Daily Archives: October 5, 2021

Radicals, mislabeled conservatives, threaten civil war, entertain conspiracies, are anti-mask and vaccination, with liberty that sounds suspiciously like a teenager saying dont tell me what to do, do what I say. Social responsibility appears mistaken for somehow being bossed around by political correctness. Hating government, spending is angrily called socialism or communism. Unless its in their own wallet or backyard. Then its acceptable. the loudest anti-government states harvest the most of other states money. Senators like McConnell of Kentucky vote against spending, then brag about all the money they brought into their states. A nice trick. Voters fall for it.

Red anti-vaxxer states lead the country in COVID-19 infections. ICUs overflow. Claiming liberty, reasonable safety precautions are rejected. Predictably, federal help is then demanded. Gratitude? Only more badmouthing of the hand that feeds them.

Have anti-government oldsters given up their Medicare because its socialism? They say they earned it? Millions in medical care? While children go without?

How many insurrectionists received government subsidies, unemployment (living off parents) receiving public pensions, or subsisting on stimulus payments? Fist on one hand, the other demanding a handout.

Why are multi-millionaire, supplement peddling right wing talkers working hard to convince basically good Americans that fellow good Americans are enemies, turning them against each other, caring less about the damage theyre causing. Big bucks. Political ambitions?

T. Carlson, like Trump an upper class inherited New York elite, talks rough to attract a working class audience (hes just like us) (?). Also like Trump, he admires dictatorships. Carlson did a weeks show in Hungary, praising its police state undemocratic system, badmouthing ours. Why doesnt he move there if its so great? He knows where his goodies are. Patriot? Or no.

Carlson won a defamation case against him. Fox lawyers argued: any discerning person knows he is being untruthful, hes not a journalist, hes an entertainer. In other words, his Fox attorneys admitted he lies. The judge agreed. Hate and lies are a good fundraiser when its what they want to hear.

Many show little concern for the compassion, love thy neighbor, helping others that supposedly are the core behaviors of the Christian principled nation were supposed to be. Those qualities require more strength, courage, and generosity than grievance, anger or violence.

Alternative facts (lying) for personal profit, without regard for the consequences or harm it causes, is wrong. It used to be honesty is the best policy was a cornerstone. Now, widespread use of dishonesty is used to get attention, get rich or gain power. Its wrong. Its not conservative. The National Motto: E. Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. It needs renewal. Re-instate the draft.

Link:

America needs to get back to honesty, thinking about the group - EH Extra

Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski has said in an interview with the Sieci weekly that Russian President Vladimir Putin is in league with his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, and the migration situation at that country's border with Poland.

The comments appeared in an interview entitled 'Lukashenko and Putin will lose this war,' which will be published in full in Monday's edition of the magazine although statements by Kaminski were made available on Sieci's website on Sunday.

In the interview, Kaminski elaborates on the situation at the Polish-Belarusian border, where a state of emergency has been in force for a month due to increased migratory pressure Warsaw blames on Minsk.

"Putin is testing how strong our country is," Kaminski said. "The more weakness we show the more brutal will be the interference in our affairs.

"Russia has always been based on the weakness of the West," he continued. "We must show our determination."

The weekly wrote that Kaminski, who is also the minister coordinator of special services, "comments on the game of Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko, in which our eastern neighbours are trying to exploit migrants as a tool of influence."

"Perhaps Lukashenko hopes that in this way he will force the European Union to lift the sanctions, recognising him as the legal president," Kaminski said in the interview. "But more important here is Putin, who would like to control the migrant tap, tightening and loosening it at will. And at the same time he can hide behind the Belarusian dictator and pretend he has nothing to do with it."

Kaminski goes on to state that Belarus is trying to attract more foreigners.

"We know that in recent days a decision has been taken on agreements with further countries in the issue of visa-free movement," he explained. "Among these countries is Pakistan, where we have a large group of refugees from Afghanistan, but also South Africa, from where migrants from other parts of Africa can easily come to Europe, or Jordan, where we have a huge reservoir of Syrian refugees. Belarusian airlines are launching further connections. Planes are leaving from Beirut, from Damascus, the number of flights from Turkey has been increased."

