amazing. It's just a wonderful film.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Friday, December 7, 2018.
Let's start with a bad singer (and a worse actress), Reba.
Let's start with a bad singer (and a worse actress), Reba.
Reba McEntire sings "The Lord's Prayer" at a funeral service honoring former Pres. George H.W. Bush. abcn.ws/2RCHe1m #Remembering41
1. She's honoring using brutal racism aka Willie Horton hysteria ads to win the 88 election
2. She's honoring giving the butchers of Tiananmen a free pass to slaughter their own young people. Then sell out the entire US working class to them so we could all buy cheap stuff at Walmart.
3. She's honoring orders to shoot an Iranian civilian airliner out of the sky killing.over 200 innocent people including dozens of children. The refusing to apologise under any circumstances.
4. She's honoring orders to invade Panama killing over 20,000 civilians by the US military in order to capture a foreign head of state, abduct him and incarcerate him in a US prison.
5. She's honoring straight up lying to Congress by Nayira in order to make a pathetic excuse to invade Iraq, killing tens of thousands of civilians, dropping 10,000 year half life uranium across the country causing death & birth defects for thousands more years.
6. She's honoring using the grotesque psychotic attack on Iraq as an openly declared method to "kill the Vietnam Syndrome"...syndrome meaning disease... thereby dehumanizing 1970s successful US anti war protesters. All in service to unaccountable military violence & terror.
He and his son are responsible for so much. In Iraq? Deaths, creating orphans and widows, birth defects.
So many are so quick to ignore that.
George W. Bush has about two or three more times to hand Michelle Obama a piece of candy before y’all completely forget about the Iraq invasion and the 2008 financial crisis altogether.
Exactly.
Here's another cute Bush moment. In the Iraq war, the US military used depleted uranium rounds meant for armor over civilian areas giving rise to a host of birth defects and deformities. THIS CANDY STORY IS GOOD TOO THO!
When you praise George H. W. Bush for his service, remember the took the US into Iraq, destroyed its infrastructure, killed 100s thousands civilians w/sanctions, used chemical weapons leading to widespread birth defects & Gulf War Syndrome among US veterans, & sowed seeds of ISIS
We've frequently covered the use of Depleted Uranium in Iraq under Bully Boy Bush. Let's note this from Barbara Koepel (WASHINGTON SPECTATOR) about Poppy Bush:
The weapons were first used in
1991 during Desert Storm, when the U.S. military fired guided bombs and
missiles containing depleted uranium (DU), a waste product from nuclear
reactors. The Department of Defense (DOD) particularly prized them
because, with dramatic density, speed, and heat, they blasted through
tanks and bunkers.
Within one or two years,
grotesque birth defects spiraled—such as babies with two heads. Or
missing eyes, hands, and legs. Or stomachs and brains inside out.
Keith Baverstock, who headed the
radiological section of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Center of
Environment and Health in the 1990s, explained why: When uranium weapons
explode, their massive blasts produce gray or black clouds of uranium
oxide dust particles. These float for miles, people breathe them, and
the dust lodges in their lungs. From there, they seep into the lymph
system and blood, flow throughout the body, and bind to the genes and
chromosomes, causing them to mutate. First, they trigger birth defects.
Within five or more years, cancer. Organs, often the kidneys, fail.
At one Basra hospital, leukemia
cases in children up to age 14 doubled from 1992 to 1999, says Amy
Hagopian, a University of Washington School of Public Health professor.
Birth defects also surged, from 37 in 1990 to 254 in 2001, according to a
2005 article in Environmental Health.
Leukemia—cancer of the
blood—develops quickly. Chris Busby, a British chemical physicist,
explains: “Blood cells are the most easily damaged by radiation and
duplicate rapidly. We’ve known this since Hiroshima.”
Dai Williams, an independent weapons researcher in Britain, says the dust emits alpha radiation—20 times more damaging than the gamma radiation
from nuclear weapons. The military insists the dust is harmless because
it can’t penetrate the skin. They ignore that it can be inhaled.
Father and son ensured that birth defects and they both should have been held accountable. Poppy Bush is dead so we can consider that both a win and a blessing. But Bully Boy Bush is alive and he should be held accountable. He paints cute pictures! Michelle Obama loves him! He paints hollow bulls**t that will never pass for art and Michelle Obama was greedy and corrupt long before she became First Lady so find a better testimonial for him.
While I'm grateful that one less War Criminal walks the earth, that gratitude does not -- and should not -- translate into silence. Lie after lie has been broadcast non-stop for six or so days now to sell the notion that Poppy Bush was some kind of wonderful.
Bruce A. Dixon (BLACK AGENDA REPORT) points out:
George HW Bush was a one term president who committed committed the usual quota of domestic and foreign atrocities. He put the bloodthirsty Dick Cheney, who’d been Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in charge at the Pentagon, and named Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. He invaded Panama, where US forces commanded by Colin Powell obliterated an entire black neighborhood killing tens of thousands of civilians to prevent inconvenient protests against the occupation. Jimmy Carter had negotiated US bases in Saudi Arabia, and Bush filled them with hundreds of thousands of troops, artillery, armor and aircraft for a planned invasion of Iraq.
