Homer Hickam’s Testimony before Congress
Watch our pal and client Homer Hickam’s incredible testimony before the Congress advocating a return to the Moon. He testified on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Watch our pal and client Homer Hickam’s incredible testimony before the Congress advocating a return to the Moon. He testified on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Bob Malone, solo artist and keyboard player for rock legend John Fogerty releases his new single “Good People” and it’s his most accessible radio-friendly song yet; you’ll be singing the hook after the first listen. Created with timeless pop sensibilities, “Good People” harkens back to the great 1970’s piano rock of Billy Joel, Elton John and Leon Russell. In an often divided nation, it is the song we need for the times we live in.
“When it seems like someone’s always, getting in your face, shooting up the place, making you lose your faith in the human race. Just remember…there are good people everywhere!” – Bob Malone
A D.C. florist is sending encouragement in the form of fresh flowers to the four U.S. Congresswomen targeted in President Donald Trump’s incendiary tweets this week.
Alisa Rabinovich, who owns and operates Nosegay Flowers in D.C. and Galleria Florist in Falls Church, Virginia, said she designed custom flower arrangements to send to Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) to show the women support.
“It’s really not about politics for me,” Alisa Rabinovich said in a statement sent to WAMU. “I’m not a terribly political person. It’s about these women being bullied by the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, and standing up for themselves.”
She delivered the flowers on Thursday with a note thanking the Congresswomen.
The notes read: “Thanks for being a role model for women everywhere. You are the best part of America!”
Trump told the representatives to “go back” to “the crime-infested places from which they came” in a racist tweet.
The president’s intentions behind making the comments urging the women to go back to their countries of origin have been widely disputed by lawmakers and pundits throughout the week, some denying the hurtful usage of Trump’s “go back” comment and the context in which the statement has historically been used toward people of color.
Omar, a Somali refugee, is the only representative of the four women born outside of the U.S. She became a naturalized citizen as a teen.
Rabinovich immigrated to the U.S. with her family as a child from Russia. She said she identified with the four Congresswomen who received Trump’s taunts.
“I love America, and one of the things I love most about my home is that people here have been able to have civil disagreements, and also look for ways to come together for the common good,” she said. “That seems to be lost on the President sometimes.”
Link to article https://wamu.org/story/19/07/19/d-c-florist-sends-a-message-of-support-to-congresswomen-targeted-in-trumps-tweets/
Mine 9, a low-budget but high-octane film, does not advocate for or against America’s controversial legacy of coal mining. Instead, it lionizes the miners who do the heavy lifting in order to keep plants afire. To date, Mine 9 has had a limited theatrical release in America’s so-called coal belt, where the film has been embraced by audiences for its realism. But when Mine 9 opens Friday, July 19, at The Flicks in Boise, more than a few audience members will undoubtedly deconstruct Idaho’s own checkered past (and present) in mining. Lest anyone forget, 91 Idahoans died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the 1972 Sunshine Mine disaster in northern Idaho’s Silver Valley. In fact, the Gem State’s mining tragedies have extended far beyond the Panhandle. Records indicate that more than 600 Idahoans have been killed in explosions, cave-ins or other mining disasters in Ada, Adams, Bear Lake, Blaine, Boise, Bonner, Boundary, Butte, Caribou, Clearwater, Custer, Elmore, Gem, Idaho, Lemhi, Owyhee, Shoshone, Teton, Valley and Washington counties.
All that said, most Americans probably envision Appalachia when they think of mining; and Mine 9‘s backdrop is, quite appropriately, a small West Virginia mining town. Since the early 20th century, when 362 West Virginians were killed in a mine explosion in Monongah, the Mountain State’s portrait has been matte with coal dust. Most recently, 12 West Virginians were killed in the Sago Mine explosion of 2006, and 29 miners died in the Upper Big Branch explosion in 2010.
Mine 9 Director/Screenwriter Eddie Mensore, a native of Martinsville, West Virginia, pitched his screenplay for nearly a dozen years before finally getting permission to film some of his movie inside a real coal mine, thus giving the project intense authenticity. But a word of caution: The claustrophobic, you-are-there nature of Mine 9 is palpable. Suffice to say, theater owners might want to consider selling portable oxygen tanks at concession stands.
