On Wednesday night I attended the New York Film Festival and witnessed a cinematic masterpiece, the film that last month won the top prize as the Best Film of the Venice International Film Festival. It’s called “Joker” — and all we Americans have heard about this movie is that we should fear it and stay away from it. We’ve been told it’s violent and sick and morally corrupt — an incitement and celebration of murder. We’ve been told that police will be at every screening this weekend in case of “trouble.” Our country is in deep despair, our constitution is in shreds, a rogue maniac from Queens has access to the nuclear codes — but for some reason, it’s a movie we should be afraid of.

I would suggest the opposite: The greater danger to society may be if you DON’T go see this movie. Because the story it tells and the issues it raises are so profound, so necessary, that if you look away from the genius of this work of art, you will miss the gift of the mirror it is offering us. Yes, there’s a disturbed clown in that mirror, but he’s not alone — we’re standing right there beside him.

“Joker” is no superhero or supervillain or comic book movie. The film is set somewhere in the ‘70s or ‘80s in Gotham City - and the filmmakers make no attempt to disguise it for anything other than what it is: New York City, the headquarters of all evil: the rich who rule us, the banks and corporations for whom we serve, the media which feeds us a daily diet “news” they think we should absorb. This past week, a week when a sitting President indicted himself because, in true Joker style, he was laughing himself silly at Mueller’s and the Dems’ inability to stop him, so he just quadrupled down and handed them everything they needed. But even then, after ten days of his flaunting his guilt, he was still sitting with his KFC grease-stained nuclear codes in the Oval Office, so he told
Captain Sketchy to fire up the helicopter, the sound of its blades revving up, meant only to alert the reporters to scurry outside for the daily “press conference” — Trump walks outside into the deafening cacophony of the whirlybird and publicly and feloniously asks the Peoples Republic of China to interfere in our 2020 election by sending him dirt on the Bidens. He and his magic carpet of hair then walked away and, other than the citizen howls of “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?!”, nothing happened. As “Joker” opens this weekend, Joker, Jr. Is still still sitting at John F. Kennedy’s desk in the Oval Office on the days he shows up to work, dreaming of his next conquest and debauchery.

But this movie is not about Trump. It’s about the America that gave us Trump — the America which feels no need to help the outcast, the destitute. The America where the filthy rich just get richer and filthier.

Except in this story a discomfiting question is posed: What if one day the dispossessed decide to fight back? And I don’t mean with a clipboard registering people to vote. People are worried this movie may be true
oo violent for them. Really? Considering everything we’re living through in real life? You allow your school to conduct “active shooter drills” with your children, permanently, emotionally damaging them as we show these little ones
that this is the life we’ve created for them. “Joker” makes it clear we don’t really want to get to the bottom of this, or to try to understand why innocent people turn in to Jokers after they can no longer keep it together. No one wants to ask why two smart boys skipped their 4th-hour AP French Philosophy class at Columbine High to slaughter 12 students and a teacher. Who would dare ask why the son of a vice-president of General Electric would go into Sandy Hook Elementary in
Newtown, CT and blow the tiny bodies apart of 20 first-graders. Or why did 53% of White women vote for the presidential candidate who, on tape, reveled in his talent as a sexual predator?

The fear and outcry over “Joker” is a ruse. It’s a distraction so that we don’t look at the real violence tearing up our fellow human beings — 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance is an act of violence. Millions of abused women and children living in fear is an act of violence. Cramming 59 students like worthless sardines into classrooms in Detroit is an act of violence.

As the news media stands by for the next mass shooting, you and your neighbors and co-workers have already been shot numerous times, shot straight through all of your hearts and hopes and dreams. Your pension is long gone. You’re in debt for the next 30 years because you committed the crime of wanting an education. You have actually thought about not having children because you don’t have the heart to bring them onto a dying planet where they are given a 20-year death-by-climate-change sentence at birth. The violence in “Joker”? Stop! Most of the violence in the movie is perpetrated on the Joker himself, a person in need of help, someone trying to survive on the margins of a greedy society. His crime is that he can’t get help. His crime is that he is the butt of a joke played on HIM by the rich and famous. When the Joker decides he can no longer take it — yes, you will feel awful. Not because of the (minimal) blood on the screen, but because deep down, you were cheering him on - and if you’re honest when that happens, you will thank this movie for connecting you to a new desire — not to run to the nearest exit to save your own ass but rather to stand and fight and focus your attention on the nonviolent power you hold in your hands every single day. Thank you Joaquin Phoenix, Todd Phillips, Warner Bros. and all who made this important movie for this important time. I loved this film’s multiple homages to Taxi Driver, Network, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon. How long has it been since we’ve seen a movie aspire to the level of Stanley Kubrick? Go see this film. Take your teens. Take your resolve.

This is excellent and why I'll always be a Michael Moore fan. I admit to buying into Joker propaganda. Moore is setting me straight once again.

Thank you, Michael Moore.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
If ever time travel becomes possible, I would like to travel back and meet this woman. She is one of my heroes. I am using the following quote from her for the introduction to my next book.

