‘Babe’ Actor James Cromwell Glues Himself To Starbucks Counter In Animal Rights Protest

James Cromwell, nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1995 for his role in Babe, took up the banner of animal rights today in a protest at a New York-area Starbucks. As part of a PETA action against the chain upcharging for non-dairy milk substitutes favored by vegans, Cromwell and one other man glued themselves to the front counter in the store while other activists held signs protesting the policy.

“Non-dairy products all over the world…France, they give these things away. There’s no charge for it. Here, there’s an exorbitant charge,” said Cromwell as he sat with his hand glued to the store’s payment counter. “Why, when it’s so important now to address climate change and to understand the violence to animals to go on to make dairy products that are served here? There’s no reason for it except greed.”

That’ll glue, pig. That’ll glue.

 

The One Group That Can Stop Elon Musk From Unbanning Trump on Twitter

But Twitter employee action could make a real difference. Engineers and others who work at tech companies are in high demand. There’s lots of competition among the leading companies to bring in and retain the best talent. Employees can organize and seek to pressure Twitter’s likely new owner to do the right thing; they can threaten to leave if he doesn’t.

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What would action by Twitter employees look like? Those in high enough positions can threaten to quit, though that could come at a potentially large personal cost. To make the threats credible, other social media companies with pro-democracy policies can invite these employees to apply for jobs with open arms. All employees could try to unionize to have greater power to push against anti-democratic moves by the company. Individual employees can leak information about what Twitter knows about the relationship of Trump’s tweets to threats to American democracy. At the very least, employees can make their views known within the company and seek to put pressure on managers to bring concerns to Musk.

As private actors not bound by the First Amendment any more than Twitter or Facebook, social media platform employees have a choice. They can help promote democracy. Or they can help to facilitate its demise.

It appears that fear has driven this poor man to madness.

 

David Cronenberg Breaks Silence On His Fleshy Return To Cannes With ‘Crimes Of The Future’

DEADLINE: It takes place in the art world, which is something you touched on in Videodrome, but you’ve never really gone into that before.

CRONENBERG: Yeah, it was also evident in Scanners, actually — there’s a sculptor who lives inside the head that he’s created, you’ll recall. So, the art world has never been far from my purview. In Toronto, I was an interested part of what was developing with the art scene here with the sculptors and the painters that were developing in Canada. You know, I’ve really avoided having a major character who is an artist, but with Crimes, it’s a very specific kind of art, a very fleshy kind of art. It’s surgical performance art, basically. So, it brings together a few of the themes of things that I’ve been dealing with. I’m always interested, as any, I suppose, writer, director, filmmaker, in the creative process, and turning your own lens on your own process. It’s an honorable thing. Many, many filmmakers have made films about filmmaking, or about writers, about sculptors. So, this is my very particular version of that because I’ve invented the art form. Not that performance art hasn’t existed; of course it has existed, and it is still thriving. But in my film, it’s an invented environment. So, it felt very natural to me when I was writing it those many years ago. And when I revisited it — from, of course, a very different perspective — it still felt quite viable, quite juicy, with meaning and potential, dramatically and thematically.

A very fleshy kind of art. I’m so excited. Give me the goo, DAVID!