The interior minister goes on to say that due to Poland's "firm and consistent stance, Lukashenko will start to have problems.

"He was convinced that due to political correctness we would accept and legalise all (the migrants)," Kaminski said. "If for example Iraqi citizens come, there is no basis to give them refugee status, because as in the Middle East, the situation there has been quite stable for several years."

Kaminski went on to say the current situation represented a threat to Lukashenko himself and that Poland had information from intelligence and diplomatic sources that normal Belarusians were becoming progressively disenchanted with what is happening as they see hundreds of people from Asia and Africa in their cities in the evenings.

Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have accused the government of Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president, of bringing migrants from the Middle East and then pushing them across the EU border in an effort to destabilise the EU in retaliation for sanctions that Brussels has imposed on Minsk.

On Thursday evening, Poland extended a state of emergency along its eastern border, introduced for 30 days on September 2, for another 60 days.

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Putin has hit us but will lose, says interior minister - The First News

Princeton and former School of Architecture Dean Alejandro Zaera-Polo are officially cutting ties as the 57-year-old has been formally dismissed from his faculty position following a unanimous vote by an Ad-Hoc committee of the universitys board of trustees this summer.

Zaera-Polo served as Dean of Princeton's School of Architecturefor a brief period from 2012 until 2014, when he resigned following allegations of plagiarismthat eventually led to a defamation lawsuit brought by Zaera-Polo against the university, which then made an unsuccessful attempt to dismiss the four-part claim against itself and President Christopher Eisgruber.

Zaera-Polo had continued on as a faculty member despite the surrounding controversy.

In response to his dismissal, Zaera-Polo has issued a 5-hour Gonzo-style polemic against the university in which the AZPML founder touches on various topics including Interpretation Trumps Evidence, Identity Politics, and The Post-truth University. The Spanish architect has also made an 813-page accounting of his evidence available to the public in the hopes of making his case more transparent.

The "seminar" consists of seven sessions with an overall duration of 4.5 hours: Introduction (above), Identity Politics, Academic Freedom?, Power and Knowledge, The Post-truth University, Interpretation Trumps Evidence, and Speaking Truth to Power.

Through this process, I have gradually elevated the controversy about academic freedom, the ideological imposition onto my thesis supervision activities, the blockage to the free association between students and advisors and the illegitimate allocation of credit up to the Board of Trustees, triggering various collateral processes which I have also meticulously recorded, Zaera-Polo said in an email statement.

He continued: What emerges from my investigation is a disturbing picture of Princeton as a structure of layers formed by opaque committees that cover up and exonerate each other with the ultimate aim of protecting the authorities, at the expense of truth, the rules, and academic freedom.

Zaera-Polo shared the following statement with select individuals and press:

For those of you who do not know Princeton, probably the two first sessions and the last one will be probably sufficient to understand the facts. Those of you who know Princeton university or the School of Architecture may enjoy listening to the details of the intermediate sections.

Through this process, I have gradually elevated the controversy about academic freedom, the ideological imposition onto my thesis supervision activities, the blockage to the free association between students and advisors and the illegitimate allocation of credit up to the Board of Trustees, triggering various collateral processes which I have also meticulously recorded.

What emerges from my investigation is a disturbing picture of Princeton as a structure of layers formed by opaque committees that cover up and exonerate each other with the ultimate aim of protecting the authorities, at the expense of truth, the rules, and academic freedom.

The entire process records not only the deceitful behavior of Monica Ponce de Leon, Elizabeth Diller and other members of the faculty at the SoA, but a multitude of administrators and academics throughout the university, acting as pawns of authority, operating unanimously but refusing to argue their decisions publicly and in writing. They regularly lie, incur in conflicts of interest, rewrite rules ad hoc, conceal evidence, falsify records, certify false evidence, create scapegoats, stereotype, impose codes of silence, retaliate, coerce students and do whatever it takes to exonerate academic authority in its most autocratic forms.

