The @nytimes is being lavished with praise by the virtue-signaling brigade, but there are very basic problems with their Cesar Chavez story…
One of the VERY few details in the two claims of child sex abuse from the early 1970s includes the key use of a 'yoga mat,' but yoga mats were not even a thing until at least 10 years, and possibly 20 years, laterIs it true there weren't things called yoga mats in the 1970s in California? I asked Grok. Answer:
"... in Instagram parodies filmed by her husband. She has appeared in videos as a clueless self-care influencer, sometimes wrapped in a shearling rug, hawking tinctures with names like One Per Scent and Abundance, thanking Mercedes-Benz for ferrying her to ayahuasca ceremonies, and browbeating a pair of 'students' played by naked American Girl dolls marked up with Sharpies."
I'm reading "From "A Daughter of a Warhol Superstar Tells Her Story at Last/After an unruly childhood in the Chelsea Hotel and online fame as a yoga parodist, Alexandra Auder writes an ode to bohemian Manhattan and her singular mother, Viva" (NYT).
1. The lizard's table manners.
3. A drawing of chaos and order.
5. Broadway Barbara can help you get a good night's sleep.
6. Nurse Melissa is back with her Nancy Pelosi lip-synching.
7. Infuse other exercise classes with religion the way yoga classes use Hinduism.
8. "I want to be the Bob Woodward of 'Family Feud' clips. I want to lead a ragtag group of journalists into the Steve Harvey reaction underworld, like that movie 'Spotlight.'"
I've told you my opinion before. Back in 2016, I had a post, "WaPo seems surprised that people regard yoga in school as an Establishment Clause problem":
The headline is: "Ga. parents, offended by the ‘Far East religion’ of yoga, get ‘Namaste’ banned from school."
In my opinion, it's cultural appropriation and otherizing not to perceive that this is religion.
Commenters [at WaPo] pick up the cue and say things like "Georgia hicks object to 'mindfulness.' Why am I not surprised?"/"They opt for 'mindlessness.'"
Wow. Double otherizing.
Watching and waiting for the results from various races throughout the country.#UsNotMe pic.twitter.com/DSuhD0WMh1
— Levi Sanders (@Celentra) March 5, 2020
When told that he seemed less than relaxed, he replied: “I’m not stiff. I do yoga.”
Asked to define himself, he offered, “I am not a Romulan. I am not a Vulcan.” (“Star Trek!” he cried, when his reference was met with a blank stare.)
He tried again. “I am a sentient being,” he said.
All tea, no shade, @RuPaul stole my look. (Wait, did I do that right?)
— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) June 12, 2019
Anyway, honored to be one of the first guests on RuPaul's newest show—the #RuPaulShow—today! Check your local listings for times: https://t.co/xnmte0p3qd pic.twitter.com/jyoNLC7l05
This is amazing. When we talk about ending the school-to-prison pipeline, this is exactly the kind of thoughtful, innovative and commonsense practice to we need to adopt. https://t.co/ilVp4BTfT9
— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) June 11, 2019
“I was seeing white people show up in yoga spaces in racist ways,” says Humpf.... Humpf opened Rainier Beach Yoga in 2014. She says the practice coupled with reflecting on white supremacy’s role in society helped her understand how racism manifests itself internally, including defensiveness, perfectionism and the “white savior complex.” It’s these attitudes, among others, the class seeks to neutralize.That name is strangely similar to my own. And the image of self-purifiers inventing their own pose as the word "oppression" is shouted out at them and worrying about the racism lurking inside their body while proclaiming their conscious mind "woke"... it's just too silly to worry about.
The evening workshops feature Humpf and co-facilitator RW Alves sounding off words such as “oppression” and “liberation” to about a dozen students. The paired participants then physically interpret them, posing to form human sculptures. The exercise is one of many intended to highlight how both body and mind can absorb “the conditioning of whiteness.”...
People attracted to the class are mostly racial-justice-minded white people looking to go beyond an “intellectualized” view of how racism harms everyone, according to student Anne Althauser.
