Author: Tom

And only now they tell us … I had a nightmare yesterday: I dreamt that Covid restrictions were back on, all over the world, and that they were even harsher than before. You could be arrested if you didn’t have a face mask on, and to go anywhere, besides a “vaccine passport”, you had to…

Transcription of a debate about Donbass, Nagorno-Karabakh, and other wars. This is the transcription (translated by me from French to English) of a recent debate on April 6, 2022, for a French TV show, with documentarist Anne-Laure Bonnel, director of the war documentaries “Donbass, 8 years of war” (2016, English subtitles), and “Silence dans le…

Already 40 years ago… As the war in Ukraine drags on, I’m reminded of another war: the Falklands War, between Argentina and the UK for the control of the Falkland/Malvinas islands. It started almost exactly 40 years ago, in April 1982, when I was 8 years old. I was born in Argentina, even if I…

Price increases of 20%-50% are not very nice. I went to the supermarket today and the cheapest pack of 10 eggs, which costed € 1.69 on Friday, is now costing € 2.29. News sites inform us that there are food price increases of 20-50% in German supermarkets in many other products, and this not mentioning…

I recently watched the film “For the Children of Donbass“, which is a very interesting short documentary by an Italian filmmaker about the conflict in Donbass, that started in 2014 and in many was was a “prequel” to the current conflict involving Russia and the Ukraine. I recommend that everyone watches it — I added…

From Covid to Russia, these are bad times to be an artist First the lockdowns hit hard all types of artists and artistic venues. As art and culture are considered by most governments as “non-essential”, they were the first things to close down. Many artists and performers were unable to find work for months, or…

A world on the brink of nuclear war… Since there is talk of Russia and nuclear war, I have uploaded a copy of Tarkovsky’s film “The Sacrifice”, filmed in Sweden in 1986 and about a world facing nuclear extinction. This was in the context of the Cold War but I suppose is as valid now,…

There is no “impartial news” I feel I need to make a point that seems very basic, and which to me was always obvious, but which doesn’t seem to be so obvious for many people. All “news” and everything that is shown in the media is propaganda, one way or another. There is no “impartial…

The Russian film director presents his view in a recent documentary Nikita Mikhalkov is a famous Russian film director. He directed the very good movie “Burnt by the Sun”, about the Stalinist purges, which I believe won the foreign film Oscar in 1995. He also directed “Oci Ciorne” (Dark Eyes), a story based on Tchekhov’s…

Is the current war the second phase of the Great Reset? It sounds almost like a parody of that famous poem. First they came for the anti-vaxxers, but I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t an anti-vaxxer. Then they came for the truckers, but I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t a trucker. Then they…