EYE ON A CRAZY PLANET
#AskELJames after the success of "Grey," have you considered re-telling the story from the perspective of someone who can write
— Andrew Vestal (@avestal) June 29, 2015
Last week, Pope Francis issued his new encyclical Laudato Si' (Praise be to you, my Lord) in which he addresses the problem of man-made climate change. Unfortunately, the encyclical makes it clear that the Pope completely fails to understand how the spread free markets yielded the technological and economic progress that has lifted billions out of humanity's natural state of abject poverty. Global life expectancy has more than doubled over the past century; the amount of food per capita has never been higher; literacy has never been more widespread; and the level of violence never lower. Nearly all of these improving trends can be traced to the spread of sweet commerce.
In Laudato Si' the Pope strongly urges that markets and technology be reined in. Instead of creating more wealth, the Pope would prefer to redistribute it. Now, in a not-so-strange-bedfellow alliance, Pope Francis has invited prominent hater of free markets Naomi Klein to advise him and the Vatican on economic and climate policy. In her 2014 screed, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Klein asserted that climate science has given progressives "the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism" ever. She added that progressive values and policies are "currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature."...
In 1995, an unknown actor stole the show from the most popular characters on TV.
When Seinfeld's "The Soup Nazi" episode aired, the militant chef played by Larry Thomas was an instant sensation. "No soup for you" became one of the show's most famous lines, and Thomas would go on to earn an Emmy nomination after paying for the $100 application fee himself.
Before landing the role, Thomas was working as a bail bondsman in Los Angeles, struggling to get an acting career going.
"The only people who had seen my work were the four people who had sat in the audience of the plays I was doing," Thomas tells The Hollywood Reporter...
Hamas, the gang that controls the Gaza Strip and hopes to destroy Israel, makes war in its own peculiar way.
It conducts a terror campaign by randomly sending unguided missiles across the border, traumatizing the civilian population. Rather than using its payments from Iran to feed its own people, it spends a fortune digging tunnels under the border to Israel, infiltrating the country from beneath the ground. It places artillery on top of apartment buildings and beside schools, so that Israel’s attempts to destroy the artillery will kill as many Palestinians as possible. Hamas built a military command centre underneath Shifa hospital, which Israel built for the Gaza population.
If someone attempts to arrange a cease-fire between the combatants, Hamas at first refuses to co-operate, then finally signs on and accepts praise for its peace policy. Eventually, it breaks the cease-fire. Between wars Israel maintains a permanent one-sided cease-fire, having no reason to attack Gaza; in 2005 it closed its Gaza settlements and removed its military forces from the Strip. Hamas can always re-start the war, arousing the ire of their soldiers by complaining about Israel’s enforcement of Gaza’s borders. The borders are shut to keep Hamas from importing arms but Hamas depicts it as hard-hearted retaliation.
On Monday a UN committee passed judgement on last summer’s 50-day Hamas-Israel war with a document The New York Times described in a headline: “UN Report on Gaza Finds Evidence of War Crimes by Israel and by Palestinian Militants.”...
Long, long ago, in a time so far in the past it preceded the dinosaurs and the continents, lived a tiny creature named “grandfather turtle.” It had many of the qualities of the turtles we know and love today: a boxy body, plodding legs, a long neck topped by a small, round head.
It was only missing one thing: a shell.
Thanks to the newly discovered fossil of that tiny creature, scientists say they have solved the story of how the turtle got its shell...
The anti-Israel activists employed as professors who led the fight at the American Studies Association to pass the academic boycott of Israel in December 2013, have been patting themselves on the back ever since.
Forget that over 250 university presidents and the major academic organizations condemned the move as a gross violation of academic freedom. Even the NY Times called the ASA a “pariah.”
The ASA humiliatingly had to back down from its plan to bar representatives of Israeli academic institutions from its annual meeting, eventually promising that even Bibi Netanyahu could attend.
The profs seething with hatred of Israel, and anti-Zionist websites which promoted their academic boycott agenda, saw it differently. In their own minds, they were on the cusp of a historic anti-Israel paradigm change. The future belonged to the boycotters, in their minds.
The reality has not worked out that way. Other than some very small faculty organizations, no major academic group has adopted the boycott. No university in the U.S. is even considering a boycott.
But the hyperbolic hateful rhetoric by the profs did have an effect...
Why was Rafe Esquith—a celebrated Los Angeles teacherwith numerous achievements—suspended from class and forced to cancel his annual Shakespeare production? I previously reported that his alleged infraction was reading a colorful passage from Mark Twain, but according to new details in this Washington Post story, it’s actually a harmless, wholly inoffensive joke that got him in trouble.
