​Iran and Ukraine are at the heart of 2 of the most significant political situations in America today regarding foreign Affairs, separate issues that have become intertwined.  Impeachment however is the most significant political situation in America today period, and Ukraine is right at the heart of that as well.  On this episode of Lessons from the Screen, we are going to be free wheeling on these topics.  You guys said you liked the free wheeling shows, so we are going to do more of them.  At our heart though, we like researching and bringing information, so we will try to blend the two together for future shows to see what kind of mix we get.  

​On January 3, 2020, just as we were getting warmed up to the new year, Trump decided he would say hello to his good friends in the Middle East by sending a drone to assassinate the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and several other Iraqi military officials.  The strike happened as Soleimani was leaving his flight into Iraqi in order to deliver a message from Iran to Iraq regards request made.  Since the strike, Iran has completely backed out of the nuclear deal, Iraq has said they want US troops to leave their country, and militia groups all over the region have sworn revenge on the US.  Back in August of 2019 we did a show looking at the history of the United States relationship with Iran, in this show we are going to be looking at who Qasem Soleimani was, why he was assassinated, and what this means for the Middle East and the US.  

​In early 2018 President Trump in a speech announced to the world his intentions on supporting the creation of a Space Force.  While many of us shrugged it off as a joke or a lie (depending on your view of the president) he was dead serious on capitalizing on the work that had been done in the years prior.  Discussions on the establishment of a space force have been going on for decades in small circles and behind closed doors, but by 2020 a space force will be the 6th operational branch of the US Military.  In this episode of Lessons from the Screen we will be looking at the United States Space Force. 

Trying something new this week, host Patrick Irvine shares some of his thoughts on current events.  Tune in and tell us what you think.  

​Earlier this month, Michael Jai White decided to extend his connection to films that pay homage to the blaxploitation era.  Blaxploitation was an era of movie-making history during which Black Films were recognized as a source of cheap profits for Hollywood.  Something I talked about a bit during the Dolemite show.  Black Dynamite was a wonderful addition to the genre and a great homage paying endeavor, during this show, we are going to give you our opinion on whether Undercover Brother 2 also hit that mark.   During this episode of Lessons from the Screen, we are going to be talking about Undercover Brother 2.  

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Because of all the questions I've been getting about the impeachment process, we decided to rerun the show we did on that very topic in September.  Hopefully, it answers all of the questions that have come up since the Republicans started attacking the process.  Click on the button below for the original show notes and links.  

​Last week, Dolemite is My Name hit netflix.  A film produced by and starring Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore, the man that brought Dolemite to the Big Screen.  Even if you don’t know who or what Dolemite is, there is a pretty good chance you have interacted with something influenced by Rudy Ray Moore, especially if you are a Hip Hop head.  In this episode of Lessons from the Screen, we are going to be getting into Dolemite, Blaxploitation, and Eddie Murphy.

This is a Rerun Show, the original show air 10/9/2018.

With the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, Republicans have effectively consolidated power for the next few decades on the supreme court, effectively gaining control of the judicial branch far into the future.  At this point, they have control of all three branches of government on the federal level. The 33 governors mansions that are lived in by republicans effectively give them executive power at the local level in roughly 70% of the nation. 31 State Governments are controlled by Republicans, with 26 states being totally controlled by Republicans compared to just 8 for Democrats and the rest have a combination of mismatching governors and legislators. By these measures, they have near total control of the American Political Establishment with Democrats being opposition virtually in name only.  

While it is true that this could change next month and Democrats could take control of the legislative branch, Republican power has still been locked in and will take years to unseat.  In this episode of Lessons from the Screen we are going to talk about how the Republicans managed to go from the party of Civil Rights to the party of States Rights (which has become code for having the personal freedom to mistreat and abuse others in a lot of circles).  The party that while only making up 25% of the population, controls the nation.

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​Earlier this week, on the order of Donald Trump US troops were pulled from Syria and the embedded positions they held with Kurdish Forces (if you recall from the show we did in April of 2018, which will be linked below, the Kurds have been strong allies of the US helping to fight terrorism in the region).  After US troops had been removed from their positions, US NATO ally Turkey rolled in and rolled over Kurdish forces going as far as 30 miles deep into syria in an operation that is being reported to have been green lit by the US.  In this episode of Lessons from the Screen, we will be looking at the history between the Kurds and Turkey, why the US pulled out, what has happened since the pull out, and more.  Today we will be talking about The US, Turkey, and the Kurds. 