Regardless of the future legal implications of these processes, what is most relevant now is to make this evidence available as widely as possible, so feel free to share its content with whoever you think may be interested in this evidence, post it online and in print. The purpose of this communication is to shed light onto the obscure processes which characterize not only the School of Architecture in Princeton, but also the highest echelons of the university.

The processes exemplify the implications of the post-truth culture and the imposition of a relativist ideology which leads to the prevalence of political interests over genuine academic concerns, interpretation over evidence, and the abuse of identity politics and political correctness within the contemporary academia.

I would recommend you to download these materials and save them, as their public availability may be challenged in the future by some of the agents involved.

Originally posted here:

Alejandro Zaera-Polo has been removed from his faculty position as Princeton continues its row with the former SoA dean - Archinect

The COVID-19 pandemic dealt Six a particularly cruel blow. The pop musical was to make its Broadway debut at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on March 12, 2020, when, just hours before curtain, New York declared a state of emergency and banned all gatherings of more than 500 people.

The show, which finally opened at the Brooks Atkinson on Sunday, had been making the rounds even before the pandemic with performances in London and, apparently, everywhere else on Earth. When I first saw the show a year and a half ago, I invited a friend to join me but she turned me down. I already saw it on a Norwegian Bliss cruise, she replied. When did Broadway become a shows final resting place?

Sometimes musicals travel well (or, at least, travel a lot) because theyre simple to produce. For instance, Six requires only six actors and a band of four. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss score is immediately hummable in the way that only derivative disco music can be. The often witty book, built around a competition among the six wives of Henry VIII, borrows a lot from RuPauls Drag Race while offering yet another #MeToo story. Those theatrical commonplaces aside, Six is a needed antidote to Anastasia, Frozen, Jagged Little Pill, Wicked and other pompous shows of female empowerment.

Marlow and Moss songs, while rip-offs of dance hits, serve as parodies of power anthems like Defying Gravity and Let It Go. A breathtakingly irreverent moment in Six comes when the six wives get into an argument over who was the most abused and try to top each other with their respective number of miscarriages. Talk about defying political correctness!

Emma Baileys set, Gabriella Slades costumes and Tim Deilings lighting neatly replicate a Vegas concert under Moss and Jamie Armitages tight direction. Its nice to see the six singing actors carry hand mics rather than wear those horrible around-the-jaw contraptions. Theyve been cast for their singing voices, all of which are strong.

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A disappointment is Carrie-Anne Ingrouillles choreography. At moments, the women turn into one well-oiled human machine, matching each others steps and gestures. But Six never achieves the dance excitement of Aint Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations at its best. Only Brittney Mack (as a sassy Anna of Cleves) is a real dancer.

The other five wives are played by Adrianna Hicks (a grand Catherine of Aragon), Andrea Macasaet (a perky Anne Boleyn), Abby Mueller (a maternal Jane Seymour), Samantha Pauly (a cool Katherine Howard) and Anna Uzele (a super-sexy Catherine Parr).

At the matinee I attended, something very encouraging happened. Near the end of Six, one of the wives announces that there are only five minutes left in the show. No sooner did these six women then launch into their final song than a dozen adolescent girls got up from their seats in the third row of the orchestra and promptly leave the Brooks Atkinson Theatre en masse!

Who among them cared that their parents had taken out a mortgage to pay for all those premium seats? Theyd seen enough. Are young women finally tired of being pandered to by Broadway musicals?

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Six Broadway Review: The Real Housewives of Henry VIII Put on a Show - Yahoo Entertainment

When Stewart succeeded the ousted bro-caster Craig Kilborn as Daily Show host in 1999, it was a much-needed injection of caustic Gen-X wit. The host winked with his audience at the absurdity of the post-Cold War, Clinton-era imperium, its bow-tied Thunderdome of Gingrich, Gore and grand jury testimony. But the aftermath of Sept. 11, and particularly the Iraq War, sharpened Stewarts irony into genuine outrage: the walk-up to Iraq was absurd, yes, but also just wrong. By the time he stepped down as host in 2015, citing exhaustion and a desire to spend more time with his family, Stewart had transformed himself from another modestly successful leather-jacketed stand-up into a pillar of American liberalism.