Official Trailer of Mine 9 – https://vimeo.com/294807332
https://m.boiseweekly.com/boise/hearts-and-mines/Content?oid=18914804
By Nasir Shansab – – Tuesday, July 9, 2019
(Link to article – https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jul/9/how-afghanistan-is-haunted-by-its-history-of-insec/)
A recent international study finds that Afghanistan is the world’s most insecure country. What has gone wrong?
After Soviet forces quit Afghanistan in February 1989, and the Mujahedin toppled the Afghan Communist regime in 1992, Washington was in a hurry to forget war-shattered Afghanistan. That policy of neglect and abandonment of a Cold War ally was the harbinger of other policy mistakes which have led to America’s complete failure in Afghanistan.
The success of this Cold War proxy confrontation was historically significant. It accelerated the Soviet Union’s collapse and freed Eastern Europe from Communist rule.
Disgusted with that medieval, ethnic amalgam, Washington didn’t care what transpired in that physically and financially broken country.
Then UNICAL, a Texas-based oil company, got interested in building a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean and lobbied Washington to help end Afghanistan’s civil war. Unwilling to re-engage with Afghanistan’s feudal leaders, America subcontracted the job to Pakistan. Pakistan’s secret service (ISI) had cooperated with the CIA during Afghanistan’s war of resistance against the Soviet Union. At the war’s end, Islamabad expected to see a Pakistan-friendly regime emerge in Kabul.
When Pakistan separated from India, Afghanistan refused to recognize the Duran Line, the border that had existed between India and Afghanistan and now separates Pakistan from Afghanistan. Hence, Pakistan worried about the possibility of having to fight a two-front war. Pakistan feared that — in the event of combat with India, with which it has a disagreement over Kashmir — Afghanistan would attack it from the north. When Washington charged it to pacify Afghanistan, Islamabad realized the potential of installing in Kabul a Pakistan-subservient regime and eagerly seized the opportunity.
The Saudis, who fear Iran, were delighted to fund the enterprise, thereby to counterbalance Iran’s aggressive Shia fundamentalism with a Sunni fundamentalist regime on its eastern border.
ISI hired young Afghan men from the refugee camps, training them as fighters and future leaders for Afghanistan. Once the Taliban had overrun the resistance leaders’ chaotic reign, the Taliban’s inability to run the country guaranteed Islamabad full control over the Afghan government.
By then, Osama bin Laden crept around inside Afghanistan. Yet, Washington had had no policy for Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
American politicians didn’t know that country and didn’t care to get to know it. They listened to the likes of Zalmay Khalilzad and the Karzais who either didn’t know better themselves or fed American policymakers with such nonsense as the Taliban have no support among the people. Give us 200 men, and we will kick them out of the country.
In their values and limited understanding of the outside world, the Taliban represented rural Afghanistan, where 80 percent of Afghans lives. Only, the Talibs (seminary students) had grown up in Pakistani refugee camps and attended Saudi-funded madrassas where they had been indoctrinated with the intolerant Wahhabi school of Islam.
The Taliban brought security to Afghanistan, something the Afghan people craved for. But by implementing strict Wahhabism, they hurled the country that already lived in the Middle Ages to some dark corner of human history for which I can’t find an equivalent.
Then, the tragedy of 9/11 burst into our hearts and minds, and America veered toward revenge. The bombing of Afghanistan began. CIA agents landed in that country’s north, carrying briefcases filled with $100 bills. In Bonn, Germany, an unruly conference was convened to form the post-Taliban government. Mr. Khalilzad was in the midst of it. He had become such a fixture in U.S. deliberations on Afghanistan that the German newspaper Die Frankfurter Allgemeine called him “President Bush’s Afghan.”
The congregation in Bonn was too disruptive for the international delegations to handle. The task of navigating the assembly fell to the Khalilzad-Karzai group. They knew how to control them with promises of American largesse or fury. Hamid Karzai was thrown to the top. The spoils were distributed among men with dirt and blood on their hands.
After Bonn, Messrs. Karzai and Khalilzad oversaw the return of warlords. The rule of law would not enter the Afghan people’s lives and America’s ultimate failure became inevitable.
• Nasir Shansab left his native Afghanistan in 1980 and became a U.S. citizen, advising the White House and Parliament on relations with his home country. Mr. Shansab’s latest book is “Silent Trees.” He maintains homes in suburban Washington, D.C., and Kabul.
"*" indicates required fields