Last night the blogger explored the Stalin era Soviet Union 1930’s Famine terror against the Russian people.
Tonight a documentary about the current state of Putin political terror in Russia walked away with the Academy Award for Best Documentary feature. ‘ Mr. Nobody Against Putin’.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country. And what we saw when working with this footage, it’s that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity,” Director David Borenstein said. “When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume, we all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a ‘nobody’ is more powerful than you think.”
A documentary about the current state of affairs in Russia walked away with the Academy Award for Best Documentary feature. ‘ Mr. Nobody Against Putin’.
His speech was interrupted by applause from the Dolby Theatre audience. Pavel Talankin, the 34 year old school teacher and the film’s main character, also spoke, his words translated from Russian, making an impassioned plea for peace at a time of war in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
“We look at the sky for shooting stars to make a very important wish. But there are countries where instead of shooting stars, they have shooting bombs and shooting drones,” he noted. “In the name of our future, in the name of all of our children, stop all of these wars now.”
The Academy Awards are upon us and serious movies rarely receive the Red Carpet treatment.
Tonight I watched transfixed the sobering and seriously motivating story ‘Mr. Jones ‘. Gareth Jones, a British journalist, who traveled to Soviet Russia in 1933 and exposed the terror of Stalin’s starvation campaign against his own people. Millions perished while the world remained ignorant the genocideuntil William Randolph Hearst published Gareth Jones harrowing tale.
Mr. Jones fateful and fatal phone call. Jones learns there are really two stories. One is the story the journalist, fictionalized in Mr. Jones as Paul Kleb, was desperately trying to uncover and for which he died.
Mr. Jones met a cruel fate. He was kidnapped and assassinated by Soviet agents in Mongolia one day before his 30th birthday in 1935.Gareth Jones (journalist) – Wikipedia
The film, directed by Agnieszka Holland, is meticulous. Particularly the cinemaphotography as it alternates between black/white and color.
The entire ensemble cast is stellar.
One story lines involves George Orwell and his novel ‘Animal Farm’. Apparently, the inspiration for the story was based on the ‘Holodomor’.
A second story line involves New York Times reporter Walter Duranty who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. It turns out that Duranty was well aware of Stalin’s atrocities against his own people. Yet continued to knowingly spin the fiction there was no famine. Even when the reality was known his Pulitzer was never revoked. Walter Duranty – Wikipedia https://share.google/MdriSCGn68mf9qEoU
Top photo: James Norton portrayed British journalist Gareth Jones
Excerpted from New York Times – Mairav Zonszein 3.13.2026
Israel, having demonstrated overwhelming force, is once again mistaking domination for security and tactical escalation for a sustainable regional order — even as the region continues to burn.
Benjamin Netanyahu has spent much of his political life trying to make war with Iran seem not only inevitable but overdue.
Thus, for the Israeli prime minister, the latest conflict was a victory the moment it began. Not because every consequence is good for Israel, but because he can sell almost every conceivable result as proof that he was right all along: that Iran had to be confronted, that force was unavoidable and that delay would only have made the threat more treacherous.
“It looks to me like investors are discounting what the president has to say about the direction of the war and are now focused on the duration of it.” – Joseph Brusuelas, Economist. WSJ 3.12.2026
The blogger is well aware that Country Joe McDonald’s most well traveled song ‘I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag’ became a people’s anthem of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The first Country Joe and the Fish album released in 1967 on the Vanguard Records label is a classic. Reading of Country Joe McDonald’s death at age 84 I took the album off the shelf and had some happy memories listening to the 11 tracks. In particular‘Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine’.
Trump needs to “Find Iran Exit Ramp ” – Wall Street Journal– 3.10.2026
Donald Trump’s unhinged, uncalled for, unnecessaryassault on the people of Iran is destroying the infrastructure of this thousands year old nation.
The Guardian – 3 8 2026
The unilateral assault by America and its brethren Israel is causing ruin to the United States economy.
The only benefit to all this Trump inspired death and destruction is the blogger can only hope an angry and fed up American electorate will give a big thumbs down to the hegemon Trump and MAGA in the upcoming congressional elections.
The U.S. lost 92,000 jobs in February, a widespread and unexpected downturn for a job market that continues to struggle across a broad range of sectors.
The employment numbers, reported Friday by the Labor Department, fell far short of January’s gain of 126,000 jobs. They were also much worse than the gain of 50,000 jobs that economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected to see.
The unemployment rate ticked slightly higher to 4.4%. While that is still low, the Friday report exposes troubling weaknesses in a labor market that has shown very little employment growth in recent months.
The Mainstream Media is all aTwitter and in high gear as DHS boss Kristi Noem has been given the “You’re Fired” treatment by Donald Trump.
For the blogger there’s a big San Francisco angle.
Turns out now ex-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) queen has a very chummy relationship with San Francisco Mayor and Levi’s scion Daniel Lurie.
Now we know why the Mayor has refused to cough up details of his conversations with the White House. Conversations last Fall which kept the ICE brigades from invading San Francisco.
I suppose this relationship benefited San Francisco. Still, it would be nice to know the details of the chats.
Excerpted from The San Francisco Standard 3.5.2026
Speaking Thursday during a police conference in Nashville, minutes after being fired as Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem praised San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s cooperation with the federal government pertaining to its local enforcement efforts.
During the Q&A, San Francisco Police Officers Association Vice President Chris Galligan asked Noem whether or not the federal government could help reimburse local law enforcement for the work they do at events like the recent Super Bowl.
“You maybe have some challenges in San Francisco just because of your state laws and local laws,” Noem replied. “Although you’ve got a mayor that works with us very well. He probably doesn’t want me to talk about it a lot, actually. But he has been cooperative and we have great conversations and talk quite often.”
