…this “guns are oppressed” business is actually becoming a thing. Cue gun nut Ted Nugent:
“There will come a time when the gun owners of America, the law-abiding gun owners of America, will be the Rosa Parks and we will sit down on the front seat of the bus, case closed.”
They finally mention climate change on the air and Greg Gutfeld smacks it down.
Reporting the news on The Five, Beckel started to say “For all the global warming deniers, 2012 was the hottest year on record,” before Gutfeld interjected by shouting: “Lies.”
Sitting here watching Road to Morocco with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour…and enjoying it thoroughly. Edith Head did the dresses and they are beautiful.
Anyway, just a few things for you tonight, and since I am still suffering from serious political affected disorder…the links will be sparse.
Actually, I should call it political aversion disorder. After seeing some of the crap the right-wing talking heads have said about Hillary Clinton, this evening of laughs is a welcomed treat.
“[Clinton] obviously has an adoring media. She really didn’t answer any questions. Her response to Senator Johnson about whether it was a spontaneous demonstration or not, saying it ‘didn’t matter.’ It ‘didn’t matter’ how these people died? That was stunning. That was really stunning. Of course it matters. It matters for a whole lot of reasons, including to the families and Americans, because the American people deserve to be told the truth and they were not told the truth.”
Clinton never said it “didn’t matter” how the four Americans were killed. She said the opposite.
As was obvious to anyone paying attention, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) was preoccupied with preliminary intelligence reports about a possible protest in Benghazi and Clinton saidthat was irrelevant as compared to the death of four Americans — and she was correct.
If McCain found this too confusing to understand, perhaps the Senate Foreign Relations Committee isn’t the best place for him to serve.
What’s more, Clinton has “an adoring media”? This from a man who spends so much time on the Sunday shows that he has his mail forwarded to green rooms? This from a senator who’s so adored by the D.C. political establishment that he’s considered reporters his base?
“This is the Lance Armstrong principle of when you’re in trouble, yell at the person asking you a question,” Kilmeade declared. “That’s the way that he kept everybody off of him for 15 years. And believe me, that’s what I thought of right away because when she gets angry, you do not want to be in her crosshairs.”
“But the fact is that everyone is looking at the fact that she got angry and thinking, wow, she looks good,” the Fox News host continued to rant. “But her words absolutely defy the logic behind the whole reason for the hearing.”
Spain’s unemployment rate jumped to the highest in 36 years with the rate expected to continue escalating [AFP]
Spain’s unemployment rate has surged to a modern-day record of 26.02 percent in the final quarter of 2012 as nearly six
million people searched in vain for work in a biting recession, official data shows.
The jobless rate data released on Thursday climbed from 25.02 percent the previous quarter, reaching the highest level since Spain returned to democracy after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975.
The story for young people was even grimmer: the unemployment rate for those aged 16 to 24 soared to 55.13 percent, up from 52.34 percent the previous quarter.
The result shattered even the modest expectations of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government, which had been forecasting an unemployment rate of 24.6 percent by the end of 2012.
I can’t imagine what it must be like for those young people in Spain…I see what it is like here in the US and unemployment is nowhere near 55.13 percent.
According to ad creator Dan Ilic, Dick Smith foods had planned to run over $100,000 in advertising on Saturday’s Australia Day, but it was given a PG rating because of a scene showing refugees escaping from a burning boat to enjoy Dick Smith’s OzEmite, an alternative to the Vegemite product marketed by American-owned Kraft Foods.
But for many, it will be the barrage of penis innuendos like “I love Dick” that raise eyebrows.
“This is as wrong as a dead dingo’s donger,” Smith says in the advertisement, referring to “false patriotism” in competing food commercials.
“There’s a quick and easy solution to this,” the blog dlisted explained on Thursday. “They should just edit the commercial all the way down and only show the true star, the Barbara Bush-looking memaw who says, ‘There’s only one Dick I’ll be eating on Australia Day.’ She’s at the 0:20 mark and she delivers her line like a memaw who knows her Dicks.”
I will end this post with a clip from the movie, Road to Morocco.
The scene where the camel spits in Turkey’s (Bob Hope‘s) face wasn’t planned. The camel did it of its own accord while the cameras were rolling, and Hope’s recoil and Bing Crosby‘s reaction were so funny that it was left in the final cut of the film.
I have to take my daughter to her dentist appointment in Atlanta this afternoon, so I am writing this post early…way early! If any of these links I have to share with you are repeats, sorry about that.
Pope Benedict surprised the world on Monday by saying he no longer had the mental and physical strength to cope with the demands of his ministry, becoming the first pontiff to step down since the Middle Ages and leaving his aides “incredulous”.
The 85-year-old German-born Pope, hailed as a hero by conservative Catholics and viewed with suspicion by liberals, said he had noticed that his strength had deteriorated over recent months.
A Vatican spokesman said the Pope had not resigned because of “difficulties in the papacy” and the decision had been a surprise, indicating that even his closest aides were unaware that he was about to quit. The Pope does not fear schism in the Church after his resignation, the spokesman said.
After examining his conscience “before God,” he said in a statement that reverberated around the world on the Internet and social media sites, “I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise” of his position as head of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics.
A profoundly conservative figure whose papacy was overshadowed by clerical abuse scandals, Benedict, 85, was elected by fellow cardinals in 2005 after the death of John Paul II.
Innit cute? Almost like he is taking his hat off in a goodbye salute…its a much better image for this story than the picture that Fox News had up earlier this week on a story about traditional gender roles.
This afternoon, author Jessica Valentihilariously pointed out that a Fox News column about traditional gender roles in marriage is accidentally accompanied by a photograph of two lesbian newly-weds exchanging a kiss.
The FoxNews.com column in question was written by Suzanne Venker, the niece of social conservative hero Phyllis Schlafly, and previous author of the roundly-panned column on how it’s all women’s fault that there is a “battle of the sexes.”
Venker’s latest column, titled “To be happy, we must admit women and men aren’t ‘equal’” laments that in modern marriage, “men and women have no idea who’s supposed to do what,” all because of “feminists” who preach a “new way” of thinking about gender. Men and women now believe they can do the same things “without ramifications,” she wrote:
“Being equal in worth, or value, is not the same as being identical, interchangeable beings. Men and women may be capable of doing many of the same things, but that doesn’t mean they want to. That we don’t have more female CEOs or stay-at-home dads proves this in spades.”
Knowing the author and subject of the column, it’s pretty much a given that the featured image is an unintentional (but, indeed, hilarious) inclusion:
Turns out, that’s a stock image of Alaskan same-sex couple Stephanie Figarelle and Lela McArthur, who were wed atop the Empire State Building early last year…
A major storm hit the northeast U.S. and the U.S. global model lagged badly behind the predictions of the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) . Just as with Sandy.
For a century, schoolchildren have been taught that the massive ocean current known as the Gulf Stream carries warm water from the tropical Atlantic Ocean to northwestern Europe. As it arrives, the water heats the air above it. That air moves inland, making winter days in Europe milder than they are in the northeastern U.S.
It’s not a good idea, no matter what the Feuer Buech says.
Illustration, cat and bird with rocket packs (University of Pennsylvania).Think you’re the first person to consider the offensive capabilities of cats and birds in a hypothetical war against zombiesspace invaders enemies of the Holy Roman Empire? Think again!
The Germans beat you to it by about 425 years, as proven by this painting, which BibliOdyssey found and The Appendix Journal posted to its Tumblr. The manuscript from which it was drawn was called “Feuer Buech,” which I’m guessing translates from the old German to English as “Fire Book.” It’s a “treatise on munitions and explosive devices, with many illustrations of the various devices and their uses.”
Well, I am not sure how they could get the cat to walk into the fortification on its own…it probably would need to get a little help from its friends:
Dogs are more capable of understanding situations from a human’s point of view than has previously been recognised, according to researchers.
They found dogs were four times more likely to steal food they had been forbidden, when lights were turned off so humans in the room could not see.
This suggested the dogs were able to alter their behaviour when they knew their owners’ perspective had changed.
I wonder if a dog would alter their behavior because a human put a rocket backpack on it?*
The experiments had been trying to find whether dogs could adapt their behaviour in response to the changed circumstances of their human owners.
It wanted to see if dogs had a “flexible understanding” that could show they understood the viewpoint of a human.
*Note, my comment was snarky and not in the best of taste, but I needed to put some perspective on these stories. Animals have been used during wartime throughout history.
February 11, 2013 Lolong, world’s largest saltwater crocodile in captivity, pictured in Bunawan, the Philippines, on September 21, 2011 Enlarge Lolong, a one-tonne, 6.17 metres crocodile believed to be the biggest to have ever been caught, is seen in a caged pen in the southern Philippine town of Bunawan, on September 21, 2011. Lolong has died, 17 months after the suspected man-eater was hunted down and put on display for tourists, according to his caretakers.
Philippine villagers examine the giant crocodile after its capture on September 4. A monster crocodile which is reputedly the world’s largest is the star attraction at its own nature park which opened in the Philippines this weekend, weeks after the beast’s capture.
That is one picture I haven’t forgotten, I am pretty sure you probably haven’t forgotten it either. Oooof!
Well, after having a good evening, watching a couple of Italian films last night, Life is Beautiful and Miracle on Madonna Street, I have a few links for you this morning.
The first clues appeared in Kenya, Uganda and what is now South Sudan. A British arms researcher surveying ammunition used by government forces and civilian militias in 2006 found Kalashnikov rifle cartridges he had not seen before. The ammunition bore no factory code, suggesting that its manufacturer hoped to avoid detection.
Within two years other researchers were finding identical cartridges circulating through the ethnic violence in Darfur. Similar ammunition then turned up in 2009 in a stadium in Conakry, Guinea, where soldiers had fired on antigovernment protesters, killing more than 150.
For six years, a group of independent arms-trafficking researchers worked to pin down the source of the mystery cartridges. Exchanging information from four continents, they concluded that someone had been quietly funneling rifle and machine-gun ammunition into regions of protracted conflict, and had managed to elude exposure for years. Their only goal was to solve the mystery, not implicate any specific nation.
When the investigators’ breakthrough came, it carried a surprise. The manufacturer was not one of Africa’s usual suspects. It was Iran.
A simple, fast and inexpensive new test for leprosy offers hope that, even in the poorest countries, victims can be found and cured before they become permanently disabled or disfigured like the shunned lepers of yore.
American researchers developed the test, and Brazil’s drug-regulatory agency registered it last month. A Brazilian diagnostics company, OrangeLife, will manufacture it on the understanding that the price will be $1 or less.
“This will bring leprosy management out of the Dark Ages,” said Dr. William Levis, who has treated leprosy patients at a Bellevue Hospital outpatient clinic for 30 years.
[...]
Even more important, he said, it is expected to detect infections as much as a year before symptoms appear. And the earlier treatment begins, the better the outcome. Leprosy is caused by a bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae, related to the one that causes tuberculosis, but reproducing so slowly that symptoms often take seven years to appear.
This new test requires just a drop of blood and the results are given after only ten minutes.
The disease has historically been hard to diagnose, despite the popular, but inaccurate, image of fingers and toes dropping off victims. As the bacteria kill nerves, muscles atrophy and those digits curl into claws. After disuse and repeated injuries, the body reacts protectively by absorbing the bone calcium in the bones, shrinking the digits.
For centuries, some observant doctors have noticed early signs: the numb skin patches, missing eyebrows, drooping earlobes, bulging neck nerves, the flat “lion face” caused by nasal cartilage dissolving.
Since nothing could be done for them before the age of antibiotics, victims lost the use of their hands and had to beg. Some also went blind as the blinking muscles degenerated and their eyes dried out. In the Middle Ages, some towns banned lepers, while others required them to ring bells to warn of their approach. Religious charities created “leper colonies.”
And they still exist, even in the United States. A few elderly residents have chosen to stay on in Carville, La., and Kalaupapa, Hawaii, despite having been cured. Several thousand live at one in northeast Brazil, said John S. Spencer, a leprosy researcher at Colorado State University who has worked there. “People say things like ‘People outside won’t understand what’s wrong with my face,’ ” he said.
Nowadays, he said, most patients are cured before their faces are severely disfigured. Still, he said, he had read a survey in which health experts asked Brazilians whether they would rather have the human immunodeficiency virus or leprosy. Most chose H.I.V. — even though leprosy does not kill, can be cured, and does not make a victim risky to have sex with. “The stigma is that strong,” he said.
Wow. Dr Lewis says he hopes the Brazilian test becomes available in the US so he can test the families of his patients. It takes many antibiotics given over 6 months to a year to cure the disease…these new test provide doctors with more time to could help diagnosis leprosy before permanent nerve damage is done.
I guess my PAD is getting the best of me, I just don’t have the energy to give you more than these…and instead of posting links to more of the same news, give a look at some of the artsy reads below.
With the Academy Awards later tonight, I have two links about film and films.
Hollywood is getting ready to hand out the industry’s most prestigious film awards: the Oscars.
Among the contenders for best documentary is a film directed by an Israeli, and another by a Palestinian.
Both the Israeli The Gatekeepers and Palestinian 5 Broken Cameras tell the same story, but from two quite different perspectives.
Video at the link, and…
For more of Al Jazeera’s extended interviews with Dror Moreh, the director of The Gatekeepers, and Emad Burnat, director of 5 Broken Cameras, click here. Q&A: Dror Moreh and Emad Burnat
Digital is taking over Hollywood, but celluloid’s fans intend to fight on
They are some of the most powerful people in one of the most powerful entertainment industries in the world. And when Hollywood’s grandest gather at tonight’s Oscars there will be no end of smiles and handshakes. But they are also fans, and like all fans, they are given to apparently arcane squabbles. The latest is whether films should be shot on, well, film.
Some of the most successful directors, such as James Cameron and George Lucas, are so obsessed with having the best special effects that they have spent millions embracing computer-generated imagery and abandoned 35mm film. Others, such as Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, are wedded to traditional celluloid, which is becoming the film equivalent of the vinyl record.
Epics such as Les Misérables and Lincoln – both shot on 35mm – and digital creations such as Life of Pi have all made millions at the box office. While film buffs may talk about the “feel” of film, with all its subtleties, the reality is that pixilated perfection is winning – the whirring of 35mm film projectors silenced by the hum of digital machines.
Just take a look at the films nominated for best picture:
Although many love a sharp, digital picture with high definition, others prefer something a bit less “real”. The split among directors is highlighted in the nominations for Best Picture. Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Silver Linings Playbook and Lincoln were shot on film. While Argo, Amour, Life of Pi and Zero Dark Thirty were shot on digital. As was The Hobbit nominated in three technical Oscar categories.
