Source: Liberal Currents
by Alan Elrod
“Our screens are two-way but we can easily forget that the people on the other end exist as more than characters for our enjoyment.” (05/07/26)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-parasocial-style-in-american-politics/
Source: BBC News [UK State Media]
“Film-maker James Cameron and Disney are being sued by an actress who has accused the director of using her likeness as the basis for one of the lead characters in his hit film series Avatar. German-born US actress Q’orianka Kilcher, who is of indigenous Peruvian descent, alleged that in 2005 – when she was 14 – Cameron ‘extracted her facial features’ from a photograph of her portraying Pocahontas in another film, The New World. In court documents filed on Tuesday in California, her team claimed Cameron ‘directed his design team to use it as the foundation for the character of Neytiri,’ depicted on screen by Zoe Saldaña. BBC News has contacted Cameron and Disney for a comment. The Avatar movies contain a hybrid of live-action performance mixed with computer-generated characters.” (05/07/26)
Source: The Atlantic
“How to Survive Losing a Child.” (05/06/26)
Source: Antiwar.com
by Dan Steinbock
“Modern warfare in Gaza is no longer just counterinsurgency but systems-level destruction of the environmental and infrastructural substrate of life – water, soil, agriculture, energy, and urban continuity.” (05/07/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by Maureen Tkacik
“Oliver Larkin spent most of the 2024 election season spamming out ‘I’ll be blunt’ emails on behalf of Adam Schiff: ‘We had a massive fundraising list from the Trump impeachment, and I was up until 3 in the morning sending emails and texts. And in those first 24 hours, we raised like $1.6 or $1.7 million.’ Chained to his computer screens in a Deerfield Beach bungalow 3,000 miles from Schiff’s campaign headquarters, he began to feel disconnected from man’s innate feedback loops of longing and satisfaction. ‘Trump loved to single him out, he was attacking Schiff all the fucking time, every week, calling him ‘Pencil Neck’ or ‘Watermelon Head’ or ‘Shifty Schiff,’ and every time something like that happened it was like, this could raise ten thousand dollars, this could raise twenty thousand dollars,’ the candidate told the Prospect.” (05/07/26)
https://prospect.org/2026/05/07/oliver-larkin-jared-moskowitz-jeffrey-epstein-ron-desantis-florida/
Source: NBC News
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the Middle East with Pope Leo at the Vatican on Thursday, at an audience that follows President Donald Trump’s criticism of the first American pontiff over the Iran war. The closed-door meeting, which lasted 45 minutes, was the first between the head of the Catholic Church and a Trump cabinet official in nearly a year. It comes at a fraught time between Washington and the Holy See, with relations at a low after weeks of presidential attacks on Leo and the Chicago-born pope’s outspoken responses.” (05/07/26)
Source: Free the People
“It’s Time to Give Privacy Rights an Update | Guest: Naomi Brockwell.” (05/06/26)
Source: The Dispatch
by David M Drucker
“The unshakably conservative voters of northern Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District sent Rep. Thomas Massie to Congress 14 years ago because he promised to stick to his principles under pressure from the GOP establishment in Washington, D.C., and aggressively fight the man—the man back then being President Barack Obama. But grassroots Republicans may pull the plug on the libertarian iconoclast precisely because he insists on keeping that commitment, because Republicans here now like the man—President Donald Trump—and support a party establishment on Capitol Hill laboring to deliver almost everything he wants.” (05/07/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by George Hawley
“Honest politicians are all alike; every crook is crooked in his own fashion.” (05/07/26)
Source: The American Conservative
“Andrew Day and Harrison Berger talk to Ryan Grim of Drop Site News about signs of diplomatic progress with Iran, possible Israeli sabotage of negotiations, and the Iranian Lego videos. Recorded May 6, 2026.” (05/07/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/tac-right-now-is-trump-nearing-an-iran-deal/