to set a mood • • •
John Oliver Wants To Know: Which State Will Be The One To Ratify The ERA?
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
John Oliver used the bulk of Sunday’s Last Week Tonight (aside from comparing potential UK prime minister Boris Johnson to “what Kevin McCallister [Macauley Culkin in Home Alone] would eventually look like if his parents never came home”) to weigh in on the perpetual limbo of the Equal Rights Amendment, which needs one more state to ratify it.
The ERA was originally passed in Congress in 1972, almost 50 years after it was originally introduced. Since then, the debate has been politicized and muddled by interpretations, and has been one state short (still) of the 38 needed to ratify.
Oliver doesn’t buy the interpretation arguments (some say the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal protection is sufficient to include gender discrimination, while others, including, Oliver pointed out, former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, argued it didn’t.)
“You can’t interpret [the ERA] as not addressing gender discrimination, because that is all it addresses,” Oliver said, with the ERA’s words over his right shoulder: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.”
To those still unsure, he addressed directly why we need the ERA as much now as ever. …
The Conservative Sensibility review: George Will and a right wronged
The veteran columnist is no longer a member of the Republican party, which he says has become a personality cult.
Donald and Melania Trump at the Lincoln Memorial in January 2017.
In America, traditional conservatives are not having a good day. Their amalgam of limited government, patriotism, rule of law and free markets is in retrograde.
On the right, there are those who now yearn for a soul-filled state driven by “order, continuity, and social cohesion” and who demand that individual autonomy take a back seat in an ersatz Eden. On the left, socialism, political correctness and identity politics are cudgels for beating the benighted into submission, winning professorial tenure and growing the Leviathan of government.
For both groupings, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the resulting right to be left alone are at best debatable propositions. Enter George Will’s latest book, a bracing response to progressivism, “compassionate” conservatism and neo-Caesarism.
In the eyes of Will, a self-described “amiable atheist”, rights precede government and are a bounty bestowed by the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”, to quote the Declaration of Independence. They do not emanate from the state, nor are they conferred by majorities.
Will, a columnist at the Washington Post and former panelist at ABC and Fox, now regularly appears on MSNBC. That says plenty about the state of 1980s Reaganism. It is no longer the religion of the party faithful, a reality of which Will is acutely aware but which he refuses to embrace as his own. …
5 Billion-Dollar Industries That Treat Workers Like Garbage
When we talk about industries built on human suffering, you might think of clothing sweatshops, machine manufacturing, mineral mining, or the government. Basically all of the government. Any government. It might surprise you to learn the misery goes much deeper. Even our most popular forms of entertainment can treat their employees like absolute trash. And not the fancy trash, either, like bonbon wrappers or iPhone packaging. We’re talking straight-up Hot Pocket sleeve hate-garbage. For example …
5. The NFL Treats Its Cheerleaders Terribly
It probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that a form of entertainment that uses scantily clad ladies to make men horny enough to buy warm beer has some problematic elements. To borrow a famous quote, though, we expected nothing from this industry, and we were still let down.
Each of the cheerleading squads attached to NFL teams have a handbook listing the rules and regulations that each cheerleader has to follow. Some of these rules are bad in an expected way, such as how each one has to maintain an “ideal body weight” and be subjected to regular weigh-ins, as well as avoid piercings and tattoos.
And then there are the unexpectedly awful rules that some teams enforce.
Many teams classify cheerleaders as part-time workers, meaning that they don’t get most (if any) standard benefits, or indeed, a decent paycheck at the end of the season. Despite this, however, a lot of teams have rules governing how cheerleaders have to conduct themselves in their everyday lives. When using social media, for instance, many can’t post pictures of themselves, disclose who they work for, or follow players of the team that employs them. If a player follows them, the cheerleader has to block them immediately or risk being fired.
The handbook for the New Orleans Saints takes this no-contact rule even further, and dictates that “if a cheerleader enters a restaurant and a player is already there, she must leave … if a cheerleader is in a restaurant and a player arrives afterward, she must leave.” Holding cheerleaders accountable for the actions of players who approach them might seem like the peak of ridiculousness, but this is a team that recently fired a cheerleader for posting a lingerie picture to her private, locked Instagram account.
The handbook for the Buffalo Jills used to advise cheerleaders about the correct way to wash their “intimate areas,” saying that they should “never use a deodorant or chemically enhanced product … simple, non-deodorant soap will help maintain the right PH balance.” Between this, the manual about how to use tampons, and the fact that the team used to send cheerleaders into the stands during halftime to sell calendars to drunken horny uncles — which terrified them, for reasons that should be obvious — it’s little wonder that the Jills filed suit against the team in 2014, alleging mistreatment. Which resulted in … the squad being disbanded. …
A giant boulder in Colorado offers a philosophical lesson for all of us
ROCK ON
When life gives you boulders, make landmarks.