David O Russell, director of Silver Linings Playbook, said: “Maybe I’m old-fashioned, maybe I’m superstitious, maybe I’m romantic – I love film and it has a magic quality, it has a warmth. I may use digital cameras in a pinch because they are small and fast but I like film for its humaneness.” He is one of a number of directors determined to continue shooting on 35mm. Another is Nolan, who made the Dark Knight trilogy: “I am now constantly asked to justify why I want to shoot a film on film,” he said. Nolan likens digital to an “amazing” cookie until you realise “this is some horrible chemical crap that’s giving you this bad illusion that fools you at first.”
You can read more about what actors, cinematographers and directors think about digital vs film at the link up top. I tend to agree with the folks who love film…and think that digital sucks.
Another archaic form of technology that gets lost in this day in age is the typewriter. Take this woman’s use of the typewriter:
As romantic as the idea of working on a typewriter now seems, in reality they’re rather clunky and temperamental things. Writing with one would probably take us an age – and if we made a mistake? Well, forget it.
So imagine trying to draw with one.
London based artist Keira Rathbone, originally from Dorset, does exactly that; clustering together marks made by letters, numbers and symbols, to make brilliant, one-off images.
The English artist clusters letters, numbers and symbols from a typewriter keyboard to composite images; from portraits of friends and celebrities to landscapes and still life. A closer look at what looks like a sketch of Wimborne Minster, a church in East Dorset, England, reveals swirls of ampersands and the ticks of quotations marks.
[...]
Watch the video below to see the artist at work, and click through the slideshow to see examples of her typewriter art. Visit keirarathbone.com for more examples of her work.
Be sure to take a look at the pictures, Rathone’s art is impressive…
June 1937. “Baltimore, Maryland. For every Social Security account number issued an ‘employee master card’ is made in the Social Security board records office. Testifying data, given on the application blank form SS-5, is transferred to this master card in the form of upended quadrangular holes, punched by key punch machines, which have a keyboard like a typewriter. Each key struck by an operator causes a hole to be punched in the card. The position of a hole determines the letter or number other machines will reproduce from the master card. From this master card is made an actuarial card, to be used later for statistical purposes. The master card also is used in other machines which sort them numerically, according to account numbers, alphabetically according to the name code, translate the holes into numbers and letters, and print the data on individual ledger sheets, indexes, registry of accounts and other uses. The photograph above shows records office workers punching master cards on key punch machines.” Whew. Longest caption ever? Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative.
That is all I have for you this morning. Hope you all enjoy your Sunday, see ya later on tonight…should be quite a show.
So what are you all reading and blogging about today?
It was a busy day for me yesterday, and as usual, I am late to catch up…because of this I am writing the post this morning in a fog. So if any of the links below are repeats, I am sorry.
Officials say they have put a hold on all work directly connected to the giant Louisiana sinkhole in Assumption Parish due to increased seismic activity.
The seismic monitoring in the past 24 hours turned up what appears to be an increase in the underground movement of fluids in the area of the failed Oxy 3 cavern.
Just like in the past, officials say the underground movement is also likely connected to trees falling into the sinkhole and an increase in hydrocarbon odors.
Analysts say even though there appears to be no additional significant threat to the general area, until the underground activity slows down again, operations directly on the sinkhole have been suspended.
The main sinkhole has reached more than 800 feet in diameter and the western wall continues to collapse.
Two weeks ago, officials reported about 5,000 square feet fell in on the southwest side of the sinkhole, officials call this sloughing.
Frustrated Assumption Parish residents displaced by a massive sinkhole that has swallowed 9 acres of land near their homes asked lawmakers Tuesday to assist them in getting buyouts of their property.
People who packed a hearing of the Senate and House natural resources and environment committees described 200 days of disruption and uncertainty since an August evacuation order of 150 homes.
They talked of children moved from schools and scared of their own houses, retirement dreams upended and families struggling to pay two mortgages while they decide what to do with their future and with their now nearly-worthless property.
“This has taken too damn long and people need to be bought out. They can’t go back,” said Henry Dupre, an Assumption Parish police juror.
For months now, a vocal group of activists and residents has found fault with Gov. Bobby Jindal over his absence from the scene of the Bayou Corne sinkhole.
Why, they ask, has he not made the commonly seen leadership visit to a disaster area that, while brief, boosts morale and provides hope?
Sinkhole activist John Achee Jr., a regular critic of Jindal and state government’s handling of the sinkhole and salt dome regulation, leveled this complaint again during a Feb. 19 joint hearing of the House and Senate committees on Natural Resources.
He called Jindal’s absence “disheartening” and “very concerning.”
“This to me is unacceptable and cannot or should not be tolerated,” said Achee, a polarizing figure himself over his criticisms of Jindal and state and parish government.
In response, Jindal’s press office provided its answer, quoting the governor as saying he receives regular updates and that state agencies have put out abundant resources in response to the sinkhole under his orders.
No matter how many times your subordinates send them, though, news releases will never be the same as a handshake, a pat on the back and encouraging words directly from the governor.
This perceived inattention has given Jindal’s critics a useful symbol for the way, they say, state government has inadequately responded to the Assumption Parish disaster and regulated salt dome operators.
The absence has also fit neatly into the narrative of an insulated governor with eyes on Washington 2016 and not Louisiana 2013.
But these complaints, it seems, could be neutralized for most with one helicopter ride to the command post in Bayou Corne.
So why not?
Jindal’s press office did not respond to requests for comment.
It seems to me Jindal’s non-existent response should be no surprise to anyone who reads our blog regularly, but I don’t think a helicopter fly over is going to help things. That Op/Ed is written by David Mitchell, maybe Kat can fill us in on what she thinks about this other mark against her governor. When I see the horror stories out of Louisiana, it makes me feel my hell pit of Banjoland is a cakewalk.
Christie, a potential 2016 presidential contender who is up for reelection this year, defied conservative opponents of Obamacare by embracing one of its key components when he announced his plan to the Democratic-controlled state legislature in Trenton. So far, more than a dozen Republican governors, including Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Perry of Texas, have declared their opposition to the Medicaid expansion.
“After considerable discussion and research, I have decided to participate in Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. While we already have one of the most expansive and generous Medicaid programs in the nation, including the second highest eligibility rate for children, we have an opportunity to ensure that an even greater number of New Jerseyans who are at or near the poverty line will have access to critical health services beginning in January of 2014,” Christie said.
Expanding Medicaid in New Jersey would provide new health care coverage to an estimated 291,000 people through 2022, according to an analysis released by the Urban Institute and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation in November. New Jersey would spend an additional $1.5 billion and receive $15.4 billion from the federal government to finance the expansion during that time period, the report predicted.
Even the folks at Hot Air are complaining about the big man from the Garden State. You can Google this next link, I just don’t have the energy to deal with trolls today. CPAC source: Christie wasn’t invited this year because he has a “limited future” in the GOP; Update: Sandy relief and Medicaid? « Hot Air
Hard to argue with that assessment today of all days, but … Mitt Romney’s also been invited this year. The future doesn’t get any more limited than that.
Also, since when is one’s prospects in the GOP a litmus test for whether you’re CPAC-worthy or not? Every time someone objects to GOPround’s exclusion, the rejoinder inevitably comes that it’s the “Conservative Political Action Conference,” not the “Republican Political Action Conference.” Okay, in that case, who cares about Christie’s future in the GOP? Either his ideas are conservative enough or they aren’t.
Verdict: They aren’t.
I think all those CPAC members are still pissed with Christie’s little sitcom, or after-school special, Barack and the Fat Man.
Bolling advised his fellow Republicans that they must embrace Christie as the future leader of their party.
The Five hosts noted that Bill O’Reilly told Fox’s audience on Monday that the GOP needs a leader who can articulate a conservative message and “fight back” against the press in order to move the country to the right.
Andrea Tantaros warned that the GOP has a big challenge in the effort to “fight back dependency.” She said that the future political battles Republicans will have to wage will become harder as the populace becomes more comfortable with government-backed programs that ensure financial security.
“I hate all this,” Bolling said of infighting within the GOP about the future direction of the party. “They need to get together and form one party that has a big tent for everyone; whether you’re gay, straight, black, white, male, female.”
“Bill O’Reilly’s right,” added Bolling . “You need someone who’s charismatic. He’s got to be a leader. And, this one: the way O’Reilly puts it, ‘fight back the media jackals.’ That’s Christie.”
Bolling continued to make the case for Christie as the natural leader of the Republican Party moving into the next election cycle. However, he anticipated that the party’s conservative wing will have problems embracing Christie due to the unorthodox positions on issues like global warming and gun control.
I could make a comment about how anyone would have problems “embracing” Chris Christie, but since my ass is just slightly smaller than his, I won’t.
Okay, because I’m writing this post on the quick, here are a few other stories in link dump fashion. Let’s stick with US news, shall we?
Franklin Sain, a 42-year-old Colorado Springs man, was arrested last Friday for threatening Colorado lawmaker Rep. Rhonda Fields (D-Aurora) over gun control legislation that she is currently sponsoring and that recently passed in the state House.
Franklin Sain is accused of threatening Fields and her daughter using racial and sexual slurs.
Fields told KOA Radio that she does not know Sain, and said “All I know is the kinds of things that he said were very inappropriate, and they’re alarming, and they were very intimidating.”
[...]
There are many misspelled words and incorrect grammar usage in the messages, and they appear as written in the affidavit, along with censoring of offensive words.
According to an affidavit, one of the letters alleged to have been written by the Colorado Springs man reads, “Rhonda Fields, mother of [Field's daughter]. Death to both.” The letter goes on to say “There will be blood! I’m coming for you, N—– B—-.”
In one of the emails, Sain allegedly wrote, “hopefully somebody Gifords [sic] your asses with a gun.”
The following is one of seven emails police say Sain sent to Fields:
“THANKS N—– C—! You really think passing nay more laws will stop gun violence? You and that other N—– OBAMA are living in fantasy land. Chicago and DC have the most strict gun laws in the nation and more people die from gun violence than anywhere. You f—ing c—s are pathetic excuse for civil servants. Hell, n—–s love shooting themselves with GATS, isn’t that what your people call it. What you have done here is creater [sic] criminals out of law abiding citizens, and put yourself out of a job. You politicians have no idea what you are even doing anyway, do you know how long it takes some to change a magazine, less than a second, so what if some with experience decides to flip out and bring their gun in with 5 or so 10 round magazines, they can do the same amount of damage. Limiting magazine sizes is stupididty, [sic] and will not work…”
Then the most unhinged of Sain’s messages also refers to Field’s daughter:
Rhonda Fields, N—– C—, Mother of —–, Death to Both, All N—– Back to Africa, F— you, F— Your Laws, I Keep my 30 Round Magazines, There Will Be Blood!, I’m Coming For You, N—– B—-
Sain told police that he didn’t mean to threaten Fields, and regrets the language he used. He has no prior record, and is the chief operating officer at SofTec Solutions in Englewood, Colorado, where he does consulting work for the government and private organizations
House Speaker Mark Ferrandino and two other Democratic Reps also received similar threatening messages.
A 19-year-old student died following a shooting on Tuesday at a residence hall of a South Carolina university near the resort area of Myrtle Beach, and authorities were searching for a gunman, university officials said.
When are Republicans going to learn that when the subject of rape comes up, they should shut the front door?
This time it’s the president of the California Republican Assembly, Celeste Greig, who thinks a woman who is raped is less likely to get pregnant because “the body is traumatized.”
Fox aired on-screen graphics that mimicked images included in the NRCC release in order to criticized what they termed Obama’s “sequestration priorities.” Here are those images, with the Fox versions on the left and NRCC versions on the right:
Fox News has repeatedly cut and pasted or otherwise parroted GOP materials without disclosing the partisan source of the research. In graphics used for one 2009 segment, Fox News even replicated a typo that had been included in the Republican research document that the network was reproducing without disclosure. After anchor Jon Scott subsequently apologized for the typo. CNN host Howard Kurtz castigated Scott at the time, saying that the Fox anchor should apologize for repeating “partisan propaganda from the GOP” unsourced.
For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation’s education system. What’s less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called “school choice” movement — code words for privatizing our public education system — are billionaires who don’t live in Southern California, but have gained significant influence in local school politics. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent contribution of $1 million to a political action committee created to influence next week’s LAUSD school board elections is only the most recent example of the billionaire blitzkrieg.
For more than a decade, however, one of the biggest of the billionaire interlopers has been the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who have poured millions into a privatization-oriented, ideological campaign to make LA a laboratory for their ideas about treating schools like for-profit businesses, and treating parents, students and teachers like cogs in what they must think are education big-box retail stores.
As a business chain, Walmart has spent a fortune — in philanthropy and campaign contributions — trying to break into the Los Angeles retail market with its low-wage retail stores.
Now the Walton family — which derives its fortune from the Arkansas-based Walmart — is trying to use that fortune to bring Walmart-style education to Los Angeles.
You know, even in my half-organized loopy sense of things, I can still appreciate the irony of this. I’ll explain after another quote from the Moyers blog:
The Waltons have long supported efforts to privatize education through the Walton Family Foundation as well as individual political donations to local candidates. Since 2005, the Waltons have given more than $1 billion to organizations and candidates who support privatization. They’ve channeled the funds to the pro-charter and pro-voucher Milton Friedman Foundation for Education Choice, Michelle Rhee’s pro-privatization and high-stakes testing organization Students First, and the pro-voucher Alliance for School Choice, where Walton family member Carrie Walton Penner sits on the board. In addition to funding these corporate-style education reform organizations, since 2000 the Waltons have also spent more than $24 million bankrolling politicians, political action committees, and ballot issues in California and elsewhere at the state and local level which undermine public education and literally shortchange students.
THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.
What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.
The museum’s current show, “Shoe Obsession,” presents some of the most extreme examples of those objects of desire: fantastically wrought sky-high heels by leading designers, with prices equally unreachable.
Read about the history of shoes at that link, and you can look at more pictures, since they have a gallery at the link too.
Changing styles. Prehistoric female figurines started off voluptuous like the Venus of Willendorf (left) but then became schematic like these “Gönnersdorf” style statuettes (right), possibly signaling a shift in their meaning.
Credit: Bildersturm/Creative Commons
About 35,000 years ago, prehistoric artists across Europe suddenly discovered the female form—and the art world has never been the same. The explosion of voluptuous female figurines sculpted out of limestone, ivory, and clay directly inspired Picasso and Matisse. Researchers have debated the figurines’ meaning for decades. Now, two scientists think they have the answer. Presenting their work here last week at the European Palaeolithic Conference, they claimed that the objects started off as celebrations of the female form, then later became symbols that tied together a growing human society.
