Testset

25/11/2021

Trying to understand colonialism through the lens of modern racial theory is an ill-advised task. Skip the ‘collective responsibility’ this Thanksgiving and pass the pie.

There is not a day on the calendar that does not mark an atrocity that one group of humans visited upon another. There is not a square mile on this planet that is not soaked in the blood that our species so readily spills. Yet there is a day off from all horrors of the outside world and that day is....

23/04/2021

The successful conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd is no vindication of the system that created Derek Chauvin… it is merely an indication that the system is still capable of meeting the entry-level standards of applying justice.

25/03/2021

Another year, another SXSW notch on the belt. As usual most of the films your humble scribe watched were above average but natch some quality films getting press are the ones I missed.

What was truly missed though was the vibe of being amongst literally thousands of like-minded viewers. The thrill of seeing a true star like Paul Williams or Tom Skerritt or Emily Mortimer or Jason Schwartzman in the hallway of a convention hotel and briefly grabbing their ear was non-existent.

17/03/2021

The net end result of Republican political and policy bad faith is going to be worsened border control and public health crises.

The bad faith equivalence in question is declaring the border crossing crisis the Biden administration is attempting to repair as “no different” from the racist policies of the previous administration that caused the crisis in the first place, or -- worse yet -- using this bad faith false equiva...

17/03/2021

There’s a feeling about the SXSW experience that cannot be translated by online screenings or seminars.

Starting Tuesday, March 16 and running through the week until Saturday March 20 attendees can take delight in a variety of happening events from keynote speeches featuring such superlative personalities as Willie Nelson (Wednesday) or Stacey Abrams (Tuesday) to livestream performances from accomplis...

03/03/2021

Covid has changed the landscape of how movies are made.

“For the longest time John Williams was the model that I aspired to. I saw “E. T.” and I saw “Raiders of the Lost Ark” at a drive-in. After high school I entered college as a saxophone performance major,” says composer Jermaine Stegall. “I realized very quickly that I was highly distra...

24/02/2021

The best movie you could watch right now is the one you haven’t heard of.

“Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” the latest work from Curtis, is readily available on Youtube as well as BBC iPlayer, the latter of which is a BBC platform with streaming capability showcasing existing Beeb programing and original content.

17/02/2021

Attempts at blaming these outages on emerging “green technologies” like wind turbines are crass and transparent efforts at deflection.

In the perfect storm of the first ‘Winter Storm Warning’ issued in the history of the state of Texas, few things are as damning as the flaccid incompetence of the state agency bearing the misleading name “Electrical Reliability Council of Texas”, AKA ERCOT. But few things as well were any le...

13/02/2021

This country already has a “Center Right” party– It’s called the Democratic Party.

On Friday February 5, over a hundred former elected and high-level appointees of Republican administrations -- including that of indicted extortionist and insurrectionist Donald Trump -- participated in a Zoom call to discuss the formation of a breakaway political party, which they are tentatively n...

12/02/2021

So was Hampton dangerous and did his existence warrant a massacre? White authority always eradicates insurrection in any form especially when the perceived threat is a different color.

“Judas and the Black Messiah” pulls no punches as far as that controversy is concerned. The characters of Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) and informant O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) are finely tuned with each having scenes that make the audience alternately support and despise their motives.

10/02/2021

Unfortunately for those at the top who’ve benefited immensely from speculative bubbles, speculative bubbles don’t create a vibrant middle class–they push what’s left of the middle class off a cliff.

Unfortunately for those at the top who've benefited immensely from speculative bubbles, speculative bubbles don't create a vibrant middle class--they push what's left of the middle class off a cliff.

05/02/2021

Film: Living in a Duplicate World

Film audiences can be easily bought, and from the look of things it’s not expensive.

by Michael Bergeron

What were once man caves are now bona fide entertainment clubhouses. Day and date release of a movie is a reality and the small percentage of people anxious to see movies in theaters are dwarfed by the amount of people enjoying filmed entertainment on their couch.

The mystique movie palaces once represented no longer draws breath. It was all a dream from a previous century.

Should writing a review in the new millennium concentrate on proper freeze-points to allow audiences to dash to the kitchen instead of a parade of plot points? “You’ll want to hop to the bathroom during the defecation scenes in “Nomadland” and “The White Tiger.”

Read more at testset.io

05/02/2021

Film audiences can be easily bought, and from the look of things it’s not expensive.

When Rodney Ascher makes a film it makes you want to watch other films to understand where he’s coming from. One of his previous efforts “Room 237,” which was about themes in Kubrick’s “The Shining,” spurred interest in that seminal horror flick to the extent that theaters played it in a...

02/02/2021

There is no “reality-based” counter-argument to the fact that this country is in the worst public health and economic crises in a century.

The most current manifestation of this break from reality is the Republican $618 Billion Counter-proposal to Joe Biden’s proposed $1.9 Trillion Covid Relief Package. There is no “reality-based” counter-argument to the fact that this country is in the worst public health and economic crises in ...

27/01/2021

Every single one of these senators already has blood on their hands.

