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An Interview withJohn Shipton -Julian Assange’s father
The pacifist John Shipton is Julian Assange’s father. Robert Cibis interviews him exclusively about the judicial decision to extradite his son to the US. This discussion reveals political interference in the legal system. How far will Western governments go to set themselves apart from their pre-set values?
RESOURCE: https://www.oval.media/en/75fc....7f35-8fb4-4db2-a399-
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‘THE END OF MEDICINE’ INVESTIGATES LINK BETWEEN DISEASE AND ANIMAL CONSUMPTION
While Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara have starred in many movies together, they’ve now teamed up to make a movie. The duo–who are as equally respected by Hollywood as they are by the animal rights community–lend their influence to a new feature-length investigative documentary called The End of Medicine. As executive producers, Phoenix and Mara team up with BAFTA-winning director Alex Lockwood (73 Cows) and producer Keegan Kuhn (Cowspiracy, What The Health) to expose a disturbing, dirty little secret that the food industry has been trying to conceal for decades.
In a swift 73 minutes, The End of Medicine draws attention to the underreported link between global disease–pandemics and antibiotic resistance included–and our (mis)use of animals. The film gets its momentum from whistleblower Dr. Alice Brough, a young vet who first grew intolerant toward the industry’s “acceptable” practices of animal agriculture. As we see, Dr. Brough risks her professional career and livelihood to denounce the corruption within the industry by sharing insider information about the reality of factory farming and animal disease. Through her tears, we can clearly see how distressed she is as she talks directly to the camera, remorseful for her contributions to the industry in the past.
Where to watch: ‘The End of Medicine’ is available on VOD May 10th.
While Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara have starred in many movies together, they’ve now teamed up to make a movie. The duo–who are as equally respected by Hollywood as they are by the animal rights community–lend their influence to a new feature-length investigative documentary called The End of Medicine. As executive producers, Phoenix and Mara team up with BAFTA-winning director Alex Lockwood (73 Cows) and producer Keegan Kuhn (Cowspiracy, What The Health) to expose a disturbing, dirty little secret that the food industry has been trying to conceal for decades.
In a swift 73 minutes, The End of Medicine draws attention to the underreported link between global disease–pandemics and antibiotic resistance included–and our (mis)use of animals. The film gets its momentum from whistleblower Dr. Alice Brough, a young vet who first grew intolerant toward the industry’s “acceptable” practices of animal agriculture. As we see, Dr. Brough risks her professional career and livelihood to denounce the corruption within the industry by sharing insider information about the reality of factory farming and animal disease. Through her tears, we can clearly see how distressed she is as she talks directly to the camera, remorseful for her contributions to the industry in the past.
In typical call-to-action-type documentaries, The End of Medicine provides an overwhelming number of facts that are meant to shock the viewer into making immediate lifestyle changes. Industry insiders, government advisors, politicians, scientists, and leading doctors share unnerving statistics that at times, feel more hopeless than optimistic.
One claim that caused me to sit up a little straighter was hearing that 3 out of 4 emerging infectious diseases come from an animal source. This tends to happen because an animal’s immune system is lowered when they’re stressed, and they’re stressed because they’re so densely packed in cages in unsanitary conditions. It’s easy for the animal, then, to catch an infection and spread it to the rest of their cage-mates and eventually, the humans who consume them. Not surprisingly, COVID was used as an example: We socially distance ourselves from other sick humans but are doing the exact opposite to animals. This film asks, “Why?”
The End of Medicine has one goal in mind, and that is to get its audience to think twice about consuming animal products. Ideally, Phoenix and Mara would be able to convince all of us to go completely vegan (but it may take a few more documentaries for that to happen). While the note the film ends on isn’t the most optimistic in tone, aside from the standard “transform yourself to transform the world”, its intentions are pure and worthwhile. Films like these are important, and if The End of Medicine causes you to pause before ordering the burger–even for a moment–then it’s done its job.
REVIEW RESOURCE: https://cinemacy.com/the-end-of-medicine-review/
This documentary brings up several questions about the secret space program: what it is, who is behind it and why Is there a human civilization living off-world with highly advanced technology and knowledge about the existence of aliens Why are we being kept in the dark?
The moovie exposes the fact that the NASA space program is actually a continuation of the Space Projects funded by the Royal-Bavarian Elite, who, under the custodianship of Hitler and Himmler planned to voyage to the Moon and create a LUNAR BASE. Project Paperclip, the Van Allen Radiation Belts and literally dozens upon dozens of UFO clips filmed from aboard the flight-deck of the SPACE SHUTTLE by NASA astronauts makes this motion picture documentary a special collector's item.
…as David Icke, Jaime Maussan, Marcus Allen and Valery Uvarov spoke, the veil of secrecy at NASA, the sordid history of the ex NAZI SS Officers at the heart of the Apollo Space Missions and the interplay of Masonic symbolism in the names of rockets and spacecraft all started to become frighteningly clear. Chris Everard presents what can only be described as the most startling UFO footage ever seen.
The Space Serpents flying around the upper atmosphere have to be seen to be believed. What’s more, is that all the UFO clips come direct from NASA – filmed by astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle! I must admit that I originally thought the premise for this film was ridiculous. Two hours later, I found myself staring blankly at the end credits. My phone rang unanswered. I lit my first cigarette for 20 years and realised that some kind of Alien Invasion is happening. Colonel Philip Corso was right. They’re Here!”
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Kevin Macdonald's three fictional movies have taken him to Idi Amin's Uganda, Washington DC and the northern reaches of Roman Britain. They're all thrillers of various kinds, as are Touching the Void and One Day in September, the tightly focused, feature-length documentaries that preceded them. Touching the Void centres on a dangerous expedition by two British climbers in the Peruvian Andes in 1985 and uses interviews with the real participants and simulated scenes played by actors. One Day in September is about the massacre of Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists at the 1972 Olympics and, in addition to interviews and archive footage, employs computer graphics to explain the course of events.
