The voyage went relatively well until the interception. We sailed with the 1000 Madleens to the Gaza flotilla so we spent some time catching up to them, waiting for them and then sailing with them. I met a couple of their people while we were in prison and at the hotel after we were released. They were […]
The post Israeli Occupation Forces Attacked our Ship “Conscience” first appeared on CovertAction Magazine.
[This is the second of two CAM special articles this week in honor of Indigenous Peoples Day.–Editors] In August 2023, the Kaw Nation transported a sacred boulder, known as Iⁿ‘zhúje ‘Waxóbe, from Lawrence, Kansas, to ancestral Kaw land near Locust Grove, Kansas, where Kaw Nation members lived. The Lawrence City Council voted 5-0 to allow […]
The post Kansas Gets Its Name From a Native Tribe that White Settlers Robbed and Then Displaced first appeared on CovertAction Magazine.
By: Toxicka Shock | ToxickaShock@gmail.com
I really can’t say that One Battle After Another is the worst movie I’ve seen in 2025 — because it isn’t — but it might be the one I disliked the most.
At a glacial two and a half hours long, OBAA (which was that close to having “OBAMA” as its official abbreviation) feels more like a cinematic endurance test than a proper film meant to, you know, be enjoyed and entertaining and stuff. We’ve got Leo DiCaprio phoning in one of his least inspired performances to date, only to be outdone by Sean Penn, who looks like he’s literally trying to act as little as possible en route to collecting a paycheck. Maybe the people who signed on though it was going to be something more ambitious and subversive — the director clearly wanted this to be modern-day Battle of Algiers, complete with a scene where a character watches it on TV — but the end result is just a goddamn mess of a motion picture that tries to say a million things at once and ends up saying nothing because of it.
This is Paul Thomas Anderson at his worst. He’s made plenty of great movies before — Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master — but the things that made those movies great weren’t his directing, per se, but the fact that he allowed super-talented actors to just go full tilt and play off each other in the thespian equivalent of a 12-round heavyweight title fight. The best PTA movies always revolved around the acting performances and more particularly, how the ensemble cast interacted with one another. Well, I’m unhappy to report that OBAA is a loud, clunky, overloaded political diatribe that relies way too much on action set pieces instead of character development. Considering how staggeringly one-dimensional most of the characters are — and you know they’re one-dimensional when one of them is literally named “Jungle Pussy” — you sort of assume that PTA was trying to do some sort of tongue-in-cheek satire here. Except satires are funny, and watching Sean Penn rub one out while on an Antifa stakeout mission isn’t.
Politically speaking, this movie fails for the same reason last year’s Cosmopolis failed. It’s obviously trying to make a pointed message about the Trump administration and its immigration policies, but it goes about addressing those things in the wonkiest, most ass-backwards ways. The material is never treated all that seriously, with so many ridiculous popcorn action sequences in the mix that it almost becomes an insult to the people who actually are being detained in ICE facilities. It’s one thing to make a revenge fantasy, but it’s another thing to make a revenge fantasy where the actual victims of the totalitarian regime are relegated to nothing more than plot points. It’s a very bloodthirsty movie, but bloodthirsty in that usual Hollywood liberal way were the wet works are passed off to aggrieved minorities who feel more like unpaid labor for the consenting upper class than actual revolutionaries. It’s not really a movie about political persecution and the slow creep of fascism — rather, it’s PTA’s own cartoon daydream about sticking it to the “man” even though he lives in a multi-million-dollar home and gets all of the same tax breaks that the crypto-bros and MAGA sycophants are getting. “We want a revolution!” this movie loudly barks. “But only if somebody else suffers the consequences for us.”
I’d say OBAA is an insincere movie, but I don’t think its political messaging was all that sincere to begin with. It’s a movie with at least one scene that obviously calls to mind the arrest of Luigi Mangione, but at the same time it’s also a movie shockingly glutted with product placement for Budweiser and Coca-Cola. If this thing is genuinely calling for violent resistance, it’s the first ever type of violent resistance with corporate sponsorship rights hanging in the balance.
The humor, or the attempts at humor, just don’t work. You can make jokes about high-ranking FBI officials receiving made-up awards named after famous KKK members, but they fall flat in and out of context with the rest of the movie. Like, I swear, at least 40 minutes of this nearly three-hour movie is just Leo sitting around, smoking weed in various devices, just looking tired and waiting for his phone to ring. Toss in yet another nepo-baby job for Alaina Haim — who makes Corey Haim look like George C. Scott — and you have a film that ultimately feels about as serious as two kids in their backayard pretending to be Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, bonking each other over the heads with broom handles and shit.
