Category Archive: POLITICS
O Captain! My Captain!
Post mortem image taken by John B. Bachelder
Bad Night at Ford’s Theater, Good Friday, April 14, 1865. Our great pal Torrie reminds us that since 1865, Good Friday has fallen on April 14 only in the years 1876, 1911, 1922, 1933, 1995 and 2006. And now again. It marks the seventh such Good Friday since a Great Man was felled by an assassin’s pistol, less than a week after the Confederate surrender had restored the Union of the American States. As citizens of a world in which America has played such a dominant part for over…
Continue Reading →Gandhi’s Tax Revolt
No fries with this salt
On this day in 1930, Mahatma Gandhi started his long march to Dandi on the sea to collect some salt for himself. This seemingly innocuous act was illegal at the time – the salt tax in India brought in lots of cash in olden times for the East India Company and now for the English King. A hundred thousand Indians joined Gandhi along the 400 kilometre walk. On arrival, Gandhi stooped and gathered some grains of salt, a gesture that would lead to his arrest, and presage the doom of the British Raj. It seems the Tommys had forgotten the reaction that stems from…
Continue Reading →The Hitler Club
(by Gary Gumpl and Richard Kleinig) (2007) It’s not easy being a Kraut. Hitler saw to that. He took more than two thousand years of German contributions to the world – legacies from sources such as Beethoven, Bonhoeffer, Brahms, Charlemagne, Marlene Dietrich, Dürer, Einstein, Friedrich, Goethe, Hesse, Hoffmann, Kant, Kleist, Liebniz, Luther, Mann, Mozart, Schiller, Schubert, and yes, Wagner (especially Wagner) – and sullied them, perhaps for ever. The ‘don’t mention the war’ running joke in that Fawlty Towers episode is closer to the truth than we care to admit. In modern Germany especially, the shadow cast by Nazism is long. Grotesque irony abounded in the Nazis’ world. For example, Himmler rattled around in a special train…
Continue Reading →A Hung Jury on Global Warming?
"What did South Australians use before Tom gave them candles? Electricity."
16 February 2017. Twelve years to the day since ‘implementation’ of the Kyoto Protocol.* You and I sit in a jury box. We have only just met. We bring to our mutual task our life experience and understanding of the ways of the world, our endogenous prejudices, and our gut feelings. The Judge sends us into our room charged to answer whether we are amid an interglacial, or, rather, is the globe warming – are anthropogenic CO2 emissions causing or contributing to this warming – and does this pose a clear and imminent danger, on the balance of probabilities? So we…
Continue Reading →A Mighty Heart
(Dir. Michael Winterbottom) (2007) Daniel Pearl was an American Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal, based in India, who had gone to Karachi in January 2002 for what he thought was an interview, but was probably a set-up. He was abducted and held hostage by Al Qaeda-linked terrorists, ostensibly for ransom, probably for terror. Nine days later, on 1 February 2002, Pearl was beheaded, and the atrocity was captured on film. A Mighty Heart is a film that concentrates on the frantic efforts of his wife, Marianne, to find him during those nine days. Adapted from the…
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