2025
“First day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine captured in images,” AP News, February 22, 2025, apnews.com….🇺🇦 #RussiaIsATerroristState
One of my go-to mental, musical, and emotional escapes these past few years has been “The Voice of Ukraine” on YouTube. Suck it, tyrants. 📺🎵🇺🇦
From Maine: “Governor Mills’ Statement on Notice of Investigation From U.S. Department of Education,” www.maine.gov….
No President – Republican or Democrat – can withhold Federal funding authorized and appropriated by Congress and paid for by Maine taxpayers in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will. It is a violation of our Constitution and of our laws, which I took an oath to uphold.
📽️ A well reviewed historical drama is streaming on Paramount+ in the United States: “Suffragette,” dir. Sarah Gavron (UK, 2015). The struggle it dramatizes was about getting the vote in order to shape the laws and policies that affected women in uniquely cruel ways.
'The Iron Curtain' (1948 Spy Film)
📽️ Tonight I watched “The Iron Curtain,” dir. William A. Wellman (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1948). The film was based on Igor Gouzenko’s memoir of his time working as a military cypher expert in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, “I Was Inside Stalin’s Spy Ring,” Hearst’s International–Cosmopolitan (February–May 1947).
Related News from 1948
The excerpt below from a news item in a trade journal uses the term “appeasement” to describe attempts to block the film’s release. And it recalls accusations “of war-mongering because of alleged anti-Nazi films” before the U.S. entry into World War Two. Disinformation campaigns by hostile governments are nothing new, it seems.
MPAA Pins Red Label on “Curtain” Protest
Reaffirming his continued resistance to any attempts to dictate what appears or does not appear on the screen, Eric A. Johnston, MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] president, has rejected the protest of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship against release of 20th-Fox’s forthcoming “The Iron Curtain.” At the same time Johnston questioned the motives of the National Council and coneluded that “the purpose of your organization is to create in this country an atmosphere of appeasement and acceptance of Russia’s policy of aggression and expansion."…
Johnston pointed out … that the issue of free speech in relation to the screen was challenged seven years ago before a Senate committee, when the producers were accused of war-mongering because of alleged anti-Nazi films. “Producers then insisted upon and maintained their constitutional right to make films on any subject, free from dictation,” Johnston reminded. “Their position was vindicated. They stand on that right today, and I back them up."…
Source: The Film Daily February 3, 1948, p. 5.
Anyone in the current U.S. administration who thinks Ukraine will accede to their weird demands has not been paying attention.🇺🇦 #RussiaIsATerroristState #ПутінІдиНаХуй
Operator Starsky takes time out to fact-check the recent stupefying utterances on Ukraine by the U.S. president because friends don’t let friends drown in bullshit. youtu.be… 🇺🇦 #RussiaIsATerroristState
🏳️⚧️ The U.S. federal government has opened public comments on its dehumanizing passport regulations vis-à-vis trans people. These comments will be public, so weigh carefully how much, if any, personal information you can safely include.
There are three different parts to this, but they’re all about passports. I provided the same comment for each.
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6771
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6772
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6773
'When you're famous, they let you . . .'
“When you’re famous, they let you grab ‘em by the pussy,” bragged a choad from Queens. But in 2020–21 we didn’t let him. He lost the election and his coup too.
Now the butthurt swine is fucking the entire country. He’s letting Musk and Putin have a go too.
“When you’re famous, they let you do it. If they don’t, you must do it anyway. You must say it’s all their fault because they didn’t negotiate, I mean, submit.”
“Now stop complaining, Republican senators. Say Daddy’s name like you mean it! You, too, Ukraine. You know you want it!”
'A Bit of War History' – Three Paintings by Thomas Waterman Wood (1865–66)
"The Contraband"
"The Recruit"
"The Veteran"
The word “contraband” referred to an enslaved person who had escaped. Given that the term usually indicated illegally imported or exported goods, its dehumanizing quality in the context of someone who has escaped bondage is palpable. Here, however, it stands in contrast to the painting, which shows a man, not a chattel or a caricature.1
The other two paintings see the same figure transformed into a soldier and a veteran. Both of these images underlined the figure’s manhood. With time, in fact, military service came to be associated with masculinity and citizenship in an age of people’s wars fought in North America and Europe.2
From this point of view, the paintings represent a message not only of self-emancipation through military service but of modern masculine citizenship shortly before the nineteenth amendment was ratified. In the West, this image of manhood and military service reached its high point in World Wars One and Two.
The U.S.–Russia talks in Saudi Arabia have proven once again that Ukraine is ground zero for the war against democracy. Unfortunately, the U.S. doesn’t give a rat’s ass about democracy—or ethnic cleansing or genocide. We’ve done evil before, but never so openly, stridently, or proudly.
The pope is ill. Who will Orange Ogre replace him with? Perchance himself? /sarcasm
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.
– Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” (1940)*
* Quoted in Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Anchor Books, 2002), 21.
The federal government is now using force to suppress knowledge of the history of violence against Black people. Remembering the past is too painful for these weak tyrants, so they tyrannize the brave who would teach or learn it.
Intersections: three photos of Ernestine Eckstein in a 1965 picket line outside the White House protesting Federal discrimination against gay people in civil and military service and their obtaining security clearances. Her sign reads, “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL.” Eckstein was a Black woman, whereas most of the other picketers appear to have been white men. Another lesbian activist, white, is visible in one photo: Barbara Gittings. The photographer was Gitting’s white partner, Kay Tobin.
Photos via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, images 1605765, 1605764, and 1605766
Who’s going to be the first cabinet member to go? Rubio because of the impossible negotiating position his boss and colleagues have placed him in? Hegseth because he looks even weaker and dumber than his boss on the international stage? Or will a natural or manmade disaster cost another their head?
📽️ I had fun watching the pre-Code “This is the Night,” dir. Frank Tuttle (Paramount, 1932). Its primary purpose was to be a bit racy and full of laughs. (Thelma Todd’s character loses her dress more than once, catching it in a car door, in a cabinet drawer, and on a fence…) The story begins in Paris, before moving to Venice. It is free of fascism, despite the Italian setting, but the incorruptible protagonist played by Lili Damita is clearly hungry in an early scene, a Depression-related circumstance to which the wealthy men appear oblivious. The comedy takes enough twists and turns that it’s not clear who will end up with who for much of the time.
Advertisement from The Film Daily (January–June 1932).
🎙️ On one of my long drives last week, I heard Timothy Snyder talk about freedom in a helpful way in the “Explaining Ukraine” podcast. Far from being an absence of various restrictions, it is a thing we actively cultivate in our own everyday life practices. “Why is freedom not a given but a task?"
A barrage of stupid is making it nearly impossible to see or think clearly, let alone argue cogently and persuade. M. Gessen offers a helpful diagnosis in their latest, but how do we, the collective patient, develop a cure?"
“Daisy Bates takes a walk – Activist Daisy Bates picketing with placard: ‘Jailing our youth will not solve the problem in Little Rock. We are only asking for full citizenship rights.'” Ca. 1957.
Via NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Demonstrations Collection, image id 1953728.
Anders Puck Nielsen looks at the current U.S. administration’s (non)understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War and offers reasons for why we needn’t panic. Ukraine has more agency than the U.S. administration assumes. https://youtu.be… 🇺🇦
Make America a reviled laughingstock! MAARL isn’t as catchy as MAGA, but it’s more accurate. And it captures something of the vomiting sound so many of us are making.
Felonious Husk underlings fire bird flu, not realizing it is a crucial ally in their effort to destroy the country.