The talk, part of a special exhibition on Ice Age art at London’s British Museum, surveyed the more than 20,000 year-history of female figurines, which are found at dozens of archaeological sites from Russia to France. The earliest such objects, which include the famous Venus of Willendorf from Austria (see photo) and a statuette recently found in Germany that some have called the “earliest pornography,” date from as early as 35,000 years ago and are generally called the “Willendorf style” of prehistoric art.
Well, my laptop is the shop…I am writing this post on my daughter’s computer, and can’t seem to get the feel of her keypad. There is news about George Zimmerman, and Hugo Chavez is dead. Meanwhile we have a sequester still going on…and no end in sight.
Since this keyboard is giving me problems, I will give you the news reads in link dump fashion.
…in a stunning twist of events Tuesday morning, George Zimmerman’s attorneys waived their client’s right to a scheduled April 22 hearing that was to be held under the law that has sparked so much debate, ABC news reports.
Zimmerman, the former neighborhood watch volunteer who is facing second-degree murder charges for the shooting of 17-year-old Martin, is awaiting trial set for June 10, 2013. His counsel’s move waiving his right to the April hearing leaves open the opportunity for it to be rolled into Zimmerman’s trial this summer, and gives the defense more time to prepare, an obvious concern after a motion to delay the proceedings was denied.
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela died Tuesday afternoon after a struggle with cancer, the government announced, leaving behind a bitterly divided nation in the grip of a political crisis that grew more acute as he languished for weeks, silent and out of sight, in hospitals in Havana and Caracas.
Close to tears and his voice cracking, Vice President Nicolás Maduro said he and other officials had gone to the military hospital where Mr. Chávez was being treated, sequestered from the public, when “we received the hardest and most tragic information that we could transmit to our people.”
This image has been repeatedly removed from Facebook user profiles because it’s been reported as pornography/nudity. Fail and fie on Facebook, or rather on the blue-stocking, onion-eyed morans who keep reporting it and the overworked outsourced workers who have no clue.
Facebook has a strict policy against the sharing of pornographic content and any explicitly sexual content where a minor is involved. We also impose limitations on the display of nudity. We aspire to respect people’s right to share content of personal importance, whether those are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo’s David or family photos of a child breastfeeding.
How is an image of double mastectomy survivor with a full-breast plate tattoo any more “pornographic” than a family photo of breast feeding? And really, who cares? Can’t FB maybe focus on the slew of obvious porn (full closeup insertion) profiles that keep showing up in our “people you might know” columns (and maybe figure out who is trafficking those women)? Dog-fighting and neo-Nazi hate pages?
Mummies are everywhere – not just Egyptian tombs and Hollywood movie sets, but in almost every part of the world. Hailing from China, Peru, Chile, the Canary Islands, the preserved, unwalking dead populate history. Even Italy. If you’ve never seen any specials on the mummies discovered beneath Rome or Sicily (8,000+ mummies in the Capuchin Catacombs alone!), you’re missing out on some mind-blowing cultural views and some spectacular nightmare fuel. The general conclusion is, wow, our ancestors really thought long and hard about death, preservation, and creepy ways to remind us of our own mortality. But sometimes the mummies we find tell us what our ancestors knew about biology — about life – not just the innovations of death. Today’s example: New analysis of a Dark Age mummy reveals that its preparator knew more about science than we thought.
This isn’t the oldest mummy, nor even a complete one, and there’s no funereal wrappings to be found. It’s just the head-and-shoulders of a man with the top of his skull and brain removed. Radiocarbon dated between A.D. 1200 and A.D.1280, it’s the oldest known example we have of “preserved human dissection.” No one knows who the guy was or why he in particular was chosen for anatomical preservation, but the scars on the face — made by rodents and insect larvae — suggest it may not have been a voluntary role. Gruesome, to be sure, but fascinating.
And check this: They found that the arteries and veins of the mummy were filled with a blend of beeswax, lime, and mercury, which formed an ingenious mixture that not only aided in preservation but gave the circulatory system greater visibility and color. Given that this corpse was handled in the Dark Ages — a time in history we tend to associate with ignorance and barbarism — this should sound like some cadaverous form of alchemy, but it’s surprisingly scientific in its effectiveness. Physician and forensic scientist Philippe Charlier at the University Hospital R. Poincare in France told LiveScience, “It’s state-of-the-art [for the time period]. I suppose that the preparator did not do this just one time, but several times, to be so good at this.”
There have been other examples of anatomical study in medieval times, but none quite so far back and none intended to be preserved dissection specimens. In 1308, for example, nuns dissected the body of abbess Chiara of Montefalco (who was sainted more than 500 years later) and allegedly found a tiny crucifix in her heart and three gallstones in her gallbladder (which the nuns took as symbolic of the Holy Trinity). Different reasons for dissection, of course, and very different conclusions.
Isn’t this story interesting?
Enjoy your day, and please let us know what you are reading about this morning…
In my search for a replacement for an application I use and depend upon so greatly, I did find NewsBlur. It is a paid service that I would gladly pay to use, so far the site has been up and down with soooooo many new users trying to upload their G Reader data. I know it may not seem like much of an issue, but you may not realize just how much I use my RSS feeds to find articles and write my SkyD blog posts.
The argument around the web is that RSS is dead, Twitter is king for news alerts and following blogs. Bullshit. There is no way that Twitter can be substituted for a RSS feed in a reader. At least for people whose attention spans last longer than 140 characters.
Here are a few links for you this evening, I was surprised just how many journalists we follow and read here at Sky Dancing are feeling the same anger and resentment that I am right now.
Anyway, excuse me while I go sit in the corner and whisper to myself in true “Rainman” style…
Well….ah…course…you know….I gotta check my reader…must check my reader.
On at least two occasions on Wednesday, Fox Connecticut marked an event hosted by the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women with B-roll of a woman in a low-cut top, but the shot was closely cropped to reveal only her breasts and cleavage.
“FOX CT apologizes for today’s file footage error,” the station tweeted on Wednesday afternoon. “We will continue to recognize great contributions of women in CT and around the world.”
In a statement, the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women accused the news broadcast of objectifying women.
“We are appalled at the level of sexism this incident shows,” the statement said. It is an insult not only to the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women and to all who attended Women’s Day at the Capitol, which marked the PCSW’s 40-year battle against gender discrimination, but to women everywhere who are tired of being objectified.”
“Anyone who doubts the existence of the ‘war on women’ need look no further than Fox News. We invite the executives at Fox to ask about our Sexual Harassment Awareness and Prevention trainings, which would help them and their staff learn a little more about what goes on above a woman’s shoulders.”
I wonder if the Koch Brothers have a bet going on between them about their proposed deal to buy up some big circulation newspapers like the LA Times and Chicago Tribune.
I tried to find a clip of this little bit of dialogue, but no such luck:
Recently you’ve seen many petitions asking that the Koch brothers not be allowed to buy the Tribune Company’s newspapers. We understand why the Kochs breed this distrust. They are active political proponents of harsh right-wing positions. We’re also not certain that Tribune will listen to anything but money when the final decision is made.
What we do know is that great papers publish credible, trusted journalism online and on the printed page. Whoever comes to own these mastheads needs to understand that protecting newsrooms from ideological taint is no small thing. The future of American journalism depends on the ability to print truth, not opinion.
We call on Tribune to make a pledge that they’ll only sell to a buyer that will protect the objectivity of the news product by making a public commitment to doing so. The Newspaper Guild-CWA and the Communications Workers of America seek your support in this goal.
The Newspaper Guild
Communications Workers of America
AFL-CIO, CLC and IFJ
So if the agenda at the Times changes, the agenda at the other LA news outlets will change — unless those news outlets are watching carefully. LA has to worry more about the stories that the Times stops covering than stories that are covered with a bias.
An example of how bias can take the form of lack of coverage is Fox News’ scant coverage of the national gun control debate. When President Barack Obama gave his moving speech chastising Congress for failing to pass background checks, Fox cut away to a panel discussion on the liberal media bias before the president had even finished his first sentence.
It seems the rationale is that the more silence there is on gun control, the greater the likelihood that status quo will continue. So the silence is what we have to listen for.
All LA journalists, including those at the Times, will need to research the friends and interests of the paper’s new owners and make sure they don’t get special treatment. If Times reporters hit a wall, will other LA journalists step up to report on those topics?
As I said, go read the entire article.
I kind of always felt the LA Times was right leaning anyway…but not the the extent of what it could be under a Koch ownership.
By the way, that cartoon up top is by David Horsey..cartoonist for the LA Times.
Vintage photograph found on Pinterest…btw Cheergate is over, outcome is the same, baby girl is still a varsity high school cheerleader!
Good Evening!
TGIF…and it is also the last day of school here in Banjoville. Next week, after a round of many doctor appointments, things will settle down into a nice summer schedule.
Before we get to the funnies tonight, I want to share this information with you.
The Cleveland Courage Fund of the Cleveland Foundation was established by Cleveland council members Brian Cummins, Matt Zone, and Dona Brady after the discovery of three women held captive in a Cleveland home for a decade. The fund, so named because of the courage shown by these women, will directly benefit Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, and Amanda Berry and her daughter.
All money raised – 100 percent – will benefit the survivors and their families through nonprofit organizations.The Cleveland Foundation will not assess fees on this fund and will issue a tax receipt for all donations received.
Considering that almost $11 million dollars was donated to the Sandy Hook victims families, I sincerely hope that these women receive a considerable amount of generosity from the same compassionate public…it would seem to me that these women are in more need of monetary assistance to cover cost of medical care, therapy and living expenses. Remember, these women have been shut up in hell for ten years, they do not have employment healthcare benefits...or welfare. (Stupid Rush can kiss my ass.)
Pass this information on to your friends, hopefully the women will be able to use these funds to support themselves as they begin the process of adjusting to life outside the prison where they have been tortured for so long. Thank you!
Anyway, let’s get on with the cartoons.
A shitload of stuff on Obama, his administration and the dubious conceivable three…. Benghazi, IRS, AP. (I don’t know what to call them, surprisingly they have not been given the usual Bradgelinagate nickname of sorts.)
Now, on to cartoon topics that are about different subjects. This first one seemed funny to me because I always laugh to myself when I think of Spielberg and his Jurassic Park scene “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!” It was so painfully obvious…it actually hurt watching it.
Look at the tux tails knocking over the other attendees. LOL
And this is a good way to bring this up, you must see this movie on TCM…oh, it is good. It will be showing on Tuesday, May 21st at 3 pm est: Night Must Fall (1937) – Overview – TCM.com
“It’s awfully heavy, I wonder what’s in it?”
I will give you a hint, it sure ain’t no old ladies hat…perhaps it is the old lady’s head? Robert Montgomery is spectacularly devilish…you won’t be disappointed. And the way he carries that Victorian hatbox around, ha…it is something to see.
Every true film lover needs Turner Classic Movies because there’s stuff on there available almost nowhere else –films so weird and forgotten you’ll sometimes find them only at 3-9 AM, hiding in the wings until all the prettier pictures to go to bed. If you have a DV-R to go with it, then you know what to do. Set that sucker to these obscurities on the TCM’s schedule.
Go directly to that Bright Lights After Dark blog link and you will see a list of the films with show dates and times and a little mini description/review/discussion of each film, along with posters and other film archives. (I am soooooo glad that BB has TCM now.)
And….lastly, I thought this cartoon from Mr. Fish was spot on, especially with all the well deserved bashing Jon Stewart has been giving Obama this past week.
Jon Stewart …targeted President Obama for his reactions to major administration scandals in the past week and how every time there’s a big news item involving his administration, Obama always seems to have found out about the news at the same time as the rest of the public did. Stewart found it odd that Obama wouldn’t have found out about IRS targeting Tea Party groups or the Justice Department seizing journalists’ phone records from, say, people inside the government instead.
Stewart noted how at Obama’s big press conference on Monday, there was a “question limit of one, total, from the entire American press corps,” but a reporter smartly exploited a loophole by asking four questions in the same question. Obama began his answer explaining that he learned about IRS targeting in the same news reports that the rest of the public found out about from.
Stewart mocked the blasé manner in which Obama answered the question, and pointed out that this is not the first time Obama has claimed to find out news at the same time as the rest of us. Stewart highlighted how Obama said the same thing about the Fast & Furious ATF gun-running scandal and the time when a low-flying plane freaked out everyone in New York City. And Jay Carney admitted that’s the same way Obama found out about the Justice Department seizing AP phone records.
Stewart quipped, “I wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama learned Osama bin Laden had been killed when he saw himself announce it on television.”
Plenty of links for you this morning, so let us just get down to it…
In the New York Times this weekend, more information was reported about the DOJ investigation into Fox News reporter James Rosen, as well as other DOJ press investigations during the Obama administration: Leaks Inquiries Show How Wide a Net Is Cast
Even before the F.B.I. conducted 550 interviews of officials and seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters in a leak investigation connected to a 2012 article about a Yemen bomb plot, agents had sought the same reporters’ sources for two other articles about terrorism.
[...]
The emerging details of these and other cases show just how wide a net the Obama administration has cast in its investigations into disclosures of government secrets, querying hundreds of officials across the federal government and even some of their foreign counterparts.
The result has been an unprecedented six prosecutions and many more inquiries using aggressive legal and technical tactics. A vast majority of those questioned were cleared of any leaking.
You can read the rest of the article at that link, it is rather a long read.
The emails revealed in the government’s affidavit appear to show, however, that James Rosen’s solicitation of government secrets wasn’t nearly so narrow. The affadavit describes how Rosen assigned himself the codename “Alex,” and Mr. Kim the moniker “Leo,” and in their early contacts, explained the noble aims of their prospective relationship:
Thanks Leo. What I am interested in, as you might expect, is breaking new ahead of my competitors.
Sure, that sounds bad, as if James Rosen would jeopardize America’s contacts in a hostile foreign government just to get some eyeballs away from his competition, but surely, every reporter has this competitive urge. Although it was the first thing Rosen mentioned, there was another consideration. After outlining the kinds of secret information he hoped to get from “Leo,” Rosen summed up his intention to… report the news objectively? To serve the public?
Let’s break some new, and expose muddle-headed policy when we see it – or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible.