Not only does this movie run out of gas by the 40-minute mark, you can almost feel the invisible hands of fate having to push the car over the finish line. There are parts in the final act that are so egregiously slow and uneventful that I wonder of PTA was just trying to pad out the runtime to win a bet with Martin Scorsese or something. It might not be as big or bad as an overblown ego vanity project like Cosmopolis, but at the end of the day it still feels every bit as confused, misguided and incomprehensible.
Even if you agree with every single morsel of identity politics in this movie — which would be impossible, considering how woefully inconsistent it is — I have a hard time believing anybody out there will genuinely enjoy this movie as pure entertainment. And as a philosophical statement — an attempted philosophical statement, anyway — it’s borderline unwatchable. PTA and pals may have thought they were making great art here; instead, they just crafted the world’s most expensive BlueSky rant … and one of the least convincing, at that.
By: Toxicka Shock | ToxickaShock@gmail.com
Director: Richard Brooks | USA
Some people may contend that Looking for Mr. Goodbar isn’t a “real” horror movie, or that it doesn’t become a “real” horror movie until the last ten minutes of the film.
These people clearly don’t know what the word “horror” means.
Granted, Looking for Mr. Goodbar isn’t a horror movie in the same way Night of the Creeps of Halloween 4 are horror movies. So much of the intrinsic horror of the film is implied, or suggested, or presented in surreal ways that some of the less imaginative viewers out there might overlook them altogether. But if you really pay attention to the film, it’s pretty obvious that Looking for Mr. Goodbar is one of the first true “social horror movies” to come out in the U.S. The “monsters” in this movie aren’t demons or chainsaw-toting hillbillies or oligarchic vampires or anything like that, but stuff that’s more psychological and abstract. It’s ultimately a horror movie about misogyny and the real life terror of being a woman in a social fabric that wants to hammer you into a specific lifestyle. There are monsters in this movie, only they come in the form of overbearing Catholic fathers who wear Notre Dame jackets all the time and stereotypical Italian-American mooks who say racial slurs all the time. And if you can’t see that, just fucking give up on watching anything besides Chuck Norris movies right fucking now.
Even if you don’t like the movie per se — and there are a lot of people who don’t — you have to give Diane Keaton props for turning in such a great performance as our main character. She’s about as far away from her Annie Hall portrayal as you can imagine here. No longer a nerdy manic pixie dream girl for the intellectual child-molester set, she plays a chain-smoking, sexually liberated New York teacher who molds the minds of deaf children during the day and looks for some quick dick at discos and seedy bars by night. She does cocaine and Qualuudes and does a pretty good job of balancing her two lifestyles even though literally EVERY male character in the movie tries to manipulate her into being something she isn’t. She’s jealous of her sister, who smokes a lot of weed and watches stag movies with weird guys and gets on the down low abortions, and she has fantasies about committing suicide and paranoid visions of the cops busting her apartment during drug raids. Keaton’s character is clearly bipolar, maybe even on the verge of borderline personality disorder, but this was way before movies acknowledged those kinds of things. Hell, it was before American society itself acknowledged those kinds of things. So going back and watching it now, it does feel ahead of its time in a lot of respects.
The rest of the cast is pretty good. Richard Gere shows up as some random fuck boy who likes to boss Diane around, and there’s a great scene where he shows up at her school and tries to harass her and Levar fuckin’ Burton roughs him up after he calls him the n-word. It’s the best episode of Reading Rainbow ever, really. Then William Atherton shows up as a social worker and he seems like a decent enough dude, but uh-oh, he’s secretly a crypto-Republican and wants a trad-wife and you know that shit ain’t ever going to work out. Then we’re introduced to Tom Berenger, you’re stereotypical depraved bisexual with erectile dysfunction that fucks dudes up the ass and still claims he isn’t really gay and plays pinball a lot. Yes, there are red flags all over the fucking movie, but you have to remember: it was the disco era, everybody was on drugs, and you just sort of assumed whoever you slept with wasn’t going to choke you to death post-coitus.
Well, without giving away too much of the story, let’s just say that Diane’s character ends up wrong about a lot of things.
It was a controversial movie at the time and it’s still a pretty controversial movie now. It’s actually based on a true story, which is even darker and more disturbing than anything depicted in this movie (long story short: it involves police finding a body with a broom shoved into its vagina) and a lot of people are still pissed by the “creative liberties” director Richard Brooks took in telling his cinematic story. And yeah, I know, the fact that a man directed a movie about female sexual liberation is a bit dicey, and some of the gay overtones to the movie border on homophobic. It’s a dated movie in a lot of aspects, but anybody who interprets it as a pro-“slut shaming” morality play is grossly misinterpreting the point of the film. And the fact that so many people still victim-blame Diane’s character just adds to the reality that is indeed a “true” horror movie, with puritanical misogynistic clearly posited as the invisible demons lurking in the shadows.