​We are back in the Middle East today with another show on Syria.  But a lot has changed since the missile strikes last year that prompted the first show.  If you haven’t heard that show it is linked below and goes into detail about the Syrian Civil War, the Arab Spring that caused it and how the different factions in the Syrian Civil War have come into play.  While today’s show does focus on a topic with a tremendous amount of impact on the Syrian Civil War and the politics of the region, this show is not a recap or an update show on those previous topics.  The tie in starts immediately though, with the US pulling out of the area and leaving its Kurdish allies open to attack by Turkey who has pushed roughly thirty miles into Syria in order to destroy the Kurds and to create a buffer zone that can be used to house the 3.6 million refugees that have fled from Syria and into Turkey over the course of the civil war.  That’s what we know on the surface level.  But you know here on Lessons from the Screen we never stay on the surface level.  So we will start with the first question on our minds and go from there, who are the Kurds and why would Turkey want to destroy them so badly that they would invade another country.

The Kurds are an Iranian Ethnic group, one of the largest stateless ethnic groups in the world today, numbering between 30 and 45 million people.  They have their own languages, their own culture, a variety of religious beliefs, and for a time about 500 years ago they had their own nation.  Well, not quite their own nation, although that would be a nice story to tell.  What they had was a geo-cultural region in the middle east that was named after them, that place was known as kurdistan. While as a people they have been able to be grouped together throughout most of their history is wasn’t until the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Empire began the clash in early 1500s that the many tribes that had come to be known as Kurdish experienced a loss in their ability to be grouped together.  The Iranian Empire controlled some of Kurdistan while the Ottoman Empire control most of the rest.  The Ottoman Empire ended up winning that engagement and taking control of all of Kurdistan.  

Beginning in 1514 when the Ottoman Empire annexed Kurdistan, the region was controlled by the Ottoman empire who split the region into districts and appointed local chiefs as governors.  This kept the cultural identity and stability of the region and effectively allowed the Kurdish groups to manage themselves under the banner of the Ottoman Empire.  This isn’t to say that this was a peaceful time, the Kurdish People revolted against the Ottoman Empire on several occasions.  In 1606 the Janpulat Revolt occured when a regional ruler was murder.  The stated reason for the murder was arriving late to a battle but the people believed he was murdered for being Kurdish.  His nephew, backed by the Duke of Tuscany (a region in Central Italy)  took a force of 30,000 troops against the Ottoman Empire before fleeing and being appointed Governor of a province in Hungary.  In 1655, another revolt was started when the Ottoman army passed through an area of Kurdistan and committed atrocities against civilians.  The leader of the region built an army and launched an attack on the Ottoman Empire.  This revolt was put down with 70 Kurds being cut to pieces by swords.  These are just 2 examples of many, not including a brief reconquest by Iranian forces.

Even with the revolts, the Ottoman Empire maintain control over Kurdistan in the system setup from the beginning unchanged until the early 1800s.  During that time the Kurds had gained a great deal of influence and power and had spread their influence increasing the size of their autonomous regions.  The Ottoman Empire engaged in the Russo-Turkish War from 1828 to 1829 and after the Empire lost the war to Russia, the Kurds made a move to free themselves from the Ottoman Empire in 1834.  The rising was put down and the Kurds lost their autonomy.  This was done because the Ottoman Empire, following its loss to Russia, realized it needed to modernize itself as a nation.  It needed all the different ethnic groups in Ottoman Empire to see themselves as Ottoman first nationally.  These changes and the roughly 40 year period they occured in were called the Tanzimat.  Some people have also said that the Ottoman given credit for these reforms was also a Kurd.   

The removal of autonomy caused more issues between the Ottoman Empire and the Kurdish people.  More revolts ensued.  In one particular instance, a Kurdish ruler rebelled against the Empire to protect his power in the region.  He was defeated, and his brother became ruler.  This upset his son, and his son was told by the Ottoman Empire that if he killed his uncle he would be made ruler.  He killed his uncle and instead of being made ruler of the region, he was executed.  The Kurds have songs about this.  In 1864, the Ottoman Empire abolished Kurdistan as an administrative region and as a province.  Another revolt in 1880 sought to reunify the region, but was put down.  

By the start of the 1900s, the idea of nationalism that the Ottoman Empire was trying to preach was defeated by Ethnic Identities.  These identities had not only defeated concepts of national citizenship but also defeated powerful concepts of religious unity.  The Ottoman Empire attempted to negate the cries for Ethnic Nationalism by giving the powerful voices in the Kurdish community powerful positions in the government.  This worked and held the loyalty of the Kurds through WW1.  

WW1 was fought from 1914 - 1918 and featured the allies - Britain, France, Russia, Italy and the United States on one side vs the central powers - Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria on the other side.  Although there were numerous smaller nations that also participated with the total national involvement count reaching 32.  The Ottoman Empire which had been on the losing side was forced to sign some documents.  That’s when things get a bit hazy.  