His new film, a cinebiography of Bob Marley is a bigger, baggier and simpler thing. It's the story of a man who lived an extraordinarily full yet oddly mysterious life and died a world figure 30 years ago, shortly after reaching the age of 36. It is, however, told without any reconstructions or impersonations and neither Sidney Poitier nor Morgan Freeman was called in to deliver a rousing commentary explaining the man's contradictions, achievements and significance.
The picture begins in West Africa at an old fortress on the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Through its "Door of No Return" leading to the sea passed many of the millions of shackled slaves who were shipped across the Atlantic. This was the journey made by his ancestors that shaped Marley's life, identity and music and the belief system that drew them together.
He was born in the remote Jamaican village of Nine Mile in 1945 and Macdonald takes us there in a lyrical aerial shot across the steep, wooded hill country. His mother, Cedella, was black and 16. His father, Norval Marley, a white man aged 65, was employed by the forestry commission to prevent the theft of timber. He rode around the countryside like a seigneurial Cossack and styled himself Captain, though there's no evidence he'd held any commissioned rank or served in any war. In the only known photo of Norval, he's on horseback attempting to look authoritative and his family refused to recognise Bob when he once called on them for help.
Macdonald sees Bob as a man who felt rejected by both the black and the white communities, an outsider who was to find a symbolic home in Africa through embracing Rastafarianism, a style of personal independence and social defiance, and a mission to bring people together in a grand international, inter-racial brotherhood.
Marley grew up in extreme poverty, first in the countryside, then in the slums of Kingston's Trenchtown, where the first photograph of him was taken at the age of 12. The documentation of the early life is thin, but Macdonald is able throughout to draw on the colourful testimony of his formidable mother, his friends, fellow musicians, a variety of female companions (Marley had nine or 10 children by six or seven different women) and later some businessmen, politicians and gangsters.
There are splendid anecdotes about survival, about Bob and his band, the Wailers, developing a new kind of music that fused local and international forms into a distinctive form of reggae, and the zig-zagging of a career that took Marley to the United States, where his mother had relocated, to Europe and to Africa. Much of what we hear from Jamaican witnesses is spoken in a beguiling, if sometimes obscure, patois and there are the kind of contradictions in the individual assessments of his character and the accounts of the fraught progress of the Wailers that one would expect. This is Rashomon territory.
But there are compromises and concessions of a different kind that have come about through the need to secure interviews, musical rights and other necessary forms of co-operation. These are reflected in the names of several family members and various close business associates listed in the credits as producers. Some of these people provide the finest testimony.
Among them are Bob's Cuban-born wife Rita, who worked in his backing group and recalls seeing stigmata on Haile Selassie's hand during his triumphant visit to Jamaica; Bob's three children by her (Cedella, Ziggy and Stephen); the beautiful, spirited Cindy Breakspeare, his trophy companion and former Miss World who bore him a child but refused to embrace Rastafarianism; and the laidback British impresario Chris Blackwell of Island Records.
If Marley ultimately remains something of a mystery (he gave few interviews and in none was particularly forthcoming), we nevertheless get a vivid impression of a career that included a brief stint on a Chrysler production line in Delaware, a long period of apprenticeship as a composer (initially working with homemade instruments) and a rise to local and international stardom. Gradually, the dreadlocks, the music and the cloud of ganja smoke come together to form as recognisable an image as that of the equally short-lived Che Guevara.
He was, however, altogether less militant than Che, virtually apolitical, which did not prevent competing forces seeking his allegiance or seeing him as a valuable symbol for their causes. In 1976, an assassination attempt in Jamaica drove him into exile. It wasn't, however, a bullet that did for him but the stud of a boot during a game of his beloved football in a London park, triggering the melanoma in his foot that eventually consumed his body.
We hear of a beautiful moment in a wintry Bavarian clinic where Bob's mother read the Book of Job to the emaciated singer, his dreadlocks lost to chemotherapy, shortly before he flew across the Atlantic to die in Miami in May 1981.
Perhaps this impressive, thoughtful portrait should have ended there. Instead, it concludes with a succession of Marley's hits being sung in a various languages by cheerful young people on every continent. That's all a little too "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Coca-Cola-ish for my tastes.
REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/fi....lm/2012/apr/22/bob-m
AERS cancer reports are 5 X higher in just 18 months for the Covid shots compared to all other products in the entire history of VAERS
3000 hits for the term ‘cancer’ in all previous (pre Covid injection) VAERS reports
15,000 hits for the term ‘cancer’ for Covid injections in just 18 months
Here we have such aggressive and fast moving cancers that people are clearly associating them with these shots
The median age for deaths after these injections is about 10 years lower than the median age for deaths before these injections were rolled out
The median age of deaths from Covid was 82 (above average life expectancy) and with these shots the median age of deaths is 72
Soaked in Bleach. 2015. Directed by Benjamin Statler. Written by Donnie Eichar, Richard Middleton, and Benjamin Statler.
Starring Tyler Bryan as Kurt Cobain, Sarah Scott as Courtney Love; featuring, as themselves, Tom Grant, Brett Ball, Max Wallace, and Norm Stamper.
Admittedly, even though I’ve always thought Courtney Love is bat shit crazy, I never believed she (or anyone else) might’ve been covering anything up or hiding information concerning Kurt Cobain’s suicide. As much as I loved Cobain, worshiped Nirvana as a young musician with a bad attitude and even worse fashion sense, I just took what the media fed me about his depression and how he’d always seemed suicidal, that he took his I.D out and put it on his wallet so that when he shot himself they’d be able to identify his body easily… and so much more.
