In watching an earlier Democratic debate, I mentioned how surprised I was to see an ad featuring Ron Reagan, former president Reagan’s son, on behalf of the Freedom From Religion Foundation that argued for the separation of church and state. He began by describing himself as an “unabashed atheist” and ended with him declaring himself to be a ” lifelong atheist, not afraid of burning in hell.”
This is going to be one hell of a year in the US as we have deranged, narcissistic, vain, lying, cruel, mean, insecure, xenophobic, sexist, transphobic, racist, petty, (did I miss any descriptor?) person running for re-election as president, solidly backed by a Republican party filled with sycophants who abjectly grovel before him, evangelical Christians who have given up on all their principles, and wealthy people who care more about increasing their already massive share of the wealth than doing anything of value with it.
It is going to be a really ugly year.
My wish for everyone is that we manage to stay sane during this tumultuous year and that it ends with us replacing this sociopath in the White House with Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or, failing that, with a halfway decent person who cares at least a little for those who are at the bottom of the economic and social ladder.
Chelsea Manning is currently being held in prison since May 16 for refusing to testify to a grand jury against WikiLeaks and her treatment amounts to torture, according to the UN’s special rapporteur on torture.
In the missive, [Nils] Melzer says Manning is being subjected to “an open-ended, progressively severe measure of coercion fulfilling all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.
Manning, who was detained on 16 May after refusing to testify before a grand jury, is currently being held at the Alexandria detention center in Virginia until she agrees to give evidence or until the grand jury’s term expires in November next year. She also faces fines currently running at $1,000 a day.
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This is the time of year when we get bombarded with ‘best of’ and ‘worst of’ lists, increased by the fact that it could be for the year or for the decade. The only lists I pay attention to are of films by critics I respect to get tips on what might be worth watching.
This list of Things We Hope Will Die in 2020 is a little more interesting but the item that really jumped out at me and I wholeheartedly agree with is the suggestion by Jacob Rosenberg.
Malcolm Gladwell’s career: Let’s thinslice: Malcom Gladwell needs to stop writing. Gladwell’s theories are wrong (stop and frisk) or obvious (1,000 hours) or dumb (talking to strangers is the problem with everything). He made his bones at a time when glib, crypto-conservative contrarianism was the reigning media ethos. Today, the shtick has been worn so smooth as to be transparent. Flip through his latest book and you’ll find an easy-pass treatment of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State and a determinedly apolitical reading of the death of Sandra Bland—two cases of institutional pathologies that Gladwell turns into parables about a quirk in human nature. Powerful people thus get excused for their mistakes, under the guise of Gladwell’s interrogating some orthodoxy or another. You don’t need to be a bestselling author of pop-science airport books to come up with a word for this stuff: bullshit.
I have long been mystified by Gladwell’s popularity.
After watching the inscrutable film The Lobster, I decided I needed a break from high-brow art films and so decided to watch films that just entertained and did not tax the mind. And for that purpose, I have been on my own personal Cary Grant film festival. I first watched That Touch of Mink (1962) that co-starred Doris Day, then Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) co-starring Grace Kelly, then my favorite Charade (1963) with Audrey Hepburn. Next in my queue if I can find them are Indiscreet (1958) with Ingrid Bergman and The Grass is Greener (1961) with Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum, and Jean Simmons.
Grant almost always plays a suave, witty, sophisticate. These old romantic and/or suspense comedies all provide the promise of being very pleasant and unchallenging. You can be sure that everything will end happily and that they will never take a sudden dark turn, though one false note that one should be prepared for is the casual male chauvinism on display that was taken for granted in those days but now strikes the viewer as jarring.
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When members of the Jewish community are attacked because they are Jewish, one immediately thinks that the attacker will be found to be a white man motivated by neo-Nazi ideology because it is such groups that have seen a recent resurgence in the US. And that usually does turn out to be the case. But two events recently have disturbed that pattern because they were committed by black men with unclear motives
Just two days ago an attacker entered the home of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi in Monsey, New York during a Hanukkah dinner and viciously attacked everyone present with a machete before running away. He was later captured in Harlem, covered in blood. He is suspected to have a history of mental problems
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Last week I favorably reviewed the Brazilian comedy The First Temptation of Christ that has drawn protests from Christian groups because of its suggestion that Jesus may have been gay. Now the protests have spawned violent offshoots that have attacked the filmmakers’ offices with firebombs.
Police are investigating a fire-bomb attack on the Rio de Janeiro office of a production company behind a controversial Christmas special aired on streaming service Netflix.
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Jaime Hoffman, the athletic director of the liberal arts Occidental College, had a meeting with college’s general counsel, head athletic trainer, head football coach, and president and decided that because of the declining enrollment in their football program that resulted in too few eligible players to fully field a team and the danger that injuries posed to their smaller and more inexperienced players, that they cancel the remaining games of the season
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Those who recall the first Superman film starring Christopher Reeve will I am sure remember the scene where he is heartbroken that he could not arrive in time to save Lois Lane from death when she falls into a crevasse, if I recall correctly. So what does he do? He flies around the world at high speed in a direction opposite to the Earth’s rotation and by doing so he reverses the flow of time so that events go backwards and Lois emerges from the depths and he can rescue her. This was laugh-out-loud funny bad science.
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