Kurdish voices had been trying to use the defeat of the Ottoman Empire to carve out a section of land for themselves as an officially recognized Kurdish Nation, and for a moment it looked like they were going to be successful with the encouragement of US President Woodrow Wilson.  After the Armistice of Mudros was signed ending hostilities between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies in 1918, ideas and maps began to be presented that had regions of land marked out as Kurdistan.  But the Kurds themselves couldn’t agree on what should or should not be included in Kurdistan and so with the signing of the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, Kurdistan was left to a referendum for later.

However, the signing of the Treaty of Sevres caused a surge of national pride as many in the Ottoman Empire felt like they were giving up too much.  A war broke out within the nation and by the time the Turkish War of Independence ended, the people that had signed the treaty had been overthrown requiring a new treaty to be crafted and signed.  For those of you that don’t see what I did there I’ll explain it further.  The primary ethnic group in the Ottoman Empire was the Turks.  The Ottoman Empire became present day Turkey.  In any case, a new treaty was signed in 1923 and no mention of the Kurds was included in this treaty.  The Kurdistan geo-cultural region was divided in the states that the Ottoman Empire was broken into in the region with British Mandate of Iraq, the French Mandate of Syria, Persia (current Iran), and the Ottoman (current Turkey).  To this current day, this map still exist with each region of the specific country that was Kurdistan being known as that countries Kurdistan (Iraqi Kurdistan, Syrian Kurdistan, Iranian Kurdistan, and Turkish Kurdistan).  

But instead of focusing on what the Kurds have done in all these regions, our focus continues forward right now with what was happening between the Kurds and the Turks.  

Right now the Kurds make up 15% - 20% of the population of Turkey  with half of all Kurds living in Turkey and primarily residing in the southeast region known as Turkish Kurdistan.  With the ending of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, the nation of Turkey transitioned away from Caliphates which caused major unrest amongst the Kurds.  As Turkey became a secular government and moved away from religious rule, the cultural views of the Kurds came to be directly at odds with the government that was overseeing them.  This resulted in several rebellions from the 1920s onward and growing calls for an independent Kurdistan.    

The most significant of these rebellions involved the Republic of Ararat.  The Republic declared independence in 1927 and proclaimed itself to be a Kurdish Sovereign Nation.  However, the Republic was not recognized by any other states and had no foreign support.  in the 3 years that followed the Government of Turkey mobilized 66,000 troops and 100 aircraft putting the rebellion down hard.  

After the suppression of a series of rebellions by Kurdish Nationalist, the government of Turkey in 1937 decided to take extra steps to solve what they viewed as a Kurdish threat or the Kurdish Problem.   The government imposed martial law on the Kurdish Regions of Turkey and encouraged other ethnic groups to settle in the region to water down the Kurdish cultural density and unity in the area.   From 1925 to 1938 1.5 million Kurds were reported to have been deported and massacred with villages being set on fire.  The area remained under military siege until the 50s and foreigners were not allowed to visit the area until 1965.  Kurdish Language and Culture was outlawed and words referencing the Kurds and Kurdistan were removed from the dictionary and history.  The Kurds had begun to achieve levels of integration into Turkish Society in the 50s but a coup in 1960 undid all that work and the Kurds returned back to their previous positions.  

During WW2 the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan formed 10 companies that supported the British in defeating and a pro-nazi coup attempt in Iraqi which was being ruled at the time by a pro-British government.  But Kurds also played a role in the Soviet war machine working behind the German lines.  This is only mentioned because Donald Trump said that they didn’t help us in World War 2 as a defense of his pulling the troops out.  

Turkish oppression of the Kurds through the 1970s became more and more intense.  By 1965 Kurdish Culture wasn’t just banned, it was criminalized, and not just the culture, but also political ideas that advocated for a Kurdish State or for the Kurds in general.  Singing a song in Kurdish was a punishable offense.  In 1984, the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK (which gets it’s initials from the Kurdish words used in the name)  which was organized by students in 1978, made its public declaration as a Kurdish Military and Political Organization with the goal of creating an independent Kurdish State.  Based in Turkey and Iraq the organization began launching attacks to free the Kurdish People from oppression in 1984 and continue to this day.  

Since the PKK first announced the Kurdish uprising in 1984, there have been more than 40,000 deaths.  In that time there has also been an abundance of political and social evolution.  The PKK which started out as with social leanings towards Marxism would leave that ideology behind for a more socialistic view of the nation they wanted to establish for the kurds.  They also began attacking Kurdish clans that weren’t with them, adopting the if you’re not with me you’re against me view in some regards.  The poverty of the Kurdish regions in Turkey combined with state sponsored atrocities and PKK hostilities caused the region to become depopulated.  Kurds began to move to other regions of the nation.  From 1984 to 1999 there was open war between the PKK and Turkey and the PKK was labeled a terrorist organization by the Turkish Government and its NATO ally the USA.  