After watching this, the other reviews and articles touting this documentary as a ‘conspiracy theory’ are way off base. There’s too much in this film to deny, from actual police documents, the tapes Private Investigator Tom Grant has with Courtney Love on it saying some downright incriminating things and even some with Rosemary Carroll (the Cobain/Love lawyer) saying things against Love. See for yourself. Judge on your own. But here’s my take:
The first thing we hear is a conversation between Tom Grant and Courtney. She hired him to investigate after Kurt went missing, this was only briefly before his alleged suicide. On this first tape, Grant questions Courtney about where she’d found some other letter, supposedly from Kurt, and she is telling him it was under the pillows on her bed. Grant, being there the night before Kurt was found dead, knew different; he’d tossed the bed and found Rohypnol, which Kurt had a prescription for. He knew the difference, and yet Courtney tried sticking to her guns even when Tom told her otherwise. So right off the bat, we get this very real, raw version of Courtney – outside of the media, outside of other celebrities and what they think of her or the general public and their view – right from a tape. It’s damning.
From there, we learn a little about Grant whose life story reads much like a lot of police/military officers. The thing I kept wondering is, for those who don’t believe the man or doubt he is credible – what does he have to gain from this? He’s pretty much haunted with what he sees as the facts. He’s not exactly a celebrity himself because of Kurt or Courtney; most people pass him off as just another conspiracy theorist. Yet, as he mentions later, Tom still gets letters, e-mails, all sorts of communication asking about Kurt, wondering why nothing has been done when there’s actually a lot of evidence suggesting he did not die by suicide. It isn’t only Tom who believes, but unfortunately the police seem to be the real roadblock.
It becomes very clear that police negligence really had a hand in what came to pass. On top of that, Courtney Love set the stage for this “suicide” – when she hired Tom Grant, filed a police report (and did so in fake fashion using Cobain’s own mother’s name – the media promptly reported his mom was worried he was suicidal and filed a Missing Persons), and then perpetuated the myth of Cobain being frequently suicidal. What really troubles me is this idea of the myth – that Kurt really wasn’t a suicidal person. Yes, he was depressed. Yes, he had killer stomach pains that put him in agony. But he was happy with his friends and people around him. After the stomach pains were cleared up and doctors put him on the correct medication after many stressful years, Cobain himself told an interviewer he felt the best he’d ever felt and he was plenty happy. Sure, no one knows what’s going on in the mind of someone behind closed doors – ultimately, we never know. I had a friend who killed himself and none of us in our circle of friends ever expected it. Yet so many close friends claim Kurt never ever talked about suicide once.
Furthermore, he’s not in the movie but Buzz Osborne knew Kurt, and the rest of Nirvana, from the beginning – he and Kurt went to high school together, he knew him before and after Nirvana hit the bigtime. Buzz claims Kurt was never suicidal, it was all a lie. He has harsh words for the other Cobain documentary that recently came out, Montage of Heck, because aside from the suicide myth it portrays other stories that are not actually true (the story that Kurt supposedly had sex with an overweight, mentally handicapped girl when he was young is a total fabrication, according to King Buzzo). So during Soaked in Bleach, we get a lot of other opinions from people very close with Cobain that jive with that of Osborne – that Kurt could be quiet, shy, but the idea that he was a suicide case is untrue.
What really drove this home is Courtney Love. When Cobain accidentally overdosed on his Rohypnol prescription after having a glass of champagne, the incident was not called a suicide at the time. At first people speculated it was an attempt, but it was confirmed as being accidental afterwards. Love did not, at the time, claim Kurt tried to kill himself. Nobody did. Then, after Kurt was found dead, immediately Courtney began telling the media how he tried it in Rome, he tried before, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise. This is categorically untrue. Max Wallace brings up the fact they even talked with the doctor who attended to Kurt that night in Rome, and the doctor also denies to the bone it was a suicide attempt confirming it was most certainly an accidental overdose. It isn’t hard to see Love helped the media run with the image of Kurt as a suicidal persona.
Once things get to the real down and dirty faces, looks at the crime scene and all that, it’s even more of an affirmation that Tom Grant is not just some ‘conspiracy nut’. The tapes are one thing, hearing Courtney go on about how maybe Kurt disappearing and all that before his death would be good for publicity on Hole’s next album and hearing her just lie to Grant over and over, but the crime scene is a whole other beast. I don’t want to say too much more because the evidence is some of the real knock-out stuff in this film.
I did like the little drama recreations they did with actors playing Love, Grant, Cobain, and others involved. Some of it was pretty decent. Not that she doesn’t deserve it after seeing this movie, but they really went hard at Love with their portrayal. However, I don’t see it as being that far off base. If you didn’t think Love was crazy before, you absolutely will after watching this. It’s hard not to.
A lot of the evidence presented makes you wonder how this case isn’t being re-opened and investigated again. Truly. This was an eye-opener of a documentary. Even worse, it’s coming out that apparently Courtney Love has bought Twitter followers, et cetera, to help tank ratings on websites for the film; IMDB is usually bad for ratings, but the skewed low rating for this was ridiculous as about 1,000 ratings of 1 before the release drove it down. Suspicious? Make up your own mind.
This is absolutely a 5 star documentary. I love Cobain, his music, all of it, but to see this was truly fascinating. I can’t get over it, honestly. I want to watch it again several times just to take in all the information. The whole thing is spooky. I’ll say no more other than – the directing is great, this whole film is put together well, and Tom Grant is a saint for offering himself up all these years as “that conspiracy guy” who has actually been fighting the fight for real justice.
