And oh, was “The Bachelor” amusing, while being flagrantly problematic. Everyone was young and attractive. Almost everyone was white. There were bad boys and mean girls; studs and sluts. Insults were flung. Grammar was shredded (I still cringe at the memory of every “hers and my’s relationship” I heard over the years). I live-tweeted the whole thing, along with a gleeful community of other hate-watchers who’d call out the show’s icky sexual politics and double standards, then hold our breath at the proposal point, and weep along with the winners.Oh, so she was hate-watching all along. She never liked the show. She liked hating it. Now, it begins to make sense. She's lost the feeling of superiority, the sense that her people are running the culture, that makes it fun to rag on the show.
[I]n a post-Trump world, it doesn’t feel entertaining. Or maybe it’s that I don’t think I can allow myself the luxury of escape...I don't want to be too pedantic, but Weiner suggests that pedantry is good fun, so I just want to say that yours and my's world is not yet "post-Trump."
“This was a great surprise,” said Dietrich Raue, a director of a team of German and Egyptian archaeologists who have been excavating a vast temple complex at the site since 2012. “We had to clear the area before any future construction work and because the monuments are below the level of the groundwater. The quality of the stone is fantastic, and it has an amazing art historical value.”...
Establishing the identity of the colossus is complicated because it has been broken into pieces and only fragments of the face have been found. Dr. Raue said it might have been destroyed by early Christians, or by the Muslim rulers of Cairo in the 11th century as they used limestone stonework from ancient temples to build the city’s fortifications.
But statues like the colossus were cast aside because they were made from quartzite....
Lately, she wears her hair in a light-brown shag, which she got after bringing a photo of Jane Fonda’s Klute cut to her stylist.Yeah, I too got hair-inspired by Jane Fonda in Klute...
“There is this sense that if Trump got it, why shouldn’t they?” said David Gergen, co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and an adviser to four presidents. “They’ve been more successful, they have more experience, and they’ve run a public company, which is more equivalent to what a president does than a private company” like the Trump Organization.
Stu Loeser, once the press secretary for Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who considered a presidential run last year, concurred. “If you run a company that has employed tens of thousands of people, and generated lots of profit and been undeniably successful, and you look at a sitting president who, to be honest, a lot of business people don’t have much respect for, you think, why not me?” he said.
• Resist what? She certainly can't be talking to American women. There's nothing to resist here....
• Resist what??!!!
• Resist what? Obeying the laws?
• Yeah right, 'resist' but she couldn't 'resist' that 250 million dollar donation from S.audi A.rabia who has to be THE most women abusing country on the planet.
• Resist what?
Many saw the episode as a sign of Lee’s dedication to her work. She was photographed arriving three hours before the scheduled reading of the verdict.
Some women also found it humbling that one of the highest judges in the country does her own hair instead of hiring a stylist even on such an important day.To be fair, the ousted president — Park Geun-hye — is also female. Here's an article about why she was removed.
“Any woman who does her hair on her own has an experience like that at least once,” one tweet said.
Some compared it to the impeached president who prosecutors say summoned her hair stylist to her office several hours after a ferry sank in 2014, killing hundreds of teenagers. Park’s first appearance after the sinking was at an emergency meeting; her hair was near-perfect. One of the contentious issues in the case before the Constitutional Court was whether Park fulfilled her duty as president on the day of the Sewol tragedy.
“It was such an obvious case that there was no room for the court to rule other than impeaching the president,” said Kim Seon-taek, a professor of constitutional law at Korea University.That is to say, there was no possible positive interpretation to be placed on what Park had done.
The Fremont culture or Fremont people is a pre-Columbian archaeological culture which received its name from the Fremont River in the U.S. state of Utah where the first Fremont sites were discovered.... It inhabited sites in what is now Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho and Colorado from AD 1 to 1300 (2,000-700 years ago)....
Scholars did not agree that the Fremont culture represents a single, cohesive group with a common language, ancestry, or lifeway, but several aspects of their material culture suggests they might be a single ethnic group. First, Fremont culture people foraged wild food sources and grew corn.... [They made] gray ware pottery and a signature style of basketry and rock art. Most of the Fremont lived in small single and extended family units comprising villages ranging from two to a dozen pithouse structures, with only a few having been occupied at any one time....