Watching and reading about Trump’s years long unilateral fixation with chaos and destruction both at home and abroad it’s obvious he never had any intention to make a deal with Iran.
Funerals have been held for students and staff killed in what Iranian authorities have said was a US-Israeli strike on a school in southern Iran.
Iranian officials said more than 160 people were killed when a girls’ school was hit in the city of Minab on Saturday, as the US and Israel launched widespread strikes targeting Iran’s military sites and leadership.
BBC News has not been able to independently verify the Iranian authorities’ death toll.
The school was located near an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base.
The US military said it was looking into reports of the incident, while Israel’s military said it was “not aware” of any operations in the area.
Warmonger Trump White House dismisses slaughter of Iranian civilians
Trump’s devastation in IranThere was a “Resolution.” Trump’s unilateral Declaration of War – San Francisco Chronicle 2.27.2026
I first learned about Jane Birkin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Birkin decades ago while staying at the Hotel Schriersteren in the Red Light District of Amsterdam.
Her famous, or notorious, duet with her long time partner and collaborator Serge Gainsbourg J’Taime was a staple on the hotel’s juke box.
Hotel Schreiersteren – Amsterdam
Jane Birkin went on to have quite a career of her own. The New Yorker encapsulated her life in a piece after her death
Excerpted from The New Yorker 9.15.2025
She possessed a mysterious charisma and a seemingly effortless sense of style. Both obscured her relentless, often painful search for meaning.
In Agnès Varda’s film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly forty-year-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown hair pinned back, sits in front of the Eiffel Tower and dumps out the contents of her purse. The purse, which she helped design, is named for her: it’s the Birkin bag, by Hermès, one of the most famous accessories in the world. Inside are loose papers, notebooks, a tube of Maybelline’s Great Lash mascara, a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler,” a Swiss Army knife, pens and markers, a roll of tape. “Well,” Birkin says, in heavily accented French, “did you learn anything about me from seeing my bag?” Then a grin: “Even if we reveal everything, we don’t show much.”
Throughout “Jane B.,” Varda draws attention to the elusiveness of her subject. Birkin, a British-born actress and singer best known, then as now, for the raunchy pop songs she recorded with her lover Serge Gainsbourg, comes across as both open and enigmatic, singular in a way that is hard to parse. Her beauty is undeniable, but its borders are vague. Proud of her own eccentricity, she is also shy and awkward, with the voice of a little girl—hushed, rushed, and airy. Varda dresses her up as Joan of Arc, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, the Virgin Mary, a cowboy, and a flamenco dancer, as if to suggest that Birkin’s mystery is itself a symbol, one as important to modern culture as Renaissance painting and the mother of Christ.
Jane Birkin – circa 1987
Birkin, who died in 2023, had “it”: an undefinable, unmistakable glamour that shifts our collective sense of what’s cool, or at least of what’s worth paying attention to. Easily mingling English reserve and European sensuality, she had a sweetness that set her apart from contemporaries such as the bombshell Brigitte Bardot or the edgier Anna Karina. “She wasn’t a hippie,” the journalist Marisa Meltzer writes in her new biography, “It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin” (Atria), “but rather a rising star from the upper class,” someone who radiated privilege even when she dressed down. One of the first celebrities to be regularly photographed in her everyday clothes, Birkin was an early icon of street style, traipsing around Paris in sneakers and rumpled sweaters, wicker basket in hand. The outfits could be easily mimicked and therefore easily marketed. Today, when social-media influencers praise “the French-girl look”—wispy bangs, minimal makeup, bluejeans, marinière tops—the look they have in mind is hers.
Birkin, Meltzer writes, was “nonchalance personified.” If this was not exactly an illusion, neither was it the whole story. A lifelong depressive, Birkin often thought about—and at least once attempted—suicide. Her diaries, two volumes of which have been published, reveal a wonderful writer, lyrical and self-lacerating. They also reveal her struggles with the costs and compromises of the It Girl role, how it left her feeling as though she had—as she puts it in Varda’s film—“no exceptional talents” to offset her fast-fleeting youth. What Birkin did have is je ne sais quoi, to her misfortune as much as to her advantage. After all, being famous for your ineffable qualities is perilously close to being famous for no reason.
British singer and actress Jane Birkin participates in a pro-choice demonstration of support for French family planning during an abortion trial in Bobigny. (Photo by Alain Dejean/Sygma via Getty Images)
Donald Trump and his criminal co-conspirator Bibi Netanyahu are waging a criminal war of aggression against the People of Iran.
It is simply a wanton act of raining death and destruction against the ancient country of Persia
Supreme leader Ali Khamenei – graphic Foreign Affairs September/October 2025
Both these criminal instigators Trump and Netanyahu are waging this aggression to deflect from their criminal activities at home.It won’t work.
Excerpted from Al Jazeera 2.28.2026
The United States and Israel have struck multiple locations across Iran, including the capital, Tehran, in what US President Donald Trump described as “major combat operations”.
The attacks come amid negotiations between the US and Iran over the latter’s nuclear and ballistic missiles programmes, after weeks of mounting threats from Trump – and eight months after the US and Israel waged a 12-day war against Iran.
Iran has struck back with missiles aimed at northern Israel and at US military bases in the Middle East. Details of casualties and damage in Iran and Israel are sparse at the moment.
Trump’s Fascist reign brings back the scorching memories of the murder of four students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4th 1970.
Fortuitously the blogger was thousands of miles away on the Isle of Crete in Greece and was unable to read the minute by minute news reports in the pre internet era of this State murder.
The horrific news was only available days later when the International Herald Tribune hit the news stands in Greece.
In 2026The blogger wishes he wasn’t in America and forced to live through the Reign of Terror being foisted on America by Trump and his myrmidons. Shameless wannabe fascist flunkies.
Lee's Perspective 