Over Memorial Day weekend, a mountain highway in Colorado was just minding its own business, being a nice, normal road and facilitating the transportation of automobiles and trucks hither and yon. Then, with a crash and a mighty roar, two giant boulders hurled themselves off a cliff and onto Highway 145, shutting down traffic, trapping people in towns they did not wish to be in, and ruining one restaurant’s plans for a fun holiday motorcycle parade.
Clearly, the boulders—much like most problems that we face in life—were being very inconsiderate of everyone else’s plans and desires and goals for the future. But Colorado found an ingenious way to deal with the rude rocks and, in the process, offered a useful philosophical lesson for humanity.
The smaller boulder, which weighed 2.3 million lbs, Colorado simply blew up, which must have been very satisfying. Bwahahaha! Take that, rock. Sometimes, when you have a problem, you must explode it, whether that means ending your relationship, breaking your lease, or quitting your job on ethical grounds even if you don’t have a backup plan.
But the Colorado Department of Transportation still had to face the matter of the even bigger and more terrible boulder, which weighed in at a whopping 8.5 million pounds and would have cost taxpayers $200,000 to get rid of, according to United Press International. Some problems are like this: Very big. Very heavy. Nearly sublime in their stony grandeur, and so overwhelming that attempting to eradicate the problem in its entirety is actually not the wisest move.
And so Colorado came to a delightful conclusion. Rather than destroying the boulder, governor Jared Polis has announced that the state will instead turn it into a landmark, drawing on emergency funds from the Federal Highway Administration to widen the road so that passersby can marvel at the stone to be known as “Memorial Rock.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Border patrol agents took more than 130,000 people into custody at the U.S.-Mexico border in May, the highest number in 13 years.
From there, the migrants, largely families from Central America who crossed the border illegally, will be moved to overcrowded processing centers, and then to long-term detention centers and shelters, some of which have faced accusations of abuse, inadequate medical care, and lack of legal representation.
What they won’t get is an answer on whether they can stay in the U.S. That’s because there are already 892,517 cases pending in immigration courts, which have been waiting for an average of 726 days, or just about two years.
This wasn’t always the case. The backlog really started to take off in 2006, when there were only 168,827 pending cases waiting for an average of just 406 days.
“This is a backlog that has been building for years and years, over many administrations,” Judge Dana Leigh Marks, President Emerita of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told VICE News.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Democratic presidential candidate Eric Swalwell talks about his approach to stopping gun violence, his position on health care and his perspective on white privilege.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
キャットニップ入りのおもちゃで遊びます。This is a toy with catnip.
FINALLY . . .
Animal crackers: inside the world’s most madcap menagerie
With its Frankenstein fauna and cosmopolitan chickens, Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen’s eco-park puts the perverse into biodiversity.
A hipster Wunderkammer … Koen Vanmechelen’s creations on show at Labiomista in Genk, Belgium.
A steel cage pokes up through the trees on the edge of Genk in eastern Belgium. It emerges from a long, dark brick building that has the fortified look of a high-security laboratory. Through narrow windows, you can make out the inanimate bodies of pigs, chickens and strange winged creatures, lit by eerie neon lights, while a symphony of exotic squawks emanates from an aviary beyond. Hidden out here on the edge of a forest, it looks like some secret facility for developing future species.
The reality is not far off. This is Labiomista, the otherworldly vision of artist Koen Vanmechelen, who has spent the last two decades conducting experiments with animals – from breeding the most “cosmopolitan” kind of chicken to exploring the immunological potential of camels. In a joint venture with the city, he has now built a €22m ecological park and studio complex, designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta, as a wild playground for his curious creations.
“The building is really a metaphor for our relationship with the natural world,” says Vanmechelen, 53, standing on a terrace inside his glass-walled aviary. In the trees around him, Victoria crowned pigeons from New Guinea mingle with toco toucans from South America, while a big wreathed hornbill shrieks overhead, showing who’s boss. “We have the fruit-eating birds here, and the eagle cage at the other end of the building, symbolising the eternal tension of nature – predator and prey in an everlasting search for balance, with us humans in the middle.”
Many artists take animals as their subject, but few can boast a collection of tropical birds, llamas, emus, camels, ostriches and alpacas roaming around a 24-hectare park, along with an army of several thousand chickens spread across eight farms around the world, from Detroit to Addis Ababa. In his new 5,000 sq m studio, Vanmechelen has conjured an alternative natural history museum full of taxidermied Frankenstein creations (some bred, but most stuck and sewn together), including a turkey-winged serval, ghostly white peacocks, and a Himalayan pheasant with an iguana’s head. Part Victorian Wunderkammer, part hipster restaurant decor, it recalls the work of eccentric 19th-century naturalist Charles Waterton, who conjoined parts of monkeys, fish and toads and presented them as exotic new discoveries. …
IN SOLIDARITY
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Maybe. Probably Not. Groundhog Day.