No jury picked in ordinary proceedings would ever include potential co-defendants in the crime being tried -- but that is precisely what is being done in the case of indicted Insurrectionist Donald John Trump.

25/01/2021

What is truly sad is that there has not been a first hundred days in any presidency more crucial than when FDR first coined the phrase… until now.

23/01/2021

The background of the Israeli decision can be understood within two contexts: one, Israel’s regime of censorship aimed at silencing any criticism of the Israeli occupation and apartheid and, two, Israel’s fear of a truly independent Palestinian narrative.

On January 11, the Israeli Lod District Court ruled against a Palestinian film-maker, Mahmoud Bakri, ordering him to pay hefty compensation to an Israeli soldier who was accused, along with the Israeli military, of carrying out war crimes in April 2002, in the Palestinian Jenin refugee camp located....

21/01/2021

How normal it all seemed– and how very apparent it made the sheer abnormality of the last four years.

What remains to be seen is if those who put their faith in that man can now give their honest allegiance to his legitimate successor as Americans -- or if they intend to persist in fever dreams and falsehood. That choice must be made at every level, and those choices begin this very day. Those who e...

19/01/2021

The Democratic Party blamed its 2016 election defeat on Russian interference in the election, the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, and FBI director James Comey’s decision, shortly before the vote, to send a letter to Congress related to Hillary Clinton’s private email server. It refused to acknowledge the root came of its defeat, the abandonment of workers, deindustrialization, the wars in the Middle East, and vast social inequality.

The Democratic Party blamed its 2016 election defeat on Russian interference in the election, the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, and FBI director James Comey’s decision, shortly before the vote, to send a letter to Congress related to Hillary Clinton’s privat...

18/01/2021

In order to re-unify this country, we must first hold accountable those responsible for having created the breach in the first place.

Now that the House has done the right thing and re-impeached Donald Trump, what remains to be seen is if the Senate can find the votes and moral courage among Republican Senators to convict him. The likelihood of this is, unfortunately, relatively low. Trump remains popular among the low-information...

12/01/2021

While “one-six” does not have the numeric cachet of “nine-eleven”, the two events have a number of commonalities.

This statement is not to be taken as an endorsement of conspiracy theory. The exact reasons why the Bush Administration chose to ignore warnings of an impending terrorist attack have been debated for twenty years. The fact that it happened is beyond dispute. There is equal debate over the reasons wh...

11/01/2021

The flickering image is now motion smoothed and consumed as couch fodder.

If a year didn’t deserve awards or a series of accolades requiring the requisite ten count 2020 is that year. There were hardly ten films even released in theaters this year.

10/01/2021

It is easy to celebrate Trump’s ouster from Twitter. What is hard for many, including the ACLU, is understanding the future implications for the vast majority of free speech being under the unchecked control of a handful of people in Silicon Valley.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed multiple legal actions against the Trump administration, has come out against the ban, claiming that Twitter’s move was proof of “unchecked power” on part of the social media platform.

10/01/2021

There are no “very fine people” on both sides — that ship has unequivocally sailed.

There is only a fundamentally polarizing moment, bringing into crystal clarity the result of four years of unchecked polarization and unchecked political malpractice. Either you side with the people who incited and participated in Donald Trump’s attempted coup… or you don’t.

09/01/2021

The term “responsible parties” has a very specific legal meaning. But it also has a broader meaning.

When Democratic leaders from Congress attempted to contact Vice-President Mike Pence to discuss invoking the 25th Amendment in order to immediately remove Donald Trump from the office he has so plainly abused, they found themselves on hold for twenty minutes… on a call the Vice-President ultimatel...

08/01/2021

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08/01/2021

The feudal lords of our financial system, the Federal Reserve, cemented capital’s complete dominance over labor by dropping interest rates to zero and flooding Corporate America with trillions of dollars of essentially free money.

The feudal lords of our financial system, the Federal Reserve, cemented capital's complete dominance over labor by dropping interest rates to zero and flooding Corporate America with trillions of dollars of essentially free money.

08/01/2021

It took over 200 years for levels to increase by 25%, but now just over 30 years later we are approaching a 50% increase.

Highlighting global campaigners’ demands for urgent and bold climate action, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Friday that despite coronavirus-related lockdowns, 2020 tied with 2016 for being the warmest year on record and closed out the warmest decade on the books...

07/01/2021

State governments, the courts, and even Mike Pence resisted Trump’s coup attempt. Indeed it is the people, not democracy that is broken.

The actions of the mob that rushed the Capitol are to be owned by the individuals who made these decisions. Our duty as the American electorate is to resist tyrants and educate ourselves enough to be a functioning electorate. Many of us ( y’all ) failed. There was no widespread voter fraud. If the...

07/01/2021

The presidency of Donald Trump does not end when Joe Biden is sworn into office on January 20. It ended today.

That end occurred sometime between when the disgraced former president spoke in person to incite the insurrectionist armed mob that disrupted the proceedings of the Electoral Vote certification (by way of occupying the U.S. Capitol Building), and when he later spoke via recorded video (delivered, in...