Wait, what? Is that what a News reporter is supposed to do, force the administration’s hand to guide American foreign policy to the reporter’s whim? Separate and apart from the DOJ investigation, this email seems to indicate that James Rosen is not just a News reporter, but an activist intent on pushing his own agenda, with the stated goal of manipulating U.S. foreign policy.
The bill is HB8, though there’s a Senate amendment; apparently, the Legislature plans to enact the bill as amended. The bill bars the government from releasing information about who has applied for or gotten a concealed carry permit, and the Legislature certainly can impose such restrictions on the government itself. But then it also criminalizes speech by everyone else (I merge the House Bill and the adopted Senate amendment):
Absent a valid court order requiring the release of information or unless a recipient of a concealed handgun permit is charged with a felony offense involving the use of a handgun, it shall be [a misdemeanor] … to release, disseminate, or make public in any manner any information contained in an application for a concealed handgun permit or any information regarding the identity of any person who applied for or received a concealed handgun permit issued pursuant to this Section.
So blogging that you happen to know that a gun control advocate actually has a concealed carry permit himself would be a crime. Or say that you know someone has a concealed carry permit, and that person is sued for supposedly making death threats, or is criminally prosecuted for a felony offense involving a shotgun, or otherwise seems dangerous and unstable — mentioning the permit in publicly discussing the situation would be a crime. Mentioning applicants’ names in giving examples of cases where you think a concealed handgun permit was wrongly issued, or wrongly denied, would be a crime, too. So would talking about a person’s concealed carry permit in a biography of the person, or in a newspaper or magazine story that is trying to give a sense of the kind of person he is.
In his State of the Union address this year, President Obama urged repairs of “the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country.” He proposed a plan called “Fix it First,” which would have invested $50 billion in repairing transportation infrastructure, starting with the most urgent repairs.
Instead, Congress failed to avoid the sequester and transportation repair spending faces a $1.9 billion cut.
An Oregon woman was told by a 911 dispatcher that authorities wouldn’t be able be able to help her as her ex-boyfriend broke into her place because of budget cuts.
Oregon Public Radio reports that an unidentified woman called 911 during a weekend in August 2012 while Michael Bellah was breaking into her place. Her call was forwarded to Oregon State Police because of lay-offs at the Josephine County Sheriff’s Office only allows the department to be open Monday through Friday.
“Uh, I don’t have anybody to send out there,” the 911 dispatcher told the woman. “You know, obviously, if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Do you know if he’s intoxicated or anything?”
The woman told the dispatcher that Bellah previously attacked her and left her hospitalized a few weeks prior to the latest incident. The dispatcher stayed on the phone with the woman for more than 10 minutes before the sexual assault took place.
“Once again it’s unfortunate you guys don’t have any law enforcement out there,” the dispatcher said, according to Oregon Public Radio.
The woman responded: “Yeah, it doesn’t matter, if he gets in the house I’m done.”
Police say Bellah choked the woman and sexually assaulted her. He was arrested by Oregon State Police following the incident.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t have another victim,” Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilberson told Oregon Public Radio. “If you don’t pay the bill, you don’t get the service.”
The sheriff’s department had to cut 23 deputies and the entire major crimes unit after it lost a multi-million dollar federal subsidy, according to Oregon Public Radio. There are now only six deputies left.
The sheriff’s department even put out a press release warning domestic violence victims to “consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services.”
In the wake of one of the most destructive tornadoes in history, Oklahoma state senators passed a bill on Wednesday that would effectively defund Planned Parenthood.
Senate Bill 900, which re-allocates family planning funds to public providers and hospitals instead of private providers like Planned Parenthood, passed by a vote of 33 to 8. The state Senate was able to pass the bill somewhat under the radar because it was not posted on Wednesday’s legislative agenda.
Planned Parenthood operates five clinics in Oklahoma and serves about 8,400 men and women there a year. The family planning provider has faced scrutiny from Republicans in recent years because it provides abortions, even though it cannot use public family planning funding to pay for abortion services.
State Rep. Doug Cox (R), a family physician, said he will vote against the legislation when the House takes it up on Thursday. “To defund a program like Planned Parenthood would be a mistake,” he told The Huffington Post in a phone interview. “They perform a valuable service as far as breast cancer screenings, cervical cancer screenings, parenting classes, many things that benefit our state that we’re sorely in need of.”
Cox said he believes that some of his Republican colleagues in the House also support Planned Parenthood, but they still feel pressured to vote for bills that would defund it. “I have people who tell me they feel the way I do, but are afraid to vote the way I do,” he said.
That is a real shame, too bad those GOP Reps don’t have the cahones to stand up to the PLUBs who got them into office.
On with the rest of the morning’s post after the jump…
Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski on Saturday blamed birth control pills for “masculinising” women, as he premiered what he called a satire on sexism.Polanski unveiled “Venus in Fur” starring his wife Emmanuelle Seigner, which was the last movie in competition to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
Asked by a reporter how his views of women had changed over time, the filmmaker said he thought feminism and advances in contraception had blurred the distinctions between the sexes.
“I think that now offering flowers to a lady becomes indecent, that’s how I feel about it,” he told a news conference after a well-received screening of his film.
“I think to level the genders — it’s purely idiotic. I think it’s a result… of progress in medicine. I think that the Pill has changed greatly the woman of our times, ‘masculinising’ her — how would you say it?” he said, looking to his cast for a prompt.
He added: “I think that it chases away the romance from our lives and that’s a great pity.”
These might the kind of sound bites you’d think would come from, say, the premiere of a Michael Bay movie, but — nope! Roman Polanski and Francois Ozon, two iconic male directors, with scores of nuanced, sensitive and artistic films behind them (although, obviously, not without a patchy sexual history on Polanski’s end) went to Cannes, arguably the highest-minded annual film festival there is, and said some of the most ass-backwards shit about women’s relationships with contraception and prostitution that I’ve ever heard. As if it would be completely okay to do so. Except, as far as we know, it was received okay at the festival; after all, only one female director’s movie was selected for competition up against 19 entries from men.
Uh, this quote up top is from Jezebel, written by Anna Breslaw and I think that opening sentence is a bunch of shit.
…not without a patchy sexual history on Polanski’s end.
In March 1977, film director Roman Polanski was arrested and charged in Los Angeles with a number of offenses against Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old girl[1] – rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor.[2] At his arraignment Polanski pleaded not guilty to all charges,[3] but later accepted a plea bargain whose terms included dismissal of five of the initial charges[4] in exchange for a guilty plea to the lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse.[4][5]
Polanski underwent a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation,[6] and it was expected that he would only receive probation at his sentencing. However, upon learning that he was likely to face imprisonment and deportation,[5][7] Polanski fled to France in February 1978, hours before he was to be formally sentenced.[8] Since then Polanski has mostly lived in France and avoided visiting countries likely to extradite him to the United States.
Former Defense Secretary Colin Powell said Saturday that U.S. troops convicted of sexual assault should not be automatically dishonorably discharged from the military.
“You can’t make a categorical statement like that,” he told Bloomberg TV. “We have a military justice system that is driven by our law, and it is not that dissimilar to the civilian system.”
Despite the high rate of sexual assault and instances of convictions being overturned by commanders, Powell said the military justice system was working.
“There will always be a case where somebody disagrees with a judgment made by somebody in the appellate procedure,” he explained. “Well, lets examine that, but lets not toss out a system that I think has worked very, very well over the years. I have been in that position as a commander. I have been the appellate authority. I have decided who should get tried and who should not get tried, and I can tell you that in my experience as a commander, we take it very, very seriously.”
Democratic Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) and Barbara Boxer (CA) have proposed legislation that would change the way the military prosecutes sexual assault cases. Currently, unit commanders handle the prosecution and investigation of sexual assault cases. Under Gillibrand and Boxer’s bill, that authority would be transferred to an independent body.
All I can say is that what ever the military is doing now…it ain’t working!
Prince leads his new band 3rd Eye Girl through a throwback video filmed, ’80s style, in front of an audience. Prince has always featured people of all colors and genders and sexualities in his bands, and here he emphasizes the subversive nature of his all-female backing group: “Girl with a guitar is 12 times better than another crazy band of boys/ Trying 2 be a star when you’re just another brick in the misogynistic wall of a noise,” he sings, before ceding the floor to bassist Ida Nielsen and guitarist Donna Grantis, who each rip into a solo.
Though he takes aim specifically at the U.S. and Britain, the overall message—squarely in line with his power-to-the-people dance anthems like “Uptown” and “1999”—is utopian: “When the leaders learn how to follow and let all the people lead/ Instead of everybody getting’ what they want, they can get what they need.” One of the song’s final messages could also apply to Prince himself, who seems to be excelling lately in a groove of his own: “Don’t worry about what the crowd does/ Just worry about just being good at what you love.”
The rest of the links will be in link dump fashion…
“That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable.” So declared Richard Nixon in May 1969 in his now widely forgotten “Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Program to End Hunger in America.” In that document, he summoned the country to a new level of generosity and concern and laid out a series of strong legislative steps and executive actions, including a significant expansion of the food-stamps program.
Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage.
Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital visit.
Federal officials say this type of plan, in concept, would appear to qualify as acceptable minimum coverage under the law, and let most employers avoid an across-the-workforce $2,000-per-worker penalty for firms that offer nothing. Employers could still face other penalties they anticipate would be far less costly.
Anthropologists have discovered a beautiful Greek waterfront paradise once inhabited by generations of Neanderthals up to 100,000 years ago, according to a new study.
An analysis of ancient dog burials finds that the typical prehistoric dog owner ate a lot of seafood, had spiritual beliefs, and wore jewelry that sometimes wound up on the dog.
Discussions of the relationship between time and medieval artworks often hinge on examinations of use and reception: how has the meaning of this object changed over time? To what new purposes was it put in its later life, or, to what new purpose did it put existing things? The recent developments in the conception of object agency shift these questions somewhat, so that we find ourselves asking what these works do or have done over certain stretches of time. Of course, these recent claims for the agency of objects have met with resistance, much of it rooted in skepticism about ascribing to non-sentient things the ability to act. Really, now, these are inanimate objects: how much can we claim they really do ? Are we perhaps just projecting a frenzy of activity on things that are so clearly inert?
Haiti this week marks its 210th anniversary as the world’s first Black republic. The descendants of Haiti’s self-emancipators have been forced to defend their national sovereignty in each succeeding decade. Yet, their struggle for freedom was “the single most important factor in shaping the geopolitical trajectory of the Western Hemisphere since Columbus.”
IT was the year President John F. Kennedy traveled to Berlin to proclaim “ich bin ein Berliner” and the year he gave his famous American University speech arguing that peace was “the necessary rational end of rational men.” It was the year the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke from the Lincoln Memorial of a “dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
In American history, 1963 was a year rich in speeches. But of all the signature speeches that year, it’s the one that has been all but forgotten that might have transformed the country the most.
Fifty years ago, on Memorial Day in 1963, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech in Gettysburg, Pa., that foreshadowed profound changes that would be achieved in only 13 months and that mark us still.
The occasion was a speech that almost wasn’t given at all, for an anniversary that was still a month off, delivered by a man who had grown weary of his apparent uselessness in an office that neither interested him nor engaged his capacious gifts. It is a reminder that the titanic events of history sometimes occur away from the main stage — and proof of the power of a great idea, even if it is delivered ahead of its time.
“One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” Johnson said at the cemetery in a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.”
With those two sentences, Johnson accomplished two things. He answered King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” And he signaled where the later Johnson administration might lead, which was to the legislation now known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Now that is one op/ed you have to read in full…
And finally, take a look at these images by Photographer George Hoyningen-Huene there are 122 pictures spanning the 20′s, 30′s 40′sand 50′s. Here are a few of my favorites:
Ava Gardner by George Hoyningen-Huene in 1956
Unframed (matted) gelatin silver print, Horst Study (Twisted Torso), by George Hoyningen-Huene (American/Russian, 1900-1968)
Elsa Schiaparelli, 1932 Photographed by George Hoyningen-Huene
“I don’t think, I will ever actually climb to the top of the ladder, as I am always adding more rungs.”-Hattie Carnegie, 1942 Photograph by fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene Dress by Hattie Carnegie, 1935
Hoyningen-Huene, George
Lillian Gish, 1920s, photo by George Hoyningen-Huene
Aren’t those wonderful? I put the one picture with Schiaparelli since we were talking about her last week…anyway…enjoy your long Memorial Day Weekend. If you have time, leave a comment or link and have a good Sunday!
North Carolina police are investigating why an 11-year-old South Carolina boy died and his mother was injured in the same motel room where two elderly guests were found dead almost two months ago.
Yeah, two months go by without anyone knowing that the first two people died from carbon monoxide poisoning? And they still had people using the room?
Inspectors checked a motel where three people were presumed killed by carbon monoxide fumes six weeks before anyone died, but their review didn’t include investigating for the poisonous gas, the local health agency said Tuesday.The Appalachian District Health Department said it inspected the swimming pool at the Best Western Blue Ridge Plaza in Boone six weeks before a Longview, Wash., couple were found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in their motel room. Boone Police Sgt. Shane Robbins said the room is near the indoor pool, which is warmed by a natural gas heater.
The results of the 2012 National Survey of Youth in Custody included four Georgia juvenile detention centers among a list of 13 with the highest rates of sexual misconduct nationally. The data, released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, was based on anonymous surveys completed by 8,707 youth randomly sampled from at least one facility in every state and the District of Columbia.
The four Georgia facilities were a regional youth detention center in Paulding County; the Eastman Youth Development Campus in Dodge County; the Augusta YDC in Richmond County; and the Sumter YDC in Americus, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Paulding County facility led the nation with 32.1 percent of youth inmates reporting last year that they were victimized sexually by staff or other juveniles. That was more than three times the national rate of 9.5 percent.
The survey results were released as Georgia tries to overhaul its juvenile justice system, which has been plagued by reports of attacks on teenage inmates and abusive behavior by staff members.
Researchers found that 15.8 percent of the 497 juveniles in Georgia’s criminal justice system who were surveyed had had a sexual encounter with a staff member, which is a felony even if it is deemed consensual. Just at the four Georgia facilities cited among the worst in the nation, nearly 300 boys reported sexual abuse last year.
Niles, the state commissioner, said the state has been working to build a “reporting culture” among the youth in custody and said officials had expected an increased number of survey responses from Georgia.
“DJJ will take a hard look at this,” Niles said. “DJJ will always teach our youth to break the silence and say ‘NO’ to sexual abuse.”
Just say no to sex abuse? Gee…yeah like that is going to go far in changing the “culture” of reporting sex abuse.