“Take the snake, the fruit-tree and the woman from the tableau, and we have no fall, nor frowning Judge, no Inferno, no everlasting punishment – hence no need of a Savior. Thus the bottom falls out of the whole Christian theology. Here is the reason why in all the Biblical researches and high criticisms, the scholars never touch the position of women.”

Says it all!

You can read the whole article here: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-limits-of-free-speech/387718/

It's a good article posted on another thread by a poster who's intent was to defend racist speech. The article is a clear argument for why we shouldn't.

BULLSHIT I WANT A CANDIDATE WHO CAN WIN

This is too important. I see Hillary buried in dark money. Campaign ads worse than we've seen before, and we think we've seen it all. What this will do, in my opinion, is what it did last year; discourage voting. It's not enough to fuck with the voting machines and enact voter restrictions. it's important for voters to be disgusted enough to stay home.

And, while Hillary may not be a first choice, ok she's not mine, try to imagine a Republican government in an era of global climate change and extreme weather disruptions the likes of which we've never seen. OK, got that picture in your mind?

Hillary's far ahead in the polls, so what. Do you think that scares the billionaires who plan on buying this election? They couldn't succeed with Obama because his skills at speaking and reaching out to people cut through the noise. I don't think Hillary can do that with the same success as Obama and, I'm sorry to say, neither can Bernie Sanders. In America, it's not the qualifications that matter, it's the star power. In Senator Warren we have both, and we need her badly.

In my very humble opinion, on this day, March 12, 2015, with no links provided, I think Elizabeth Warren is the best hope for the Democratic party to keep the White House in 2016, and she just might have the strength to carry the House and Senate. We need a winner in 2016. People listen to her, people believe her, people like her, and people won't like the dark money ads against her.

Being the eternal optimist, I think something will happen to get Warren into the race. It really has to. Losing the White House in 2016 cannot be an option.

I love Matt Taibbi's take on this:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/rudy-giuliani-american-soviet-20150221



I agree with Matt, especially that we have the best assholes in the world.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/rudy-giuliani-american-soviet-20150221

We are taught to read and write and it's up to us to learn the rest.

"The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson and published in 2010, is about the great migration of millions of African Americans from the South to the North.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/04/1353063/--The-Warmth-of-Other-Suns-a-review?showAll=yes

It is a huge story, taking place over great distances, large groups of people and decades of time. And that is perhaps why it is not usually told as a single narrative. Wilkerson uses the journeys of three individuals, from different decades, traveling from different origins to different destinations, to examine this largest of all internal migrations that the country had ever seen.
It was a leaderless movement of people who were tired of endless restrictions on their right to vote, to own and farm their own land; people who were tired of poor education and even poorer futures for their children. Surely, they must have been tired of their own vulnerability to Jim Crow laws that put the distance between the rest of their lives and the end of a rope in the hands of a white man who took offense at a few words spoken to a white woman.

Just as it was a war that ended the slave labor camps, it was another war that allowed so many to escape from what had become a virtual slavery in the South. World War I cut off the flow of immigrant labor from Europe upon which the industrial cities of the North relied. Word trickled down to the sharecroppers and the migrant agricultural workers and the domestics of the South and some of them left behind all they knew for a chance in the new world.

The fact that they would be facing much of the same racism and hate that they were leaving was probably unknown to many. They would at least be living in a place that did not require them to step off a sidewalk to let a white pass by, or to use a designated doorway, stairwell, or water fountain.

Isabel Wilkerson does not ignore the broader historic picture that she is painting:

The disparity in pay, reported without apology in the local papers for all to see, would have far-reaching effects. It would mean that even the most promising of colored people, having received next to nothing in material assets from their slave foreparents, had to labor with the knowledge that they were now being underpaid by more than half, that they were so behind it would be all but impossible to accumulate the assets their white counterparts could, and that they would, by definition, have less to leave succeeding generations than similar white families. Multiplied over the generations, it would mean a wealth deficit between the races that would require a miracle windfall or near asceticism on the part of colored families if they were to have any chance of catching up or amassing anything of value. Otherwise, the chasm would continue, as it did for blacks as a group even into the succeeding century. The layers of accumulated assets built up by the better-paid dominant caste, generation after generation, would factor into a wealth disparity of white Americans having an average net worth ten times that of black Americans by the turn of the twenty-first century, dampening the economic prospects of the children and grandchildren of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration before they were even born.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/04/1353063/--The-Warmth-of-Other-Suns-a-review?showAll=yes

We will never fix America until we recognize and acknowledge how we got here.

but, actually, when I think of it, we have progressed a lot, especially women and the LBGT community and the election of an African American president. It's politically that we've suffered. After the enormously popular JFK was gone, and then MLK, and then RFK, the Democratic party started to move more to the right. Liberal bashing became the cause of the day. People forgot the hope and inspiration the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King gave us. Liberals were strong and proud with these popular voices. No one since has come close..

I think as a wonderful example of an American family, you can't top our current First Family. I couldn't be more proud to have the Obama's in the White House. President Obama isn't the fiery liberal JFK was, but he's the right man for the times. I honestly believe that if America survives the current political mess, we will owe it all to the man we elected twice for our President.