Millions of Iraqis have died since the Bush invasion, millions more have become refugees. Hardly a week has passed from then till now the the US hasn’t bombed some place in that unhappy country. One of Bush’s last acts as a lame duck president in December 1992 was to land a contingent of US Marines in Somalia to keep that country from forming a unified government that might not be to Uncle Sam’s liking. A quarter century later US forces are still in Somalia, backing this or that warlord faction, or the Somali central government whose reach most days doesn’t extend past the capital’s suburbs, sometimes with Rwandan or Ugandan proxies, sometimes with US paid mercenaries, complimented with US special ops forces and drones.
On NPR's MORNING EDITION today, Rachel Martin speaks with Feisal Istrabadi and it may be the closest to honesty that the corporate media has offered.
Imagine that, outside the KRG, there's no real love for Poppy Bush. Maybe next time the US media wants to do one of their 'the world mourns' b.s. stunts, they speak to some of the people in the world.
On the KRG, HURRIYET reports, "Authorities in Iraq's Kurdish-controlled region have dismissed dozens of police officers alleged involvement in human trafficking, local media reported on Dec. 6." One hundred is the number being reported, one hundred police officers fired for human trafficking.
KRG to establish committee to follow up on police involvement in #HumanTrafficking of Syrian Arabs to Turkey
#TwitterKurds
KRG dismisses 100 police officers over alleged human trafficking in Soran #iraq #corruption #crime hozint.com/?utm_source=tw…
A year ago this month, Iraq's then-prime minister Hayder al-Abadi announced that ISIS was defeated and vanquished. No. See yesterday's snapshot. Today, the Norwegian Refugee Council notes:
More than 1.8
million Iraqis are today still displaced across the country. A
staggering 8 million require some form of humanitarian aid. Thousands of
children born under IS rule are still unrecognized by the state. In the
last three months a third of the displaced people who returned home
from just one camp in Anbar were rejected by their local communities and
had to relocate again elsewhere.
“If this is what ‘victory’ looks like, then there is little to celebrate for millions of Iraqis still haunted by the crimes of the IS and the long war to eliminate it. They have largely been forgotten by their own government and the international community,” said Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary General Jan Egeland. “We work with thousands of ordinary Iraqi women, children and men for whom untold suffering continues, and yet the world seems to act as if Iraq is back to normal. In reality, besides the abject poverty the displaced are living in, thousands face collective punishment for having been at the wrong place at the wrong time, even if they’re just children.”
While violence and fighting have decreased considerably over the last year, nearly two thirds of displaced people have said they are unwilling or unable to return home in the next year. More than half of them had their homes damaged or destroyed. Entire cities like Mosul and Sinjar are still in rubble.
The Iraqi government, together with the international community, particularly members of the coalition, has a responsibility to ensure that Iraq is on a path towards inclusive recovery and reconstruction. This means the rights of displaced people—like all Iraqi citizens—must be respected, for them to be able to rebuild their lives where they choose.
“If this is what ‘victory’ looks like, then there is little to celebrate for millions of Iraqis still haunted by the crimes of the IS and the long war to eliminate it. They have largely been forgotten by their own government and the international community,” said Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary General Jan Egeland. “We work with thousands of ordinary Iraqi women, children and men for whom untold suffering continues, and yet the world seems to act as if Iraq is back to normal. In reality, besides the abject poverty the displaced are living in, thousands face collective punishment for having been at the wrong place at the wrong time, even if they’re just children.”
While violence and fighting have decreased considerably over the last year, nearly two thirds of displaced people have said they are unwilling or unable to return home in the next year. More than half of them had their homes damaged or destroyed. Entire cities like Mosul and Sinjar are still in rubble.
The Iraqi government, together with the international community, particularly members of the coalition, has a responsibility to ensure that Iraq is on a path towards inclusive recovery and reconstruction. This means the rights of displaced people—like all Iraqi citizens—must be respected, for them to be able to rebuild their lives where they choose.
In Basra, the protests continue.
Iraqi MP from Basra says protests have resumed in Basra Province because government has not kept its promises. Still no clean water to drink & residents will not remain silent.
mobp.as/kWeTn
Friday's Morning Star:: Basra considering autonomy move after protests ignite again
Demonstrators in Basra don yellow vests like those worn in French protests.
Autonomy? Steve Sweeny (MORNING STAR) reports:
Protesters want to see political and economic autonomy which would allow them a greater share of lucrative oil revenues, enabling the region to invest in jobs, public services and access to clean drinking water.
Iraq’s post-occupation
constitution allows provincial councils to submit a petition which shows
support for autonomy with Baghdad then being responsible for holding a
referendum on the issue.
In other news, ALSUMARIA reports a rumor being denied: that Ayad Allawi was plotting a military coup against Iraq's new prime minister Adil Abdul al-Mahdi
The following community sites -- plus Jody Watley, BLACK AGENDA REPORT, DISSIDENT VOICE -- updated:
Well done, Patrick Martin
8 hours ago
Kevin Hart needs to go away
10 hours ago
The fake that is Alexandria
10 hours ago
Hillary's got troubles, troubles, troubles
10 hours ago