Hundreds of toxic wild boars have been roaming across northern Japan....
Officials have also expressed concern that returning residents may be attacked by the animals, some of which have settled comfortably in abandoned homes and have reportedly lost their shyness to humans.
“It’s important to set up an environment that will make it tough for the boars to live in,” an official told the Yomiuri daily.
It is the largest exposed monocline in North America. In this fold, newer and older layers of earth folded over each other in an S-shape. This warp, probably caused by the same colliding continental plates that created the Rocky Mountains, has weathered and eroded over millennia to expose layers of rock and fossils. The park is filled with brilliantly colored sandstone cliffs, gleaming white domes, and contrasting layers of stone and earth.
The area was named for a line of white domes and cliffs of Navajo Sandstone, each of which looks somewhat like the United States Capitol building, that run from the Fremont River to Pleasant Creek on the Waterpocket Fold.
"I was suffering from depression at the time," Bass told Judge Elizabeth Pollard Hines. "I made a superficial scratch on my face. It was visible and I was embarrassed about what I'd done. So I made up a story and told a friend that a stranger had done it while I was walking. I was encouraged to report it to the police. I made the mistake of doing that."
At the time, Bass claimed her attack was part of the surge in hate crimes following the election of Donald Trump a week earlier. She told police she was targeted for wearing a solidarity pin connected to Great Britain's "Brexit" vote.
Cook County prosecutors dropped the murder charges at the end of January after allowing too much time to elapse under the state’s speedy trial statute, according to court records and Belmont’s attorney. The robbery charges remained and [Kamari Belmont, 23] was ordered held on a $100,000 bond.Time — too long and too short.
At 5:30 p.m. Monday, a friend of Belmont posted the required $10,000 on the bond and Belmont was released at 11:12 p.m., according to jail officials.
Belmont was a few block from the jail when a white SUV pulled up to his car on California Avenue and someone inside started shooting, police said. Belmont was hit several times....
The CIA has built a capability to hack pretty much anything, anywhere. It turns out that they, potentially, have more ability to intrude into servers, computers, smartphones and electronic communications than even the NSA.
This capability is now in the hands of people other than the CIA.
All the things you’ve read, that seem like science fiction movie plots, are really true. Other people can listen to you via your smart TV, can read your email, turn on the webcam on your laptop, without you ever knowing.
The organizers of the massive post-inauguration women’s marches have called on female workers to stay home Wednesday, raising concerns among some supporters of the burgeoning feminist movement that the burden of the protest will fall too heavily on the poor.....So... with today's strike, people are doing it only where they are not risking their jobs, where they are already privileged. Where's the leverage for the "big wins"? But it makes the news, even as it is kept comfortable.
To make it more inclusive, organizers are urging women to take the day off only if they feel they can....
Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington, said the strike also is a way to continue the momentum from the marches....
“The idea of the strike — it’s another strategy,” Sarsour said. “It was not going to be comfortable for everyone.”
Historically, the people at the forefront of labor strikes have not been from among the most privileged, she said, citing hourly-pay workers who have fought to raise the minimum wage and farmworkers who have left the fields to advocate for worker protections.
“They risked their jobs, and they had big wins,” Sarsour said.
[H]e’s a great lesson — for the left as well as the right — that sensitivity is a function of sensibility, not merely of complexion or membership in a given identity group.
A black person can bumble into racially hurtful comments....
Based on the conversations after the performances, it sounded like audience members had their beliefs rattled in a similar way. What were some themes that emerged from their responses?I'd like to see video of the complete performance, but there is this clip from a rehearsal:
We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”—meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” Another—a musical theater composer, actually—said that Trump created “hummable lyrics,” while Clinton talked a lot, and everything she was was true and factual, but there was no “hook” to it. Another theme was about not liking either candidate—you know, “I wouldn’t vote for either one.” Someone said that Jonathan Gordon [the male Hillary Clinton] was “really punchable” because of all the smiling. And a lot of people were just very surprised by the way it upended their expectations about what they thought they would feel or experience. There was someone who described Brenda King [the female Donald Trump] as his Jewish aunt who would take care of him, even though he might not like his aunt. Someone else described her as the middle school principal who you don’t like, but you know is doing good things for you.
