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Warning: Major Game of Thrones Season 8 spoilers to follow.
There was a lot to go over, of course, with some serious revelations taking place during the episode.One of the biggest bombshells exploded when Samwell Tarly told Jon Snow the paralyzing truth about Jon's parentage that Kit Harington has been teasing for months.
He is the "true king" — Aegon Targaryen — and that means he's been, well, getting it on with his aunt, Daenerys Targaryen. That isn't great news for anyone to swallow, and fans had some hilarious takes on the matter. (It probably didn't help that Drogon was watching the two make out with a knowing glint in his eye, lik...
Then there was also Bran, or the Three-Eyed Raven, creeping about in every other scene.
Cersei wanted those elephants too, natch.
Plenty of shade was being thrown left and right with the Stark sisters, who always make things interesting.
The entire episode was sort of awkward, with run-ins between characters who have't seen each other in years. But there were plenty of heartwarming scenes as well, like when Jon reunited with Arya after an agonizingly long time — seven seasons, to be exact. Grab a Kleenex and watch with caution.
Of course, others had a completely different set of problems, like the fact that Game of Thrones literally broke the internet.
Meanwhile, some were frustrated at the episode's comparatively short length compared to previous , despite the fact that we already had data on each episode's runtime. The shortest episode of the season is in fact the premiere, at 54 minutes, with the next five episodes (yes, there are only six) packing in a bit more. ...
Also, Game of Thrones is warping our sense of time and space; 54 minutes is still too long for any episode of television.
Who's going to end up taking the Iron Throne? How will all these messy plot threads resolve? We don't know for sure, but we did assign power rankings to each of the potential throne contenders — if that even matters by the time the Night King rolls through. Because as the teaser for the next episode hinted, he's on his...
Whatever happens, we'll definitely be sticking around each week — wading through a sea of memes — to find out.
Nancy Weiss, Michelle Cole, and Christine Kalafus read from their work at the Pomfret Town House, on Jan. 15.
Three Pomfret poets proved that a willing audience exists for the literary art form, when they held a reading on Jan. 15.
Michelle Cole, Christine Kalafus, and Nancy Weiss drew a crowd to the Pomfret Town House when they read their work. Each was delightful and different in her own right.
Cole is a recently published author. Her book, Untitled Twentyfive, was published by Arts and Academic Press. Kalafus has won prizes for her published poetry and fiction. She’s completed a memoir and is currently working on a novel. And Weiss, a writer for the Villager Press, has 650 columns in her portfolio.
Kalafus read two poems, “Ghost,” and “Breast Bone.” She prefaced her reading by sharing some statistics on breast cancer. Kalafus is a cancer survivor. “Breast Bone” takes readers to a place she had the misfortune to visit. She does so with the help of imagery we can understand: pies, a muscle spasm, a cup of coffee. S...
Cole read several poems from her recently published book, treating soft, short pieces with an understated humility.
Barbara Lussier, Michelle Cole, and Robert Craig. Craig is the owner of Arts and Academic Publishing in Pomfret.
The Pomfret Public Library sponsored the event. After the readings the audience had a chance to ask a wide range of questions.
Did they edit their work? Did they follow a certain writing discipline? When did they start writing poetry? Who were their favorite poets and why?
The questions led to a conversation between the poets and their guests. Cole and Kalafus had diametrically opposed editing habits: Cole rarely edits, but Kalafus does regularly.
Weiss prefers writing in the morning and said she has to make herself write or it doesn’t happen. Kalafus said every day was different.
“It’s feast or famine,” she said.
A deadline will keep her feet to the fire. A sunny day without a deadline can turn into a day spent playing with her dog.
Cole waits until she sees something or feels something before she starts to write.
Kalafus loves poems with a sense of humor, but acknowledged the difficulty in writing them. Among her favorite poets are Robyn Schiff, Mark Doty, and Charles Rafferty.
Weiss said it was the sound and rhythms of poems that she loved. She used to love to listen to Garrison Keiller’s Writer’s Almanac. He read a different poem every day before the program was discontinued.
Cole’s poet heroes include Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman.
“There are so many good poets,” she said.
The event drew first grade teacher Tammi Dalimonte. Dalimonte uses poems to teach rhyme and vocabulary to her students. She’s discovered that many students aren’t familiar with nursery rhymes.
Good riddance that the University of Pretoria had to do away with Afrikaans, because our children are marking time and not progressing by learning it.
If it was a global language I would understand its role in educating our kids. Any international lingua or Chinese would be far better if it can be introduced.
