Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Johan Grimonprez’s Blue Orchids (2017), on view from Tuesday, March 22 through Monday, April 5, 2021. https://www.e-flux.com/video/384604/johan-grimonprez-blue-orchids/
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
— Aesop
In Blue Orchids, Grimonprez creates a double portrait of two experts situated on opposite ends of the same issue—the global arms trade. The stories of Chris Hedges, the former war correspondent of the New York Times, and Riccardo Privitera, a former arms and equipment dealer of the now-dissolved Talisman Europe Ltd, provide an unusual and disturbing context for shocking revelations about the industry of war. While interviewing Privitera and Hedges for his recently released feature Shadow World (2016), it became clear to Grimonprez’ that the two men were describing the same anguish and the same trauma, but from paradoxical perspectives. One has dedicated his life to unmasking lies while the other has built his life on lies. Both their personal and political histories gradually reveal the depths of suffering and duplicity, situating the arms trade as a symptom of a profound illness: greed.
Blue Orchids is presented here as one of four films in Part Four | Optics of Truth: Media and Alternative Facts, the fourth of five programs in the online series True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists‘ Films programmed by Lukas Brasiskis for e-flux Video & Film.
True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists‘ Films runs from February 9 through April 19, 2021. The films in each part will screen for two weeks. Subsequent parts will follow bi-weekly, with new films screened every other Tuesday.
Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed works dance on the borders of practice and theory, art and cinema, documentary and fiction, demanding a double take on the part of the viewer. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his works seek out the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization. Grimonprez questions our contemporary sublime framed by the industry of fear. By suggesting new narratives, his works emphasize a multiplicity of histories and realities. Using documentary material, found footage, historical items from archives, self-made home videos, news pictures, advertising, video clips, and excerpts from Hollywood films, Grimonprez tries to give some meaning to the havoc wreaked by history. The questioning of our consensus reality, which Grimonprez defines as “a reality that is entangled with the stories we tell ourselves in the worldview we agree on sharing” is among the themes he explores. Traveling the main festival circuit from the Berlinale to Sundance, his films have garnered many awards. Grimonprez’s curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, such as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; MoMA, New York; The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Blaffer Museum, Houston; and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Gent.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
On January 28th, 2020, Harvard for Bernie hosted its first "Class Warfare" Conference with 2 panels.
The panelists include: Michael Brooks, Dr. Cornel West, Esha Krishnaswamy and Philip Agnew.
Sound/video courtesy of Harvard for Bernie
Annie Jacobsen is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and investigative journalist whose work revolves around government secrets. She has published books on a range of topics, including what really goes on inside Area 51; Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists to America; and government-funded research projects on extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis.
Her latest book delves into one of the most infamously covert agencies in the country: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins is an unprecedented look inside the Special Activities Division of the CIA, one of the most effective black operations in the world. Through interviews with 42 men and women who served in covert CIA operations, she delivers a shocking exposé of U.S. covert operations with the pace and novelistic skill of a thriller.
Join us for an insider’s view on this controversial and understandably obscure component of American foreign policy and the political, ethical and legal quandaries that have come with it.
SHOW NOTES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=34598
This week on the de-program James digs up an old New York Times report on the CIA's "mighty wurlitzer," their global propaganda network that included hundreds of journalists, editors, academics, publishing houses, newspapers, magazines and front companies. Although the Times piece is, as expected, a limited hangout, it does provide some interesting pieces of the global intelligence propaganda puzzle.
China has now restricted travel for over 35 million people in 12 cities due to the coronavirus outbreak that was said to originate in Wuhan, China. Now, more than two thousand confirmed cases have been reported, in countries such as China, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, France, Australia, Canada, and the U.S. Coincidentally enough, this "outbreak" coincides with the Chinese New Year, with 2020 as the "Year Of The RAT"....
The U.S. has also enforced screenings in five airports so far, due to “confirmed cases.”
But What Is The REAL TRUTH About This “Coronavirus?”
And did it REALLY originate from China to begin with, or is there ANOTHER Origin?
Why are there coronavirus patents relating to the use of such a coronavirus in a vaccine to “prevent and/or treat a disease?” Per the current assignees belonging to the Pirbright Institute, and also the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) along with the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) — The better question is, WHO Are The Ones FUNDING Such Patents and Vaccines?
It’s also no coincidence how in spring 2018, Bill Gates informed listeners at a discussion about epidemics hosted by the Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine that a “new disease” could kill 30 million within 6 months, and how it could happen posthaste. And, from a TED Talk back in 2010, Bill Gates even quoted: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care & reproductive health services, we could LOWER that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”
But Do You Know The BIGGER Agenda?
Did you know that World Governments and Alphabet Soups such as the WHO, CDC, UN, FDA, FEMA, etc. team up together and travel into what they call “third-world countries," bringing their Killer Vaccines with them? They then vaccinate the women and children there, when they are purposefully causing and spreading diseases. Once these diseases have been spread, and an "epidemic" has been declared, they then label this "epidemic" with a creative name, such as "Ebola."
Then, mainstream medias such as ABC, FOX, CNN, etc. report an "epidemic" initially caused by the Government to begin with, to make you think it's a worldwide "epidemic" when really this isn't the case at all. This thusly triggers fear and chaos in the general sleeping public, thereby giving the Government more tyrannical control.
In order to offer a solution to their created problem, the Government begins to enforce the Rule of Law — such as mandatory vaccines, mandatory healthcare, mandatory screenings and other "security" measures leading up to martial law. When such measures only focus on one thing and one thing only: Depopulation. So that more people will gladly accept these Killer Vaccines.
Former OPCW inspector Ian Henderson testified to the UN Security Council this week that his team's report on the April 2018 alleged gas attack in Douma, Syria, had been falsified at the orders of senior management and perhaps under pressure from the US government. The US mainstream media is silent.
Pushback with Aaron Maté
As millions of Iranians mourn the US murder of Qassem Soleimani, ex-Bush administration official Col. Lawrence Wilkerson discuses the parallels between Bush's war on Iraq and Trump's campaign against Iran; the history of US shunning diplomacy with Tehran; and how an addiction to war drives US foreign policy.
Guest: Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell. Currently a distinguished professor at the College of William and Mary.
Eduardo Galeano: "El mundo se divide en indignos e indignados"
The Crime of Ecocide
http://www.pollyhiggins.com/
"... move away from property laws to trusteeship laws, so rather than I own, to I owe. I owe a duty of care to this planet."
12-year old Victoria Grant explains why Canada (her homeland) and most of the world, is in debt.
"How the Media Frames Political Issues" by Scott London
In The Emergence of American Political Issues (1977) McCombs and Shaw state that the most important effect of the mass media is "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."[13] The presidential observer Theodore White corroborates this conclusion in The Making of a President (1972):
The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about - an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.[14]
McCombs and Shaw also note that the media's tendency to structure voters' perceptions of political reality in effect constitutes a bias: "to a considerable degree the art of politics in a democracy is the art of determining which issue dimensions are of major interest to the public or can be made salient in order to win public support."[15] http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/frames.html