“When this ‘Undoing Whiteness’ yoga class came up, I felt like it answered two cravings of mine — to work through racism and how I hold whiteness in my body, and to bring an anti-racist lens to an appropriated practice that so many of us white folks participate in. If I’m only “woke” in mind but not body, I will only continue playing out harmful, subliminal racist actions unintentionally,” says Althauser, a longtime yoga practitioner....
Cops committed James Polite, 26 of Bedford-Stuyvesant to the psychiatric ward at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn.... The suspect was busted in the same clothes he wore in surveillance video of his vandalism at the historic Union Temple in Prospect Heights. Polite is also suspected of setting a series of small trash fires in and around synagogues in Williamsburg, police sources said.... Cops released a surveillance image of the vandal on Friday. He is described as a black man, about 20 years old, 5-foot-8, 140 pounds with black hair.The words in the graffiti: "Hitler," "Jews better be ready" and "Die Jew rats, we are here!" What makes a 20-year-old black man write that? An immediate decision seems to have been made that he is a person with mental illness.
But while rage-filled anti-Semitic online posts from an account bearing Bowers’s name have drawn considerable attention, his offline life left startlingly little impression on people who met him before the massacre.... The elements of his background that have emerged since the bloodshed at Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27 suggested moments of instability in his early life, including family divorces, moves and ultimately being raised by his grandparents....This morning, a new story is: "Two women were killed when a gunman opened fire in a Florida yoga studio before class members fought back and the attacker killed himself, police said on Saturday" (NYT). I don't know the killer's motivation, but a yoga class is a religious or religion-like ritual (see "Does doing yoga make you a Hindu?" (BBC)).
Much of the rest of Robert Bowers’s life remains a mystery. He attended high school in Baldwin, Pa., but did not graduate. He was not well-known to neighbors, who said he kept a low profile and gave no indication of the racist views he espoused online.
Simmons is associated with two things in the public mind: the drive, grit, and party-hard lifestyle that accompanied the rise of hip-hop, and his newer public idealism involving spirituality, veganism, charity, and progressive politics. But [his 2 accusers] Khalighi and Lumet clearly saw something false, worryingly so, in the narrative Simmons had been peddling. His supposed commitment to the #MeToo movement already was revealed to have its limits when he told the actor Terry Crews to give “a pass” to an agent Crews accused of groping him. Now Simmons joins the growing list of men who have taken high-minded stances in public only to be accused of doing monstrous things in private.AND: Remember something I said last week, when we were talking about the question why so many men have been ruined over sex allegations, but Trump has held his ground. I put out 4 theories at the time, but here's the one that has special relevance in the case of Russell Simmons:
Some Simmons supporters might respond to the allegations against him by saying that he is not the man he was in the ’90s. But even before these women came forward, Simmons cheerfully stood as an example of how publicly performed “consciousness” can fail to extend to matters of the flesh. For a 2012 Forbes profile that touched on his womanizing ways, he said, “It was the last problem for Lord Buddha before enlightenment. I go to the classes, but I’m still looking at asses.” The Los Angeles Times article about Khalighi highlighted a passage in his 2014 book Success Through Stillness that said he’d transcended his former identity as a man “constantly on a mission to make more money, have sex with more women, and snort more coke than the next man.” But, Russell had added, he was “still working on the women part.”
Many of the new targets of allegations are people who had seemed to be male allies of the women's movement, and it's the lying and the hypocrisy that bothers us the most. The accusations against Trump seem only to reinforce what we already saw on the surface of Trump: brash exuberance, wanting plenty of good things for himself, excitement over beautiful women, impoliteness. The new allegations don't take us back to the Trump allegations because Trump wasn't accepted as an ally of feminism. He seems to represent the old school, male chauvinism. That's a different category and not what we're paying attention to right now.
How did she get from day to day? “Chardonnay helped,” she told me.... She also practiced a form of yoga that involves “alternate-nostril breathing.” That someone might leap on her prescription of white wine and yoga as a parody of blue-state self-care is, in her post-candidate life, irrelevant.I'm amused both by alternate-nostril breathing and the way Remnick makes a joke about it (as if he's not the one making the joke).