Esquith teaches at Hobart Boulevard elementary in LA. Most of his students are low-income Korean and Hispanic kids. His numerous extracurricular activities—including field trips and Shakespeare productions—are largely funded through private donations from benefactors attracted to his excellent work. While reading a passage from Huckleberry Finn in which “the king came prancing out on all fours, naked,” Esquith remarked that if he couldn’t raise additional funds for his annual production, he supposed “the class would have to similarly perform naked.”...
If the Liberal Party claims victory in the next federal election, Justin Trudeau says, his government would end Canada's bombing mission against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and restore diplomatic relations with Iran, in a dramatic departure from the path taken by the Harper government on foreign policy...
Authorities say no charges will be filed against an Uber driver who shot and wounded a gunman who opened fire on a crowd of people in Logan Square over the weekend.
The driver had a concealed-carry permit and acted in the defense of himself and others, Assistant State's Attorney Barry Quinn said in court Sunday.
A group of people had been walking in front of the driver around 11:50 p.m. Friday in the 2900 block of North Milwaukee Avenue when Everardo Custodio, 22, began firing into the crowd, Quinn said.
The driver pulled out a handgun and fired six shots at Custodio, hitting him several times, according to court records. Responding officers found Custodio lying on the ground, bleeding, Quinn said. No other injuries were reported...
In the strange and fascinating case of the suddenly and sensationally infamous civil-rights activist Rachel “I am definitely not white” Dolezal, there is something especially peculiar about the vast expenditure of effort in reporting, punditry and chatshow analysis undertaken by CNN, MSNBC and the CBC and all the dailies from the New York Times to Israel’s Haaretz and Britain’s Guardian, and the contributions from the new-media toilers at Buzzfeed and Slate and Vox and all the rest.
It’s this: nobody has managed to significantly advance the original story that veteran Idaho newspaper reporter Jeff Selle, after a mostly solitary investigation, filed for last Thursday’s editions of the plucky Coeur D’Alene Press. What little has been accomplished since last Thursday has come almost solely from the margins...
The political Left has come up with a new buzzword: “microaggression.”
Professors at the University of California at Berkeley have been officially warned against saying such things as “America is the land of opportunity.” Why? Because this is considered to be an act of “microaggression” against minorities and women. Supposedly it shows that you don’t take their grievances seriously and are therefore guilty of being aggressive toward them, even if only on a micro scale...
House GOP Benghazi investigators have discovered 60 new Libya communications between Sidney Blumenthal and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a congressional source told POLITICO on Monday — suggesting that either the State Department or the 2016 Democratic presidential contender withheld correspondence the panel had requested.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi had quietly subpoenaed Blumenthal’s Libya emails. And on Friday, the longtime Clinton family friend — who is set to testify before investigators behind closed doors Tuesday morning — handed over 120 pages worth of new Libya- and Benghazi-related emails.
“These emails were not previously produced to the Committee or released to the public, and they will help inform tomorrow’s deposition,” panel Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said in a statement late Monday evening. “We are prepared to release these emails.”
Panel Republicans are pushing to release the emails as early as Tuesday but need Democrats to agree to do so under committee rules that require the minority to be given a five-day warning before release.
In the meantime, they’re wondering why they didn’t have them in the first place...
Speaking on a conference call organized by the Clarion Project, Woolsey said he would rather deal with the Soviets he met across the negotiating table decades ago than talk to Tehran.
"They weren't theocratic fanatics," he said of his Soviet interlocutors.
Woolsey now chairs the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which not only looks at Tehran's nuclear program but also its human-rights record.
"Iran is hanging political dissidents every day," he told reporters and an international audience. "The problem is not the Iranian people," he said.
He urged Western powers to encourage average Iranians to "stand up to their 'masters'," and believes with external support Iranians could succeed where their attempted revolution failed in 2009.
However, it was the Iranian nuclear file that dominated Woolsey's remarks. He fears Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will insist, for example, that any deal does not include U.N. inspections of military facilities.
"An agreement is at least as bad as no agreement. Neither is going to stop the Iranian march toward nuclear weapons," he said, calling for a ramping up of financial sanctions.
The President of Sudan was allowed to leave South Africa unmolested today, despite courts in the country ordering his arrest on a genocide warrant. The International Criminal Court, pursuing a case launched by the Security Council, issued warrants for Bashir’s arrest years ago. Yet he has roamed the globe with impunity.
Nonetheless, he has thus far avoided ICC members like South Africa. As a state party to the Rome Statute, South Africa has a treaty obligation to cooperate with the enforcement efforts of The Hague-based court. The order by the South African judge to seize Bashir generated a massive wave of excitement in the ever-optimistic international law community. But as I predicted, South Africa did not detain him, instead allowing him to return to Khartoum.
The free pass given to Bashir is another in a series of major blows to the credibility of the ICC – and in this case, the Security Council. If member states like South Africa do not take the Court seriously in cases that do not even involve its own nationals, it is hard to expect non-members to do so.
