Something new....a shorter DDD, fewer stories, easier to get through.....
1/ There have been some incredible movies this last year about how America has treated blacks, such as Django, Lincoln, the Butler and recently 12 Years A Slave. Having seen all four movies I had some hope that seeing the brutality and callousness of our history that maybe these movies would have the power to sway some minds and attitudes.
But just when you feel a little better, here comes Frank Rich to set you straight with an excellent analysis and persuasive arguments of why these movies won't make any difference with the bigots, and might actually make things even more polarised.
12 Years A Slave may win some Oscars this year, and if you haven't seen it you should because it's amazingly good, but I can guarantee it's won't be playing in the typical Alabama suburban multiplex.....
Liberal Echo Chamber
If only 12 Years a Slave (or Roots, or any other wrenching American slave narrative) could move audiences beyond those already eager for a dose of feel-good shame.
- By Frank Rich
- Published Nov 3, 2013
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Roots (top); 12 Years a Slave.
(Photo: From top, Warner Bros. TV/David L. Wolper Prods/The Kobal Collection; François Duhamel/Fox Searchlight)
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Just because critics have proclaimed 12 Years a Slave a “landmark event” and “easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery” does not mean it’s as tedious as such eat-your-spinach accolades suggest. The black British artist turned director Steve McQueen has tried harder than anyone else in commercial filmmaking to convey the physical barbarity of slavery along with its perverse racial, economic, sexual, and Christian trappings. All that’s missing in the extended lashing scenes is 3-D. His movie is grueling in a naturalistic way that the equally violent Django Unchained didn’t aspire to, and, like Quentin Tarantino’s operatic fantasia, it’s never preachy or boring. There are naysayers, of course—the reliably dyspeptic African-American critic Armond White has accused McQueen of hawking “torture porn”—and the movie is not without its flaws. As is de rigueur in American films on this subject, a white star (Brad Pitt as an abolitionist) arrives to save the day—although, as Courtland Milloy, a black columnist at the Washington Post, has helpfully calculated, at least we see “fewer good whites than usual.” They don’t upstage the movie’s real-life hero—Solomon Northup, a free black man of Saratoga Springs, New York, who was kidnapped in 1841 while visiting Washington, D.C., and spent the next twelve years in bondage in the fetid hell of antebellum Louisiana.
Still, as I fought back tears at the end of the film, I questioned why I was crying. Like many, if not most, of the white and black adults you’d expect to turn out for 12 Years a Slave on opening weekend in downtown Manhattan, I arrived at the theater knowledgeable about the history on tap.
2/ This is an amusing look back in time at commercials in the 50's and 60's........a compilation of "The 10 Most Sexist Commercials Ever" which certain elements in our society are trying to bring back unless you ladies are vigilant.....
But realistically - ladies - this blatant sexism won't budge your blood pressure, as in retrospect they are just silly, but funny too......3 minutes.....
3/ Unions are under relenting pressure from the corporate oligarchs, and over recent years have lost most battles to save their pay, health benefits and other remnants of middle class life.....but one group has taken a stand......
Bold Boeing workers refuse to screw over next generation
By rejecting a contract that amounted to corporate extortion, employees have taken a stand for the middle class.
A Boeing assembly facility in Renton, Wash. (Credit: AP/Ted S. Warren)
This originally appeared on Next New Deal.
In a remarkable act of courage and solidarity with the next generation, last week Boeing workers in Seattle soundly rejected corporate extortion, by voting down a contract which traded job guarantees for concessions that would severely erode the pay and benefits of younger workers. In doing so, the members of the Machinists are risking their jobs to save an America built on the middle class.
The dramatic fight of fast food workers for a minimal living wage, risking their jobs every time they take a day off to demonstrate, is one end of a corporate economy based on low wages, no benefits and no unions. That corporate strategy, aimed at maximizing profits, is destroying America’s middle class, wrecking the engine that powered the U.S. economy.
