Every fall, the long-running satirical show Saturday Night Live introduces new cast members. It is considered a huge boost to the career of young comedians to get a slot on this show because many have gone onto highly successful careers later. But this year, the introduction of three new members ran into trouble when it was discovered that one of them, Shane Gillis, had made racist, homophobic, and misogynist jokes.
[Read more…]
Will Happer has resigned as a member of the Trump administration’s National Security Council. Since Trump never got around to filling the position of Science Advisor to the president, Happer tried to play that role. Happer is one of those physicists who seems to think he is an expert on many things and even though he is not a climate scientist, he was a fierce climate change denialist and had a plan to thwart the scientific consensus on the causes and dangers of global warming by following the playbook that had been adopted by earlier generations of industry-funded skeptics on things like the dangers of smoking, and that was to sow doubt on the scientific consensus.
[Read more…]
Today came news that Cokie Roberts, was a major player at NPR and ABC as a political commentator, has died. I do not celebrate her death but found her to be utterly tiresome and am dreading the deluge of appreciations of her as some kind of wise and sagacious analyst. As far as I could see, her analyses consisted almost invariably of conventional wisdom or quoting poll results. I cannot recall a single original idea or compelling insight to come from her. Eric Alterman described her best: “With no discernible politics save an attachment to her class, no reporting and frequently no clue . . . a perpetual font of Beltway conventional wisdom uncomplicated by any collision with messy reality.”
[Read more…]
So in Pakistan, mobs of Muslim religious fanatics attack non-Muslims for blasphemy and while in India mobs of Hindu religious fanatics attack non-Hindus for killing cows.
Why can’t the fanatics of each of these religions in each of the two nations see that what they do is exactly what results in their co-religionists on the other country getting attacked? Why not declare a truce so that their co-religionists in the other country do not suffer because of religious fanaticism. That would truly be a win-win.
Oh, I forgot. That would imply that these mobs are open to logic and reason, and religious fanatics are anything but.
We know that serial abusers who are prominent people must have had a large cadre of enablers who either assisted them or looked away and did not raise any alarms. University of Oregon law professor Elizabeth Tippett discusses a new book She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story, and focuses on what the book says about all the lawyers who assisted and enabled him to get away with all the awful things he did.
[Read more…]
I know that watching Bill Maher these days is grating on the nerves but in this heated exchange, Michael Moore brought Maher’s predatory capitalistic sympathies to the surface. It is clear that Maher has become (maybe he always was) a grumpy, get-off-my-lawn, crank who thinks he is progressive and edgy because he smokes pot. But he essentially pulls out all the tired old centrist bromides that are much favored by the Democratic party establishment because it enables a few people to be rich like him while still feeling smug about the few crumbs they throw to the rest.
The bet at the end? Moore won it.
The attack on the Aramco oil processing plant in Saudi Arabia that has disrupted about 5% of the global oil supply has heightened tension. The Houthi group in Yemen that has been waging a war against the Saudi –backed government in Yemen has claimed reswponsibility.
Of course the US and Donald Trump have immediately blamed Iran for the attack, although interestingly Saudi Arabia has not as yet laid the blame anywhere. Iran is backing the Houthi rebels but deny that they were responsible.
[Read more…]
Thanks to a comment by John Morales, I read this article by Kelsey Piper that looks at a possible justification given by MIT for why they went to such lengths to keep the money they got from sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein secret. It is an argument I had not heard before.
The obvious question: What on earth were they thinking? The MIT Media Lab — an interdisciplinary research center affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — was well regarded, well funded, had great publicity, and was attached to one of the world’s best universities. Why would they risk it all to attract donations from someone like Epstein? And how could people write emails like the ones revealed in the New Yorker piece — “jeffrey money, needs to be anonymous” — without realizing they were on the path to disaster?
On Sunday, we got a partial answer via an essay by Larry Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He knew all along that the MIT Media Lab was taking Epstein’s money, he said. He thought it was the right thing to do. So, he says, did the team at the Media Lab.
Their justification is simple: If someone is a bad person, taking their anonymous donations is actually the best thing you can do. The money gets put to a better use, and they don’t get to accumulate prestige or connections from the donation because the public wouldn’t know about it.
This argument isn’t that eccentric. Within philanthropy, it has been seriously raised as a reasonable answer to the challenging question of how organizations should deal with donations from bad actors.
When one government does something that displeases another, the latter government usually publicly signals its displeasure by announcing that it had ‘summoned for consultation the ambassador’ of the former country. This is a staple of reporting of international relations and gives the impression that the ambassador is given a stern talking to and is sent away with their tail between their legs.
But this article says that the whole thing is political theater.
In August 2015, three journalists from the al-Jazeera network were sentenced to jail in Egypt for “spreading false news”. Outside court, [UK ambassador John] Casson spoke on Egyptian television in Arabic to condemn the sentence.
Soon after, Egypt’s foreign ministry said it had summoned him to attend its offices. In doing so, it used one of the few diplomatic tools a host country has when it wants to make its anger felt to another country.
“I was called by the foreign ministry and was told ‘We need to see you immediately,'” Mr Casson tells the BBC. “The first thing they said was, ‘We are not summoning you, but we are going to tell the press we are summoning you. If it had been a summoning, we would have sent a formal diplomatic note summoning you.'”
This is the way things normally work in a summoning – a formal, polite, diplomatic note is sent to the relevant country’s embassy asking – but not really demanding – its representative to attend a meeting at the foreign ministry, or its equivalent. The medium of the summoning is the message, Mr Casson says.
“The main thing is that it is a piece of diplomatic theatre and everybody understands their role, and acts their role,” Mr Casson, who was in Cairo between 2014 and 2018, says. In London, the drama can involve being made to wait in the grand surroundings of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to understand the seriousness of the occasion.
Strange are the ways of diplomacy.
As the UK prime minister Boris Johnson pushes for a no-deal Brexit will lying about making progress at arriving at a deal with the EU, he has one thing going for him. Given how hellishly complicated the Brexit negotiations have been, the public may have the belief that the no-deal option is at least simple. You just walk away and wash your hands of the whole business.
But that is not true. No-deal does not mean no complications after the split.
Johnson’s latest rhetorical fancy – that, like the Incredible Hulk, the UK would break out of its “manacles” on 31 October – has further fuelled EU scepticism about his sincerity.
Describing the language as “not very surprising”, the EU source said: “It all makes it look like it’s a bit of a joke. We are talking about something extremely serious. The consequences of no deal will be extremely serious and it looks like this is being treated as a game in which you are the hero sort of story rather than [dealing] with real lives.”
Juncker said a no-deal Brexit would be a mess and take years to resolve. Speaking to Deutschlandfunk, he said patriots in the UK “would not wish your country such a fate”.
In fact, the government official who was closely involved with Brexit planning says things are going to take a long time to sort out.
[Read more…]