Oh Boy It Never Ends: RIPLEY and UNCOUPLED

Swapping shows? LGBTQ NATION reports:

The TV/streaming landscape is wild at the moment. Platforms are axing current shows left and right and offloading others, all while instituting mass layoffs following various mergers. It’s safe to say the “streaming wars” have entered a chaotic new phase in recent months.

Amid all of this, Netflix and Showtime (reportedly soon to be rebranded as “Paramount+ with Showtime”) have negotiated something of a queer prisoner swap.

On Friday, news broke that Showtime’s highly anticipated series Ripley, starring out actor Andrew Scott (a.k.a. Fleabag’s Hot Priest) would no longer be premiering on the cable network, but would instead debut on Netflix. The same day, it was reported that Showtime had picked up Uncoupled for a second season. The Darren Starr-created comedy starring Neil Patrick Harris had been canceled after one season by Netflix last month.

I like UNCOUPLED -- but agreed with Ava and C.I. from "TV: UNCOUPLED:"

Equally true, the whole Michael is hurt works a lot less when Michael both hurts another person and acts like Queen Priss.

We're not fond of drama queens -- whether they use the pronouns he and him, she and her or they and them, we're not fond of drama queens. You may remember we lost a lot of sympathy for Ryan in SPECIAL when he ignores his boyfriend repeatedly until suddenly wanting to have sex with him -- and have it right then -- and then Ryan turned all priss because he got a bit of fecal matter on his penis.

Something much milder happens to Michael.

He briefly decouples from the caboose on the pity train long enough to meet Luke -- a 3rd grade school teacher played by Dan Amboyer. Luke is wonderful and great for Michael's ego . . . until a friend puts a bug in Michael's ear -- six days in a row, isn't that a lot to spend with someone. Michael dismisses it because they'll be apart the next night due to the poker game. But then Michael invites Luke to the poker game. And Luke wanting to be the couple they've been being for a week but, now, in front of Michael's friends leaves Michael tense. Luke and he are discussing everyone while doing the dishes after and suddenly Luke farts.

And.

That.

Is.

It.

He breaks up with Luke on the spot.

Luke can't believe it.

Nor could we.

We couldn't believe that someone in the NYC gay scene -- where what blow jobs were to the 20th century, tossed salads are to the 21st one -- would be such a prude. And we couldn't believe it as Luke expressed his disbelief and Michael kept insisting that they just met, that this was no relationship, they just met.

Considering all the moping from Michael that preceded this moment, he didn't not come off well.

That was nonsense and awful prissy. Michael really does not need more prissy scenes. You break up with someone because they fart?

I remember that scene more than any other in the show. They've gone out to Michael's friends. They're now back at Michael's and the guy farts and Michael hits the ceiling.

It made no sense at all. This was not 'he has an extra toe!' Remember when Grace was freaking out over that on WILL & GRACE and we all laughed about how stupid Grace was for that and how the guy wasn't freaking over the herpe sore she had on her lip. That was Ken Marino, by the way, who played the guy with six toes on one foot.

But we were meant to see how ridiculous Grace was.

I liked UNCOUPLED but that scene was sheer stupidity. I am glad that UNCOUPLED is getting a second season.

I don't think we were meant to see Michael as ridiculous. It was treated as though he was a nice, good guy doing the right thing.

Going out with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

Tuesday, February 14, 2023. The 20th anniversary to a massive global protest is tomorrow, a faux action loses their convicted pedophile speaker but still remains too toxic for most people to get on board with, toxic is what Iraq's become as a result of the never-ending wars, and much more.

Dr Gideon Polya (COUNTERCURRENTS) reports:

On the weekend encompassing Friday 14 February to Sunday 16 February 2003 in Australia, coordinated mass protests against the impending Iraq War occurred around the world in over 600 cities. This global mass protest was described as the largest protest event in human history. According to the BBC 6-10 million people protested in a total of about 60 countries. In Italy the Rome protest involved about 3 million people, and in Spain the protest in Madrid involved 1.5 million people.

On Friday 14 February the protesters totalled 150,000 people in my city Melbourne (I and family were there with highly visible black on white STOP WAR placards). On 16 February 250,000 people protested in Sydney, and 100,000 in Brisbane. About 600,000 demonstrated against the impending Iraq War in cities around Australia [1-5]. Between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the world globe participated in some 3,000 protests against the Iraq War [5].

