02/05/2023
CITYRADIO Jan 15, 2023
Welcome to Season 2 Episode 2 of CITYRADIO published on the 15th of the month at 8 pm PST.
I am PETER THOMAS BUSCH, your host for tonight.
I wanted to congratulate all the Golden Globe Award Winners at the 80th Ceremony on Sunday, January 10, including Cate Blanchett for the lead acting role in Tar (2022), and Austin Butler for Elvis (2022), Kevin Costner for the Drama Series Yellowstone (2022) and Julia Garner for a supporting role in the series Ozark (2022), as well Paul Walter Hauser for a supporting role in Black Bird (2022).
And congratulations to Director Steven Spielberg for picking up a Golden Globe for the autobiographical film, The Fabelmans (2022).
Spielberg has only previous won Golden Globes best picture awards for Saving Private Ryan (1999) and Schindler’s List (1994).
And he has only won the best picture Oscar for Saving Private Ryan (1999) and the best picture Oscar and best directing Oscar for Schindler’s List (1994).
Spielberg has made so many good movies over the years, I would have expected him to have a bigger trophy room.
I am looking forward to viewing The Fabelmans for the OTC50 Streaming Film Festival (Biopics) next week. Spielberg was chosen as the Iconic Movie filmmaker in OTC50 Issue 50. And he was again featured for his remake of the classic film, West Side Story (2021). OTC50 will republish the Iconic Steven Spielberg feature with the biographical film review next week.
What to watch on the streaming channels this month includes two series returning for another season on Amazon Prime Video.
Jack Ryan has 8 new episodes for season 3 with John Krasinski playing the CIA operative. Ryan goes a bit rogue this season with one of the main location shoots occurring in Prague.
The series is produced well with a feature film quality finish.
I am also watching season 2 of Hunters, starring Logan Lerman and Al Pacino. The series is a about a New York City based covert operational team involving private Jewish agents hunting down German N**i’s that have escaped the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials held at the end of World War II during the Allied Occupation of Germany.
Season 1 features Al Pacino recruiting Lerman’s character into the covert operation, while season 2 features Lerman’s character branching off into Europe and South America. During a black op in Paris, one of the N**i’s being hunted suggests that su***de of German N**i leader Adolf Hi**er was a hoax and that he may still be alive in South America, where hundreds of N**i officers escaped to after the war.
Well, the weather is winter, and the season is for skiing and snowboarding.
Whistler continues to get 10-20 cm of snow on a daily basis, after not getting enough in November and December to open up fully during the holiday season.
I am still riding the same 156 cm snowboard.
I checked over the board prior to the first day riding this season and decided that I would get a few more days on the board, especially with the poor mountain conditions, before tuning the board at home.
I had a core shot on the upper edge of the board right where I would apply pressure and turn in the snow. This minor damage occurred two seasons ago at the beginning of the season with insufficient snow on the Upper Franz’s Run at Whistler. The sign said, ‘rocks abound’, but I went anyway, and sure enough almost right away I scraped a rock covered with a very thin layer of snow.
I decided after buying a home tune-up kit to try to repair the core shot on my own. After trial and error with the P-tex base repair that comes with the kit, I decided to use a really strong glue to fill the base before putting on a layer of P-tex.
The repair is only a thump print, and so I rub the wax on just the repair patch once it is cold and hard and had a chance to set. I checked the repair after every ride and found it had come out after a few days. I then redid the repair leaving more days for the industrial grade glue to cure without overfilling the top with glue and P-tex. And this final repair seems to have held for now after 3 days riding this season.
I intend to give the entire board a new wax and at the same time check the edges for spurs. Based on past homebased tuning, this process may take less than one hour, with the biggest challenge in a downtown Vancouver apartment being able to find a place that is safe for the tiny metal fragment waste and the abundance of wax shaving to fall off the board.
My kit comes with an iron to heat the wax so my home iron for the clothes can stay in the clothes cupboard and my shirts and pants will be free from wax for now.
The board is holding up well and seems to be a better ride than the first season.
I also have a repair to my boots with the BOA dial on the side for the front lacing coming off and not really wanting to stay on. Initially, I was grateful to find the dial in the cuff of my snow pants. I was able to continue to use the dial to tighten the lacing for the next day riding, but the dial no longer popped in place, and I eventually lost the dial altogether.
I contacted BOA for the lifetime warrantee. I then ordered the ‘dial’ repair kit, which is being delivered within 7 days. So, we’ll see how the repair kit and the do-it-yourself video enable me to repair the boot at home. Failing that process, I will likely just take the boot in to a repair shop at the ski/snowboarding retail store.
Whistler is finally getting the snow needed to open the mountain resort for winter, and California is getting lots of rain, resulting in flash flooding.
California has had years of drought with the land getting baked dry which causes the rain to just flow off the land toward the ocean without absorbing down into the aquifers for later use during the summer. The rains this winter are so heavy though that the soil likely would not have held the water in the best of soil conditions.