On Thursday’s airing of right-wing wackadoodle Michael Savage’s radio program, Savage Nation, Allen West agreed with Savage’s assertion that “Khmer Rouge feminists” are attempting a “coup” against the military by proposing to change the military chain of command in sexual assault cases. Allen West also took the opportunity to blame sexual assault on Liberals for allowing women in combat. Savage began with an audio recording of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) proposing a change in the way sexual assault cases are handled. The Senator wants the cases to be handled outside the victim’s chain of command. Savage, clearly not in favor of this proposal said the Senator sounded like a “college chick at a dorm” (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean) and made the Feminist claim:
SAVAGE: “When I watch these Khmer Rouge feminists try to take over the military, this looked like an attempted coup to me, Colonel West.”
WEST: “Nah, you’re absolutely right and that’s a big concern that I have because when you start to get — you know, I understand civilian oversight of the military. We all understand that as all officers who served in uniform. But when you start to have this interjection of, you know, political, you know, will against, you know, the military, good order and discipline, where you start to try to usurp the commanders’ authority and I guess replace it with some type of political, legal officers, and things of that nature. Then the next thing you know, it goes from just dealing with this, you know, sexual assault thing to, you know, making decisions on the battlefield.”
Yes, because wanting a to change the way rapes are handled is clearly a military coup. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that many perpetrators of rape get away with it because they are buddy-buddy with their commanding officer. It has nothing to do with the fact that military rape is less likely to be reported than civilian rape because of the stigma attached to it. Nope. That’s not it at all.
Oh, the misogyny didn’t stop there. It’s not enough that the two pigs insulted lawmakers that are fighting for justice for thousands and thousands and thousands of rape victims; No, they also had to insult the actual victims of these rapes and call into question whether or not there is a wide scale problem:
SAVAGE: … Am I mistaken in assuming the following: When you say sexual assault, according to the new liberal interpretation of such a phrase, does that not include, “Hey honey, let’s go for a beer?” Could she turn him in and say that was a sexual assault because it was an unwanted advance?
WEST: Well she could. I mean that’s the –
SAVAGE: Alright, so amongst the 23,000 — amongst the 23,000 so-called cases that the Commander-in-Chief Obama talked about last, two weeks ago, at a commencement address, how many of them are fraudulent claims? We don’t know, do we?
WEST: No we don’t. And furthermore, Dr. Savage, we don’t know how many of them are female against male, you know, sexual assaults, or same-sex sexual assaults. So we don’t have those numbers either.
There is absolutely no doubt that the military has a rape problem. The Pentagon estimates that there were 26,000 rapes in 2012. A six percent rise from the previous year. Military rapes and sexual assaults reach over 70 per day. The head of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention program was charged with assaulting a woman. Furthermore, only 34% of women and 24% of men report assaults. All of this information is easily available to Savage and West, but they choose to stay ignorant and spread they’re filth over the airwaves. These are the kind of comments that motivates victims of sexual assault to stay silent.
On a warm spring day, farmworker Cristina Melendez was bedridden and unable to make her way back into the asparagus fields of central California for the kind of backbreaking work she’s done since childhood.
The 36-year-old mother of seven was desperate. Her bank account had been at zero for months, the refrigerator was nearly empty, and she didn’t have enough to cover the rent. Lacking health insurance, Melendez couldn’t see a doctor or afford medication, so her illness dragged on – and another day came and went without work or pay.
A native of Mexico who was smuggled into the United States as a child, Melendez had once dreamed big: to be a bilingual secretary, to own a house and a car, to become a U.S. citizen. Agriculture, she hoped, would be the springboard to a better life – for her and her U.S.-born children, the next generation of a family whose past and future are deeply rooted in the fertile earth of America’s breadbasket.
California’s San Joaquin Valley is one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, with Fresno County farmers receiving a record $6.8 billion in revenues last year. But the region also consistently ranks among the nation’s most impoverished. Sometimes called “Appalachia of the West,” it’s where families, especially Hispanic immigrants and their children, live year after year in destitution.
Come the end of this month, New Orleans may lose its one and only ferry, thanks to a state uncommitted to keeping it financially afloat and a city even less sure about who’s responsible for keeping it from going under. This is the ferry that since 1827 has crossed the Mississippi River, transporting “West Bank” residents to jobs downtown. It’s the ferry featured in the HBO series Treme that carries the populist scold Creighton Bernette, a hopeless romantic for New Orleans, to his death at the end of the first season. Now, with its original funding stream dammed off for good, the ferry’s own ending is imminent.
THE cheerleaders of the European Union like to think of it as an entirely new phenomenon, born of the horrors of two world wars. But in fact it closely resembles a formation that many Europeans thought they had long since left to the dustbin of history: the Holy Roman Empire, the political commonwealth under which the Germans lived for many hundreds of years.
Some might take that as a compliment; after all, the empire lasted for almost a millennium. But they shouldn’t. If anything, today’s Europe still has to learn the lessons of the empire’s failures.
Then you have this little shit at Fox, here is a laugh. I had found this last link while looking at the way Fox News, Drudge and other news outlets were covering the latest California shootout as it was happening. As you might as well have guessed Fox News and Drudge had nothing on their websites alerting to the shooting, ABC News also was downplaying the shooting as well. Even after the crisis was over, to find any news coverage of the “event” on Fox News you had to go searching for a link to an article. Anyway, here is some of the quality reporting over at Fox News. Like I said, it is just a little shit but it is funny in a racial/hypocritical/typical asshole Fox News way: Baby names reveal parents’ political ideology | Fox News
Quick, make a guess: Are Liam’s parents Obama voters, or did they pull for John McCain? How about Kurt’s mom and dad?
If your gut suggested that Kurt’s parents might swing conservative while Liam’s are liberal, congratulations. A new study of baby names does, indeed, show that parents in liberal neighborhoods are more likely to choose softer, more feminine sounds, such as “L,” for their babies’ names, while conservative parents go for macho-sounding K’s, B’s and D’s.
The same research finds that liberal, well-educated parents are more likely to pick obscure names for their children, while conservative, well-educated parents take a more conventional naming path. Both methods seem to be a way of signaling status, said study researcher Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago though it’s unlikely parents realize what they’re doing.
Okay so you can probably guess where this is going, look at this:
Lots of research has focused on American political polarization, particularly whether liberals and conservatives in the general public are moving further apart. Some possible examples of the gulf focus on consumer choices, including stereotypes like Whole Foods-loving liberals and Walmart-shopping conservatives.
[...]
The results revealed that overall, the less educated the parent, the more likely they were to give their child either an uncommon name (meaning fewer than 20 children got the same name that year in California), or a unique name (meaning only one child got that name in 2004 in California). When parents had less than a college education, there were no major ideological differences in naming choice.
However, among college-educated whites, politics made a difference. College-educated moms and dads in the most liberal neighborhoods were twice as likely as college-educated parents in the most conservative neighborhoods to give their kids an uncommon name. Educated conservatives were more likely to favor popular names, which were defined as names in the top 100 in California that year.
For boys, 46 percent got a popular name in conservative areas, compared with 37 percent in liberal areas. For girls, 38 percent were given a popular name in conservative neighborhoods, compared with 30 percent in liberal neighborhoods.
Notably, the kinds of uncommon names chosen by upper-class liberals differed from the unusual names picked by people of lower socioeconomic status, Oliver said. Lower-status moms tend to invent names or pick unusual spellings of common names (Andruw instead of Andrew, for example).
“Educated liberal mothers are not making names up,” Oliver said. “They’re choosing more culturally obscure names, like Archimedes or Finnegan or, in our case, we named our daughter Esme.”
[...]
The liberal Obamas named their daughters Sasha and Malia, both names heavy on As and Ls, whereas the conservative Palin family picked more masculine-sounding names for both their boys and girls, particularly Track, Trig, Bristol and Piper (although third daughter Willow got a softer-sounding moniker).
What, so no comment about the “unconventional” names that Palin picked for her brood?
Anyway, that is all I got for you now, have a great day.
So much going on in the spy game that I thought I would just bring you up to date on some of the shit going on in the “hate” side of life, well… at least the ones that are getting a little play in the news lately.
Athens police are conducting abusive stops and searches and have detained tens of thousands of people in a crackdown on irregular migration, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 52-page report, “Unwelcome Guests: Greek Police Abuses of Migrants in Athens,” documents frequent stops of people who appear to be foreigners, unjustified searches of their belongings, insults, and, in some cases, physical abuse. Many are detained for hours in police stations pending verification of their legal status.
“It’s cruelly ironic that the authorities named the sweeps Xenios Zeus, after the ancient Greek god of hospitality,” said Eva Cossé, a Greece specialist at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “In fact, Operation Xenios Zeus is anything but hospitable to migrants and asylum seekers, who are regularly stopped, searched, and detained just because of the way they look.”
Between August 2012, when Operation Xenios Zeus began, and February 2013, the police forcibly took almost 85,000 foreigners to police stations to verify their immigration status. No more than 6 percent were found to be in Greece unlawfully, suggesting the police are casting an extraordinarily wide net.
The report draws on dozens of interviews with people who have been subjected to at least one stop since Operation Xenios Zeus began. Many of those interviewed had a legal right to be in Greece at the time of the stops because they are asylum seekers, legal foreign residents, or Greeks of foreign origin.
Many said they felt they were stopped because of their physical characteristics and gave disturbing accounts of clear targeting on the basis of race or ethnicity.
For a review of the report and some other talking points you can take a look at two articles, one from RT.com and one from Voice of America:
Yesterday (Tuesday) was an extremely productive day for bigots around the world. Who knows what gems of ignorance we’ll see today, let alone throughout the week. For now, we can enjoy the following:
1. Jury selection in the murder trial against George Zimmerman started this week. Zimmerman is on trial for killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager.
While on Fox News, Former NYPD detective Harry Houck had the following to say about the case: “Listen, Trayvon Martin would be alive today, okay, if he didn’t, alright, have a street attitude.” It’s pretty clear that “a street attitude” is code for “being black” and wearing a hoodie. As if either of those things justifies getting out of your car, ignoring a 9/11 dispatcher who tells you to remain in your car and shooting someone to death.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade told the leader of a violent nationalist hate group that targets British Muslims, “We got your back” and “it’s great what you’re doing.”
Kilmeade offered his endorsement to the English Defence League (EDL) and co-founder Tommy Robinson, who appeared as a guest on the June 10 edition of Kilmeade’s Fox News Radio program. Kilmeade’s support followed an interview in which Robinson railed against the immigration of Muslims into the United Kingdom, and warned of Muslims “forcefully putting us under Sharia” Law and planning a “silent takeover” to “implement Sharia” in his country and across the world.
Fox News has previously reported on the violent and fringe nature of the EDL. On August 28, 2010, America’s News HQ anchor Gregg Jarrett noted there were “hundreds of extreme right-wing protesters rioting in northern England. Members of the so-called English Defence League tossing bottles and rocks at police in the city of Bradford. There’s the map. Police penned the group in, keeping them away from a separate rally headed by a leftist group. The English Defence League opposes what it calls the spread of Sharia Law and Islamic extremism in England. Police arrested five people, but there are no reports of any injuries.”
For some unexplained reason, Taylor Chapman walked into a Dunkin’ Donuts Saturday morning–iPhone in hand–to record a complaint about not being provided a receipt for a prior purchase. “This is all being under video surveillance,” she warned one employee (who was unfailingly polite).
Since she had not purportedly been given a receipt, the Broward County resident cited a store policy that supposedly guaranteed her free food as a result of the oversight. Over eight minutes, the boorish, arrogant, and cursing Chapman (seen at right) records herself berating workers and even accosting fellow customers.
As she waited for her food, Chapman remarked, “Even if they hock a loogie and shit in it I don’t even care.” She added, “‘Cause one time they pissed in my fries…literally I could smell the piss in it.”
At one point, Chapman notes that she has a “business degree” and had previously received exemplary service at the Dunkin’ Donuts. Until, of course, a “dumb bitch” female employee “completely pissed me off” and “decided to cross my fucking line.”
You can read the horrible things this woman said at the Smoking Gun link. Anyway, here is an update in the story:
Dunkin’ Brands media chief Michelle King said Wednesday that the “difficult situation” had been handled “with grace and patience.”
“Dunkin’ Brands’ leadership has reached out to the two crew members featured in the video. Both have been invited to an internal company event in Boca Raton later this month for further recognition,” she added in a statement.
The Washington, D.C.-area NFL franchise has commissioned veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz to conduct some focus groups to see how American football fans feel about the franchise’s name, which is a vile racial slur.
[...]
Luntz isn’t just going to get a feel for what people think of the name. Luntz’s specialty is crafting language to sell conservative policies or discredit liberal ones. You hire Luntz not to merely poll, but to figure out how best to sell people on something. It seems reasonable to assume that team owner Daniel Snyder, who has vowed to never change the name, is working now on how best to convince people that his team’s name is not a repellent racial epithet. Luntz’s specialty is renaming things to sound more appealing, but in this case he’ll be crafting the best possible language to use when explaining why something shouldn’t be renamed. (Luntz was reprimanded by American pollsters’ official professional association for his work on the 1994 GOP “Contract With America,” because he was suspiciously vague about how many people he actually polled after claiming that polls showed that Americans loved the contract.)
Luntz is actually fantastically good at his job — so good that he’s convinced quite a few seemingly intelligent liberals that Luntzian language-massaging is the secret behind all conservative electoral success — which is why he is basically Fox News and the House Republicans’ message-crafter-in-residence. He renamed the estate tax “the death tax.” He told the GOP to refer to Democratic healthcare reform as “a Washington takeover” and financial reform as a “big bank bailout bill.”
ThinkProgress reports that Luntz sent out an email survey designed to find eligible focus group participants. The survey asked about the team’s name directly, asking respondents to select either “I find the name offensive and they should change it” or “I don’t find the name offensive and they should keep it as is.”
Speaking at the 92nd Street Y cultural center in New York City last week, consumer advocate Ralph Nader made it clear that he was no supporter of President Barack Obama.
I wonder if Myrna Minkoff was at the Y too, giving her lecture about “Sex in Politics: Erotic Liberty.” Anyway…
Nader mocked Democrats for saying they wanted to increase the minimum wage but doing nothing about it. He was particularly scornful about Obama’s position and lack of assertion regarding the issue.
“He proposed $9.50 by 2011 in 2008,” Nader explained. “Never said anything about it in four years. Then he goes to the State of the Union, and he has a great minute and a half on a $9 minimum wage by 2015 or something. And he has never said anything since.”