(A). The ongoing carnage anti-war demonstrators unsuccessfully tried to stop in 2003.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq War was conceived by the war criminal Americans as part of the absurdly named post-9/11 US War on Terror that in horrible reality became a genocidal War on Muslims from West Africa to South East Asia. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was presaged by 13 years of crippling Sanctions and US, UK and Apartheid Israeli bombing that devastated Iraq in the period 1990-2003. The US had “greenlighted” the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 but as soon as the invasion occurred the serial invader America and its allies turned on Iraq – 200,000 Iraqis perished in the 1990-1991 Gulf War and an estimated 1.7 million Iraqis (mostly children ) perished under genocidal Sanctions that devastated a formerly prosperous Arab country that had a secular administration.

The “excuses” for invasion of Sanctions- and bombing-crippled Iraq in 2003 were utterly false. No Iraqis were involved in the 9/11 atrocity in 2001 according to the “official lying Bush conspiracy theory about 9/11”. However the US and UK governments presented their people and the world with utterly false assertions about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda terrorists (the opposite was true, with the secular Iraqi regime being opposed to Islamist terrorists), and with falsely alleged Iraqi possession of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMDs) that after the conquest of Iraq were simply not found. The invasion of Iraq by US, UK and Australian forces formally commenced on about 20 March 2003. The already economically and militarily devastated Iraqis having no air force, no navy and no defence industry were quickly defeated by the genocidal US Alliance “shock and awe” tactics.

Nevertheless Indigenous resistance continued. The Iraqi leader Saddam Hussain was hunted down and killed (the same fate befell Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi after the France-UK-US (FUKUS) Alliance invaded and destroyed Libya) [6, 7]. The US Alliance mostly left devastated Iraq in 2011 having installed a Shia-dominated government to their liking. The subsequent Sunni revolt gave rise to the Islamist ISIS and thence the excuse for the return of the US Alliance to further devastate Iraq, and to also wreck and Balkanize Syria [6-20]. Fallujah (the City of Mosques) was destroyed in the Iraq War but was again besieged and devastated a second time by the barbaric Americans in the subsequent war on the barbaric ISIS insurgents [17-19]. The western half of the huge city of Mosul was destroyed by the US Alliance together with the lives of 40,000 of the residents (pre-war Mosul population 2 million) [19].

The Iraq War and the Syrian War continue. The US has a large number of temporary military bases in Iraq, mostly a type of forward operating base (FOB), plus 2 major airbases [21]. In January 2020, the Iraqi PM, the Iraqi Parliament and the Speaker demanded that the US Alliance forces leave Iraq. The US, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany rejected the Iraqi Parliament’s Quit Iraq demand, with the US threatening to instantly collapse what was left of the Iraqi economy by a banking freeze if Iraq insisted on US Alliance withdrawal from its territory [22]. Syria is largely held by the Syrian Government with the help of Russia. However Turkiye occupies a northern strip, US-backed rebels occupy a north western enclave, Kurdish forces occupy a north eastern region, ISIS remnants still exist, Apartheid Israel has illegally annexed the Syrian Golan Heights, and the US illegally maintains a major base in Syria. The active and passive killing of Iraqis and Syrians by the US and Apartheid Israel continues. Despite the immense earthquake horrors in north east Syria, the US and its allies maintain deadly sanctions against war- and earthquake-devastated Syria. Apartheid Israel continues to routinely bomb Syria and Iraq. Indeed Apartheid Israel tried to broker a Ukraine-Russia peace deal to bolster Russian cooperation over Israeli warplanes in Syria but this was scotched by the genocidal US [24].

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the massive, worldwide protests against the Iraq War. You had people taking to the streets and making a huge statement. You had people like Janeane Garofalo, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Jane Fonda, Ani DiFranco and many others speaking out and being attacked for it. And Meg Ryan. She got trashed by Al The Pig Franken. His embarrassment of a radio show needed guests because Randi Rhodes was outdoing him daily on AIR AMERICA. So he gets Meg to be a guest while he's doing a show on a college campus. Meg calls out the war and says the troops need to come home. Al grins and chuckles and as soon as she's gone explains on air that she's just too stupid -- unlike him -- to know about stuff like war. He was a piece of filth ahead of the war, by the way, urging Democrats in Congress to vote for the authorization.

