I would SO watch this movie

I'm wondering just how convoluted the theory is connecting these four stories...

What they missed

The brilliant Alexandra Petri writes a column covering what the kids missed in school when they walked out.

("I have seen a number of Sage Folks on the Internet complaining that students across the nation walked out Wednesday to protest gun violence instead of remaining in class and learning important things. How dare they! Don’t worry: I have you covered for the 17 minutes of walkout, and beyond. Here is what you missed. ")

Here's what they missed if it was their period for American History:

U.S. HISTORY
The people on the Internet think you would have been discussing the Second Amendment today, but if it has taken you until March to get to the Second Amendment, something is very wrong in your class. You are supposed to be on America’s role in World War II, but you are a little behind, and so today Mr. Z is discussing the bonus marchers. You will erroneously learn about a time when people who believed in something showed up in a certain place and made their demands known. This is not how it works in real life, adults will tell you.

(Source link)

Nice layout choice. I mean it.

Nice juxtaposition, isn't it? Good work by the layout guys.

Story 1 is about how "Major utilities have found evidence of ground-water contamination at coal-burning power plants across the US where landfills and man-made ponds have been used for decades as dumping grounds for coal ash" and story 2 is about "The Trump administration ... roll [ing] back regulations ... over how utilities dispose of the ash".

Clearly what we need is less Federal oversight.



(Here are links: Story 1 and Story 2.)

James Baldwin at Cambridge, 1965

I can't figure how to put the video itself here. But go watch it, it's short and it's powerful.  

The Guardian says: "At the start of Black History Month, we take a look at a seminal speech by writer, essayist, poet and civil rights activist, James Baldwin. Attending Cambridge University Union in 1965, Baldwin debates whether the ‘American dream’ has been achieved at the expense of African-Americans."

I add, take a look at 1:20 - William F Buckley doesn't like what he's hearing, at all.

Nice try but no

One might have a good discussion about just which vowel is in Pyeongchang's first syllable, though most sources agree it's /ʌ/ (the vowel in 'mud').  But I believe we can all agree that this is just plain wrong, and weird, especially given their transcription of 'taekwondo' later in the article. And what happened to the NG, /ŋ/? Usually it's /pʰjʌŋtɕʰaŋ/ or /ˌpjʌŋˈtʃæŋ/), NG in both syllables. This is just weird.

New trend in Hollywood?

I saw two movies last week, one on Friday and one on Saturday, that both did the same thing: adding a black actor to an otherwise white cast - and making him the villain.

The details vary, of course. As is well known, Tim Burton cast Samuel L. Jackson as the over-the-top villain Baron, while keeping all the other characters white. Even in Florida we don't see a black person anywhere. All the children are white, though it would have been trivially easy to make one of them West Indian or India Indian at the least. Burton is famously on the record about being offended by adding black characters to white-sourced books or tv shows (though "fidelity to the source" isn't a Burton characteristic). But somehow he has no problem changing a white villain to a black one. hmmm.  

Inferno goes a different route. Its lone black actor plays a villain who wasn't even in the book at all, not just as a white man. And I find it very odd that the blatantly unnamed provost (described in the book as "a tiny, stunted man with tanned skin and deep-set eyes") not only gets a name in the movie (and is never called "the provost") - a very English name, too, Harry Sims and is played by Irrfan Khan.

Are film studios going to respond to the call for more POC in movies by making them all villains? Not so sure that's progress.

"Of" and Nouns

"Of" is a prepo- sition that most often shows a relation- ship of owner- ship or partitive or com- position. Generally the noun following "of" controls the other one. That's what makes this gist/summary/tease so problematic.

"The attack of four Dalits" pretty much has to mean that the dalits did the attacking. Instead, they were the victims.

The writer needed to say "attack on four Dalits".

Daughter, Wife, Mother

Remember all the commotion during the Olympics, when women athletes kept getting identified as "Chicago Bear's wife" and having their accomplishments credited to men? Wouldn't you think people would have learned?

Well, not the Washington Post, who cheerfully gives us a story called: Tom Waits, his wife, John Prine receive songwriting awards.

Seriously?

All Are People

I've seen a number of posts, comments, and even articles saying that it shouldn't matter that the people at Pulse were gay. We shouldn't divide ourselves up. It was, in the words of Mark Longhurst on Sky TV, a crime against “human beings” who were “ trying to enjoy themselves, whatever their sexuality."