One thing resonated with me deeply. Tom brought up how there have been tons of suicides that have been copycats of Kurt – either they did what he did exactly, or their suicide notes quoted Nirvana and related to the late rockstar – and he just wants the truth out there. Because it’s a shame for any kid to kill themselves, but if it’s partly due to the fact Kurt supposedly did, when he might not have, then there is a real need to have the truth known. Not only for all those kids, future kids possibly, but also for Kurt, for Frances Bean, and for all the people of a generation who related to him through his music.
REVIEW RESOURCE: https://fathersonholygore.com/....2015/06/15/soaked-in
Sound has the power to charm, annoy, and even change history. Sonic Magic: The Wonder and Science of Sound reveals the historic force, promise, and potential of sound – and a strange phenomenon called cymatics that has created a new scientific mystery.
Sonic Magic explores how sound has shaped our history, introducing us to fields of acoustic ecology and also research labs where sound is eliminating cancer tumours and much more.
RESOURCE: https://spark-doc.com
This documentary looks inside the life of a high-powered music publicist who became a techno-age philosopher.
For the past 20 years, in his second career as a best-selling author, Howard Bloom has been grappling with the big questions, all of which can be boiled down to, as he puts it here, “What does the universe want from you and me?” Bloom has, in the pre-Covid-19 world chronicled in this documentary about him, a strict routine that helps him in this discipline.
It includes morning exercise and consulting a list of reminders of what to take with him when he ventures out of his Brooklyn brownstone. It also involves a staggering number of medications, which he needs to combat his chronic fatigue syndrome, which struck him in 1988 and left him unable to step out of his bed, let alone his apartment, for many years.
Directed by Charlie Hoxie, “The Grand Unified Theory” is a moderately engaging documentary that credibly portrays Bloom’s indefatigability. He speaks of his aspiration to be a “24 hour-a-day information processing device” and defends his auto-didacticism by saying “Grad school looked like Auschwitz for the mind.” That eyebrow-raising simile is emblematic of Bloom’s bluff offhandedness, which likely served him well in his first career as a high-profile music publicist. (Recalling his tenure representing Run-DMC, he says, “We made rap.” Kurtis Blow and others might like a word.)
The movie spends more time on Bloom’s personality than it does on the ideas promulgated in such volumes as “The Lucifer Principle,” for which the actor Jeff Bridges contributes an onscreen blurb. And when Bloom confides his plan to let a Dubai-based fitness instructor and gym entrepreneur handle his archives, we get into what looks like some P.T. Barnum territory.
REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0....7/21/movies/the-gran
Watch PART 2 (TWO) here => https://vajratube.com/v/B4mRnJ
After a long summer of feasting, their bodies stately and plump, the emperor penguins of Antarctica begin to feel, toward autumn, a need to march inland to the breeding grounds "where each and every one of them was born." They are all of a mind about this, and walk in single file, thousands of them, in a column miles long. They all know where they are going, even those making the march for the first time, and when they get there, these countless creatures, who all look more or less the same to us, begin to look more or less desirable to one another. Carefully, they choose their mates.
This is not a casual commitment. After the female delivers one large egg, the male gathers it into a fold of his abdomen, plants his feet to protect the egg from the ice below, and then stands there for two months with no food or water, in howling gales, at temperatures far below zero, in total darkness, huddled together with the other fathers for warmth. The females meanwhile, march all the way back to the sea, now even more distant, to forage for food, which they will bring when the spring comes, if they know it must. When the females return to the mass of countless males, they find their mate without error and recognize the cries of chicks they have never seen.
"March of the Penguins" is simply, and astonishingly, the story of this annual cycle. It was filmed under unimaginable conditions by the French director Luc Jacquet and his team, including the cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison. There is not much to choose from in setting up their shots: On the coldest, driest and (in winter) darkest continent on Earth, there is snow, and there is ice, and there are penguins. There is also an ethereal beauty.
Although the compulsion to reproduce is central to all forms of life, the penguins could be forgiven if they'd said the hell with it and evolved in the direction of being able to swim to Patagonia. The film's narrator, Morgan Freeman, tells us that Antarctica was once a warm land with rich forests that teemed with creatures. But as the climate grew colder over long centuries, one lifeform after another bailed out, until the penguins were left in a land that, as far as they can see, is inhabited pretty much by other penguins, and edged by seas filled with delicious fish. Even their predators, such as the leopard seal, give them a pass during the dark, long, cold winter.
"This is a love story," Freeman's narration assures us, reminding me for some reason of Tina Turner singing "What's Love Got to Do With It?" I think it is more accurately described as the story of an evolutionary success. The penguins instinctively know, because they have been hard-wired by evolutionary trial and error, that it is necessary to march so far inland because in spring, the ice shelf will start to melt toward them, and they need to stand where the ice will remain thick enough to support them.
As a species, they learned this because the penguins who paused too soon on their treks had eggs that fell into the sea. Those who walked farther produced another generation, and eventually every penguin was descended from a long line of ancestors who were willing to walk the extra mile.
Why do penguins behave in this manner? Because it works for them, and their environment gives them little alternative. They are Darwinism embodied. But their life history is so strange that until the last century, it was not even guessed at. The first Antarctic explorers found penguins aplenty, but had little idea where they came from, where they went to, and indeed whether they were birds or mammals.
The answers to those questions were discovered by a man named Apsley Cherry-Garrard, in one of the most remarkable books ever written, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). He was not writing about the journey of the penguins, but about his own trek with two others through the bitter night to their mating grounds. Members of Scott's 1910-1912 expedition to the South Pole, they set out in the autumn to follow the march of the penguins, and walked through hell until he found them, watched them, returned with one of their eggs. Cherry-Garrard retired to England, where he lived until 1959; his friends felt the dreadful march, and the later experience of finding the frozen bodies of Scott and two others, contributed to his depression for the rest of his life.