We would appreciate a language that will develop us and the country so that we make progress for the students after they have studied it.
A better language would be any internationally spoken language, e.g. French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Chinese and German. We'll also appreciate it if the national anthem can be reduced to Nkosi sikelel' i-Afrika and "Die stem van Suid Africa" removed; it will be a good riddance.
In a new complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the National Consumers League (NCL) is calling advertising and labeling claims on vitaminwater products “dangerously misleading” and is urging the commission to halt deceptive statements being made by the manufacturer.
NCL says it was "shocked" to see that the company that manufactures vitaminwater -- Glaceau (a Coca-Cola company) -- is suggesting that its products can keep you healthy or pre-empt the need for flu shots!
“These advertising claims are not only untrue; they constitute a public health menace. Stopping these vitaminwater claims, which contradict information by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other public health authorities, should be a top FTC priority,” said Sally Greenberg, Executive Director of NCL.
According to NCL, the statements are deceptive because the products on which they appear are not simply made from vitamins and water, but are made with crystalline fructose or other forms of sugar, and contain 125 calories per bottle.
This article below entitled Who is Osama bin Laden? was drafted on September 11, 2001. It was first published on the Global Research website on the evening of September 12, 2001.
Since 2001, it has appeared on numerous websites. The original September 12, 2001 posting is one of the most widely read articles on the internet, pertaining to Osama bin laden and Al Qaeda.
From the outset, the objective was to use 9/11 as a pretext for launching the first phase of the Middle East War, which consisted in the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan.
Within hours of the attacks, Osama bin Laden was identified as the architect of 9/11. On the following day, the “war on terrorism” had been launched. The media disinformation campaign went into full gear.
What happened subsequently, with the invasions of Afghanistan (October 2001) and Iraq (March 2003) is already part of history. In the wake of the NATO sponsored “Liberation” of Libya (August 20011), Syria and Iran constitute the next phase of the US-NATO military roadmap.
9/11 remains the pretext and justification for waging a war without borders. In a bitter irony, the global war on terrorism (GWOT) is waged not against the terrorists but with “with the terrorists” (WTT), with the full support, as in Libya, of Al Qaeda affiliated paramilitary brigades under US-NATO supervision.
Excerpts from the Preface of America’s “War on Terrorism”, Second edition, Global Research, 2005.
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an indepth police investigation.
That same evening at 9.30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11.00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The decision was announced to wage war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in retribution for the 9/11 attacks. The following morning on September 12th, the news headlines indelibly pointed to “state sponsorship” of the 9/11 attacks. In chorus, the US media was calling for a military intervention against Afghanistan.
Barely four weeks later, on the 7th of October, Afghanistan was bombed and invaded by US troops. Americans were led to believe that the decison to go to war had been taken on the spur of the moment, on the evening of September 11, in response to the attacks and their tragic consequences.
Little did the public realize that a large scale theater war is never planned and executed in a matter of weeks. The decision to launch a war and send troops to Afghanistan had been taken well in advance of 9/11. The “terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event” as it was later described by CentCom Commander General T...
The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage a war on “humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the “international community”.
Several prominent “progressive” intellectuals made a case for “retaliation against terrorism”, on moral and ethical grounds. The “just cause” military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11, without examining the fact that Washington had not only supported the “I...
In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country of 30 million people.
I started writing on the evening of September 11, late into the night, going through piles of research notes, which I had previously collected on the history of Al Qaeda. My first text entitled “Who is Osama bin Laden?” was completed and first published on September the 12th. (See full text of 9/12 article below).
From the very outset, I questioned the official story, which described nineteen Al Qaeda sponsored hijackers involved in a highly sophisticated and organized operation. My first objective was to reveal the true nature of this illusive “enemy of America”, who was “threatening the Homeland”.
The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush adminstration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America.
Without an “outside enemy”, there could be no “war on terrorism”. The entire national security agenda would collapse “like a deck of cards”. The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on.
It was consequently crucial for the development of a coherent antiwar and civil rights movement, to reveal the nature of Al Qaeda and its evolving relationship to successive US adminstrations. Amply documented but rarely mentioned by the mainstream media, Al Qaeda was a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet-Afgh...
After 9/11, the campaign of media disinformation served not only to drown the truth but also to kill much of the historical evidence on how this illusive “outside enemy” had been fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.
Michel Chossudovsky, Excerpts from the Preface of America’s “War on Terrorism”, Montreal, Global Research, 2005.
Meanwhile, parroting official statements, the Western media mantra has approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in the Middle East. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — ...