Since then, the mainstream left has shifted decisively toward the outrage end of the Stewart-ian spectrum, even among his fellow seen-it-all Gen X-ers. The wry, above-the-fray attitude that created Stewarts initial bond with his audience isnt just out of fashion its seen as insensitive, offensive or even literally harmful to those on whose behalf he would crusade.

The programs hosted by the extensive Daily Show alumni network, including John Oliver, Stephen Colbert (in his uber-cuddly modern incarnation) and current host Trevor Noah, are far more earnest than Stewart ever was. If ironic detachment served as a cultural get-out-of-jail-free card that made it cool, or at least acceptable, to care deeply about current events in the Y2K era, Stewarts successors view such cover as entirely unnecessary. His eagerness back then to skewer left-wing absurdity and extreme political correctness as well as conservative hypocrisy would stand a pretty good chance of getting him canceled today. (More likely, it wouldnt make it to air in the first place.)

Stewart still retains his on-screen charisma, command of current events and cachet with his old audience, as his constant presence on his peers talk shows suggests. But launching a new program in a political-media ecosystem thats been entirely transformed is a profound test for Stewart. Its also a test for where we are as a culture whether Stewart is allowed to nod to the earnestness of the moment without capitulating to it entirely.

The first clue to how Stewart and his team have adapted is in the shows format itself, which takes a more polished and sober approach to the news without totally discarding his endemic wisecracks. Now an hour-long weekly program, in the first episode we get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how Stewart and his team of writers and producers have structured it: a familiar, Daily Show-style monologue at the top, followed by an interview with stakeholders, as they describe them (people directly affected by the shows subject material), and finally an antagonistic, Mike Wallace-style one-on-one interview with an authority figure who ostensibly has the power to help those people.

In an interview with the New York Times, Stewart describes the programs focus as not advocacy, but amplification, in a way that recalls the deadly-earnest millennial imperative to use ones platform for good. If youve earned some capital in all of this, why not spend it on people better than you, who are doing remarkable things? he said. You can help frame their good work.

The jokes remain, but if The Daily Show was subtractive, railing against the hypocrisy and absurdity of modern political life, The Problem With Jon Stewart is additive, clearly seeking a resolution for those affected by the single issue each episode so far explores. (The first episode, tellingly, does not mention former President Donald Trump once as good a sign as any that Stewart is interested in less chewed-over currents in American life.)

Stewart himself, with his reflexive sarcasm, Howard Beale-like bouts of righteous indignation, and stand-up hamminess remains mostly unchanged even if, as the 58-year-old jokes, he does look decidedly more now like an anti-smoking poster. The host implicitly addresses the continuity between his previous and current TV incarnations in the series premiere, titled War. That is, Americas various wars in the Middle East, which caused severe health outcomes for veterans exposed to open burn pits in the desert who have now been struggling for years with a seemingly indifferent Department of Veterans Affairs bureaucracy.

Working up a head of steam, Stewart proclaims The DoD and the VA are forcing them to indisputably prove a connection that they already internally admit exists they are holding the veterans to a standard of proof far beyond the one our own government used to send them to war in the first place, before throwing to footage of George W. Bushs now-infamous smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud speech. We went there to find weapons of mass destruction, Stewart says staring directly into the camera, And when they werent there, we made our own.

Its bracing stuff, enough to throw one back to the era of flip phones and Tom Cruise jumping on Oprahs couch. Even better is an interview with VA Secretary Denis McDonough, where Stewart pushes the steely Midwesterner on the departments torpor to the point where the host feels the need to obliquely apologize to which McDonough, certainly no stranger to close-quarters combat as Obamas former chief of staff, responds gamely that I dont really give a shit (about, to be clear, Stewarts hardball interview style, not the veterans).

