Pierre (Cluck-Cluck) Poulet, that feisty bantam-weight pugilist and leader of the Consumptive Party of Kanadoodle, has smoothed down his tail feathers, trimmed his talons and had his beak polished for his latest television advertisement promoting his suitability for the highest perch in the land - Prime Ribber. Yes, it’s a warmer, kinder and gentler Cluck-Cluck …
THE TRANS HYSTERIA FACTOR
I was browsing on Facebook the other day and saw a post being circulated by some ‘conservative’ group. It was a split picture, one side showing a smiling transvestite crouching down in order to greet a small girl and the other side pictured a lion cornering a baby gazelle. Really. Sadly, it’s an all too …
CORPORATE CHUTZPAH
Have you heard the howls and seen the bitter tears from the billionaire Elong Musk-rat now his car company’s remuneration has been overturned by the courts? I’m sure Musk-rat pleaded with the judge about how hard it is to get by on a measly $56 billion a year, but it seems his lamentations fell on …
WHO LOST RUSSIA? BY CONRADI
Who Lost Russia? by Peter Conradi, Oneworld Publications 2017 (revised 2022) - The question at the heart of Conradi’s book is how Russia went from the collapse of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, through a disastrous attempt at becoming a western style ‘free market’ economy under Yelstin to the rise of Putin and his war …
THE PROMISE
The Promise is a 2016 film directed and written by Terry George from an unproduced screenplay by Robin Swicord - While we generally view films as a commercial endeavor, ‘The Promise’ was created as a vehicle to raise awareness about the genocide of the Aremenian people by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 - something the …
Van der Valk
Van der Valk - a 2020 UK PBS ‘Mystery’ presentation. For those with a fondness for murder and mayhem on television, the ‘Van der Valk’ series might be just the thing. This is a remake of an earlier ‘Van der Valk’ series produced in Britain by ITV (it ran for several consecutive years starting in …
THE GREATEST CONSPIRACY
‘Reality becomes a matter of PR techniques’. This pithy statement wasn’t found in a current political article, although one could be forgiven if you thought so. The quote comes from an article entitled ‘Flaks’ in the January, 1987 issue of Playboy written by Alexander and Andrew Cockburn. ‘Flaks’ is the name they gave to public …
THE MOMUMENTS MEN
The Monuments Men - 2014 - now available on Netflix - There are a number of ways to check out what critics thought of a film. Most of the major critics blog on-line these days and it’s pretty easy to check on any that you rely on before you invest your time and money on …
WWII – FROM THE FRONT LINES
WWII - From the Front Lines - aNetflix 6 part series 2023 If you haven’t seen enough devastation on your television with coverage of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, or you just need a timely reminder as to where these wars could lead, the new Netflix six part documentary series entitled ‘WWII - From …
THE PERFECT SOLUTION
Here we are, nearly eighty years after the end of WWII and ‘Murica, the cradle and arsenal of democracy, has become such a politically polarized political mess that it’s an embarrassment to its western democratic allies. In other places around the world the kind of fractionism found in ‘Murican politics inevitably leads to civil wars …
Richard's Left Bank 