The search for secret documents continues in the United States with US President Joe Biden having been found to shuffle off with several pages of secret documents after leaving the Whitehouse as Vice President.
Presidents and Vice Presidents in the United States maintain their legacies through the development of privately funded presidential libraries in conjunction with the National Archives and Records Administration.
The libraries are eventually open to the public, with historians and various other researchers being granted access to a treasure trove of original sourced information in the archives.
This information flow is standard practice in post-election America, but nonetheless decidedly not intended to include documents containing national secrets.
I am not sure what the problem with this transfer process is since presidents and vice presidents have from the election results in late November to Inauguration Day on January 20 to empty their Whitehouse Offices and move material to a secure storage location pending the fundraising and construction of the libraries.
President Richard Nixon notoriously protected his Whitehouse documents from being released into the public domain, including tape recordings of confidential discussion with his inner circle of advisors that occurred inside the official working office of the president.
Nixon believed that those documents and recordings were his private documentary evidence of his doings as president, and so accordingly, he believed that he owned those documents.
The Watergate prosecutors thought quite differently about that myopic perspective, and used the possibility of what may or may not be in evidence as leverage to affect the president’s resignation.
Congress has been in a row ever since over ‘the next impeachment of a president’, whomever that president may be, depending on whether the governing party or the opposition government party, controls the Lower and Upper Houses, where these impeachment trials are initiated and carried out in the most public of fashions.
United States President Barack Obama is currently constructing his presidential library on a piece of land in Jackson Park close to the University of Chicago and his former electoral offices on the Southside of Chicago after fundraising for a few years post presidency. The Obama Foundation also had to negotiate with the city for land development permit approvals.
Also this month, the State of Illinois has joined 8 other states in banning the sale and distribution of assault weapons, including switches that convert existing street legal weapons into the not so legal automatic assault modes.
Illinois House Bill 5471 is just one piece of legislation in a series of bills ramping up protection of the public in a state with a lot of day to day gun violence.
The United States Supreme Court may yet overturn the gun bans legislated on a state level based on the right to possess weapons provided in the United States Constitution.
Assault weapons though are clearly not a defensive weapon, and have the ability to kill multiple individuals prior to any defensive action being taken by possible victims. These weapons are essentially very destructive battlefield ready and have no place on a person on city streets and in public places.
Chicago is at times an urban warzone with multiple killings by street legal handguns on the weekends.
America’s epidemic of mass shootings in public community spaces are usually carried out with an assault weapon as opposed to a handgun carried on a person for a defensive.
And you would not use an assault weapon for sport hunting wild turkey in Oklahoma and deer in Kentucky.
One of the other big problems of epidemic proportions throughout North American is the opioid crisis. The development of the overdose antidote naloxone is lifesavings but a typical quick fix solution to a much larger crisis.
Every overdose death is concerning. And the negative ripple effect of an overdose death can cause substantial social, economic and personal trauma to a community with one death impacting the lives of the people around them and forever altering their futures.
British Columbia had 1,473 opioid related deaths in 2017, and expects over 2000 deaths for the second year in a row in 2022, with Canada experiencing about 20 deaths a day.
The crises may have developed out of the health industries over prescription of pain medications, but the solution now is more of a holistic social economic and poverty reduction issue that requires community, government and legislative intervention.
Despite all the people getting turned back home along the Rio Grande River, over 30,000 migrants are getting through the southern border with Mexico each month.
This migration crisis is occurring all over the world with legal migration and illegal migration of such significant numbers as to be creating a socio-economic imbalance.
This unnatural flow of people across national borders hints at further systemic issues within places of origin, such as unequal distribution of national resources and disproportionate wealth accumulation.
The ultra-rich class of every nation enjoy a luxury and associated leisure that 99.9 per cent of the world cannot even comprehend to experience within a lifetime.
The world needs better policies to correct the imbalances occurring from the more concerted push for a broader and more sophisticated globalization. Instead of systemic displacement within a region, the world is now also experiencing global displacement with economic inequalities causing systemic stressors such as rising housing prices.
People of the Ukraine are setting the example for people of nations throughout the world by staying and fighting with the support of the global community instead of running and hiding within the populations of peaceful nations.
The elite must slow their flight from places of origin by contributing intellectually and reinvesting wealth into the community of origin.
The inability of the Russian people to fight for freedom and democracy, and even for liberty from their own state, has created more global problems with different concepts of the balance between individual rights and state authority now clashing along the western border with Europe.
The state in Russia chooses when and where to go to war, and for what reasons, without the checks and balance of a democracy, a free press and the liberty of the people to decide.
War in the Ukraine makes no sense with existing global infrastructure in place that would have allowed cooperation between states. Russia has benefitted from this cooperation with the sale of gas to the European Union.
And perhaps now in the future the world should also buy the grain from Russia that may or may not be stolen from the Ukrainian people by war’s end.
