Film review: Past Lives (2023)

This film, that has won many awards and was nominated for best film at the latest Academy Awards, will evoke long forgotten memories in viewers who have reached or passed middle age. Who amongst us does not recall past loves from whom we drifted away for a variety of reasons, and now occasionally wonder what our lives might have been like if things had turned out differently and we had stayed together?

This film tells the story of Nora and Hae Sung, childhood sweethearts in Seoul, South Korea who get separated at the age of 12 when Nora’s family emigrates to Canada. She subsequently moves to New York to pursue a career as a writer while he remains behind in Korea to become an engineer. But he still thinks of her and at the age of 24, he reaches out to her through Facebook and they start talking via Skype where they discover that they still feel warmly towards each other. But there is little chance of them meeting in the near future and that brief period of connection also fades and they do not make contact for another twelve years, when they are in their mid-thirties. In the meantime, she attends a writing residency and ends up falling in love and marrying Arthur, a fellow writer she met there, while Hae Sung also gets engaged.
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Trump’s curious campaign against his potential allies

Rachel Leingang writes that you have to listen to in full to the rally speeches of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to appreciate how unhinged they are. The snippets that are broadcast, even if they are of his lies and lunacies, actually make him seem more lucid than he really is.

He’s on the campaign trail less these days than he was in previous cycles – and less than you’d expect from a guy with dedicated superfans who brags about the size of his crowds every chance he gets. But when he has held rallies, he speaks in dark, dehumanizing terms about migrants, promising to vanquish people crossing the border. He rails about the legal battles he faces and how they’re a sign he’s winning, actually. He tells lies and invents fictions. He calls his opponent a threat to democracy and claims this election could be the last one.

Trump’s tone, as many have noted, is decidedly more vengeful this time around, as he seeks to reclaim the White House after a bruising loss that he insists was a steal. This alone is a cause for concern, foreshadowing what the Trump presidency redux could look like. But he’s also, quite frequently, rambling and incoherent, running off on tangents that would grab headlines for their oddness should any other candidate say them.
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Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it’s like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories.
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These tangents can be part of a tirade, or they can be what one can only describe as complete nonsense.

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The negatives of food delivery services

Many people take advantage of the convenience of food delivery apps like Uber Eats, GrubHub, and Door Dash. Their popularity soared during the Covid lockdown era when people were reluctant to go out and they were a boon to restaurants struggling to stay afloat then. But they have stayed popular even after things returned to almost normal as people had got used to the convenience and. continued to use them. It definitely helps those who for whatever reason are unable to cook their own food or are unable to go out.

In his latest episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver takes a close look at this business and finds that the two categories that we think benefit most from this model (restaurants and delivery workers) are in fact benefiting the least.


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Good riddance to No Labels

After huffing and puffing about how we needed to have a new party that had no ideology, the group No Labels has shut down because they could not find any high profile (or even medium profile) people willing to agree to be their presidential nominee.

The group’s decision not to field a ticket will likely be celebrated by Democrats, who had long warned that No Labels’ effort would have helped boost Donald Trump and harm President Joe Biden.

The group, in its statement, said it will “remain engaged over the next year during what is likely to be the most divisive presidential election of our lifetimes. We will promote dialogue around major policy challenges and call out both sides when they speak and act in bad faith.”

Yeah, well good luck with that. Nobody is likely to pay any attention to the pontifications of people who thought of themselves as more important than ideas.

The whole enterprise was ridiculous. Any political party has to stand for some thing, just like any group of people need to have some common goal that unites them if they are to get together. The idea that people who do not stand for anything would get together around some leader who also does not stand for anything other than being proud of not standing for anything, and that a party platform would somehow emerge from such a group, was an idea of extreme silliness. It has now deservedly been consigned to the dustbin of history.

The person who was the national director of the group says that he will now vote for Joe Biden over serial sex abuser Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Anthony Comstock should be made the face of the Republican party

It has become increasingly clear that there is a Republican war on sex and that Anthony Comstock has become their flag bearer.

Who is this Comstock, you ask? He is a 19th century anti-vice campaigner who “was dedicated to upholding Christian morality [and] opposed obscene literature, abortion, contraception, masturbation, gambling, prostitution, and patent medicine”. There is a law named after him that is still on the books that reflects his anti-sex views. The Comstock Law was referred to by the two most extreme members of the US Supreme Court Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas during oral arguments on the legality of women accessing by mail the abortion-terminating drug mifepristone that can be used for abortions.

Rebecca Solnit makes a convincing case that the Republican party has become a full-fledged anti-sex movement that is following in the footsteps of Comstock.
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More on the right wing freakout over Easter and the Transgender Day of Visibility

The Daily Show show had fun at the expense of Faux News and other rightwing news sources losing their minds over the fact that this year, because of a calendar coincidence, Transgender Day of Visibility coincided with Easter. And let’s be clear, these people know better. They are just pretending to be outraged, like a lot of their other ‘outrages’.

Desi Lydic made the important point that what these people object to is not that the visibility day coincides with Easter, they dislike the fact that the transgender community exists at all.

Also, make sure you get to the very funny conversation she has with Michael Kosta that begins at the 6:35 mark.

Lina Khan interviewed by Jon Stewart

I have long said that the appointment of Lina Khan as head of the Federal Trade Commission is the best decision that Joe Biden made. She is smart and aggressive and not afraid to take on the business giants. On Monday’s episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviews her about how the FTC is trying to combat the monopolies that now exist in so many sectors of the economy, thanks to the relaxing of regulatory rules governing mergers that began with Ronald Reagan and have continued since then.

The horror in Gaza keeps getting worse

A state of famine in Gaza, if not already present, is imminent. The government of Israel is deliberately starving to death an entire population of two million people by limiting the amount of food aid to well below the levels necessary to maintain even basic levels of nutrition. The soldiers at the checkpoints for trucks to gain entry into Gaza delay the trucks for inordinate lengths of time and often turn them back for the most trivial of reasons, such as having scissors in medical kits, absurdly claiming that these could be used as weapons. A “clear pattern has emerged” of Israeli obstruction of aid trucks, which suggests that deliberately creating famine conditions is now official policy.
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Trump posts bond, gets a stricter gag order

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has managed to post the reduced $175 million bond set for him by a panel of the appellate court.

According to a court filing, the $175 million bond he and the other defendants posted Monday was provided by Los Angeles-based Knight Insurance Group. The filing didn’t specify which assets Trump used as collateral for the bond.

Knight’s president, Amit Shah, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking information about the collateral.

Here is some information about the company that paid the bond. It is also not clear what fee the company charged SSAT.

Meanwhile Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing the hush money criminal trial that is due to start in New York City on April 15th, has stiffened the gag order barring SSAT from attacking people after he attacked the judge’s daughter.
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