On the other end of the middle class are workers like Boeing’s, who have fought together through their union for the good pay, pensions, health benefits and job security that characterized the increased prosperity and lowered income inequality of America in much of the second half of the 20th Century. But despite being a hugely profitable corporation, with dominance in the world aerospace market, Boeing is eager to follow the Wal-Mart/fast-food model of the 21st Century economy.
4/ Last week was the anniversary of JFK's death, and Bill Maher had an excellent "New Rules" comparing JFK to the Republican icon Reagan......Maher seems to have a fun time doing this one.....six minutes of him on great form.....
Bill Maher delivered an impressive comparison of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan on Friday Night's "Real Time," concluding of course that JFK wins the competition, hands down.
Maher understands that politics is tribal, and Republicans will never feel the way Democrats do about JFK, but he wants to know: "Can we at least agree that Kennedy was cooler?"
"I mean, sorry, but our liberal icon was a smart, sexy war hero who said he wanted to go to the Moon. Yours was an old fuddy-duddy who tried to rock denim."
"Don Draper vs. Rooster Cogburn," and "James Bond vs. Matlock" are just a few of the other ways Maher compared the two political idols. He thoroughly explained why Kennedy's style, friends (The Rat Pack), and era (the 60s) were all more favorable than Reagan's -- and Maher has pictures of himself from the 80s to prove it.
"JFK was far from perfect, but he was a true wit and a sex machine, and he knew how to wear a pair of shades. Reagan was an amiable square in a cowboy hat who had sex with a woman he called "Mommy"."
5/ It's interesting to see ads from Europe as they are so much more racy than the pablum on American TV......consider this one - you certainly won't see this in the Duck Dynasty commercial break......45 seconds of Mr. and Mrs. Piggy.....
6/ And continuing with European theme, this is a German trapeze act "Die Meiers" combining comedy and some incredible feats of dexterity, balance and strength all done with the female trying to keep her skirt and handbag intact......most impressive, amusing and about 8 minutes.....
Note....it starts slowly, but gets going in the third minute.....
7/ If you are a middle class person, Republican or Democrat, you may wonder what fuels the rage that has given rise to the Tea Party. This article takes a stab at explaining where these angry people come from and what pressures drive them into the hands of the extreme right.....
A scary article......and the most frightening thing is not how angry they are but that they completely miss what should be the target of their rage....the oligarchs that have sold them out. Couple this bitterness with how pissed they are going to get when the effects of climate change start to significantly change their lives in a few years, and watch out......
Up Close With Small-Town White Male Rage
Explaining the phenomenon of the bitter, scary men who feel left behind by economic and cultural change.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/PhotosbyAndy
Who are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns. Geographically, they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t the prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of “southern pride”—in the same way that wearing a swastika would be a symbol of German “heritage” (except it’s illegal in Germany to wear a swastika).
There’s a large rural component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson, “the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in the midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success in their rural campaign.” For many farmers facing foreclosures, the Far Right promises to help them save their land have been appealing, offering farmers various schemes and legal maneuvers to help prevent foreclosures, blaming the farmers’ troubles on Jewish bankers and the one-world government. “As rural communities started to collapse,” Davidson writes, the Far Right “could be seen at farm auctions comforting families...confirming what rural people knew to be true: that their livelihoods, their families, their communities—their very lives—were falling apart.” In stark contrast to the government indifference encountered by rural Americans, a range of Far Right groups, most recently the militias, have seemingly provided support, community, and answers.
8/ Holiday shopping tips for black people.....Jessica Williams from the Daily Show .......a mildly amusing four minutes....
To help make Black Friday easier for shoppers, Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams offered some helpful hints on how to get in the store easily. Chief amongst them? “Don’t be black.” Yep, Williams tackled racial profiling in department stores and had some truly unique and bizarre advice for black people trying to avoid racial profiling while shopping.
Suggestion number one: don’t shop at big stores alone. As Williams explained, “Everybody knows you’re supposed to bring your white friend when you go to a place like that!”
Suggestion number two: announce your intentions at the outset. As in, “Hey, everybody, my name is Jessica Williams and I intend to buy a pack of gum!”
Other suggestions ranged from making friends with security to “hire a middle-aged white lady as your personal shopper” and put a hidden camera in a neck brace.