This sentiment may be a wonderful one. BUT. This is not the time to trot it out (and that goes a hundredfold for people who have nothing but hate for LBGT people in their daily lives and politics).

When Marc Lépine walked into the École Polytechnique in Montreal and killed fourteen women, twelve of whom were engineering students, he wasn't killing "people" or even "people who were studying engineering". He was deliberately killing women.

When Dylan Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and killed nine black church-goers, he wasn't killing "people" or even "people who were Christians". He was deliberately killing blacks.

And when Omar Mateen walked into Pulse in Orlando, he wasn't killing "people" or even "people who go to clubs." He was killing LGBTs.

As soon as we say that the victims of a crime shouldn't be described as what they are that made them the target, we are begging off from confronting what it is that our society does to make people into misogynists, racists, or homophobes. Also, we remove our ability to understand what just happened. Julia Hartley-Brewer, another panelist on the Sky show, said that the killer probably hated her, “a gobby woman”, as much as he did gays. Maybe. Maybe he did; he seems to have also hated Jews and blacks. But dammit, he didn't walk into a Curves and start shooting, just like he didn't walk into a bar in his own town of Port St Lucie, or a black club or a synagogue. He walked into Pulse. Maybe he did it because he knew Pulse and knew who would be there; maybe he did it because he might not be noticed for a while (Port St Lucie has gay bars). The point is: of all the groups he hated, it was gays he decided to kill.

And pretending that he didn't target gays, or that Lépine didn't target women, or that Elliot Rodger didn't hate women and the men who "got lucky with them", means we're just saying that oh, gosh, crazy people kill people and what are we going to do about it.

Omar Mateen didn't kill "people". Omar Mateen killed gay people. It's important to acknowledge that.


ps - people's reactions to Owen Jones's argument and actions on that video are illuminating, I think.

Raising obliviousness to an art form

Forbes has an article about ten ways to know the company you're interviewing with is a bad place to work.

As is common with such listicles, every reason is its own page. Eleven pages in all, serving up a heaping helping of ads all over the sides. But the really remarkable thing?

Every page has a picture of earnest young corporate worker bees. And every single person in every single picture is white.

Vapidity

I went down to the cafeteria (I don't like getting up earlier than I already do to cook and eat at home) in time to see Breaking News on CNN. Here it is:

The US may know the name of the fugitive airport bomber. (The one in the hat).

Now you know all there is to know.

But CNN chose to treat this like *actual* news, meaning 5 minutes of various sets of people standing around in various places all saying some version of "the US may know the name" "oh that would be helpful" "it's not surprising" "the US may know the name". All utterly without content or added value. And they may still be at it, since I am no longer there.

Honestly. I know they're constantly scraping for ways to fill up the 24-hour-cycle, but this?

(And it's hardly new. Perhaps I'm just grumpy since I haven't had much coffee yet.)

Ahahahahahaha

"So they’re both factually wrong and ridiculous in their conclusions. That’s why it’s on Fox News."

From Ed at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Priorities

Yes, by all means, let's talk about Uber as the key subject in the Kalamazoo shooting spree story. After all, he was murdering his passengers. ... Oh, wait.

In fact, apparently there wasn't anything Uber would have found out if they had vetted him. So perhaps Uber's admittedly horrible business model isn't where we should be focusing? Maybe?

Hyphens, people, please

The headline reads U.S. Supported Shia Militias in Iraq Lead Ethnic Cleansing.

What?

When I hit "lead" I thought it was a typo for "led", with a missing hyphen, then I realized that what was wrong was the missing hyphen in "U.S.-Supported".

Punctuation isn't grammar, but it IS cohesion. There's a big difference between "U.S. supported Shia militia" and "U.S.-supported Shia militia."

Now = 600 years ago

The local paper ran this "guest column" today, What do YOU know about the nativity? by Kent Bush. He makes possibly the most awkward pop culture reference I'll see this week:

They cast the rebellious storm trooper in “The Force Awakens” as a black man and now there is a black man in the nativity scene. Is this just more liberal political correctness run amok?

I mean, first ... "now"? "Now there is a black man in the nativity scene"?

At least he tacitly acknowledges later in the piece that "now" would be a stupid, bigoted, right-wing overreaction. Tacitly. He says

Fortunately, no one from either party will have to modify their manger scenes.

and adds

The black wise man became a part of folklore in the 1400s.

Exactly.

There have been black people around for quite a while, even if YOU haven't had to acknowledge their existence until now. But honestly - why the heck can't some people get over there being a black man in Star Wars? I mean, there's still only one.