At the same time that many nations were recognizing the PKK as a terrorist organization, the European Court of Human Rights was condemning Turkey for thousands of human rights abuses including acts on Kurdish Civilians like torture, forced displacement, village destruction, and disappeared Kurdish journalists. Leyla Zana was elected to parliament in Turkey in 1994 and after she finished her swearing in oath in Turkish, she added in Kurdish, “I take this oath for the brotherhood of the Turkish and Kurdish Peoples.” She served 10 years in prison for that add on.  Turkey continued and continues to view the Kurds as a threat to the unity of their nation, a sentiment that began during the time of their Ottoman forefathers.  Zana was actually sentenced to 15 years but was released early as a condition for Turkey to have a chance at joining the EU.     

There was a ceasefire in 2000 between the PKK and Turkey with the PKK announcing they would try peaceful methods to achieve their goals.   But hostilities continued both politically and militarily spurring a civil war inside the PKK amongst the reformers who wanted the organization to demilitarize altogether and the traditionalist who wanted to end the ceasefire and return to fighting.  The traditionalist won and the fighting resumed officially.  The traditionalist believed that without the military activity the political activity was pointless.  During the time of the Ceasefire the Turkish government was ignoring PKK calls for diplomacy and discussion. 

From 2004 - 2012 the PKK resistance looked differently than it had before.  Because they didn’t have the resources they had once enjoyed, and they lacked a sponsor or foreign backing, they transitioned into a more guerilla style of fighting.  Smaller units and hit and run tactics were deployed with them no longer attempting to hold territory.  The PKK also began launching attacks from Iraq during this time.  The Turkish Government during this period blamed the PKK for various bombings with the PKK denying most of them.  Both sides also issued different numbers for casualties during conflicts.  Turkey launched offensives across the Iraq border to destroy the Kurds there which prompted involvement from the Kurds in Iran who put their fights with the Iranian government to the side in order to unite in the fight against Turkey.  Kurds were being oppressed and persecuted in all four of the nations they existed in, but Turkey was providing them all with a reason to unite.  Through all of this, the Kurds were still seeing advances politically growing in power and influence in Turkey.  The Turkish government responded to these advances by easing up on its bans on Kurdish Culture.      

In 2015 what has become known as the third phase of the Kurdish - Turkish Conflict started.  Following another failed ceasefire and frustration as the Turkish Government refused to let the PKK send reinforcements to Kurdish Fighters fighting ISIS in Syria with the US.  This wave of conflict saw the Kurdish Forces behaving similarly to the second wave with the added component of holding territory.  And that brings us up to the December of 2018 when Donald Trump following a phone call with the Turkish President announced that he would pull US forces out of Syria.  However, the huge political backlash he received from politicians, the media, other nations, and the US military  caused him to go back on it.   However in October of 2019, he again announced he would pull US troops out of Syria following a phone call with the President of Turkey, and this time he followed through. 

But While I have talked about Turkey and the Kurds, we still have to answer one more question before we can put all this together, what were the Kurds doing in Syria?

In Syria the Kurds also faced extreme oppression the same as everywhere else.  However, the Syrian government also supported Kurdish Organizations (including the PKK) in the 1980s and 90s as a means of destabilizing their neighbors in the region.  Syria went so far as to allow the leader of the PKK to have safe haven in Syria and allowed them to launch operations from Syria as well as allowing a Kurdish leader to found the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan or PUK in order to combat oppression in Iraq. The Kurds in Syria weren’t as united as those in Turkey making them less of a threat, they were also smaller in number.  Situated in the Northeast of Syria they are the largest ethnic minority in the country numbering at about 2 million.  Syria holds special places for the Kurds as the great muslim leader Saladin was a kurd that founded the Ayyubid Dynasty which built great castles and buildings in the entire region of the Middle East and northeast Africa.  Some of which still stand in Damascus which is situated in modern day Syria.  