9/ This is the wonderful clip of an autistic girl singing Katy Perry's "Firework" at a charity benefit, accompanied by La Perry herself. Found this again with new footage of Jodi DiPiazza growing up and the problems autistic kids have.....
A very "nice' eight minutes......may generate some eye moisture as well......
10/ Doctors get cancer too - and how they cope with the worst news any person can get about their health is instructive. The message is sometimes - accept it......
How Doctors Die: Showing Others the Way
Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times
Dr. Elizabeth McKinley, right, at her home in suburban Cleveland, where she was receiving hospice care. With her was her sister Brent McKinley.
By DAN GORENSTEIN
BRAVE. You hear that word a lot when people are sick. It’s all about the fight, the survival instinct, the courage. But when Dr. Elizabeth D. McKinley’s family and friends talk about bravery, it is not so much about the way Dr. McKinley, a 53-year-old internist from Cleveland, battled breast cancerfor 17 years. It is about the courage she has shown in doing something so few of us are able to do: stop fighting.
This spring, after Dr. McKinley’scancer found its way into her liver and lungs and the tissue surrounding her brain, she was told she had two options.
“You can put chemotherapydirectly into your brain, or total brain radiation,” she recalled recently from her home in suburban Cleveland. “I’m looking at these drugs head-on and either one would change me significantly. I didn’t want that.” She also did not want to endure the side effects of radiation.
What Dr. McKinley wanted was time with her husband, a radiologist, and their two college-age children, and another summer to soak her feet in the Atlantic Ocean. But most of all, she wanted “a little more time being me and not being somebody else.” So, she turned down more treatment and beganhospice care, the point at which the medical fight to extend life gives way to creating the best quality of life for the time that is left.
Todays video - a reviewer's top five Clint Eastwood scenes.....love the last one.....four minutes of testosterone.......
Todays canine joke
I Just Realized Something:
My dog sleeps about 20 hours a day. He has his food prepared for him. His meals
are provided at no cost to him. He visits the Dr. once a year for his checkup and again during the year, if any medical needs arise. For this he pays nothing, and nothing is required of him. He lives in a nice neighborhood in a house that is much larger than he needs, but he is not required to do any upkeep.If he makes a mess, someone else cleans it up. He has his choice of luxurious places to sleep. He receives
these accommodations absolutely free. He is living like a king and has absolutely
no expenses whatsoever. All of his costs are picked up by others who earn a living. I was just thinking about all this, and suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks ~
My dog is a CONGRESSMAN!!!
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Todays multi-generational joke.....
A group of 15 year old boys discussed where they should meet for dinner. It was agreed they would meet at the McDonald's next to Captain Jack's Seafood Grille because they only had six dollars among them, they could ride their bikes there and Jennie Webster, that cute girl in Social Studies, lives on the same street and they might see her.Ten years later, the group of now 25 year old guys discussed where they should meet for dinner. It was agreed they would meet at Captain Jack's Seafood Grille because the beer was cheap, the bar had free snacks, the house band was good, there was no cover charge and there were lot of cute girls.Ten years later, at 35 years of age, the group once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. It was decided they would meet at Captain Jack's Seafood Grille because the booze was good, it was near their gym and, if they went late enough, there wouldn't be too many whiny little kids.Ten years later, at 45, the group once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. It was agreed they would meet at Captain Jack's Seafood Grille because the martinis were big and the waitresses wore tight pants.Ten years later, now 55, the group once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. It was agreed they would meet at Captain Jack's Seafood Grille because the prices were reasonable, they have a nice wine list and fish is good for your cholesterol.Ten years later, at 65 years of age, the once again group discussed where they should meet for dinner. It was agreed they would meet at Captain Jack's Seafood Grille because the lighting was good and they have an early bird special.Ten years later, at 75 years of age, the group once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. It was agreed they would meet at Captain Jack's Seafood Grille because the food was not too spicy and the restaurant was handicapped accessible.Ten years later, at 85 years of age, the group once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. It was agreed they would meet at Captain Jack's Seafood Grille because they had never been there before.
