ACTION ALERT: Phone Zap

BACKGROUND: Prisoners in struggle at Toledo Correctional Institution (TCI) have requested your assistance. Their cage is being converted into a maximum security concentration camp. People sent to maximum security prisons are subject to prolonged solitary confinement for a minimum of two years. According to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, "some studies said confinement after seven days created a long-term psychological impact.." We view the practice of solitary confinement as a form of psychological torture and torture is prohibited under international humanitarian law. Therefore, we need to ban the practice of solitary confinement.

TCI officials are also engaged in the practice of free speech retaliation and this practice is a violation of the U.S. Constitution. TCI officials are retaliating against TCI prisoners who speak out against the use of solitary confinement. TCI guards have also violated first amendment rights of prisoners by censoring their mail on the basis of political perspective. This censorship practice is illegal.

Even as some Democrats are at long last growing frustrated with the lack of actual evidence for the past several months of stories about Russia stealing a U.S.

Bing Crosby crooned about “Sweet Leilani,” that Hawaiian “heavenly flower” in Harry Owens’ Academy Award-winning hapa haole ditty. Eric Clapton sang that “Layla” “got me on my knees.” In Michael Connelly’s crime novel Trunk Music, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch scours Las Vegas, searching for the missing stripper also named Layla. And in The Pearl Fishers Georges Bizet features the enticing high priestess Leila (beguiling Tblisi, Georgia soprano Nino Machaidze, last seen gracing the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as Mimi in 2016’s La Boheme).

Originally set in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), this stunning production is simply eye-popping, with sublime music, even if Michel Carre and Eugene Cormon’s turgid libretto is fraught with Freudian symbolism about sexual repression and religious zealotry (funny how those two things often go hand in hand). LA Opera gives Bizet the Hollywood treatment, opening with a scrim that makes it seem as if the stage is underwater, as real life “swimmers” (or “scrim-mers”?) cavort about.

Around the world activists who are strategic thinkers face a daunting challenge to effectively tackle the multitude of violent conflicts, including the threat of human extinction, confronting human society in the early 21st century.

I wrote that ‘activists who are strategic thinkers face a daunting challenge’ because there is no point deluding ourselves that the insane global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane’ – with its compliant international organizations (such as the UN) and national governments following orders as directed, is going to respond appropriately and powerfully to the multifaceted crisis that it has been progressively generating since long before the industrial revolution.