While the Kurds did face oppression in Syria, it was somewhat different.  The Syrian government did ban Kurdish culture like Turkey, they also denied the right to Syrian Nationality making the Kurds there effectively invisible people with no rights in any land.  Children with Kurdish Names either weren’t registered or were given arabic names instead by the government.  In 1998, when the Syrian Government banned Kurdish political parties and organizations including those they once supported, the Kurds in Syria began strategizing and 5 years later in 2003 they had formed the Democratic Union Party or PYD.  Turkey claims that the PYD was formed in secret by the PKK but others say that the PYD is its own naturally occuring Syrian Organization.  Due to the PYD’s ability to mobilize large numbers of people, the Syrian Government viewed them as a major threat much in the same light that the Turkish Government did.  Syria treated PYD members with a special intensity of violence and oppression that was worse than it treated Kurds that weren’t a member of the PYD.  But still, all kurds faced oppression.  The PYD organized a large protest in 2007 in order to prevent Turkey from invading Iraqi Kurdistan and to show their disapproval of the Syrian Government's approval which resulted in Syrian Forces opening fire on the protesters with live ammunition killing 1 and injuring others.  Things persisted in this manner until the start of the Syrian Civil War in 2011 with a few instances of Kurdish resistance sprinkled in.    

It should be mentioned at this point that the French employed a divide and conquer strategy in Syria that saw them encouraging Kurdish and other minority groups to gain power and advocate for themselves against the dominant ethnic group in the nation.  They used the Kurds as members of their police forces and conscripted them into local military organizations.  The British did similar things in the regions they controlled as apart of their mandate. The mandate system was supposed to be different from colonization because it was not a system of permanent control.  The idea was for a country to control and sponsor another long enough for the country to manage its own affairs and then to pull out.   However it would be extremely naive to think that the British and the French along with the US and other allies didn’t put things in place to ensure that the Ottoman Empire didn’t reform.  Stroking the flames of ethnic tensions is something that European nations have down the world over in order to keep threats against them from forming.  

Moving into the Syrian Civil War, the PYD found itself joining up with various Kurdish Umbrella Organizations including the Kurdish Patriotic Movement, the Kurdish National Council (KNC), and the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) which included the PKK from Turkey.  In 2012, when the Syrian Government pulled most of its troops out of Kurdistan in order to fight rebels elsewhere, the Kurds placed more resources in the hands of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in order to provide security for Kurdish Regions in Syria.  This caused the YPG and their sister group The Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) to become the dominant Kurdish Fighting Force in Syria.  And seeing as how the YPG and the YPJ were created under the PYD, this meant that the PYD was the dominant Kurdish Fighting Organization in the region.  However, their control over Syrian Kurdistan did cause some problems with other Kurdish Groups, especially the purist and the nationalist.  The PYD wanted to create a multicultural safe haven for all, and they eventually ended some of their agreements with other Kurdish Factions.  The area that the PYD control has been renamed Rojava by the Kurds and it’s existence on the Turkish Border is viewed as completely unacceptable to Turkey. 

In 2014, the US began supporting the PYD.  But only indirectly and definitely conditionally through it’s support of the YPG-YPJ.  The US entered the picture because things weren’t going well in the battle against ISIS.  As the Syrian Civil War continued and chaos spread, ISIS was using this opportunity to consolidate power and territory.  That is until they ran up against the Kurdish Province of Kobani and it’s main city Kobani.  Kobani exists in the Kurdish controlled region of Rojava and the Kurds weren’t having it.  Things started going well for ISIS as they captured more than 300 towns and villages in the region displacing 300,000 kurds who fled into Turkey.  But the Kurds regrouped with other Syrian rebel groups and began fighting back this time also supported by American Airstrikes.  In January of 2015 the Kurds had retaken the city, but many villages and towns in the region remained under ISIS control.  By April of 2015 the Kurds had retaken most of the region and the battle was seen as the turning point for the battle against ISIS in America.    

However this made things difficult for Turkey who had allowed the PYD (Syrian Kurds) use Turkish Land in the early stages of the Syrian Civil War.  But when Turkey refused to help Kurdish Fighters fight against ISIS in the battle of Kobani while  also not allowing the Turkish Kurds to support the Syrian Kurds, well, we talked about that earlier, it caused the end of the ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK.  But also caused an issue because America needed bodies on the ground to fight ISIS and didn’t want to send its own troops.  With Turkey unwilling to indirectly defend Kurdish lands and other rebel forces in the region proving unreliable or unstable, that only left the YPG-YPJ and their parent organization the PYD.  But Turkey saw the PYD and the PKK as the same organization and began to view the PYD as a terrorist organization the same way it viewed the PKK.  As such, Turkey will not allow an autonomous region of Kurds on it’s borders and if that means invading other countries they are more than willing to do it.  In 2016, the Turkish Government stated that the destruction of the PYD was a policy arm of the government.  