While refusing treaty obligations to arrest the world’s leading genocidaire – known of course for his campaign against black Africans in Darfur – might seem unconscionable, Bashir has his defenders.
Among them is Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who vocally opposes the ICC process against Bashir. “We must also take a decisive stance of solidarity alongside fraternal Sudan and President Omar al-Bashir,” Abbas has said. He has has also expressed his “solidarity” with the Sudanese despot, and categorically rejected enforcement of the ICC warrant...
Mossad stole my shoe! Please retweet to help me find it! http://t.co/GfAWUMZu3c #MossadStoleMyShoe pic.twitter.com/r1ZRzXme2o
— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) June 14, 2015
...The First Amendment is practically a relic on college campuses right now. A relic that can’t be displayed anywhere because it might offend and melt a few special snowflakes. The fact that restrictive, unconstitutional campus speech policies are being used to stifle entertainers isn’t an opinion, it’s a matter of public record in courts of law.
A couple of the response posts stood out for ignorant audacity and the fact that they wasted little time in proving that Seinfeld had made a valid point, so I’ll mention them here, if for no other reason than to mock.
The first is from Salon, which is known mainly for employing white people to write about racism. This time it’s employing a non-comedian to tell comedians how we should conduct ourselves comedically...
Oral sex is good for women's health and makes you feel happier, according to a study which studied the effects of semen's 'mood-altering chemicals'.
The State University of New York study - which scientists carried out via survey rather than through practical experiment - compared the sex lives of 293 females to their mental health.
It follows research which shows that seminal fluid contains chemicals that elevate mood, increase affection, induce sleep and also contain at least three anti-depressants.
The researchers also claim that women who have regular unprotected sex are less depressed and perform better on cognitive tests.
Semen contains another of chemicals along with spermatozoa, including cortisol, which is known to increase affection, estrone, which elevates mood and oxytocin, which also elevates mood.
It also contains thyrotropin-releasing hormone (another antidepressant), melatonin (a sleep-inducing agent), and even serotonin (perhaps the best-known antidepressant neurotransmitter)...
Christopher Lee was the only actor I know of to play the all of The Big Three Monsters in movies; Frankenstein('s monster), Dracula, and the Mummy. He's also the only major film actor to have played both Sherlock Holmes and Holmes' brother Mycroft."Pakistan aaye din (constantly) disturbs India, jo naako dum la deta hai (creates nuisance), terrorism ko badhawa (deta hai)...ki ghatnaayein ghatthi rehti hain (promotes terrorism and such incidents keep recurring)," Modi had said on Sunday in his address to Dhaka University during his Bangladesh trip...
...A man is on a soapbox at Hyde Park Corner, London. He is haranguing the crowd with a series of promises prefaced with the phrase “Come the Revolution…” After several promises he says, “Come the Revolution we will all wear shirts and ties.” A voice shouts out, “But I don’t want to wear a shirt and tie.” To which the speaker replies, “Come the Revolution, you will do what you are bloody well told.”
As the very existence of the Senate is called into question over less than $1 million in allegedly improper spending by 30 senators, more than double that number of MPs have been accused over the past five years of mis-spending more than quadruple that amount.
Yet unlike the Senate, there have been no external audits, no suspensions, no referrals to the police, no criminal investigations, no charges laid, and no auditor general poring over the minutiae of how MPs spend taxpayers' dollars.
Transgressions by MPs have been handled solely by the secretive, multi-party board of internal economy, which polices House of Commons spending and typically demands only that the improperly spent funds be reimbursed.
A double standard?
No question, says Garry Clement, a retired police chief and former RCMP superintendent in charge of financial crime investigations.
"When you look at those cases (involving MPs) and actually what happened, it's breach of trust," Clement said in an interview.
"I would suggest that every one of those could be supported under a criminal charge."
Since 2010, the board has demanded reimbursement from:
- Liberal MP Judy Sgro, $60,000 in improperly claimed living expenses for renting an Ottawa condo she had sold to her children.
- Liberal MP Wayne Easter, $8,050 in living expenses claimed for a property he no longer owned.
- Former Liberal MP John Cannis, $106,842 for living expenses claimed for an apartment rented from his wife.
- 68 current and former NDP MPs, $2.7 million for allegedly improperly using their Commons budgets to pay the salaries of staffers in satellite party offices.
- 23 NDP MPs, $1.17 million for allegedly improperly using free parliamentary mailing privileges to send almost 2 million partisan missives....
...Who are the Jordanians? Until the second decade of the 20th century there had never been a Jordanian people, ethnic group or tribe by that name, or a group of diasporic exiles who thought of themselves as “Jordanian.” Jordan is a 20th-century British invention, dreamed up in the 1920s, for the peoples living in what Britain illegally hived off from the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1923. Until 1946 its British administrators called it just that — Eastern Palestine.