In Clinton’s view, she could never win with people who had been trained to regard her as a high-minded phony.... Clinton has come to believe that there is an overriding reason that she has aroused such resentment: her gender.... Clinton said that she has learned... that “the more successful a man becomes, the more likable he becomes; the more professionally successful a woman becomes, the less likable she becomes.” Her situation, she said, “was Clinton-specific, plus sexism and misogyny.”...
She castigates Trump for inflaming and giving “permission” to misogynists and racists. “Those attitudes have never gone away,” she told me. “But we had successfully—and this is part of the role of civilization—we had rendered them unacceptable: being an overt racist, being an overt misogynist, saying the terrible things that Trump said about immigrants or Muslims. All of that was not political correctness. It was respect. It was tolerance. It was acceptance. But there was a growing resentment, anger, that came to full flower in this election. . . . The Internet has given voice to, and a home for, so many more people. And so with Trump to light the match, from the first day of his campaign to the last, there was a sense of acceptance, liberation, empowerment for these forces.”
Can singlehood be portrayed as good but only good enough to reduce the number of bad marriages and not good enough to attract the kind of staunch adherents who advocate marriage as a way of life? Is DePaulo's book a nice, reassuring middle-of-the road sort of a thing, designed to take the edge off the predicament of not having a spouse? Or is she really promoting singlehood at the expense of marriage? If she is, you see the problem. That's the basis of my punchline: "The pleasures of singlehood must be kept hush-hush. It's not a legitimate life style, you hear?" I want to be single, and maybe so does DePaulo, but we might live to regret promoting this simple, free, self-indulgent life-style.Whoa! That's really funny, considering the absolutely direct connection between Bella DePaulo's book and my marriage to Meade in the following year.
Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong... Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.Jarrett:
"These are good people. They were aware that their son was gay; they embraced him, they loved him, they supported his lifestyle choice. But when he left the home and went to school, he was tortured by his classmates."
"Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced," and which cultures those practices "are being taken from." The centre official argues since many of those cultures "have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy ... we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga."The Centre's prose is abstruse. The Ottawa Sun, reporting the controversy, offers some plainer English:
The concept of cultural appropriation is normally applied when a dominant culture borrows symbols of a marginalized culture for dubious reasons -- such as the fad of hipsters donning indigenous headdresses as a fashion statement, without any regard to cultural significance or stereotype.Hipsters are donning headdresses? I hadn't noticed that, but fashion does typically grab and decontextualize ideas from other cultures. Have you ever seen the documentary "Unzipped," about the designer Isaac Mizrahi? Here's the scene where he's sitting in bed watching "Nanook of the North" and sketching ideas that end up in his next runway show. He's saying: "These Eskimos are inspiring. I can't even believe how beautiful these Eskimos are. And I love it. All the fur pants.... There's something very charming about a big, fat fur pant."
"People are just looking for a reason to be offended by anything they can find. There's a real divide between reasonable people and those people just looking to jump on a bandwagon. And unfortunately, it ends up with good people getting punished for doing good things."The acting student federation president Romeo Ahimakin said the idea was not a permanent ban but a rethinking of the school's use of yoga "to make it better, more accessible and more inclusive to certain groups of people that feel left out in yoga-like spaces":
"We are trying to have those sessions done in a way in which students are aware of where the spiritual and cultural aspects come from, so that these sessions are done in a respectful manner."That strikes me as a moderate approach, not a ban, but a call for deeper reflection about something that is, in its origin, deep and that has been made shallow for the purposes of consumption by health-minded young people in stretch pants. A university should be a place of learning and a search for greater understanding. There is something wrong with presenting yoga as fun, lightweight, stress relief.
Leaders say the practice of “surya namaskar” or sun salutation–a series of poses–goes against Shariah or Islamic law, which doesn’t allow Muslims to bend before anyone other than Allah, or God.
“We don’t believe in praying to the sun,” said Mohammad Abdul Rahim Quraishi, spokesman for Lucknow-based All India Muslim Personal Law Board....
India’s ruling Bharaitya Janata Party says yoga is a secular activity. Yoga “is a science that deals with the well-being of the human mind and body,” said BJP spokesman Nalin Kohli. “There is no religious angle to this at all.”
पोस्ट्स