Over the past two-plus decades, the host has cultivated a gravitas that gives him a credibility here his many would-be successors sorely lack. (The interview subjects for the first two episodes are McDonough and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen; it remains to be seen whether any Republicans, who have been burned and outright mocked by Stewart in instances too numerous to count, might willingly sign up to appear on the program.)

Of course, such gravitas can be a double-edged sword for a comedian. Consider the extreme case of Jerry Lewis attempt to dramatize the Holocaust, or the hectoring, imperial asshole-dom of Stewarts late-night liberal compatriot Bill Maher. Here nothing so flagrant occurs, but the tension between Stewarts impulses and the shows new tone is evident: theres a jarring moment in the debut when he careens just too rapidly between a somber recounting of American institutional failure and one of his numerous wisecracks, staring in silence for a split-second too long that forces the viewer to wonder whether the audience was instructed not to laugh or declined of their own volition.

Theres also an uncanny sense that by skirting the days most hot-button political issues in favor of a relatively-uncontroversial advocacy for veterans or victims of gun violence, Stewart might be holding back some of his more unpopular, potentially cancel-worthy thoughts especially after a high-profile tiff with Colbert and his liberal viewers, after endorsing the coronavirus lab-leak theory on Colberts program. Much of liberal America still embraces Stewart as its conscience, but its not clear whether he fully embraces the extent to which that conscience has evolved in his absence.

Still, the program largely succeeds in what it sets out to do: Stewarts candor and energy give life to interviews that are often deadly dull or maudlin in the hands of others, and his simmering populist rage and nose for the audience make him an effective public inquisitor for figures like McDonough. At the same time, the shows relative sobriety and mission-mindedness keep it from lapsing into the smug self-righteousness or triumphalism of which critics accused The Daily Show after it ended (and especially after Trumps election).

As a millennial who came of political age during the same time in which Stewarts show did, theres something inherently comforting about his return to television. Despite a few clumsy moments, the show is entertaining, surprisingly hard-nosed, and has scrubbed many of its hosts and his eras worst impulses. But at the same time, its high earnestness can feel suspiciously like not just an adherence to the modern moral imperative to care a lot, but an implicit penance for not having done so openly all along.

Which might be noble, but it certainly remains to be seen whether that can sustain an indefinite amount of entertaining television (not to mention that if true, its flagrantly in opposition to Stewarts truth-telling, cant-censor-me persona). The most obvious benefit of Stewarts return to television, at least for now, is in what hasnt changed the vanishingly rare, elementally reassuring feeling of someone looking at the same news you are, feeling the same alarm, and saying youre not alone in feeling a deep alienation or sadness or outrage at whats going on.

More:

Jon Stewarts Back. Heres Why We Should Care. - POLITICO

The snark is laid on pretty thick in Larissa FastHorses The Thanksgiving Play, a satire that explores the lunacy behind Americas ability to construct a wholesome family holiday out of genocide and land theft.

FastHorse also skewers the performative wokeness of white liberals whose best intentions are as flimsy as the construction-paper turkeys and headdresses American children make to celebrate the holiday.

Director Raymond O. Caldwells production for Olney Theatre Center taps deep into this vein of comedy, assembling a top-notch cast and design team into a show that entertains foremost while never letting us forget that beneath all the jokes lie hundreds of years of problematic history.

Logan (Megan Graves) is a high-school drama teacher embarking on a make-or-break project: creating a Thanksgiving play for the school district that simultaneously honors the Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives on the holiday without getting her fired. Logan is a vegan who screams at the sight of cheese, snaps instead of claps, and frequently refers to the six weeks she worked as an actress in Los Angeles which she pronounces the Spanish way. You get the picture: Shes woke as f*ck.

Logan pairs well with Jaxton (Parker Drown), her boyfriend in moments when they are not consciously decoupled. Jaxton is not at all threatened by the fact that Logan is the director of this project and totally OK with letting her take the lead. A local actor and a yoga enthusiast (his day job doesnt count as part of his identity), Logan continually reminds us how sensitive he is to the politics of representation. He went by the pronoun ze for an entire year, performs at his local farmers market, and doesnt mention Columbus Day in case its shameful to the Italian American in the room. Jaxtons idea of romance is bringing Logan a water bottle made with recycled glass from broken windows in housing projects.

