** "I'm an actor, they tell me what pants to wear and where to stand - but as far as the corruption and commercialization of sports, it's just part of our culture..."

Michael Mosley Talks Signing Tony Raymond, Ballard, The Savant...Mosley is our guest on the show, in a conversation about his latest film during this football season, a satire delving into what the corporate exploitation of US sports and targeted young athletes is really all about.

Along with the character he portrays in Signing Tony Raymond, a shady college recruiter ruthlessly competing with 'all these guys sniffing around in their khaki pants and whistles around their necks - all sniffing around to pull this kid in one direction or another...'

And the actor's venture into directing as well, with 'No Room For Groceries' - along with revisiting memories of his small town Iowa 'cool band, we wore black clothes, got our ears pierced, and tried to be all scary...!

** "The mentality in the West - that all you've got to do is punch somebody in the face..."

Pacifica Host Garland Nixon on what we're supposed to think right now, the neo-con version; the US oil puppets; reading comprehension - and Trump sticking his chest out at a press conference..."

** "It never feels good sending out money to the federal government around this time of year - but it has never felt so bad as it does today..."

Writers Corner: We Had It Coming - A Luke O'Neil reading, storytelling on steroids. And 'how do you write fiction when the horrors of the present world outstrip what our imaginations imagine' - while 'trying to figure out how to deal with the helplessness and terror that makes a mockery of any John Wayne or Ernest Hemingway definition of manhood...'

Plus...Venezuela, ICE, Greenland... 

** "The worst series - the year of fudging dangerously..."

Movies 2025 Wrap-Up Report: Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe on the Global Television Beat - the worst of the worst. Not to mention the glut of all those proliferating series and their endless episodes seemingly pushing out movies, to maintain an audience addiction to competing channels online.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin Review: Mr Somebody Hopeful Heading To The Oscars

Less anti-war than anti-Russian, 'Mr. Nobody Against Putin' - shortlisted for the Oscars, sums up that hidden agenda revealed unintentionally or not in its title, a documentary framed as a kind of brooding internal gotcha espionage thriller focused on pro-war teaching in a Russian primary school. As Pavel Talankin aka Mr. Nobody, the videographer for the school and the combo director and protagonist of the film, self-proclaims in primarily secret solo home video recordings as the loner anti-war protester in town. Or does he.

Dramatic features deploring the subject at hand are one thing when it comes to a certain narrative freedom to manipulate facts, but shaping a documentary subjectively with a clear negativity regarding the reality is quite another matter. Unless of course, you're open to engaging both sides of the story - which unreliable narrator Mr. Nobody is not, in this flagrant out of context cinema. And the proclaimed peace protester as an alternative, heads off into the open arms of Western Europe's military industrial complex, profiteering endless war machine ganging up against his country.

Let's begin with the opening sequence, as Pavel presents an assertion that his rural town in the remote Ural mountains is the most polluted area on the planet, due to the toxic local copper smelting plant - and resulting in the average life expectancy of 38 years. Yet in the course of the film, no cemeteries or other substantiation are presented as evidence - while many in the population are encountered quite older than that. Including Pavel's quite beyond thirty years old mother, the school librarian - and who seems to be the only one in town disputing Pavel's disdain for the Russian government. And though he may be implying that people fear to speak up because of censorship, Pavel offers no proof suggesting that. While at the same time, the provocateur appears to be frustrated that the authorities are ignoring him, and don't show up to arrest him.

Mr. Nobody then proceeds to his narrative, primarily involving his anger over patriotic teaching at the school when the war begins - and the related official video recordings which he's presumably secretly sending out to his Western benefactors via the Internet. And by the end, pretending to leave the country on vacation in 2024 - when he's actually joining up with his anti-Russian enablers to produce the footage into an Oscar hopeful documentary. While in one final rebellious moment he broadcasts on the school's loudspeaker, Lady Gaga singing the US national anthem - a country most eligible for the title of head warmongering nation on the planet.

And about Pavel's Western European benefactors. In addition to collaborating on this film with Denmark based US director David Borenstein, whose speciality is anti-communist Chinese documentaries including Dream Empire and Love Factory - one financial contributor is ZDF in Germany - the Nazi country during WWII responsible for the invasion and genocide of 20 million Russians in the Soviet Union. So patriotic fears there might not seem such a stretch. And including Putin's own trauma of post-war memories of his parents suffering from starvation and his wounded soldier father during the Nazi horrific Siege of a destroyed Leningrad - when his mother near death from starvation, was mistakenly laid out with corpses in the snow.

While regarding in the present time, what exactly are Mr. Nobody's anti-war sentiments - collaborating with the pro-war Western European endless war elements to make this movie, in other words sleeping with the enemy - or the ignored option of becoming part of the existing anti-government movements of peace protesters coming together by the thousands in all of those countries, denouncing the war.

Not to mention denouncing pro-military war patriotism presented in his local school, while saying nothing about his implied favoring of the well documented Ukrainian military recruitment scandal- kidnapping men young and old from their homes and off the streets, and tossing them into vans headed to the front lines.

And a war that actually began when Russia came to the defense of the primarily Russian speaking provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, who broke away from Ukraine based on cultural oppression - and the subsequent Ukraine bombing and murder of thousands of resisting civilians and children there. Along with a decades long trail of broken promises to Russia and the prior Soviet Union - that the West would not assemble a threat on the Russian border - perceived as plans to break up Russia into economically exploitable small states, as they achieved with the bombing and partitioning of a destroyed Yugoslavia.

And in conclusion, an observation about war noted by a very different Russian ironically - Vladimir Lenin: "A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends..."

Prairie Miller