He added that there had never “been a bigger con-man in the White House.”
“This is the easiest way to alleviate suffering,” Nader continued. “He should have been sensitized as a community organizer. You know what the score is? The one ingredient you want when you vote for somebody — it doesn’t matter what they have [in their head] in terms of cognitive knowledge — it’s their moral courage and the fire in their belly.”
Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s office reacted Tuesday to news that roadblocks were setup in two counties at which point commuters were offered compensation for saliva and blood samples.
Drivers in St. Clair and Bibb counties were stopped at roadblocks in the area and were asked to give DNA and blood samples as part of a study. Officials say giving samples was voluntary and participants were paid $10 for mouth swabs and $50 for blood samples.
I have a varied selection of stories for you today. I’ll begin with one that doesn’t involve politics, racism, murder, woman-hating, or any other depressing topics. A new study released yesterday provides additional evidence that Dolphins may see each other as unique individuals. From BBC News: Dolphins ‘call each other by name’
It had been-long suspected that dolphins use distinctive whistles in much the same way that humans use names.
Previous research found that these calls were used frequently, and dolphins in the same groups were able to learn and copy the unusual sounds.
But this is the first time that the animals response to being addressed by their “name” has been studied.
Dr Vincent Janik University of St Andrews
To investigate, researchers recorded a group of wild bottlenose dolphins, capturing each animal’s signature sound.
They then played these calls back using underwater speakers.
“We played signature whistles of animals in the group, we also played other whistles in their repertoire and then signature whistles of different populations – animals they had never seen in their lives,” explained Dr Janik.
The researchers found that individuals only responded to their own calls, by sounding their whistle back.
According to Janik,
“(Dolphins) live in this three-dimensional environment, offshore without any kind of landmarks and they need to stay together as a group.
“These animals live in an environment where they need a very efficient system to stay in touch.”
Although humans start naming things almost as a matter of course during early development, the process of creating and using a name is actually quite complex. Scientists refer to names as learned vocal labels, meaning vocalizations that refer to specific objects. Both parrots and dolphins have used learned vocal labels while in captivity, and researchers had no reason to believe that the animals couldn’t do the same in their natural environments. Now biologists Stephanie King and Vincent Janik from the University of Aberdeen have found that, indeed, wild dolphins use the equivalent of a human name to address each other.
What’s interesting to me is that if these dolphins can recognize each other as individuals and recognize their own names, this suggests a level of self-consciousness that is seen in very few animals other than humans. Even human children do not develop the ability to recognize themselves (PDF) in a mirror or on film until they are at least 18 months old and the development of true self-consciousness and awareness that others have similar thoughts and feelings (theory of mind) takes much longer.
The not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman has produced dramatically different reactions among blacks and whites, with African Americans overwhelmingly disapproving of the jury’s decision and a bare majority of whites saying they approve of the outcome, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll….
The new survey underscores not only the gap between whites and blacks, but also how passionate many African Americans are about the case. Among African Americans, 86 percent say they disapprove of the verdict — with almost all of themsaying they strongly disapprove — and 87 percent saying the shooting was unjustified.
In contrast, 51 percent of whites say they approve of the verdict while just 31 percent disapprove. There is also a partisan overlay to the reaction among whites: 70 percent of white Republicans but only 30 percent of white Democrats approve of the verdict. Among all whites, one-third say the shooting was unjustified, one-third say it was justified and the other third say they didn’t know enough to have an opinion.
It figures that Republicans would be driving the results among whites. Republicans have truly become the party of white males who hate anyone who isn’t white and male. You have to wonder why any African American or any woman would choose to be a Republican. Unfortunately the poll didn’t break down the results by gender and geography. Would more women have disapproved of the verdict? It was an all-woman jury, but also a Florida jury. A more complex analysis would have been helpful.
Republicans–at least the ones who watch Fox News–are old too. It’s hard to believe, but even though Fox leads the other cable news channels in viewers, the average age of Fox viewers is 65-plus! From the NYT:
Fox News declined to make executives available for comment, but several recent signs — including changing personalities for some of its weekday programs — suggest the network may have decided the time has come to confront the issue of age.
Just how old is its audience? It is impossible to be precise because Nielsen stops giving an exact figure for median age once it passes 65. But for six of the last eight years, Fox News has had a median age of 65-plus and the number of viewers in the 25-54 year old group has been falling consistently, down five years in a row in prime time, from an average of 557,000 viewers five years ago to 379,000 this year. That has occurred even though Fox’s overall audience in prime time is up this year, to 2.02 million from 1.89 million three years ago….
“The numbers indicate they haven’t been replacing the younger viewers,” Mr. Moffett said of Fox News. Many of the loyal viewers the network has always had are simply aging up beyond the 54-year cutoff for many ad buyers. The result is an audience edging consistently above that 65-plus number.
News audiences always trend old, and the viewers of Fox’s competitors are hardly in the full flower of youth. MSNBC’s median age for its prime-time shows this year is 60.6; CNN’s is 59.8.
In terms of the rest of television, Fox News also is quite a bit older than networks considered to have a base of older viewers. CBS has frequently been needled for having older viewers, but at 56.8, its median viewer is far younger than Fox News’s. (Viewers at Fox News’s sister network, Fox Broadcasting, have a median age of 50.2; at ABC, the median is 54.4; at NBC, it’s 47.7.)
Speaking of old-fashioned viewpoints, I posted this in the comments yesterday, but it’s worth a closer look. Yesterday, Margaret Sullivan the NYT Public Editor posted a remarkable column about Nate Silver: Nate Silver Went Against the Grain for Some at The Times. Sullivan speculates that Silver may have decided to leave the Times for ESPN/ABC because his fact- and probability-based methods of writing about politics didn’t jive with the attitudes of some other Times journalists. She based her analysis on a number of conversations with Silver and “about him with journalists in the Times’s newsroom.”
* I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.
His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.” Of course, The Times is equally known for its in-depth and investigative reporting on politics.
His approach was to work against the narrative of politics – the “story” – and that made him always interesting to read. For me, both of these approaches have value and can live together just fine.
* A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility.
I’ll wrap this up with a some Edward Snowden updates. It’s very clear at this point that Snowden is being controlled by Russian intelligence. We don’t really know where he is, and his spokesman is an “attorney” who is in charge of PR for the Russian FSB. We also don’t know what Snowden has given the FSB in return for their help. Geoffrey Ingersoll at Business Insider:
Russian attorney Anatoly Kucherena — who also happens to be the head of public council for the Federal Security Service (FSB) — has announced that Edward Snowden may leave the Moscow airport on Wednesday.
Not only does Kucherena run the FSB’s public council, but it seems he runs Snowdens public relations as well — he “helped” Snowden apply for temporary asylum, he relayed Snowden’s ”promise” not to hurt the U.S. anymore, and he announced Snowden’s (very own) idea about possibly applying for Russian citizenship with the intent to stay for a while and “learn Russian culture.”
National Security Agency whistleblower/leaker Edward Snowden reportedly flew to Hong Kong carrying “four laptop computers that enable him to gain access to some of the US government’s most highly-classified secrets,” raising the concern that data could have been compromised in China or Russia.
But the information in his head may be more valuable, and accessible, than highly encrypted files.
Beyond trying to acquire information about the 10,000 NSA files Snowden accessed in Hawaii, a U.S. adversary would want to learn from Snowden’s expertise of internal NSA processes — such as its recruiting and vetting processes — to gain insight into America’s decision loop.
“Snowden understood exactly how far he could push [the NSA],” Robert Caruso, a former assistant command security manager in the Navy and consultant, told Business Insider. “That, coupled with his successful exploitation of our entire vetting process, makes him very dangerous.”
There’s much more of interest in the Kelley article, including a timeline of Snowden’s activities. Highly recommended.
I have several more Snowden links that I’ll just list for anyone who’s interested to click on:
Yeah, it’s one hell of a blues song…but it sure is a sad song too…and I mean what else can you say about being so down and out and blue you need to turn to prostitution? The Blues…You know that also includes the dark, depressing and disturbing stuff too.
So this post will focus on dark things…
Starting with this little update on the rodeo clown that caused Fox News, Glenn Beck and Hannity to have a conniption, not because of the disgusting racist “mockery” displayed at a state funded event…but because rodeo clowns always make fun of sitting presidents. Cough, cough. Tommy Christopher has this to say: You Would Not Believe How Common Rodeo Clown Mockery of Presidents Is
For days, conservatives in the media have been calling out Republicans in Missouri for denouncing a rodeo clown’s performance at the Missouri State Fair, although they keep referring to those Republicans as “liberals,” for some reason. However, conservative media watchdog Newsbusters has now swooped in with a welcome dose of cold, hard truthiness to let the Republicans, Democrats, and other decent people who were offended by the rodeo’s mockery of President Obama, know that this exact thing happens all the time! In fact, you wouldn’t believe how often!
Newsbusters‘ Noel Sheppard, however, wants to make sure that the mainstream media reports that “these things aren’t that unusual at such events,” and he’s got ironclad proof that sitting presidents are mocked by rodeo clowns at publicly-sponsored events all the time:
Maybe these folks should report that these things aren’t that unusual at such events, and that in 1994, a bull attacked a dummy wearing a George H.W. Bush mask without the world coming to an end, anybody being fired, or any press outrage.
The big white gate flew open. The bull came out bucking. The rider flopped from side to side and the bullfighters held back, letting the bull make his moves until the rider dropped off. Licciardello crouched in a heavily padded barrel, a human target should the bull decide to charge. Hawkins waited near the barrel, holding his big inner tube. A dummy with a George Bush mask stood beside the clown, propped up by a broomstick. [...]
T.J. Hawkins rolled out the big inner tube, and the bull lowered his head, shot forward and launched into the tube, sending it bounding down the center of the arena. The crowd cheered. Then the bull saw the George Bush dummy. He tore into it, sending the rubber mask flying halfway across the sand as he turned toward the fence, sending cowboys scrambling up the fence rails, hooking one with his horn and tossing him off the fence.
Okay, fine, it wasn’t a sitting president, it was 20 years ago, and it wasn’t even a rodeo clown wearing a mask, but still, why was there no media outrage at this taxpayer-funded effigy eff-up? Well, it turns out the Philly Inquirer was doing a feature on Jimmy Lee Walker, and the Bush bit was just a bit of color thrown in to give readers a Proustian grasp of New Jersey’s Cowtown Rodeo, which is not a state fair, is not funded by tax dollars, and happens every week… in New Jersey. It’s like asking why ESPN is ignoring the prevalence of steroids in Wiffle Ball.
He was responsible for the Death Star. Two of them bitches.
Sure, as Heisenberg, Walter White strikes fear into the hearts of drug dealers everywhere. But take away the black headgear and he’s really just a sad old white dude with a bald head and a lung problem.
[...]
…illustrator PJ McQuade, who calls the above work “Darth Heisenberg.” That’s got a real nice ring to it, actually. And he’s not wrong — White is definitely in the empire business for sure. Though I’m kind of hoping that Walt doesn’t get a redemptive moment at the end of his story like Darth Vader did. Die in a million fires, Mr. White.
Hey, that is the Dark Side of The Force, no question about that. What about a Dark Religion? Or what some of the geezus freaks would have you believe was the deep dark devil side….
Well, here is an update on Georgia placing Bibles in the State Parks. You remember the deal Gov. Deal made a few months ago? That he would allow other religious material to be placed in the cabins located on state park property. Atheist books delivered to Georgia state park
Ed Buckner, a former president of American Atheists Inc., said he brought two atheist books for each cottage at Red Top Mountain State Park in Cartersville. The Cranford, N.J.-based organization had said it would supply atheist texts for lodging in Georgia state parks after the governor said in May any religious group could donate literature.
Bibles were temporarily removed earlier this year after Buckner complained about finding them in a cabin he rented at Amicalola Falls State Park. They were returned after the state attorney general said the books were permissible since the state hadn’t paid for them. In May, Gov. Nathan Deal ordered the Bibles returned to state park cabins and said any religious group could donate books.
“American Atheists does not believe the state of Georgia should be placing Bibles or atheist books in state park cabins; however, if the state is going to allow such distribution, we will happily provide our materials,” group president David Silverman said in a statement.
Buckner said Wednesday he was told by officials at Red Top Mountain State Park that the books he dropped off “The Skeptics Annotated Bible” by Steve Wells and “Fear, Faith, Fact, Fantasy” by Dr. John A. Henderson wouldn’t be immediately put in cottages at Red Top Mountain because the manager would have to make sure they complied with regulations.
Let’s see if those books really get to live next to the bibles in the cabin’s bedside table’s drawers…place your bets.
Each category has slightly different motivations and many cases also have a hidden history of domestic abuse. In four out of five cases the murderers went on to kill themselves or attempted to do so.
The research revealed the most frequent month for the crime was in August, when fathers were likely to be with their children more often because of school holidays.
Four types, ready?
Self-righteous: Killer seeks to locate blame for his crimes upon the mother who he holds responsible for the breakdown of the family. For these men, their breadwinner status is central to their idea of the ideal family. (case study: Brian Philcox)
Anomic: The family has become firmly linked to the economy in the mind of the killer. The father sees his family as the result of his economic success, allowing him to display his achievements. However, if the father becomes an economic failure, he sees the family as no longer serving this function. (case study: Chris Foster)
Disappointed: This killer believes his family has let him down or has acted in ways to undermine or destroy his vision of ideal family life. An example may be disappointment that children are not following the traditional religious or cultural customs of the father. (case study: Mohammed Riaz)
Paranoid: Those who perceive an external threat to the family. This is often social services or the legal system, which the father fears will side against him and take away the children. Here, the murder is motivated by a twisted desire to protect the family. (case study: Graham Anderson)
Be sure to read the whole article and then go back to read the case studies.
As Britain puts airport staff on alert to spot potential victims of forced marriage, one campaigning group says the trick of putting a spoon in their underwear has saved some youngsters from a forced union in their South Asian ancestral homelands.
The concealed spoon sets off the metal detector at the airport in Britain and the teenagers can be taken away from their parents to be searched — a last chance to escape a largely hidden practice wrecking the lives of unknown thousands of British youths.
The British school summer holidays, now well under way, mark a peak in reports of young people — typically girls aged 15 and 16 — being taken abroad on “holiday”, for a marriage without consent, the government says.
The bleep at airport security may be the last chance they get to escape a marriage to someone they have never met in a country they have never seen.
The spoon trick is the brainchild of the Karma Nirvana charity, which supports victims and survivors of forced marriage and honour-based abuse.