The following text outlines the history of Osama Bin Laden and the links of the Islamic “Jihad” to the formulation of US foreign policy during the Cold War and its aftermath.
Pakistan’s ISI was used as a “go-between”. The CIA covert support to the “jihad” operated indirectly through the Pakistani ISI, –i.e. the CIA did not channel its support directly to the Mujahideen. In other words, for these covert operations to be “successful”, Washington was careful not to reveal the ultimate objectiv...
Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam. While there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the CIA.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 — coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics– reached a record high of 4600 metric tons.15 Powerful business syn...
The ISI’s extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic “jihad” out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan’s military and intelligence apparatus essentially “ser...
Meanwhile, Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had established themselves in the Muslim republics as well as within the Russian federation encroaching upon the institutions of the secular State. Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was largely serving Washington’s strategic ...
And the JUI with the support of the Saudi Wahhabi movements played a key role in recruiting volunteers to fight in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.
In other words, backed by Pakistan’s military intelligence (ISI) which in turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic State was largely serving American geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the K...
Russia’s main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington’s perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea bas...
Basayev’s organisation has also been involved in a number of rackets including narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia’s oil pipelines, kidnapping, prostitution, trade in counterfeit dollars and the smuggling of nuclear materials (See Mafia linked to Albania’s collapsed pyramids, 25 Alongside the extensive la...
Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at same time placing him on the FBI’s “most wanted list” as the World’s foremost terrorist.
While the Mujahideen are busy fighting America’s war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI –operating as a US based Police Force- is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has –since the Soviet-Afghan war– supported international terrorism throug...
In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad –featured by the Bush Adminstration as “a threat to America”– is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, these same Islamic organisations constitute a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Sovie...
In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the truth must prevail to prevent the Bush Adminstration together with its NATO partners from embarking upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.
Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best America’s “War on Terrorism” Second Edition, Global Research, 2005. He is Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization.
Hugh Davies, International: `Informers’ point the finger at bin Laden; Washington on alert for suicide bombers, The Daily Telegraph, London, 24 August 1998.
Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999.
Steve Coll, Washington Post, July 19, 1992.
Dilip Hiro, Fallout from the Afghan Jihad, Inter Press Services, 21 November 1995.
Weekend Sunday (NPR); Eric Weiner, Ted Clark; 16 August 1998.
Dipankar Banerjee; Possible Connection of ISI With Drug Industry, India Abroad, 2 December 1994.
See Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, Oxford university Press, New York, 1995. See also the review of Cordovez and Harrison in International Press Services, 22 August 1995.
Alfred McCoy, Drug fallout: the CIA’s Forty Year Complicity in the Narcotics Trade. The Progressive; 1 August 1997.
Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a changing World, Technical document no 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations Publication, Vienna 1999, p 49-51, And Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000.
Report of the International Narcotics Control Board, op cit, p 49-51, see also Richard Lapper, op. cit.
International Press Services, 22 August 1995.
Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November- December, 1999, p. 22.
Tim McGirk, Kabul learns to live with its bearded conquerors, The Independent, London, 6 November1996.
See K. Subrahmanyam, Pakistan is Pursuing Asian Goals, India Abroad, 3 November 1995.
Levon Sevunts, Who’s calling the shots?: Chechen conflict finds Islamic roots in Afghanistan and Pakistan, The Gazette, Montreal, 26 October 1999..
See Vitaly Romanov and Viktor Yadukha, Chechen Front Moves To Kosovo Segodnia, Moscow, 23 Feb 2000.
The European, 13 February 1997, See also Itar-Tass, 4-5 January 2000.
Another season of the Netflix original series has been released.
On Oct. 27, a new season of the sci-fi Netflix original series “Stranger Things” was released to the public. Chock full of cinema genius and an entertaining plot line that just kept unraveling, “Stranger Things 2” blew me away.
Twin brothers Matthew and Ross Duffer created the show and released the first season with Netflix as their video platform. I fell in love with Season One when it was released in July 2016 and couldn’t help but be excited for the release of Season Two.
Right off the bat, you can tell that Season Two was blessed with a much larger budget than the first. The opening scene portrays a great action scene in an urban setting with special effects that help connect the scene to the “Stranger Things” plot.
In Episode Nine, actress Millie Bobby Brown, playing the character Eleven, throws her all into her character. That, along with the help of the new budget and outstanding special effects, creates an intense scene.
Along with more financial freedom, the Duffer Brothers brought Season Two to life with the help of one of the most iconic casts of all time.

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