This put the US in a delicate position because they had basically become an ally to an organization that was connected to another organization that they viewed as a terrorist organization and that their NATO ally of Turkey had pledged to destroy.  But Turkey wasn’t willing to help the US with the ISIS problem in the region because doing so would have advanced a group they considered to be a terroristic threat.   Obama regularly made calls to the Turkish President to try to appease the outraged nation and put a 12 million dollar bounty on PYD leaders.  The US also tried to distance the PYD from the PKK and the YPG-YPJ from the PKK by having the YPG-YPJ announce themselves as the Syrian Defense Force (SDF).  None of it has worked.  

Then we come to Donald Trump who has an affinity for the type of Authoritarian leader that the President of Turkey is. Which is why in 2018, after 4 years of the US working and fighting side by side with kurdish forces, training them and learning from them, and various incidents of US Soldiers being told to remove Kurdish Patches from their uniforms (the soldiers view them as allies, the government wants to view them as proxies) Donald Trump was persuaded to remove US troops from the area in a phone call.  But as stated earlier he went back on that after fallout.  But earlier this year, 2019, another phone call happened and this time he followed through quickly before any backlash could occur.  And as the US pulled the small number of troops it had in the region out of the region, Turkey moved in.  

Turkey is also facing some economic issues and hopes that resettling the Syrian Refugees into the created buffer zone will ease some of that economic tension and hopes to push deep enough into syria to secure enough land to settle 2 -3 million refugees that have fled to Turkey. 

The Kurds have called the US pullout a stab in the back.  Something that they recognize is a pattern when dealing with the US.  In addition to some of the other things I’ve mentioned earlier, the US also supported the kurds when it was feared that Saddam Hussein would become a Soviet Asset.  When the US was sure that wasn’t going to happen, they stopped supporting the Kurds immediately.  But this one is a bit different.  The US had been training, arming, and fighting alongside the kurds.  And the kurds for their part have been dying (more than 10,000 kurds have died in the past 5 years) and directing their fight towards ISIS while also acting as guards to more than 10,000 ISIS fighters and 70,000 ISIS families.  

But since the US pullout, several of those fighters have been set free and ISIS is looking to reconstitute itself.  The Kurds have gone to the Syrian Government for protection against the Turks.  Russia has stepped in to fill the power vacuum left by the US.  Thousands of Kurds have been killed or injured with many more being displaced.  And all of this happened in a matter of days.  The situation got so bad so fast that the US stepped back in and negotiated a ceasefire between the Kurds and the Turks (that many on both sides say isn’t being honored) in order to stop the international fallout against the US.  Many have said that it was less than 100 troops in the region and that isn’t enough to stop a war.  But Turkey did not want to launch an offensive and potentially kill or endanger American Soldiers, that would have put them directly at odds with the US.  So now the Kurds are allied with Syria, Russia, and Iran, three nations the US is not fond of.  

As the talks during the Ceasefire continue, it’s looking more and more like the Kurds once again will not have a real voice in the proceedings.  Many are calling this a US negotiated surrender of the Kurds.  While the Kurds have said they will continue to administer the regions they control, we don’t know how long they will be able to control anything.  And US trustworthiness has taken another huge hit as another deal made by the Obama Administration, has been destroyed by the Trump Administration.  While some have argued that he was right to pull us out of an endless situation in the Middle East.  That isn’t necessarily true, while he did pull some soldiers out of Syria, he deployed more to Saudi Arabia, and he justifies this by saying that the Saudi’s are paying for us to be there.  Basically acknowledging that the US Military is available for hire.  And on the whole, US presence in the MIddle East has gone up during the Trump administration not down.   But for Trump, this move has larger implications, as he moves to face his impeachment, he may have given many republicans in the Senate the cover they need to vote to impeach him.  

​On October 1st the CDC, FDA, and numerous other health departments and organizations announced a nationwide investigation into an outbreak of lung injuries that have been associated with vaping.  For years vaping has spread through the US as a substitute for smoking cigarettes, a way to stop smoking cigarettes, a way to take marijuana, and as a cool recreational tool.  in the last few years, we have also seen vaping being utilized by teenagers in increasing fashion.  In this episode of Lessons from the Screen we will be taking a look at the Vaping Outbreak. 

Due to family issues, the show for today has been delayed. We hope to release the show as soon as the family matters are resolved. Thank you for your patience.

​Scandal after scandal, through broken laws, rules, norms, and traditions Donald Trump’s presidency has seemed unassailable.   The Republican party has been overtaken by an extreme wing of “alt-righters” that are dead set on defending Trump regardless of what he does.  The Democratic party has been at war with itself as the far left fights with the moderate and conservative left on how to deal with Trump.  This is creating a disunified front incapable of doing anything.  With all of that going on, Trump has managed to reshape the Judicial and Executive Branches of government into extensions of his will by filling them with partisan persons and going around the official appointment channels where ever possible.  Surviving campaign finance issues, lying to the media and the public, instructing others to lie under oath to congress, interfering in multiple investigations, potentially using pardons as a political tool, and encouraging other countries to interfere in US elections, his presidency faces a new challenge that has people seriously talking impeachment: pressuring Ukraine to investigate the son of a political opponent. In this episode of Lessons from the Screen we are going to be talking about impeachment.  