Based in Derby, central England, it fields 6,500 calls per year from around Britain but has almost reached that point so far in 2013 as awareness of the issue grows.
When petrified youngsters ring, “if they don’t know exactly when it may happen or if it’s going to happen, we advise them to put a spoon in their underwear,” said Natasha Rattu, Karma Nirvana’s operations manager.
“When they go though security, it will highlight this object in a private area and, if 16 or over, they will be taken to a safe space where they have that one last opportunity to disclose they’re being forced to marry,” she told AFP.
I guess that is a bright turn on a black horror story of abuse, but for something more disturbing…look at this old advertisement for Cellophane I found on Pinterest:
The world in which 1)Jenny McCarthy can get a highly compensated talk show gig and 2)inequality is increasing leads to some grim results:
Why is anti-vaccination sentiment associated with the economic elite? Alex Seitz-Wald examines the question in Salon, in light of an uptick in parents refusing to vaccinate their kids.* But not just any parents. As Seitz-Wald explains, the unvaccinated kids are clustered in some of the wealthiest schools and neighborhoods, particularly in California, where some extremely expensive private schools have vaccination compliance rates as low as 20 percent. Anti-vaccination sentiment has been stereotyped as a mindless lefty cause, but in reality, Republicans are slightly more likely to oppose vaccination than Democrats. The real correlation is between having a lot of money and class privilege and opposing vaccination.
And, yes, I’m a big fan of making anti-vaxxer cranks legally liable for the injuries they inflict on others, although I’d definitely favor civil rather than criminal remedies.
I don’t know, by sister-in-law is an anti-vaxxer and she is a far left-la-leches-legue-natzi…who lives in the college town around Cornell. These crazy nuts are putting other children at risk…they should be held legally liable. And the government should do more to get these kids vaccinated…if it means fines or some kind of other actions taken against the parents/guardians.
A badger has reportedly proved to be a talented archaeologist after helping to discover the tombs of two medieval lords in Germany.
The 12th century burial site, which has been hailed as a “significant find” contains a sword, bronze bowls, a belt buckle and skeletal remains of two Slavic lords, according to Germany’s Der Spiegel Online.
The animal had made its underground home on a farm in the town of Stolpe in the eastern state of Brandenburg.
Two sculptors who also happen to be hobby archaeologists Lars Wilhelm and Hendrikje Ring, live on the farm and had planned to exhibit their art near the badger’s sett.
The pair were made aware of the artefacts when they found a human pelvic bone that had been dug up, prompting them to place a camera into the badger’s sett. Photographs taken with the device revealed pieces of jewellery, which the two then retrieved before notifying authorities.
Commenting on the discovery, Ring told the website,“It wasn’t exactly surprising to us because a whole field of ancient graves had been found on the other side of the road in the 1960s.”
The researchers examined burial soil, at spots where the child’s major organs would have been situated, to understand the child’s final days.
In medieval Denmark, a pre-teen child passed away, and was buried in the town of Ribe. Eight hundred years later, chemists have learned more about this child’s final days by analyzing soil samples in burial remains. Their research uncovered evidence that the child had been seriously ill and received a large dose of medicine in the form of mercury, in a desperate attempt to save his or her life.
Professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen, a chemist at the University of Southern Denmark, and his colleagues, reported on a novel technique to detect non-local chemical traces in ancient graves that could shed light on the final days of a long-deceased person. They published their findings about the Ribe child in the journal Heritage Science and announced the results in an August 9, 2013 press release, in which Rasmussen said:
I cannot say which diseases the child had contracted. But I can say that it was exposed to a large dose of mercury a couple of months before its death and again a day or two prior to death. You can imagine what happened: that the family for a while tried to cure the child with mercury containing medicine which may or may not have worked, but that the child’s condition suddenly worsened and that it was administered a large dose of mercury which was, however, not able to save its life.
Scientists are able to study the earth samples around the bones at the burial site to check for chemicals used as medicine during the middle ages.
Mercury, which is rarely found naturally in soil, is of particular interest to Rasmussen. It was used in some ancient cultures for various purposes, including medicine. While it’s possible to analyze ancient bones for the presence of mercury, bones only provide evidence of exposure for three to 10 years before death.
Organs, however, hold on to mercury over shorter intervals; in the lungs, for instance, mercury is excreted quickly. Rasmussen and his team were able to determine the amounts of mercury in the soil where major organs would have been situated. In that way, they could determine how long before death, on a timescale of days, the dose had been administered.
There is more detailed explanations at the link above.
As a writer I’ve always tended to seek out origins. My first book, about the search for the historical Jesus, was an attempt to get at the “real” story behind my Catholic upbringing. After living in Manhattan for several years, I wrote “The Island at the Center of the World,” a book about the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, the seed from which New York City grew.
Recently I began considering my family. Among its manifold curiosities is our last name. People always ask me about the derivation of “Shorto.” The story I’d heard as a child was that after my illiterate Sicilian great-grandparents settled in my hometown of Johnstown, Pa., they enrolled their children in school and said the name aloud: Sciotto. And the administrator wrote it as he or she heard it.
Anecdotes like that were good enough before, but once I began to take a serious interest in my roots they felt soft. I wanted a better sense of who we were and where we had come from. I’d grown up with some of the atmosphere of the Old Country — the primal aroma of frying meatballs, the smothering embraces of old relatives, whispers of Mafia shenanigans, funny traditions like taping a silver dollar to the bellybutton of a newborn. But really it was an American childhood. There was almost no information about how it all began, about the generation that had emigrated at the start of the 20th century. It wasn’t even clear where in Sicily the family hailed from.
It is better than your usually travel piece. Take a look at it.
One last link for you, about that Greek Island we talk about so often: 9 top Greek islands I’m thinking Koufonisia or Naxos….
Today I am making the spaghetti sauce with meatballs, about 10 pounds of meatballs and a whole bunch of sauce too, so I will be very busy most of the afternoon. Anyway…one last dark image before I go.
I will end this with a picture of Mae West dressed as a bat…found this image on Pinterest.
What a dame!
Have a dark day, full of darkness! Post a comment if you have the inclination to do so…I think I need a vacation. See y’all later, Ciao!
<————- And take a look at this. I found this picture on Pinterest, is it me…or does the left side of her jacket look like Texas? I don’t know, but when I look at that picture, I think of Wendy Davis running for Governor of Texas! Wendy had some choice words for Republicans regarding the SCOTUS decision to give all of Texas Women the ol’ “fuck you!” More on this later…but, first…let’s get this “morning” post started.
At least three hospitals near Bath County had available beds the day before the son of Virginia state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds apparently stabbed his father and then shot himself to death, officials confirmed Wednesday.
Deeds’s condition was upgraded to good at a Charlottesville hospital as investigators and mental-health officials continued to search for an explanation of what happened. Austin Deeds, who was 24, had undergone a psychiatric evaluation on Monday, but officials initially said he was not admitted to a hospital because no bed was available.
It remained unclear Wednesday which hospitals were called and why Austin Deeds was not taken to one of the available facilities.
Voters here on Tuesday defeated a ballot question that sought to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, delivering a critical setback to an anti-abortion movement that had sought to use this progressive city to recalibrate the national debate around women’s reproductive rights.
The referendum, the first of its kind in the country for a municipality, was marked by record turnout and aggressive tactics by volunteers on both sides, who sought to capitalize on the controversy and passion surrounding the issue to drive voters to the polls. For political strategists, it also offered a chance to test the way their message on abortion resonated among Hispanics, a key constituency that accounts for nearly half of the residents in Albuquerque and New Mexico, and is one of the fastest-growing populations in the country.
“This was a clear counterpunch to the Republicans and right-wingers who came from out of state to push their agenda on us,” Sam Bregman, chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party, which campaigned hard against the ban, said in an interview.
Give that piece a read, some interesting quotes from the local people in Albuquerque. The vote was 55 % to 45% btw…
Tribune Co., the parent of several legendary newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, announced restructuring plans that include cutting 700 jobs, mainly from its newspaper unit. Facing falling advertising revenues, Tribune has been engaged in aggressive cost-cutting which has helped the company remain profitable, its latest earnings show.
Staff reductions amount to about 6% of Tribune’s workforce, and will be focused on operations personnel at their publishing unit, rather than on editorial staff, chief executive Peter Liguori said, according to the LA Times. At the same time, the company is looking consolidate advertising and circulation functions which were previously managed by each of the eight newspapers in their portfolio individually.
I wonder what Horsey will do with this nugget of news now. (He is really such a talented and ballsy cartoonist…)
Alright. Now that the newsy part of the post is over, here comes the meaty part.
Did you hear the news? Hollywood is making a sequel, but this in no ordinary sequel. It’s not Rocky 15 or Hobbitt III…this time Hollywood is going back to it’s roots…back to it’s heyday…it is going back to Bedford Falls.
Star Partners and Hummingbird Prods. are collaborating on production of a sequel to Frank Capra’s iconic 1946 movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which starred Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.
The sequel, titled “It’s a Wonderful Life: The Rest of the Story,” is being financed by Allen J. Schwalb of Star Partners who will also produce along with Bob Farnsworth of Hummingbird. The duo are aiming to get the movie into theaters for the 2015 holiday season.
Karolyn Grimes, who played George Bailey’s daughter “Zuzu” in the original, will return for the “Wonderful Life” sequel as an angel who shows Bailey’s unlikeable grandson (also named George Bailey) how the world would be if he had he never been born.
I am negative by birth, being a Sicilian and all, but there are some things (whether they be books or film) that do not and should not be treated to “the sequel.” It’s a Wonderful Life is not one of them.
Our sister publication Variety just bannered an exclusive that there is a sequel in the works to the charming Frank Capra-directed Jimmy Stewart film It’s A Wonderful Life. Here, the actress who played Bailey daughter Zuzu (Karolyn Grimes) returns as an angel to advise George Bailey’s grandson (cleverly named George Bailey) because he has turned into a douchebag. While my first impulse is to label this a sign of the apocalypse, particularly after I see stories about Robert De Niro talking about a Taxi Driver sequel, maybe the Wonderful Life‘s backers at Star Partners are on to something. Even if something is considered a sacred cow, if that cow was run through the slaughterhouse, wouldn’t there be some tasty steaks for all? I need to stop judging.
No, please Mike..judge…judge!
You could take the progeny of a number of classic films and continue those beloved story lines. Why, maybe Rosebud didn’t completely burn up in the fire at the end of Citizen Kane. It got saved by Charles Foster Kane’s son or nephew, and their grandson finds it in the barn, pimps it out and uses Rosebud to conquer the downhill wooden sledding circuit, which for sequel purposes has been approved as an event in the next Winter Olympics. Any other classics that could be sequelized with the combination of ingenuity and public domain rights expiration?
After watching weeks of The Story of Film on TCM, I see just how crappy cinema has become here in the US. I knew it was shit for a long time now, but there is nothing like seeing some of those wonderful classic films through a film historian’s eyes to get a true feel for what we have lost. And I think what is more important, what we are losing in not moving forward towards innovation in film.
Police said a man whose gun accidentally fired in his pants pocket while at Walmart on Sunday kept on shopping, paying for his items and leaving as though nothing had happened.
Christopher William Strube, 50, was arrested Monday and charged with discharging a weapon within city limits.
Strube was shopping Sunday afternoon with his .45-caliber gun in his pocket, when a bottle he was carrying bumped into the gun and caused it to fire one round, police said. Strube told police that after the gun went off, he paid for his items and left the store.
Employees and customers said they heard a gunshot and smelled gun powder. Police later found a .45-caliber bullet inside a can of beans.
These Walmart employees are collecting cans for other Walmart employees who are too poor to feed themselves at Thanksgiving.
Of those three articles, I say read the last one by Bill Moyers.
This is very disturbing and upsetting for me on a very personal level. You all know why…Walmart puts food on our table, and I was always told not to “shit where you eat.” Walmart should increase their employee pay…geez, WTF is wrong with them. The Simple Path to a Living Wage at Walmart
In the past week, both a senior editor at Fortune magazine and the liberal think tank Demos have made similar proposals for how Walmart could greatly increase worker wages without harming its business prospects. What is this mysterious financial magic?
The two proposals differ a bit in the details, but they use roughly the same mechanism to reach the same goal, so we’ll go with Demos’s proposal (described in full here) for ease of explanation. Basically, the argument is this: Walmart throws off enough cash in profits each year that it could easily raise the wages of its workers by about 50%, so that they all made about $25K per year, which is what activists are seeking. Currently, the company just uses that cash for other purposes. Like what? Well, Demos points out that Walmart spent $7.6 billion last year buying back its own stock shares, a maneuver designed to buoy the stock price and dividend payments.
[...]
Demos estimates that if Walmart had dedicated last year’s share repurchasing money to worker wages, it could have ensured that all employees working 32 hours or more per week made at least $25K per year. (Something that is not unknown in the retail world.)
The key to this plan is simply a realistic look at which stakeholders benefit from which economic decision. Buying back shares can be popular on Wall Street, but it doesn’t change Walmart’s actual business operations one whit. The money, then could either provide a living wage to close to a million workers who currently do not make enough to provide for their families, or it could be used to vastly increase he personal wealth of the richest and greediest family in America.
Contrary to popular myths and stereotypes, Hawaii, and especially Honolulu, has a serious problem with poverty and homelessness. It’s not hard to spot tent cities in parks and near industrial areas, where hula dancers, surf boards and mai tais are nowhere in sight. In fact, Hawaii has the highest rate of homelessness in the nation, with a population of around 17,000.
So along comes State Rep. Tom Brower — and his sledgehammer. Brower, wearing an Armani hat, has taken it upon himself to destroy and confiscate shopping carts used by homeless people.
Video at the link if you can stand it.
Brower, a Democrat, was quoted by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser as saying, “If I see shopping carts that I can’t identify, I will destroy them so they can’t be pushed on the streets.” Later, on a local news station, Brower told a reporter, “I want to do something practical that will really clean up the streets.”
Yeah. He’s quite a hero, isn’t he? Destroying one of the only means by which homeless people can carry their few possessions — or, in some cases, earn some extra money by collecting recyclable cans and bottles. Specifically, Brower smashes the wheels off the carts, making them impossible to use. So instead of homeless people pushing shopping carts, Hawaii will have a homeless population dragging bashed up, wobble-wheeled carts now. Nice guy.
The French don’t think Downtown Atlanta is such a safe tourist destination after hours.
Because of that, the city “too busy to hate” has found itself on a list of U.S. cities foreign countries warn their traveling citizens about.