For Jacquet and his crew, the experience was more bearable. They had transport, warmth, food and communication with the greater world. Still, it could not have been pleasant, sticking it out and making this documentary, when others were filming a month spent eating at McDonald's. The narration is a little fanciful for my taste, and some of the shots seem funny to us but not to the penguins. When they fall over, they do it with a remarkable lack of style. And for all the walking they do, they're ungainly waddlers. Yet they are perfect in their way, with sleek coats, grace in the water and heroic determination. It's poignant to watch the chicks in their youth, fed by their parents, playing with their chums, the sun climbing higher every day, little suspecting what they're in for.
REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.rogerebert.com/rev....iews/march-of-the-pe
AI is taking over and nothing can stop it. Soon Artificial Intelligence will take over the planet and dispose of human life in the process. Robot rebellion is no longer fiction, it's reality and we have to act now for humanity to survive.
It would be easy to dismiss an hour-long film adaptation of Peter Schweizer’s book about the charitable-political-nonprofit complex of Bill and Hillary Clinton as nothing more than conservative propaganda. But sitting in a Manhattan screening room late Wednesday, it quickly became clear that conservatives weren’t the intended audience for Clinton Cash.
Environmentalists. Anti-nuke activists. Gay-rights advocates. Good-government folks. They’re all going to find themselves increasingly uncomfortable over claims that the likely Democratic nominee, in the film’s words, takes cash from the “darkest, worst corners of the world.”
The 60-minute indictment of the Clintons will soon find its way to an awful lot of televisions ahead of November’s elections. Based on a heavily researched book by the same name, Clinton Cash is careful in laying out a series of facts that are mostly true, though both the book and the movie sometimes draws connections and conclusions that aren’t as solid as their evidence.
“When it comes to the Clintons, you have to follow the money,” Schweizer says in a rough-cut previewed for TIME.
No doubt, there are many places where dotted lines are smudged into solid ones, and some assumptions are made where concrete evidence of quid pro quo is impossible to prove. But as a work of persuasion, the movie is likely to leave on-the-fence Clinton supporters who see it feeling more unsure about casting a vote for her. Made by the conservative Breitbart News’ executive chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, and director M.A. Taylor, this film rises above the traditional campaign hit job.
“This film is not to re-litigate Benghazi or the 1990s,” Bannon said.
The 1990s were, in fact, dealt with during Clinton’s last campaign. Hillary: The Movie was broad and provocative, dealing with the various scandals during Bill Clinton’s presidency. That movie had little influence on the 2008 campaign, but it ended up becoming inadvertently influential when a case about it led the Supreme Court to overturn campaign finance restrictions in the Citizens United case, ushering in the era of super PACs.
Unlike Hillary, Clinton Cash is a more narrowly focused production with a clear-cut thesis that it repeats through a litany of perceived shifty associations. One alleges that that the Clintons helped the Russian nuke agency get control of 20% of American uranium as part of a deal that involves a Canadian billionaire, Kazakhstan mining officials and Vladimir Putin. Another claims that the Clintons got into bed with African strongmen with horrendous human rights records. “Paul Kigali is a friend of Bill Clinton’s,” the film tells audiences of Rwanda’s leader and suggests the Clintons are engaging in neo-colonialism in exploiting African countries’ natural resources.
The film also accuses Hillary Clinton of flip-flopping on the Keystone XL pipeline after an investor booked Bill Clinton for lucrative speeches. Schweizer also says Clinton’s State Department spared Sweden’s Ericsson of troubles over selling technology to Iran after it, too, booked Bill Clinton for a paid talk. The list goes on: that Bill Clinton pocketed KGB money, a mining company put Hillary brother, Tony Rodham, on its board after it won concessions.
The individual facts are largely true and based on widely reported events and public documents. The conclusions, however, are not as cut-and-dried as the film makes them out to be when assembled together. In general, the film’s reasoning is that if one thing followed another, it was a case of cause-and-effect.
Clinton campaign officials did not respond to a request for comment about the film, but they were harshly critical of its source material. “A new book by Republican operative and friend of the Koch brothers, Peter Schweizer, makes a number of wild accusations about Hillary Clinton—so wild that even the author admits he has no evidence to support them,” the campaign said last year.
There are a lot of leaps of logic in the film, but the insinuations, told through a pattern of favorable results following cash to Clintons, make for a disheartening watch. For instance, Clinton pal Joe Wilson, a former U.S. Ambassador at the center of the Bush-era controversy over weapons of mass destruction, allegedly got a leg up for his investment firm with help from the Clintons in South Sudan. Then there is a $100 million pledge to the Clintons that coincided with favorable contracts in Nigeria and a $1.4 million speaking fee for Bill Clinton personally. Investor Marc Rich, who received a controversial last-minute pardon in 2001, even makes an appearance.
This is not a movie that is going to dissuade the #imwithher crowd from supporting Clinton. But it is a movie that might keep disaffected liberals at home, energize the Sanders supporters to keep up the fight even after their preferred candidate bows to reality and serve up new fodder for conservative talking heads on cable news. This isn’t a game-changing movie, but one that could keep some less enthusiastic voters on the sidelines.
The film carefully curates reality in way to boost anti-Clinton voices. For instance, discussion of Bill Clinton’s role in post-2010 Haiti earthquake completely ignores that George W. Bush also helped raise cash in the wake of the disaster, nor does it acknowledge that one character, the founder of Canadian TD Bank’s sister corporation, TD Ameritrade, also funded Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s super PAC. The film doesn’t mention other reasons why Hillary Clinton may have made particular decisions, leaving the viewer with a narrow understanding. And it blurs the line between Bill and Hillary Clinton’s actions, treating them as essentially the same person.