​Those of you that follow the show know that we are not afraid of being late to the party when it comes to documentaries, and we are fashionably late here.  Although the film made its American debut in March of 2019, it hit Netflix in the first part of August, and it didn’t hit our radar until early September.  Do we need another film about steroids, baseball, superstars, drugs, and the Miami dark side?  Do we need more documentaries talking about the ineptitude of Florida and the lack of concern that parents have for their children’s health in the sports world?  Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter if we needed another one, because we got another one, and in this episode of Lessons from the Screen we are going to talk about it.  

​The Summer of 2019 has just ended however the ramifications of the things that transpired and that were discovered will continue to shape global history forever.   The social media and digital giants faced a world that was a lot more inquisitive about their business models and a lot more aggressive in how it sought answers to those questions.  A 2-year federal investigation wrapped up in April of 2019 and at its core was the largest social media company in the world and how data stolen from them was being used to shape democracies and engineer societies.  The great hack follows the story of one of the primary culprits in this game of digital shenanigans, it is the story of Cambridge Analytica, and it is the story of this episode of Lessons from the Screen.  

Following the proposal of the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation in February of 2019, a series of protest swept through Hong Kong that continues to this day.  The bill would have made it possible to detain and extradite people accused of criminal acts to countries that Hong Kong does not currently have extradition agreements with.  The bill was proposed because the Hong Kong government wanted to close a loophole that was allowing a Hong Kong man that had killed his girlfriend in Taiwan (a place with no agreement) to go without trial.  However the people of Hong Kong felt like the bill went too far and placed their autonomy at risk giving too much power to China.  In this episode of Lessons from the Screen, we will be taking a look at the relationship between Hong Kong and China, the bill, and the protest raging on and spreading across the globe. 

Lessons from the Screen is back after a slew of situations preventing the release of new episodes.  In this return show which also happens to be the last show of Mental Health Awareness Month on the Freedom Train Network, we are going to be talking a terrible tragedy and the communities response to it.  

​Despite having no formal diplomatic relations since the 1980s, Iran and the United States can’t seem to get enough of each other.  That love to hate relationship was cranked up another level with the withdrawal of the US from a Nuclear Deal, the reimposing of sanctions, and the increased economic pressure the United States has been placing on other countries forcing them not to deal with Iran.  As powder continues to be added to the keg, it seems like every day we inch closer to a military conflict with Iran.  In this episode of Lessons from the Screen we will be looking at the 65-year history and the growing issues between Iran and the United States.

​Many of us thought that after the last challenge to the Affordable Care Act was defeated, it would finally just be accepted as the law of the land.  President Trump said as much after his republican cohorts in congress failed to repeal it and failed to construct a suitable template for a replacement.  But that should have been one of all of our strongest indicators that it was not going to be allowed to exist and that they would not simply seek to plug the holes and build on it, Donald Trump’s words usually only carry the impact of a future assurance that the opposite will eventually happen.  Therefore, when he announced that the ACA was the law of the land, we should have been expecting it to be challenged more severely.  Well, that challenge is here, and it looks to be the most significant challenge to date with a very high chance of having the entire law thrown out for being unconstitutional.  In the episode of Lessons from the Screen, we will be looking at the current challenge to the Affordable Care Act.  

Thank you for listening and supporting Lessons from the Screen and the Freedom Train Network.  Unfortunately, due to various issues, we are not able to provide an episode of Lessons from the Screen this week.  We look forward to bringing you more high quality content and we will be back next with with an episode focused on the current efforts to dismantle Obama Care and we will be following that up with an episode focused on the current happenings in Iran.  Thank you again for your support and we apologize again for not being able to provide content this week.  Do feel free to contact us or to listen to previous episodes and share them with your friends and family.  

The questions remain, what does July Fourth mean to Black People and what has been done to change that meaning?  Just like last year, we want you to think about these questions and more as you listen to Douglass's Speech on the Fourth of July.  Leave your thoughts and comments below.

​In June of 2019 Netflix pulled back the curtain on Clarence Avant, a Black Man from Greensboro, North Carolina born in the 1930s who rose to become one of the most influential Black Persons in Entertainment.  Best friends with Quincy Jones, mentor to a slew of Black Entertainers of all strips, and supporter of politicians, this documentary pulled out all the stops featuring 2 former presidents and a whole host of A list Black Stars to tell their stories of Clarence Avant.  On this episode of Lessons from the Screen, we are going to be taking a look at The Black Godfather. 