Hans Blix, Clare Short and Tony Benn may be names from the past for many people in Britain but the wider world has not moved on from the war they tried to prevent in Iraq, says the filmmaker Amir Amirani, and neither has he.

After spending nine years interviewing such people for his film We Are Many, about the global anti-war marches on February 15, 2003, Amirani is still engrossed in the topic: working on a release in America, thinking of writing a book, and developing an offshoot project he is keeping under wraps for now.

Tim Stickings (THE NATIONAL) reports:

There were many brave people speaking out -- most are forgotten especially by the idiots propping up registered sex offender Scott Ritter. I hit campuses starting in February of 2003, one month ahead of the war, filling in for a friend who got a more prominent campus speaking gig and needed to do that to reach a larger audience. I was asked to fill in and I did that for years and years until the pandemic hit. My point in raising that now is I never even heard of Scott Ritter until long after the war began. He was not the brave voice everyone thinks he was. He wasn't, for example, Katharine Gun -- but don't they try to rewrite history and make him that.

And on the rewriting of history: Sy Hersh. I have a long history of him and I noted that when I reviewed his bad book here. If you're late to the party, you can read Elaine's "Seymour Hersh" for a primer. And, yes, I know it and Coretta knew it, that Sy was feeding information about us and others to his government sources in exchange for tidbits. He's a snitch. And I love how his 'greatest hits' being listed currently never acknowledge the reality that he had many, many 'scoops' implode over the years. He's only as good as his source because he's just a stenographer. The JFK book really damaged his legacy -- but don't expect the political equivalent of twinks to know about that. We should all know that he pimped the narrative that Seth Rich was murdered not in a robbery but for leaking to WIKILEAKS.

Was Seth murdered by the DNC or the government? I have no idea but my guess would be no. Until Sy starts appearing on shows dropping crumbs here and there. The fact that he's doing that means it may be true. Or it could be a bad source. Again, Sy is not an investigative reporter. He writes what he is told. That's all he's ever done. Some sources are solid and some are not.

It's a shame that the shallow are so shallow yet so convinced that they learned something.

Real actions took place 20 years ago today.

The Scott Ritter fan club is not holding a real action in DC.

Black Alliance for Peace issued the following:

The Final Deathblow to Imperialism Will Only Come Under The Leadership of The Organized Colonized Masses

Efforts to marginalize, disregard, and erase the presence of radical Black-, Brown-, and Indigenous-led anti-imperialist organizations, as well as our political positions, is proving to be endemic to the politics of too many who consider themselves radical anti-imperialist and anti-war activists. For this reason, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) reiterates that the peoples who bear the brunt of the brutal and lethal practices of U.S. imperialism are at the forefront of the struggle to dismantle the global system of white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism.

The colonized within the U.S. settler state see more clearly than the privileged the holistic nature of the system as well as the interdependencies between our domestic repression and U.S. wars abroad. Some forces that claim to be anti-war have an unsophisticated understanding of peace.

We understand that peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement, by popular struggle and self-defense, of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament, and unjust war. A condition for real peace is the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and white supremacy. Anyone with genuine concern for the well-being of humanity and the planet should be deeply concerned that some supposed “leftist” forces consider it easier to find common cause with right wing libertarian forces than with the Black radical movement, as BAP Coordinating Committee member Jacqueline Luqman writes in this Black Agenda Report piece.

And as Chair of the BAP Coordinating Committee, Ajamu Baraka points out:

“The white left in the U.S. is deeply delusional. Elements of the left actually believe a radical movement leading to revolutionary change will be led by white activists with Black & colonized people as backdrops. #AntiWarSoWhite”

We cannot afford any confusion, complicity, silence, or outright collaboration with some “liberal/left” forces on armed intervention into Haiti, the reactionary role of NATO, the intensification of state repression in the United States, the plight of the working class being subjected to an induced recession, and austerity. For BAP, all of these contradictions reaffirm why it is absolutely necessary for colonized people to be organized or face an inescapable subjugation and eventual annihilation. The comfortable will dismiss this as hyperbole.

