3 Brothers-Radio Raheem, Eric Garner And George Floyd. pic.twitter.com/EB0cXQELzE

— Spike Lee (@SpikeLeeJoint) June 1, 2020

Spike Lee released the above short film, "3 Brothers," combining footage of the arrests of George Floyd and Eric Garner, black men who were killed by police, with the scene from his classic movie "Do The Right Thing" (1989) in which police choke and kill the fictional character Radio Raheem.

Lee premiered "3 Brothers" during the CNN special "I Can’t Breathe: Black Men Living & Dying In America. Also watch Lee's comments below:

"The attack on black bodies has been here from the get-go," says filmmaker Spike Lee, responding to protests over George Floyd's death. "...I am not condoning all this other stuff but I understand why people are doing what they are doing." https://t.co/K5Gzn1gRT0 pic.twitter.com/sxnZJ9xRpi

— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) June 1, 2020

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Climate change, growing inequality, systemic racism, militarized police, rising fascism, Covid-19 pandemic, plagues of locusts. From is2020over.com, a list of 2020's bad news to date.

January More than 20% of Australia's forest is lost to forest fires.^[>] World War III is barely averted after US aggression.^[>] Africa is plagued by unprecedented locust swarms.^[>] February The UK withdraws from the European Union.^[>] The 2020 Tokyo Olympics are postponed due to COVID-19.^[>] March COVID-19 is declared a global pandemic. Hundreds of thousands die. ^[>] Schengen borders are closed, halting European travel. Global public air traffic comes to a halt. April Mecca sits eerily empty, despite Ramadan. Pentagon releases UFO footage. White people riot to get haircuts. 1986 sent a "Miss Me?" as a wildfire in the radioactive forests around Chernobyl caused radiation to spike 20-fold. May Eurovision Song Contest is cancelled. Microsoft breaks Windows via update, again. Locusts now sweep India and Pakistan. The murder of George Floyd sparks protests & riots throughout the US. June A new Ebola outbreak was declared in Mbandaka, Congo, where no cases had been found since 2018. Read the rest

I've always been a big fan of Caitlin Doughty and her Ask a Mortician YouTube channel, but I especially liked this almost 40-minute mini-doc she did on the disastrous voyage of the Essex, the Nantucket whaling ship which served as part of the inspiration for Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick. I knew some of this story, but Caitlin provides all of the bone-chilling, marrow-sucking details.

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African-American women suffer a much higher level of maternal mortality than the national average, and Elizabeth Warren has proposed a bold -- but high-risk -- plan to incentivize hospitals to root out the institutional, systemic racism that produces these terrible outcomes. Read the rest