At almost two and a half hours, it’s a bit overlong and some scenes definitely drag on for too long. But it’s still a well-acted movie, with some very effective set pieces and a grand finale that’s incredibly hard to watch, especially if you don’t already know how things end up.
You might love Looking for Mr. Goodbar, you might hate it. But it won’t bore you, and it’ll keep you glued to the screen all the way until the end credits. Which is what all good horror movies do, after all.
Rating: 
out of
Half of all renters in Santa Barbara County are rent-burdened, and another 25% are severely rent-burdened, according to an updated housing data dashboard by the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments.
Homeowners, by contrast, have it a little easier financially. About 28% are considered cost-burdened, while only 12.7% are considered severely cost-burdened, according to the dashboard.
Cost-burdened is when a person spends more than 30% of their income on housing, and severely cost-burdened is when a person spends more than 50% of their income.
The dashboard shows where housing is being built, how affordable it is, who lives in the region and how people commute to work. It also provides information on homelessness trends and workforce characteristics.
The interactive platform visualizes housing development, affordability, availability and demographic trends.
The data breaks down a variety of information and reveal some common fault lines. The housing shortage is real, and government has been slow to meet regional housing needs as directed by the State of California.
The data also shows that countywide, about 9% of rental units are overcrowded, and another 6.5% are severely overcrowded. About 31% of the rental units in Santa Maria are overcrowded, and another 15.4% are considered severely overcrowded.
Overcrowded is defined as more than one person in each bedroom.
In Guadalupe, about 47.4% of rental units are overcrowded, and 10.8% are severely overcrowded. In Santa Barbara, 10.9% of units are overcrowded, and 5.2% are severely overcrowded. In Goleta, the percentage of overcrowded units is about 13.8%, and severely overcrowded is 5.8%.
In the unincorporated area of Montecito, 1.8% of the units are considered overcrowded, and there are zero units considered severely overcrowded, according to the dashboard.
The affluent town has about 56% of its rental stock available for “seasonal, recreational or other use,” according to the dashboard. Another 24% are classified as units that are “not occupied and do not fall into standard vacancy classifications. These units could be held for personal reasons, undergoing repairs, in the process of foreclosure, or abandoned.”
About 33% of Santa Barbara’s vacant units are for “seasonal, recreational or other use.” About 28% are considered “not occupied and do not fall into standard vacancy classifications. These units could be held for personal reasons, undergoing repairs, in the process of foreclosure, or abandoned.”
The dashboard reveals the number of units that were built in the first year of the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, for all income levels. During the past few years, the state has passed a variety of legislation designed to make it easier for developers to get their projects approved.
However, in the categories intended for “affordable housing,” Santa Barbara County is off to a slow start.
The RHNA allocation states that developers should build 5,799 very-low-income units by 2031. In the first year of RHNA, the county approved 41. It has approved 473 low-income units, out of 3,935 required. Of the 4,397 units required for moderate-income renters, only 60 had been approved in 2023. About 395 above-moderate units were approved.
“I’m frustrated by these numbers, but soon they will improve,” Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors chair Laura Capps. “There’s no higher priority for our county than affordable housing. The lack of it impacts every aspect of our community.”
Capps said developers need to follow through on their commitments to build — and prioritize affordable housing.
She said that in a few weeks, the county Housing Authority will break ground on the largest affordable housing project in county history with 236 units on Hollister Avenue.
“My initiative to utilize county land for affordable housing means we can do it so much faster, beginning with 300 units,” Capps said. “I believe all government sectors need to turn some of their underutilized land into affordable housing. For one thing, it has the potential to get done faster.”
Jarret Gorin, a land use consultant who works with developers, said he has not seen a radical commitment toward housing development on the part of local government.
“The state laws have helped because they have removed some obstacles,” Gorin said. “I am not seeing local government work to expedite the housing process.”
Gorin said cities are understaffed, which contributes to the slowdown. He added that the effort to include below-market-rate units slows down housing construction overall.
“Inclusionary housing takes projects that are already difficult and makes them harder,” Gorin said. “The cost to build a low-income unit is the same as the cost to build a market-rate unit, but the rents are the same. The market-rate units have to subside the rental units.”
The housing dashboard is available here.
“Instead of searching through multiple state and federal reports, the dashboard makes annual housing and demographic data easy to access in one place,” said Mia Lewis, transportation planner for SBCAG. “The transparency of the information is helpful for residents and decision-makers working on housing solutions.”
The data comes from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and local homelessness counts.
SBCAG also conducted its own calculations to align data with local planning needs. It originated as a project by the League of Women Voters of Santa Barbara.
“
The post Housing Data Reveal Stark Reality for Renters in Santa Barbara County appeared first on Noozhawk.
Log in
reply