"And the concept offers tailor-made mobility for everyone: adults and children, retirees and people with physical disabilities, city people who do not have their own car or a driving license, and visitors in a new city and suddenly decide they want to get from A to B in a convenient mobility setting."So much better than trains.
The sitting president has accused his predecessor of an act that could have gotten the past president impeached. That’s not your ordinary exercise of free speech....But impeachment is not available as a solution to excessive innuendo.
In a rule of law society, government allegations of criminal activity must be followed by proof and prosecution. If not, the government is ruling by innuendo....
Breaking the law by tapping Trump’s phones would have been an abuse of executive power that implicated the democratic process itself. Impeachment is the remedy for such a serious abuse of the executive office....Why would that make impeachment the right remedy for saying that Obama did it?
The Constitution speaks of impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”... Suffice it to say that what makes crimes “high” is that they pertain to the exercise of government office. That’s exactly what accusations by the executive are: actions that take on their distinctive meaning because they are made by government officials....So the power available to be used against the President must equal the President's power? We need symmetry, an equal-playing-field fight? If that's the theory, we won't have a presidency anymore. The fact that seems to escape Feldman is that Trump was elected President. THAT was the procedure. The trust was put in him.
Obama is the best-known and most popular Democrat in the country. The effect of attacking him isn’t just to weaken him personally, but to weaken the political opposition to Trump’s administration.
Given how great the executive’s power is, accusations by the president can’t be treated asymmetrically. If the alleged action would be impeachable if true, so must be the allegation if false. Anything else would give the president the power to distort democracy by calling his opponents criminals without ever having to prove it.
Among other disclosures that, if confirmed, would rock the technology world, the WikiLeaks release said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”...
WikiLeaks said the source, in a statement, set out policy questions that “urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the C.I.A.’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency.” The source, the group said, “wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”
"Remember Hungry Man?"AND: Meade texted me one of his photographs. The dark blue line shows the progress of the sun hitting the mountain across the valley:
"Oh, God, yes!"
"Feminism is about giving women choice. Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with. It’s about freedom, it’s about liberation, it’s about equality. I really don’t know what my tits have to do with it. It’s very confusing.... I’m confused. Most people are confused. No, I’m just always just quietly stunned."Parts of that are not banal. I like "Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with." And the banal part is actually good. It's just so good we shouldn't have to keep saying it. I blame the haters for the banality.
According to [the NYT report "Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones"], a Trump official said that White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II is “working to secure access” to what is believed to be “an order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing some form of surveillance related to Mr. Trump and his associates.” Presumably, this means the Trump White House is seeking to review the Justice Department’s applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance of Trump associates, and perhaps Trump himself, from June and October 2016, including any orders issued by the FISA court – as my post explains, it has been reported that the Obama Justice Department’s June application was denied, but its October application (which apparently did not name Trump) was granted.The NYT report makes assertions about the law — "Any request for information from a top White House official about a continuing investigation would be a stunning departure from protocols intended to insulate the F.B.I. from political pressure" — that McCarthy debunks. McCarthy is adamant:
[A] FISA investigation is not a “law-enforcement matter” or “case.” A law-enforcement matter is a criminal prosecution. That is the mission in which there should never be any political interference because it involves the strictly legal matter of whether there is evidence that penal statutes have been violated. In such a situation, White House intrusion would be political interference in a proceeding that is essentially judicial in nature, involving the potential removal of liberty from a citizen.McCarthy has great expertise in this area and the NYT should be powerfully embarrassed to botch things this badly — whether the mistakes are from ignorance or from a deliberate attempt to deceive. I'm not an expert in this area, so maybe McCarthy is wrong and the NYT is right. The NYT had better scramble to explain itself if it's right or come clean if it's wrong.
“President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said in the statement.
Mr. Spicer, who repeated the entire statement in a series of Twitter messages, added that “neither the White House nor the president will comment further until such oversight is conducted.”
Posts
