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Academy Award-winning Danish director Bille August’s screen adaptation of Thorkild Bjørnvig’s (played by Simon Bennebjerg) memoir The Pact, about his experiences with the celebrated Out of Africa novelist Karen Blixen (who was portrayed by Meryl Streep in the 1985 Sydney Pollack-directed film of the same name, but is here played by the Copenhagen-born actress Birthe Neumann), is a movie meditation on the nature of celebrity, wealth, power and how they affect (and afflict) artists. Endowed with fame, Blixen, a baroness ​whose pen name is Isak Dinesen, takes Thorkild – who’s less than half her age – under her wings, arranging for businessman Knud Jensen (Anders Heinrichsen) to subsidize the handsome aspiring writer.

As part of his eponymous “pact” with Blixen Thorkild moves from his home to reside at the famous authoress’ estate so he can pursue his writing, unobstructed – and so the lonely Blixen can have a young male companion. But not necessarily a lover per se, as Blixen has been afflicted by venereal disease that causes her great pain and rendered her, alas, apparently unable to consummate her amorous longings.

As soon as Moscow received an American response to its security demands in Ukraine, it answered indirectly by announcing greater military integration between it and three South American countries, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.

Washington's response, on January 26, to Russia’s demands of withdrawing NATO forces from Eastern Europe and ending talks about a possible Kyiv membership in the US-led alliance, was noncommittal.

A succession of events in recent weeks all point to the inescapable fact that nearly 75 years of Israel’s painstaking efforts aimed at hiding the truth about its origins and its current racially-driven apartheid regime are failing miserably. The world is finally waking up, and Israel is losing ground quicker than its ability to gain new supporters, or to whitewash its past or ongoing crimes. 

Pssst . . . here’s a little secret. Don’t tell anyone, OK? It might cause trouble.

In recent years, there have been more than a thousand lawsuits filed around the world — including a few in the United States — challenging corporate or governmental negligence about climate change and ecosystem damage.

That’s not the secret. This is the secret: These lawsuits, especially as they continue and grow in number, come with consequences beyond comprehension. They are infinitely larger than “the law” they are humbly summoning in order to address specific issues — a construction company dumping rubble in Ecuador’s Vilcabamba River, loggers and farmers destroying the Amazon rainforest, the state of Montana promoting the fossil fuel industry — and are pushing the social and legal status quo well beyond the abstractly linear world it presumes to control.

By Dave Meserve, February 8, 2022

Here in Arcata, California, we are working to introduce and pass a ballot initiative ordinance that will require the City of Arcata to fly the Earth flag at the top of all city owned flagpoles, above the United States and the California flags.

Arcata is a city of about 18,000 people on the north coast of California. Home to Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt), Arcata is known as a very progressive community, with a long-time focus on the environment, peace, and social justice.

The Earth flag flies on the Arcata Plaza. That is good. Not many town squares include it.

But wait! The Plaza flagpole order is not logical. The American flag flies at the top, the California flag beneath it, and the Earth flag at the bottom.

Doesn’t the Earth encompass all nations and all states? Isn’t the well being of the Earth essential to all life? Aren’t global issues more important to our healthy survival than nationalism?

It’s time to recognize the primacy of the Earth over nations and states when we fly their symbols on our town squares. We cannot have a healthy nation without a healthy Earth.

A scheme is underway to withhold or to reduce payments made by the Palestinian Authority to the families of Palestinian prisoners.

Smedley Butler is generally left out of U.S. history. If you bring up a guy who prevented a Wall Street coup against FDR, you do real damage to the tale of peaceful respect for government from the beginning of time up through January 6, 2021. If you mention the scandal that erupted when he recounted how Mussolini had run over a little girl with his car, it’s hard to leave out the U.S. government’s friendly relations with Mussolini.

Interestingly, it was Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, who had been in the car with Mussolini and who had told his friend Smedley Butler about it, who later recounted in his autobiography a second Wall Street coup plot that he said he had exposed to Eleanor Roosevelt and thereby her husband, and successfully put a stop to. For some reason we never celebrate Vanderbilt as the savior of the U.S. government in the way that those of us who’ve heard of him do Smedley Butler, even though Vanderbilt turned against oligarchs as Butler turned against warmakers.

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, is leading his country’s anti-Palestinian propaganda, this time engaging in pre-emptive hasbara in anticipation of a Palestinian response to the ongoing evictions in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

“Would you consider it a terror attack if a rock like this was thrown at your car while driving with your children?” Erdan asked the United Nations Security Council members, while holding the rock in his hands. “Would you, at the very least, condemn these brutal terror attacks carried out against Israeli civilians by Palestinians?”

Somewhere out there in the geopolitical wilderness of Eastern Europe, two powerful beasts stalk each other. One of them is good. One of them is evil. The future of all life on this planet is at stake.

We’ll be back after these messages . . . (or maybe not).

This seems to be the context in which the spectator public gets the details about the re-emerging Cold War, suddenly back from the dead, and the nuclear brinkmanship that comes with it.

Will Russia invade Ukraine? Such an act, according to President Biden, would be “the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world in terms of war and peace since World War II.”

Wow. Only we get to invade countries, apparently.