We—the colonized, the exploited, the oppressed—are in the midst of a war. It is clear that the colonial-capitalist rulers will continue to deceive, mislead and co-opt to maintain their dominance. Our responsibility in opposition is to keep the focus on the imperialists and not be confused by the machinations of their supporters. That task and responsibility will continue to inform our work in 2023.

At SOCIALIST ACTION, Jeff Mackler also called the faux action out.

It's amazing to look at these people -- THE CONVO COUCH, for example -- and note that they've been willing to spend years now rescuing the right-wingers, defending the hate merchants to build up to this moment. They claim to be left but that time wasn't used to defend transgender people, for example, or to reach out to the left. Mabye tht's because they'd need to do real work for that. And, check out RT when Fiorella's on and you'll see she does no real work. She just goes on air, Russia's own Judith Miller, and 'reports' by saying, "Russian intelligence has learned . . ."

Get your cash however you can, Fiorella, but be a smart whore: Get it up front. Customer's always going to want to pay you less after he shoots his wad.

"Russian intelligence has learned"?

What a propagandist.

And I've defended her. She has every right to work for RT. But when that's what she's 'reporting' -- spitting back out what a government -- any government -- has fed her? She's a propagandist and I look at her with the same disgust I would if she were reporting for a US channel and saying, "The CIA has learned . . ."

They're idiots, this group of people.

They aren't going to sway anyone with her being seen as Tokyo Rose and registered sex offender Scott Ritter being their cause celebre. Yes, at the end of last week, Scott Ritter finally took a hint and dropped out. Though there are rumors that he will show up and speak as a 'surprise guest.' Parents, protect your daughters.

But this is what it came to. Fiorealla and other embarrassments and they're going to do something major. No.

They're bringing on homophobes, on a FOX NEWS personality who FOX fired because of complaints from young men that the judge was harassing them, they're a disgusting group of people.

And no one's going to take you seriously when you're putting on a White man convicted and sent to prison for being a pedophile.

White privilege is what kept Scott out of prison the first two times he was arrested for being a pedophile. He was able to whine to the people he met while working for the UN and they wrote character letters insisting that Scott was wonderful and this was a momentary lapse of judgement.

The third arrest didn't work out for him.

No man of color would have been able to avoid prison on two arrests for pedophilia but White Scott Ritter did.

And maybe that glorification of Scott by the group is really the glorification of White which is why it's a White Power 'action.'

You're putting people on the stage who attack Civil Rights, who attack LGBTQ+ persons, who attack women's right (including with regards to reproductive health) and you want to build that coalition. It's not going to build for you. Even if you hadn't spent weeks promoted pedophile Scott Ritter, it still wouldn't work. Hate merchants are not the answer, they never are.

But the Jimmy Dores can't get accepted among the left so they'll be a face of the left for the extreme right. That's how they'll earn their bread and butter, as trained monkeys doing the tricks that they were taught.

Tara Reade will be there -- in all her girth and non-glory. Marcia noted last night, "In other news, the ultimate Karen -- Tara Reade -- is now reTweeting Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tara, we knew you were ugly and fat, we just did not know you were also a homophobe."

There's a reason that the so-called left speaking at this event don't speak out against the hate campaigns the extreme right launches -- they agree with them. They would rather be around their friends and fellow-thinkers than defend the LFBTQ+ community. Tara has destroyed her own reputation. Some day they should make a movie out of her -- it would be a non-stop laugh riot.

We'll wind down with this from THE BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL:

The combination of destroyed health care infrastructure, medicine shortages, limited resources, high levels of heavy metal contamination, and poor sanitation is likely to blame, they argue.

Antibiotic resistance, or AMR for short, is rising globally at an alarming rate and is expected to cause 10 million deaths a year by 2050, if nothing is done about it, point out the authors.

Largely attributed to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, attention is now turning to other factors, such as heavy metals and disinfectants containing quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs), which are widely used in the health care and hospitality sectors.

War has been implicated in the emergence of AMR as far back as the 1940s, but has received little attention, say the authors.

Iraq is a stellar example of this neglect, as the country has experienced a sequence of conflicts since the 1980s that have coincided with the emergence and spread of pathogens with specific patterns of antibiotic resistance, they highlight.