To satisfy the terms of the various grants Logan has received for the project, she hires two additional people to help with the play: Caden (David Schlumpf), a third-grade teacher who passes out lollipops prolifically and arrives with a binder full of Native American history, and Alicia (Dani Stoller), a Native American actor who Logan hired based on her headshot to bring authenticity to the project.

It doesnt take long for the audience to parse out that Alicia is not at all Native American. She arrives in sexy yoga pants, plastic water bottle in hand. (Hello, symbolism, no recycled glass for her.) But the do-gooders on stage are too flustered in the presence of a real live Native American to notice. Peppering her with questions about honoring her heritage, they fumble while Alicia makes pouty faces into her phone before admitting that she gets headshots as a variety of ethnicities to increase her chances of getting work. Looking ethnic got her cast as the third Jasmine understudy at Disneyland, after all.

While all the actors turn out entertaining performances, Dani Stoller is a laugh from start to finish. She dives headfirst into Alicias simplemindedness and provides a refreshing contrast to the belabored political correctness of everyone else on stage. Im not smart, she says at one point. I was tested.

The rest of the play hinges on the characters realizing that none of them know a single Native American. How do you include the Native American view in a play without any Native American representation? The four scramble through an increasingly ridiculous series of attempts to stage a play honoring the very people who are absent.

Despite the serious nature of the subject, the play only wavers from comedy in a series of videos that play between scenes. Lifted from the social media pages of actual American educators (yes, you should be embarrassed now), the videos depict the very racist and biased version of Thanksgiving that many of us were exposed to in school. Songs including Ten Little Indians are pretty wince-inducing when you realize that generations of American children grew up with this as their only reference point to Native American culture. For fun, try having students say Injun instead of Indian, one video ends. My students loved it. (Angela Miracle Gladue, Benairen Kane, and Jack Novak perform in these videos)

Milagros Ponce de Lens set design adds to the liveliness of the play. Sure we are in a public school classroom, but this room is anything but high-school drab. The linoleum floor pops in squares of red, blue, and yellow. The walls are plastered with posters depicting the typical high school thespian fare (i.e., plays by white men): Angels in America, Death of a Salesman, and of course, the Bard. Peeking through the classroom window, we see the turkey hand cutouts and Native American headdresses so many of us made in elementary school.

You wont learn much about Native American life from this play, which is a shame since FastHorse (a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation) is Americas most esteemed Native American playwright. But this was intentional on her part. FastHorse has penned several plays featuring Native American characters only to be told by theaters that they couldnt find the Native American actors to play those roles. So in a brilliant middle-finger move to the theater industry, FastHorse wrote a script that spoon-feeds modern American theater the content it excels at in a neat little package: Four white actors, one set, 100 minutes, no intermission. And her calculation has paid off. The Thanksgiving Play was one of the top ten most produced plays in the country prior to the pandemic according to American Theatre Magazine. Everyone and their mother is clamoring to produce this play.

DC audiences are now getting their chance to see it. And see it they should.

Running Time: 100 minutes, with no intermission.

The Thanksgiving Play runs through October 31, 2021, at Olney Theatre Centers Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab 2001 Olney Sandy Spring Road, Olney, MD. For tickets ($64, general; $59, under 17 and senior), call the box office at (301) 924-3400 or go online.

Health and SafetyMasks and proof of COVID vaccination are required at all performances ofThe Thanksgiving Play.This production is not recommended for those under 12, but children attending a performance who are not yet eligible for the COVID vaccine must be masked and accompanied by a vaccinated adult.At this time, the theater does not accept proof of a recent negative COVID test in lieu of vaccination. Visit Health and Safetyfor more information.

SEE ALSO: An Interview with Playwright Larissa FastHorseby Patricia Mitchell

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The comedy in Olney's 'Thanksgiving Play' comes with a side of snark - DC Metro Theater Arts