Dear Bay Area Rapid Transit System:

For more than 40 years, I've been riding BART and, like the other 430,000 passengers who use the 107-mile system on an average day, I occasionally find myself staring idly at the maps and safety placards posted in each BART car.

And for years, I have been puzzled by the illustrations accompanying the Evacuation Procedures poster. The instructions seem to invite "suicide by BART."

In the event of a train breakdown in the Transbay Tube, along the subway sections, or on the elevated structures, these omnipresent placards instruct passengers to: "Cross over to adjacent track and wait for rescue train."

Am I the only one who thinks this borders on lunacy?

Follow these instructions and you will wind up—like the rousted cartoon passengers in the posters' graphics—stuck in the middle of a train track or positioned directly alongside the rails. In either case, you will be left standing directly in the path of an oncoming "rescue" train.

When it comes to keeping passengers safe and secure at boarding stops inside its stations, BART's printed Safety Guide is quite clear:

"At stations, do not cross the tracks [or] walk on the trackways…."

This advice is considered so critical that it is the only portion of the Safety Guide printed in bold type. But when it comes to train evacuations between stations, different rules seem to apply.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, James Risen, and his team at The New York Times conducted an in-depth investigation into the abuse of prisoners by the CIA. Risen and military psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen Xenakis, concluded that the CIA torture methods caused devastating long-term psychological harm. -more-

The devastating hurricane that brought havoc and destruction to Haiti has invoked fresh memories of the outright fraud perpetrated by the American Red Cross following the 2010 Earthquake. -more-

The third presidential debate had the elements of a classic Hollywood western. A robber-baron, Donald Trump, tries to takeover the town; the inhabitants turn, incongruously, to the local "schoolmarm", Hillary Clinton. They meet in an epic "battle" and the good woman forces the bad guy into mistake after mistake. At the end, Hillary walked into the audience, smiling, while Trump remained on stage, petrified. -more-

I can only speak for myself, but that is typical of my column which consists of the opinions of one man with mental illness--me. However, I can guess that at least in this case, numerous other mentally ill people may feel the same way. -more-

Recently, much has been written about the Wells Fargo scandal where, to meet aggressive sales quotas, the bank charged unwitting customers $1.5 million in fees for accounts they didn’t know they opened. They made 565,000 false credit card applications, sometimes closing the accounts as quickly as they were given credit for opening them. This misconduct stretches back at least to 2005. -more-

Should he lose the election, Trump won't pledge to concede to the winner. He's going to keep us in "suspense." This shouldn't surprise anyone. Remember, the first Republican debate in August 2015, when he said he would refuse to endorse the eventual Republican nominee for president. In September 2015, he refused to sign a loyalty to the party, but later he did sign the pledge. Then later during a CNN town hall in Milwaukee, he was asked if he was sticking to his pledge to support the nominee. "No, I don't anymore," Trump said. "No, we'll see who it is." Trump is not a loyal Republican Party member; he is really an outsider with his own private agenda. -more-

Not long after I started reviewing for the Planet a dozen years ago, I went to a production at Ashby Stage. Shotgun was collaborating with Darvag Theatre of Oakland, an Iranian-American troupe that mostly performs in Farsi. The production was an English translation of 'The Death of Yazdgerd,' the last pre-Islamic Shah of Iran, killed under mysterious circumstances after the battle won by the Arab Muslim invaders. The play was written by Bahram Beyzaie. -more-

Opens October 21 at the Elmwood in Berkeley

Filmmaker Craig Atkinson's dad was a Detroit-area cop for 29 years and a member of his town's first SWAT team in 1989. Both the filmmaker and his retired father are troubled by the direction policing has taken in the US over the post-9/11 years and Do Not Resist—a visceral, unnarrated 73-minute documentary—presents a powerful warning about the perils and growing presence of an American Police State.

Director/cinematographer/editor Atkinson's pro-police background enabled him to gain uncommon entrée into the world of policing—hanging out with cops, attending their conferences and training sessions, even squeezing his camera inside urban tanks crowded with automatic weapons and combat-ready enforcers heading to suburban drug raids.

The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the federal government from using military personnel to enforce domestic laws. In the 1960's, however, when UC Berkeley was besieged by bayonet-wielding soldiers, we saw how the National Guard could be deployed to avoid this law. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon and the War Lobby found a new way to entrench their powers and enrich their coffers—by turning domestic police into a virtual army equipped with full-scale combat weaponry including assault rifles, drones, and armored personnel carriers.

But here's the problem: when you adopt these weapons, you also adopt the killer mentality they are designed to serve.

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The Disability Film Festival

Screenings on Saturday, October 22 at The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley and Sunday, October 23 at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of Superfest, the world's longest-running disability film festival. Since it first debuted in a small Los Angeles showcase in 1970, Superfest: The International Disability Film Festival has become an eagerly anticipated international event—co-hosted by San Francisco's Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired and the Paul K. Longmore Institute.

Hollywood has had a long and feverish romance with disease and disability (c.f., Love Story, My Left Foot, A Beautiful Mind, The Theory of Everything) but these award-winning blockbusters frequently have left the disabled community feeling jilted. Hence, the Superfest.

As a blog on the Longmore Institute website puts it: "We [no longer] have to settle for the typical fare of nondisabled actors getting Oscars for playing disabled people in ways that promote pity and helplessness. We know that disability isn't just about Kleenex™ boxes and suicide."

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