REVIEW RESOURCE: https://time.com/4328254/clint....on-cash-movie-hillar
FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency exchange, exploded onto the scene in just a few years. Endorsed by celebrities and accepted by the establishment, it attracted big-name investors and was valued at $32bn before it collapsed in a matter of days. Regulators fell for it, venture capitalists fell for it, celebrities fell for it - everyone fell for the legend of Sam
Produced, directed and edited by Daniel Garrahan. Filmed by Petros Gioumpasis and Gregory Bobillot. Graphics by Russell Birkett
00:00 - The legend of Sam
03:04 - FT explodes into the mainstream
07:04 - Cracks start to form
10:00 - The fall of FTX
13:58 - "I ended up losing $2.1m"
15:22 - Sam's apology tour
17:33 - Police arrest Sam in the Bahamas
18:34 - FTX's inner circle of power
21:09 - A failure of due diligence
23:29 - Where were the auditors? Where were the regulators?
27:49 - What FTX's collapse means for crypto
A horrific tale of misogyny, rape and 10,000 deaths
This shocking, methodical documentary uses first-hand testimonies to expose a toxic culture where abusers prey on the vulnerable – while hiding behind a cloak of saintliness.
Not the United Nations as well. We live resigned to the knowledge that our political parties, law enforcers, independent standards agencies and sport governing bodies are functionally corrupt and deeply chauvinistic. Now Whistleblowers: Inside the UN (BBC Two) is here to tell us that the nearest thing we have to an expression of global conscience is a source of shame as much as hope.
Anyone who has studied the mechanics of the UN security council knows the United Nations is an instrument of iniquitous power, not a check upon it, but Whistleblowers suggests the parts you could still naively have thought of as pure – the collective effort to fight disease, hunger and climate change – ripple with the familiar stench of powerful people who are concerned, it seems, only with how to preserve and abuse their positions.
The documentary combines disparate accounts from former senior UN staff, to accumulate a breadth and depth of evidence that becomes crushing.
We start with Emma Reilly, claiming a boss overruled her when she refused to let China see the names of Uyghur activists who were to attend a human rights council meeting. She feared they would be targeted by state repression. One of those activists says his family was targeted.
OK, perhaps that’s just one blase manager, and in any case the programme-makers have been sent a UN statement contesting Reilly’s claim. But then we hear from James Wasserstrom, who says he found evidence that the tendering process for the construction of a power station in Kosovo was compromised by kickbacks, and John O’Brien, who raised concerns that an environmental programme in Russia had succumbed to local money-laundering scams.
Reilly, Wasserstrom and O’Brien all separately allege that once they spoke out, the UN went after them. O’Brien was suddenly accused of solicitation and viewing nude photographs on his phone at work (O’Brien sees the allegations as vexatious). Wasserstrom was promised whistleblower protection, then had his identity leaked to the very people he had accused. Reilly has footage of Swiss police entering her flat and refusing to leave: she says the UN had sent them, and had told them Reilly was a suicide risk. “Effectively,” she recalls, “the UN tried to have me sectioned.”
By the time she’d convinced them it was a false alarm, she had missed an online meeting at which she had planned to raise the disclosure of activists’ identities – it so happened that the cops arrived just as the meeting was beginning.
Still, although the trio’s tears seem real, perhaps the odd viewer might, somehow, think all three are lying and the UN’s flat denials are the truth. But we are not even halfway into a 90-minute programme that never feels short of material.
Next, the journalist Jeremy Dupin relates how he came to suspect that leaking latrines at a UN base in Haiti caused a catastrophic cholera outbreak that began in 2010 and ended up costing more than 10,000 lives. Attempts to hold anyone accountable were stonewalled.
Somehow, after this allegation the programme manages to be shocking in a new way.
Because, of course, we’re not talking here about powerful people. We are largely talking about powerful men and, in its latter stages, Whistleblowers switches its focus to an organisational culture of misogyny and rape. We hear how peacekeeping troops in Haiti and Central African Republic were implicated in numerous horrific sexual assaults against vulnerable locals, and we meet one of the victims – as well as the former assistant secretary-general Tony Banbury, who resigned in dismay at the UN’s indifferent response to a child in CAR being raped: “I needed the organisation to prioritise that girl. They prioritised the perpetrators.”

Purna Sen, former UN spokesperson on sexual harassment … Whistleblowers: Inside the UN. Photograph: Ben Steele/BBC
The most pained testimonies – presented, like everything else in this methodical dossier, with a sober lack of sensationalism – are from three women who worked for the UN to help those affected by floods, poverty or Aids. They make detailed allegations about their careers being derailed when they reported senior colleagues for serious sexual misconduct.
When Purna Sen, formerly the UN’s spokesperson on sexual harassment, claims that the United Nations badge is “a fantastic cloak for abuse”, it highlights what’s so particularly disturbing here: the nature of its work ought to make the UN a safer institution to work in or deal with than, say, a multinational corporation, but its supposed inherent goodness gives bad apples natural impunity. One is reminded of the infallibility afforded to the Catholic church in the 20th century; in the 21st, the UN’s secular saintliness offers the same sort of men similar protection. A stronger one, in fact, since – as the Haitian cholera victims discovered when they tried to sue – if you work for the UN, you generally enjoy legal immunity.
And so Whistleblowers slots in with one of the themes of the age: we have placed our trust in certain institutions to enforce vital rules, but we’ve constructed those institutions as toxic boys’-club hierarchies where the rules, depending on who you are and how much power you wield, do not always apply.
REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/tv....-and-radio/2022/jun/
A personal look at the extraordinary life, career and artistry of Alexander McQueen. Through exclusive interviews with his closest friends and family, recovered archives, exquisite visuals and music, McQueen is an authentic celebration and thrilling portrait of an inspired yet tortured fashion visionary. Directed by Ian Bonhôte and co-directed/written by Peter Ettedgui.