​We are at this moment in the middle of a crisis.  Drug prices are simply out of control and superbugs are on the rise making drugs less effective.  However, out of control prices are the first issue of concern right now because millions of people have to make do without the drugs they need because they cannot afford them.  Enter generics, the low-cost option for those that cannot afford expensive brand name drugs.  However, before we get super excited about generics we have to ask the question, do they work.  On this episode of Lessons from the Screen, we are going to be looking primarily at that question, but we are also going to be digging into the process of how generics are made, approved, and brought to market.

Unfortunately, because of a serious of family emergencies and technical problems. We aren't able to put out the show that we wanted to put out today.  We will be back next Thursday with the show on Brands vs. Generics.  Thank you for your patience and support.  

Earlier this year a bomb dropped as Katherine Eban released the culmination of roughly a decade of research and investigative work on the Generic Drug Industry, and the explosion should be huge.  In this Episode of Lessons from the Screen we are going to be taking a look at Bottle of Lies: Inside the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban.

The book starts out introducing us to an FDA Inspector that ends up in a foot race down a hallway chasing a pharmaceutical plant manufacturing worker who is trying to destroy paperwork.  This sort of cat and mouse game is basically the narrative of the entire book and thus the narrative of what has been happening between the FDA and overseas generic drug manufacturers since the boom of the industry.  Which this book manages to tie to Gandhi as he leads the resistance against British colonialism and advocated for Indian corporations.  2 students, in particular, heeded his direct call and birthed the generic pharmaceutical industry.  While Gandhi wanted cheaper, high-quality drugs from Indians what ended up happening was lower quality drugs for India and the rest of the developing world in favor of profits.  

The point of profit over quality is especially clear with regards to AIDS medications in Africa at the onset of the AIDS global epidemic.  At several moments in the book, it is alleged that a very dismissive behavior was given to the fact that the drugs weren’t working in Africa because “they were just Black People,” which is a sentiment that probably also filter down through Gandhi.  These poor quality medications are mentioned as a potential reason why the AIDS epidemic in Africa never came under control like it did in other countries.  It speaks to those in Africa that tried to start legitimate pharmaceutical companies to supply high-quality drugs to the continent only to find that high quality, low cost was the biggest lie in the pharmaceutical industry and the entire generic drug sector was built on that lie.  In one occasion mentioned in the book, an African Drug Company wanted to purchase active ingredients for medications only to be presented with the option to by low-quality ingredients at the “African” rate.  A segment of these low-quality goods was regularly being set aside to sell to those making drugs for African Nations.  

But far from just being focused on the underprivileged, the book also takes a look at the impact of generic drugs on wealthy countries such as the European and Western Nations of the World.  While those implications have been minimized to an extent by the ability to create and pay for brand drugs, it details how the growing trend of resistant diseases could actually be attributed, in part, to substandard generics.  The concept of substandard generics causing treatment-resistant bacteria is a new development but evidence is quickly being amassed to prove the case.  As the generic drug industry continues to grow and expand, plants founded in corrupt areas of the world are also selling active ingredients to other manufacturing plants lowering the quality of the drugs made in potentially safe plants.  

The book spoke passively to the fact that well-meaning activist where being used to place the FDA in a tough position.  The public largely sees generic drugs as a lower cost version of brand drugs and as such demands and champions generics.  Unfortunately, this is far from the case and the book makes this point over and over again.  But the FDA is not treated as the victim, they are in a lot of ways treated as an accomplice to what is happening and in a lot of ways they are an encouraging accomplice but so is the uninformed populace.

Most of the story is told from the perspective of Ranbaxy and Dinesh Thakur, the whistleblower that ended up getting $48 million from the $500 million dollar settlement Ranbaxy agreed to with the FDA.  It veers off into necessary and informative tangents where necessary, quickly coming back to the main story after a tangent has been sufficiently explored.  Like all books, this one is another must read. I actually struggled with what to share and what not too because I wanted to share everything.  What I settled on is that next week's show will be on Generic vs. Brand drugs.  So get ready.  

Data manipulation, governmental politics, dirty plants, compromised drugs, villains, heroes, evil schemes with deadly consequences it's all here and it’s all real.   It’s hard to read this book and believe that drugs are drugs.  But reading this book and understanding that drugs aren’t drugs is something that I believe all people must do.  

​​​During this episode of Lessons from the Screen we are going to be looking at the Women that have been profiled thus far highlighting the fact that everyone can make up their minds to do something beneficial for the community and have an impact.  It doesn’t matter whether you get famous or not, it simply matters what you are doing. ​