No one reads the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine document anymore. But according to international law, it is still valid. It is the legal basis for the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. Its provisions still stand, because all of the legal pronouncements of the League were subsequently recognized as binding, when the United Nations was created after the Second World War.
In 1923 the British arbitrarily violated the Mandate, morally and legally, by creating the “Emirate of Jordan” in Eastern Palestine. The British announced that this was a “temporary” measure, which they quietly and quickly made “permanent.” Jews were no longer allowed to live there.
The name, the “Hashemite” Kingdom of Jordan, makes reference to the fact that its ruling tribe, the Hashemis, were imported by the British from outside of Jordan in the Hejaz (what is now western Saudi Arabia). The Hashemis rule Jordan today as the Saudis do Arabia, claiming the name of the country by right of tribal conquest and occupation, but in their case with the connivance of the British, who unilaterally lopped off 70 per cent of mandated Palestine, and gave it to them as their compensation for their tribal revolt against the Turks during the First World War.
In order to give this new national fiction of Jordan some instant legitimacy, the British creatively mistranslated Arabic titles like “emir” (in those days it meant an often non-hereditary, elected Bedouin tribal leader) and “sharif,” and called these men “kings,” giving them a kind of faux-royal aura. In fact, the Hashemis were and continue to be a usurping Bedouin tribal elite in Eastern Palestine....
President Obama and his administration continue to support the global Islamist militant group known the Muslim Brotherhood. A White House strategy document regards the group as a moderate alternative to more violent Islamist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
The policy of backing the Muslim Brotherhood is outlined in a secret directive called Presidential Study Directive-11, or PSD-11. The directive was produced in 2011 and outlines administration support for political reform in the Middle East and North Africa, according to officials familiar with the classified study.
Efforts to force the administration to release the directive or portions of it under the Freedom of Information Act have been unsuccessful.
White House National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan declined to comment on PSD-11. “We have nothing for you on this,” she said.
The directive outlines why the administration has chosen the Muslim Brotherhood, which last year was labeled a terrorist organization by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates as a key vehicle of U.S. backing for so-called political reform in the Middle East...
...“Media and Reconciliation” starts with a brief description of the role the CBC has played in promoting aboriginal language and culture. It could be meta-summarized in one word: “Feh.” The Broadcasting Act requires the Corporation to “create programming that reflects the aboriginal cultures of Canada” — but only, the Act adds, “as resources become available for the purpose.” The result, combined with the relative stagnation of the CBC’s overall budget during the Chrétien-Martin-Harper years, has been what the report calls “a minimum level” of service. The Corporation creates little aboriginal-specific programming and directly employs few aboriginal Canadians.
There’s good news, though! We have an independent aboriginal-run public broadcast apparatus — the Aboriginal People’s Television Network. Which was basically founded to make up for the failure of the CBC to meet its half-hearted afterthought of an aboriginal mandate.
We all know that APTN has a weird business model in which it monetizes its legally mandated cable carriage by airing a certain amount of dubiously “aboriginal” programming. (Airing Friday night: direct from Hollywood, Kevin Reynolds’ Rapa Nui.) This approach gives APTN a budget that is still a minuscule fraction of the CBC’s. But that money has been used to create viable career paths for aboriginal creatives, technicians, and producers; to make programming in threatened aboriginal languages; and to fund aboriginal news reporting, documentaries, and shows for children and youth. Seventy five per cent of APTN’s employees are aboriginal.
...The hope is that the Corporation, out of the goodness of its thrumming white heart, will use the cash to create more opportunities for aboriginal broadcasters. Meanwhile, APTN gets a cheerful pat on the back: it is urged to continue providing “leadership” in making First Nations television, with no mention of any possible adjustment to its budget.
Am I crazy, or does this seem like an example of the settler-vs.-colonized mentality that facilitated the creation of the residential schools in the first place? For some months before the TRC report came out, I had already been asking myself a question: why the hell don’t we just swap APTN’s budget with the CBC’s?...
...One of the supposed benefits of college is being able to connect with a lot of other smart people, and having the chance to interact with experts, artists, musicians, and policymakers who are invited to speak or participate in events on campus. As a student at the University of Michigan, for instance, I was able to meet several fascinating characters, including ‘60s radical Bill Ayers and lolcats founder Ben Huh. I also chatted with Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson and listened to Rep. Ron Paul give an awesome campaign speech. I didn’t like or agree with all of these people, but the experience was deeply enriching, and that’s the entire point of college. That’s what you’re paying for.
How sad, then, that some students’ hostility to new or troubling ideas has comedians (understandably) convinced that campuses aren’t worth their time...