The Washington Post recently named 16 American cities that governments from overseas suggest that people visiting the U.S. take precautions when touring.
Among those was Atlanta, whose downtown area the French Consulate suggested might not be the safest place to be after hours.
“Be vigilant in isolated areas of the city center (downtown) after the closure of the offices and to focus on the travel by taxi at night,” a translation from French of the warning about Atlanta.
Hmmm, maybe those homeless people know something about dangerous places after hours? Like it would be better and probably safer to stay awake at night? (Yeah, it is a stretch, I know…)
Birth control affects the global economy — on a much larger scale than you might think.
This infographic, created by Population Action International, shows just how much a lack of access to contraception impacts not just women and their children, but the amount countries spend on basic services for entire populations. Yet, sadly, only 22 percent of family-planning needs are being met worldwide.
According to Population Action, “For every $1 we invest in family planning, we save $4 in other areas like education, public health, and water and sanitation.” Check out the numbers below. They paint a pretty depressing picture — and one that needs to change ASAP.
Fox Business host Stuart Varney on Monday addressed the lack of women executives in the technology industry by suggesting that there was “something about the female brain” that deterred companies from hiring them.
Early last month, filings for Twitter’s plan to publicly offer shares showed that the company was dominated by male executives.
“Should tech companies feel obligated to put women on the board or to make women top executives just to be politically correct,” Varney asked the Tea Party News Network’s Scottie Hughes on Monday.
“No business should ever be obligated to bring on a woman,” Hughes insisted. “They should want to, but you’re not seeing this in Silicon Valley for some reason.”
“But why is that?” Varney wondered. “It’s a very difficult question to ask because it’s politically incorrect. Is there something about the female brain that is a deterrent for getting on board with tech? Is there?”
State Sen. Wendy Davis (D), Democrats’ popular candidate for governor of Texas, slammed Texas Republicans following the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the state to continue enforcing its strict anti-abortion law.
“This law is an abuse of power by politicians in Austin. Clinics will close and women’s health will be hurt,” Davis said in a statement to TPM on Tuesday. “I trust women to make their own decisions and will continue to work to make sure that women and mothers are safe and have access to adequate health care.”
Earlier in the year Davis gained national attention for waging a 13-hour filibuster of the law.
In a separate statement Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) praised the high court’s decision.
“This is good news both for the unborn and for the women of Texas, who are now better protected from shoddy abortion providers operating in dangerous conditions,” Perry said. “As always, Texas will continue doing everything we can to protect the culture of life in our state.”
Love her.
The next few links are not within the “wonderful life” theme, but I wanted to include them anyway:
Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol and a team of researchers are investigating how meat products were preserved for provisioning ancient Egyptian tombs. “We’ve done quite a bit on human Egyptian mummies and even a fair bit on animal mummies. But the meat mummies…they’d been sort of left on their own,” he explained. For example, a calf and a goat leg he and his team examined with mass spectroscopy had been wrapped in bandages and smeared with animal fat. A few hundred years earlier, beef ribs prepared for Pharaoh Amenhotep III were treated with an expensive resin imported from the Mediterranean.
Let’s start with the dull stuff, because pragmatism.
The word “because,” in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, “because” has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I’m reading this because [I saw it on the web]) or by a prepositional phrase (I’m reading this because [of the web]). These two forms are, traditionally, the only ones to which “because” lends itself.
I mention all that … because language. Because evolution. Because there is another way to use “because.” Linguists are calling it the “prepositional-because.” Or the “because-noun.“
You probably know it better, however, as explanation by way of Internet—explanation that maximizes efficiency and irony in equal measure. I’m late because YouTube. You’re reading this because procrastination. As the language writer Stan Carey delightfully sums it up: “‘Because’ has become a preposition, because grammar.”
Go and read the rest of that article, it is real interesting.
I guess you could say that Varney and his comment about women tech CEOs would be because misogyny.
As anyone who has tried to blag a vocab test will know, words really don’t have any logic to them. You can’t just “work out” what the German word for “fridge” is. That’s because, of course, words are arbitrary. Cat (or katze or chat) only means “cat” because at some stage people came to agree that it did. Words may share roots and flit across language barriers, but because there’s such a vast number of sounds a human can make, it’s very unlikely that we’d all spontaneously come up with the same word for the same thing.
Except that, apparently, we have. That word is “huh”. According to a recent study it seems to be pretty universal. The scientists (in what sounds like an excellent idea for a research trip), recorded bits of informal language from 5 continents, and of the 31 dialects they compiled, all had this same word in common.
My first thought in reading their findings was “hmmm”. Is “huh” even a word? It seems more like an instinctive utterance – the kind of sound we make when confused. Noises of surprise or anger might be the same everywhere, but that’s because they are not really part of a language. They’re just noises.
But the researchers do a fairly good job of arguing that “huh” is, in fact, a word. It’s not involuntary, and it follows the rules of a given language: if questions are posed with rising intonation, “huh” rises too, and vice versa (it fell in two of the dialects). It is also possible for children and language learners to get “huh” wrong by using it out of context. You can’t get noises of astonishment wrong.
So why is “huh” everywhere? Here’s where the research gets interesting. “Huh”, the scientists suggest, is the only word that can do that particular job. This means you could, technically, work the word out in a vocab test. And if children were really thorough inventors of made up languages, they’d have to include “huh”.
Go figure?
There is more of course at the link. Check it out.
That is it.
Shit, almost 4:30…time does fly when it is a Wonderful Life.
We lost one of the most beautiful and talented actresses yesterday. Eleanor Parker passed away, she was 91 years old. This post features photographs of Eleanor and movie clips of some of my favorite scenes. TCM is going to have a memorial event for her on the evening of December 17th…so be sure to catch that.
Eleanor Parker, who was nominated three times for a best-actress Oscar but whose best-known role was a supporting one, as the marriage-minded baroness in “The Sound of Music,” died on Monday in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 91.
She was nominated for an Oscar for dramatic roles as a wrongly convicted young prisoner in “Caged” (1950), a police officer’s neglected wife in “Detective Story” (1951) and an opera star with polio in “Interrupted Melody” (1955), a biography of the Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence. She also received an Emmy Award nomination in 1963 for an episode of “The Eleventh Hour,” an NBC series about psychiatric cases.
If she never became a star, admirers contended, it was because of her versatility. Sometimes a blonde, sometimes a brunette, often a redhead, Ms. Parker made indelible impressions but submerged herself in a wide range of characters, from a war hero’s noble fiancée in “Pride of the Marines” (1945) to W. Somerset Maugham’s vicious waitress-prostitute in a remake of “Of Human Bondage” (1946).
Eleanor Jean Parker was born on June 26, 1922, in Cedarville, Ohio, the daughter of a math teacher and his wife. She appeared in school plays as a child and, in her teens, headed for Massachusetts to study acting at the Rice Summer Theater in Martha’s Vineyard. Then she moved to California and studied at the Pasadena Playhouse.
“Eleanor Parker was and is one of the most beautiful ladies I have ever known,” said Plummer in a statement Monday. “I hardly believe the sad news for I was sure she was enchanted and would live forever.”
The fame accompanying Parker’s supporting but pivotal role in the enduring 1965 musical about the Von Trapp family was “something she came to make peace with” after many years, her son said Monday.
“It was a lovely role, and she was terrific in it,” Clemens said, “but it was hardly her greatest role. It was only in the last 10 years of her life that she became glad she had done the film. People of all ages know it.”
Eleanor Parker and Frank Sinatra in Otto Preminger’s The Man With The Golden Arm
Eleanor Parker, who somehow remained a Hollywood mystery woman despite a dazzling array of work that included three best actress Oscar nominations in the 1950s, has died. She was 91.
Parker earned her Oscar noms during a remarkable six-year span. She played a naive 19-year-old who transforms into a hardened convict in Caged (1950); starred as Kirk Douglas’ wife with a secret in William Wyler’s film noir Detective Story (1951); and portrayed real-life Australian opera star and polio victim Marjorie Lawrence in InterruptedMelody (1955) opposite Glenn Ford.
During a career that spanned more than half a century, the Ohio native also starred as the smothering wife of recovering heroin addict Frank Sinatra in Otto Preminger’s tense The Man With the Golden Arm (1955); as a woman with three distinct personalities in the drama Lizzie (1957); and as the jealous baroness Elsa Schraeder in Robert Wise’s classic musical The Sound of Music (1965).
Screenwriter William Ludwig, who shared an Oscar for his work on Interrupted Melody, wrote in a 1986 biography about Parker that moviegoers “didn’t go to her films to see Miss Parker being Miss Parker in a different dress or locale. You went to see that person she created on film.”
That ability for the real-life person to disappear onscreen led author Doug McClelland to title the biography Eleanor Parker: Woman of a Thousand Faces.
“I don’t always recognize myself when I see my own [still] pictures,” Parker said in the book. “Even to me, they look like Ingrid Bergman, Pat Neal, Myrna Loy, Joan Fontaine and Eleanor Powell at various times. I never look like me. Frankly, I think all this is wonderful. What woman doesn’t like a little mystery about herself?”
Eleanor Jean Parker was born on June 26, 1922, in Cedarville, Ohio. Her father was a math teacher. At age 15, she attended the Rice Summer Theatre on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, earning her keep “by [ushering] and waiting on tables. They finally let me appear in one play, a bit in What a Life!,” she told The New York Times.
A good case can be made for Eleanor Parker as the screen’s “least-heralded great actress,” as co-star Dana Andrews once dubbed her. A ravishing beauty with a patrician air and a distinctive, throaty voice, Parker might have become the sort of glamorous star personality who amasses a following by essentially playing herself in film after film. Ironically, she may be missing from the pantheon of best-remembered movie stars because she chose instead to create a gallery of characters so unlike one another that biographer Doug McClelland titled his 1989 book Eleanor Parker: Woman of a Thousand Faces. Commenting on her chameleon-like quality, Parker herself once said, “When I am spotted somewhere it means that my characterizations haven’t covered up Eleanor Parker the person. I prefer it the other way around.”Today, despite her impressive range, frequent brilliance and three Academy Award nominations as Best Actress, Parker unjustly does not share the name recognition of studio colleagues Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland at Warner Bros. and, later, Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr at MGM. Still, Parker gave them all a run for their money, whether in gritty black-and-white Warner dramas or MGM exercises in Technicolor glamour.
I know that I’ve gone on about Eleanor Parker, but you must understand, two of my favorite movies growing up starred Eleanor Parker!
Woman in White and Naked Jungle. Both of those films fascinated me…I know Naked Jungle was a regular on Creature Feature…hell, Woman in White is haunting itself.
These old movies, Gone With The Wind, Jane Eyre (Orson Wells and Joan Fontaine), Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Woman in White are the keys that opened that door to books…reading and my love for the written word.
I read GWTW for the first time when I was 7 or 8 years old…It was a big deal for me, I remember taking it to school and reading it in the playground, all my friends would comment on how “thick” the book was.
Woman in White was the second “thick book” I read, I remember it vividly because after reading Gone With the Wind for the third time, I asked my mother to get me Wilkie Collins…having seen Eleanor Parker in the dual role on the local TV channel some late night.
Take a look at her in this scene from Woman in White…
and then wander through the links above…and spend some time to enjoy these clips from her films. She was one of the best.
So be sure to watch Eleanor Parker on December 17th, on Turner Classic Movies….and spend the day with one hell of an actress.
Oh, what would I do if it wasn’t for TCM.
(They were going to show Tony Richardson’s Hamlet with Nicol Williamson on Dec. 17th. I had been waiting a year for them to show it again…I hope they schedule it again soon.
If you have not seen this version of Hamlet it is the best. It is something else you should not miss.)
Before we get to the other morning links, here is the TCM Remembers video for 2013:
Okay the rest of today’s stories are in link dump fashion.
Let’s see if this counts as part of the War on Christmas™: Festivus poles are being erected in both the Wisconsin and Florida state capitals, alongside the other holiday… sorry, Christmas displays. The holiday, famously started by Seinfeld‘s Frank Costanza, has taken on a life of its own and been symbolically embraced by secular groups in the years since. And now they’re fighting for a place at the table. Sometimes it’s a giant A, sometimes it’s a giant pole.
Madison, Wisconsin boasts a giant, 30-foot Christmas tree at the capital, not to mention a secular version of the “room at the inn” including Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Mark Twain, and also now happens to be home to a Festivus pole. The traditional airing of grievances will take place two days before Christmas, though sadly there will be no feats of strength.
Indian mascots, they’re totes honoring to Native peoples, right? That’s what fans always tell us, at least. Inspired by this image above posted on twitter, from a Sonic in Benton, MO, I decided to take some time to compile a list of just a few instances of how these mascots totally “honor” Native people. This is just from memory, btw. There are so, so, so many more.
WikiLeaks and The Huffington Post have raised all kinds of unshirted hell this morning by publishing a trove of documents relating to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the gigantic new trade agreement which was negotiated largely in secret — unless, of course, you were a CEO or a lobbyist who worked for one — and which the administration is seeking to “fast-track” through Congress so as to avoid the kind of public scrutiny to which deals like this rarely stand up. OK, that last part’s me, but you get the point.
One of the most controversial provisions in the talks includes new corporate empowerment language insisted upon by the U.S. government, which would allow foreign companies to challenge laws or regulations in a privately run international court. Under World Trade Organization treaties, this political power to contest government law is reserved for sovereign nations. The U.S. has endorsed some corporate political powers in prior trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, but the scope of what laws can be challenged appears to be much broader in TPP negotiations.
A team of botanists were surprised to Europe’s rarest orchid species growing in the Azores. Richard Bateman
One of Europe’s rarest orchid species has been rediscovered in the Azores, a group of volcanic islands in the North Atlantic Ocean.
The discovery of the Hochstetter’s butterfly-orchid confirms that the islands support three kinds of orchid species, rather than one. The findings, published in the journal PeerJ, explains how the rare species was found.
So delicate and beautiful. Well, that is all folks…have a wonderful day and share your thoughts and stories with us.
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Changing styles. Prehistoric female figurines started off voluptuous like the Venus of Willendorf (left) but then became schematic like these “Gönnersdorf” style statuettes (right), possibly signaling a shift in their meaning.
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Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage.
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does, indeed, show that parents in liberal neighborhoods are more likely to choose softer, more feminine sounds, such as “L,” for their babies’ names, while conservative parents go for macho-sounding K’s, B’s and D’s.
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Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol and a team of researchers are investigating how meat products were preserved for provisioning ancient Egyptian tombs. “We’ve done quite a bit on human Egyptian mummies and even a fair bit on animal mummies. But 