Did anybody even want to ask him?

So, Parade Magazine had one of their fluffy little pieces sparked by a new movie - in this case, a double profile on Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg because of Daddy's Home. I know it's Parade, and I don't expect hard-hitting journalism, but still. Here's a couple of paragraphs:

“Sometimes marriage can be difficult,” he admits. “We both come from homes of divorce, but we want our marriage to be successful. We work at it. We’ll go to couples counseling. We want to love and support each other, raise our kids and be there for each other in the good times and the bad. We both believe the same things, and we married for the same reasons. She was already Christian, but she converted to Catholicism so we could marry in the church. That’s where I proposed, in the church. When you take those [marriage] vows, you take them very seriously. For me, [keeping them] starts with my doing the right thing in my own home, being a good example, making sure that my kids are raised the right way and do the right thing in the community and the church.”

Catholicism plays a defining role in Wahlberg’s life, and he makes no attempt to hide it. “I feel very welcomed within my church and the parish community,” he says. “I feel comfort . . . peace . . . love.”

Let's pass by the whiff of better-than-you and just focus on that last paragraph.

Did anybody feel like asking him about the fact that he and his wife had three kids before they got married? Anybody? And if not, why not?

Subtle and weird cohesion

My father's semi-local newspaper (it's from Knoxville), which has just been bought by Gannet and so will be much less local very soon now, ran a story today on that e-cig study from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that includes this:

“In theory it sounds wonderful for a lifelong smoker having a hard time quitting and not successful with nicotine patches or gum to use e-cigarettes that mimic cigarettes and are a good replacement,” Dr. Primack said. But he adds that “it’s not hard to find testimonials from people who [used e-cigarettes to] quit smoking. The potential is there for some people to derive benefit.”,” Dr. Primack said.

"But"? But?

What does Templeton (the writer) think he's contradicting here? That 'but' is outside the quotes, so it's not Primack's.

"In theory it sounds wonderful" for people to have this new tool, BUT ... what should follow is something that show it's not wonderful, something like "But it's hard to find anybody who has used it to quit." Instead, what Primack "adds" is something that is entirely congruent with the first statement: in theory it sounds wonderful AND it's not hard to find people who say it works.

I'm guessing Templeton bought the study's results.

Conjunctions are cohesive

In one way, after is a temporal con- junction. But reading after as because is so common, it's its own logical fallacy - post hoc ergo propter hoc, "after this therefore because of this".

And that makes its use - particularly in headlines - very problematic. This particular headline (Vatican Fires Polish Priest After He Comes Out as Gay to Reporters) begs to be read as "he got fired because he came out as gay".

But that's not what happened. He got fired because he's bragging about having a sex life. If he'd paraded a woman around the same thing would have happened, and a nice tame celibate gay priest would be a coup for a church that claims it loves gays as long as they don't, you know, act that way.

Oh, dear - the Toys Я Us transliteration strikes again

Here's a listing from Biblio.

You may not be able to read Cyrillic, but the book's title is МОРФОЛОГИЯ СОВРЕМЕННОГО РУССКОГО ЛИТЕРАТУРНОГО ЯЗЫКА, Morphology of the Contemporary Literary Russian Language. Interestingly, in one place they transliterated ИЯ (i ya) as just YA, and later they transliterated the Я as YA by itself. Puzzingly, the word ЛИТЕРАТУРНОГО (literary) has its И (i) become an E, and a Y has appeared from nowhere. (Well, maybe not: Russian E is yotated, but the same letter is in СОВРЕМЕННОГО, twice, with no leading Y.

What's worse is their inability to recognize the font used on the book jacket. What they've shown as M is really a lowercase T. You can see a difference between the м's in морфолгия современного and the m's in лиmераmурного:

So what should be LITERATURNOGO becomes LEMYERAMURNOGO. I call this Toys Я Us because it involves mapping the Cyrllic letter to the Latin one it most resembles. After all, the Cyrillic 'r' is P, and the Я is 'ya'. This isn't the worst example I've seen, which is:

Mohymehtajibhar nponarahia
Монументальная пропаганда

(and which should be rendered as Monumental'naya propaganda). But it's up there.

Je reste Charlie

There's a lot of anger at Charlie Hebdo for its recent cover, which some claim was mocking

Here's an article by Maajid Nawaz about that.

And here's the actual newspaper that the infamous McDonald's cartoon was really mocking:



As Nawaz asks, "And how many of us noticed that on the day this Daily Mail cover went to print?"