This moving documentary looks at the legacy of Lee A McQueen, the mercurial, anti-establishment fashion designer better known as Alexander McQueen. Co-directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, it divides his life into chapters or “tapes” titled after his most iconic collections. It’s a thrill to relive McQueen’s shows, from Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims to Highland Rape and Plato’s Atlantis. Their theatrics have a tense, cinematic quality, only helped by Michael Nyman’s twisting, needling score.
McQueen grew up daydreaming of dresses in Stratford, east London, before an apprenticeship at Anderson & Sheppard of Savile Row that would eventually lead to a creative director role at Givenchy. Described as “funny and disrespectful”, McQueen had an equal interest in sabotage and tradition (and an obsession with Sinéad O’Connor), and was inspired by fetish culture, Francis Bacon and the grim history of London’s East End. The film does well to capture its subject’s cheekiness.
Bonhôte and Ettedgui stress that he came of age at Central Saint Martins, catching the attention of soon-to-be mentor Isabella Blow, who was struck by the emotional quality of his work. By combining cheaply shot home videos of the designer goofing off in the studio with archive of his shows and talking head interviews with some of his closest colleagues (though not all – fashion heads will surely spot the omissions), the film-makers capture the impact he had on the people around him.
However, this is also a film about McQueen the Londoner, surviving on unemployment benefit while he established himself and coming up in the 90s among controversial celebrity artists like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Much of the film’s context is cocaine and overwork, liposuction and New Labour – a cocktail of unhappiness that drove McQueen to suicide in 2010.
RESOURCE: https://bleeckerstreetmedia.com/mcqueen
Moment of Contact is an exploration of extraterrestrial encounters, this one centered on a series of events in 1996 when citizens of Varginha, Brazil, reported seeing one or more strange creatures and a UFO crash. A number of locals, including a group of girls ranging in age from 14-21, had a close encounter with a being described as about 4 feet tall, with brown oily skin, a large head and huge red eyes.
The town of Varginha was cordoned off by military and emergency response teams and two creatures were captured. Local military policeman Marco Cherese died under mysterious circumstances after allegedly handling one of the creatures.
Fox’s documentary features interviews with key eyewitnesses, experts and officials including nuclear physicist and professional ufologist Stanton Friedman, Brazilian Air Force General Jose Carlos Pereira, and Brazilian ufologist Ademar Jose Gevaerd.
Nikola Tesla did countless mysterious experiments, but he was a whole other mystery on his own. Almost all genius minds have a certain obsession. Nikola Tesla had a pretty big one!
He was walking around a block repeatedly for three times before entering a building, he would clean his plates with 18 napkins, he lived in hotel rooms only with a number devisable by 3. He would make calculations about things in his immediate environment to make sure the result is devisable by 3 and base his choices upon the results. He would do everything in sets of 3.
Some say he had OCD, some say he was very superstitious.
However, the truth is a lot deeper.
“If you knew the magnificence of the three, six and nine, you would have a key to the universe.” – Nikola Tesla
RESOURCE: https://garylite.com/2018/09/0....9/the-secret-behind-
One of the most important videos I’ve done to date… watch until the end and comment your thoughts below 👇
Elizabeth April is a Universal Source Channeller, she was given the message at 16 not to do any external research*. Everything you listen to in her videos is channeled through conscious meditation.
Clairvoyant, truth seeker, intuitive psychic, and best-selling author ELIZABETH APRIL (also known as EA), is here on a mission to help humanity awaken.
EA has been featured on Vice, Bustle, Discovery, and Gaia TV to name a few, and has spoken at world-renown conferences across North America.
Most recently, EA was a featured expert on Unidentified with Demi Lovato (NBC’s Peacock TV). Elizabeth April is on a mission to help shift the world, the only question remaining is, are you ready to join her on this journey?
RESOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/c/ElizabethApril
Tommy Edison talks about independent journalist and filmmaker Millie Weaver’s arrest on Friday as she tried to release her highly anticipated and controversial documentary, Shadow Gate. The Tommy Edison Experience Podcast is available on YouTube, Apple/iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Radio.com, Tune In, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Deezer, Overcast, Breaker, Castbox, Castro, Pocket Casts, Blubrry, PodBean, PlayerFM, and more.
Millie Weaver, a correspondent for Infowars, posted on her website on Aug. 3 that "ShadowGate" was coming soon.
Billed as perhaps the "biggest whistleblowing event ever," the promised exposé, nearly an hour-and-a-half long, started spreading on social media about two weeks later.
Much in the vein of Infowars, which was created by Alex Jones and promotes conspiracy theories, this video makes sweeping claims about a supposed shadow government puppeteering civil society. But it provides no supporting evidence for its eye-opening claims.
"What if I were to tell you that a small group of government contractors were hired by government officials to frame the Trump campaign, set him up for the Russia collusion investigation, provided witnesses for the impeachment hearings, and provided administrative support services to the Department of Justice during the Mueller investigation," Weaver says as the video starts. "And what if it just so happened that this same group of government contractors are behind the fake news in mainstream media, influence operations on social media, and the civil unrest nationwide pushing the defund the police movement."
The referenced "contractors" form the "military industrial complex," Weaver says. "These contractors have used their connections, power and influence to create an unprecedented international criminal enterprise where blackmail is traded and people’s personal data is gold."
From there more allegations unfurl without evidence, including that:
- News pundits like Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" are assets for this shadow government.
- Polls that showed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 presidential election by a big margin were an attempt at "hijacking reality" to distract from "the fact that she couldn’t walk, talk, climb stairs."
- So-called "Obama phones" — described as free cell phones for low-income families — "played a significant role in fostering" unrest in Ferguson, Mo., after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager was shot in 2014.
-The whistleblower who told federal officials that President Donald Trump solicited foreign interference from Ukraine in the 2020 election is a "decoy." (Here, the ShadowGate video shows several photos of the son of Democratic fundraiser George Soros, Alexander Soros, who has been frequently misidentified as the man some conservatives allege is the whistleblower.)
If you understand the consequences of Virtual Reality, your life can improve positively!
Thomas W Campbell, physicist and author of My Big TOE, a theory of everything, delivers this positive message for you for 2018.
2018 is the 20th anniversary of his conclusion that we are living in a Virtual Reality.
Virtual Reality makes profound statements of our purpose and mission here in this reality.
Virtual Reality supports Consciousness as fundamental. In a Virtual Reality, you as Consciousness are immortal. This Virtual Reality exists for your evolution and growth.
Virtual Reality supports spirituality and the existence of a higher aware intelligence.
Virtual reality solves the mysteries of physics. This short video clip is for sharing and raising awareness for Tom's physics experiments.
These experiments will, if the results are as Tom predicts, furnish further evidence that we are living in a Virtual Reality.
Three Identical Strangers: the bizarre tale of triplets separated at birth
“Ideas are my bread and butter,” says film-maker Tim Wardle. “But it’s hard to find ideas that make you want to get out of bed at 3am and go film somewhere.”
That, however, was not the case when a producer at Raw, the London-based production company where Wardle works, brought to his attention the story of Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, a set of identical triplets who knew nothing of one another until they were reunited by happenstance at age 19. That alone would make for a compelling documentary, but their story doesn’t end there.
Bobby, Eddy and David are the subjects of Wardle’s new film Three Identical Strangers, an extraordinary documentary that starts as a feelgood human interest story and, by the end, has you questioning the nature of existence. As far as documentary subjects go, this one is nonpareil, a fact that was heavy on Wardle’s mind as he set out to tell the brothers’ story on film. “There’s huge pressure not to fuck up the story,” he admits. “I wasn’t worried about money or anything like that. I was just like, ‘I can’t blow this.’”
Three Identical Strangers begins in 1980, as a 19-year-old Bobby Shafran attends his first day of university only to find unfamiliar classmates greeting him as Eddy. While it’s only the first in a series of fortuitous revelations, most of which are better seen than read about here, Wardle is smart to tell the first half of the documentary through narration and recreated scenes, a tactic that allows the viewer to get a sense of how uncanny it must be to move into your dorm room and find you’re already an on-campus celebrity. Eventually, Bobby and Eddy meet and are contacted by David, whose adoptive mother noticed a pair of twins in the newspaper who looked exactly like her son, down to their shared pudgy hands.
Those alive in the early 80s might remember what followed, a period of pre-internet virality that took the triplets from the Phil Donahue Show to a cameo alongside Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan. As they made the rounds, audiences lapped up the brothers’ likeness: they finished each other’s sentences, smoked the same brand of cigarettes, even had the same taste in women. When one brother crossed his legs, the others followed. So, in the ensuing decade, they made good on the frenzy by opening a steakhouse in Soho, New York, called Triplets, which thrived until things between them went sour.
To Wardle, the honeymoon period served as wish-fulfillment for the brothers and the media. “There’s been an obsession with identicals going back to Romulus and Remus,” he says. “And the siblings wanted to believe that they were similar, too. It’s that thing where you fall in love with someone for the first time, you try and find everything you have in common. ‘Oh my God, we like the same music!’ But you sort of tone down the differences.”
The brothers, as they discovered on account of their own detective skills, were separated by a ritzy New York City adoption agency called Louise Wise Services, which declined to tell their adoptive parents they were a set of three. It’s at this juncture that the documentary turns – tonally, structurally, thematically – and embraces a very au courant style of leather-shoe reporting in Wardle’s efforts to uncover the bizarre and nefarious reasons for the brothers’ 19-year estrangement. But convincing producers he’d get there wasn’t easy.
“They kept saying, ‘What’s the third act? What’s the third act?’ And I’m like, it’s a documentary, you don’t always know!” recalls Wardle, who was accustomed to inconclusive, even plotless projects after making a documentary about prisoners serving life-sentences. Too many documentaries, he believes, explore “weighty”, ethically fraught issues without a human element to provide connective tissue. But since he had that in the first act, Wardle was confident he’d end up with a finished product whether or not his own sleuthing yielded results.
The question at the center of Three Identical Strangers essentially concerns nature versus nurture, which led Wardle to California, where he interviewed Natasha Josefowitz, the 90-year-old research assistant who contributed to psychoanalyst Peter Neubauer’s study of siblings separated at birth.
For Wardle and Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who is featured in the film, the idea that nature is more determinative than nurture is an unsettling one, especially as articulated in Josefowitz’s frank, unsparing style.
“She would talk to me about how much of what I’ve done in my life was a function of biology and genes, how little agency I had, which was kind of mind-blowing,” says Wardle, who gives equal weight in the film to both theses while endorsing neither. “A lot of liberal ideology is based on the idea that nurture is really, really important. So when you start down the nature perspective you end up in quite a politically and scientifically dark place, a kind of eugenicist paradise where, ‘Why bother trying to help people?’ It’s all determined by biology anyway.”
Or is it? As Three Identical Strangers proceeds, you find yourself seduced by both prospects, the relative liberty afforded by nurture and the ice cold-comfort of nature. Mostly, though, it’s the brothers who keep the film grounded in reality, which turned out far different than it looked when they got their first taste of fame on the talkshow circuit.
When Wardle recently showed them the film, they were surprised to find he delivered as he’d promised. “I realized at that point how much they’d been disappointed and let down in their lives,” he says. “Documentaries are only as good as the contributors and what they give you. And they gave me pretty much everything.”
REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/fi....lm/2018/jun/27/miste