"Save us from fascism, but like, don't be a bitch about it."
That describes exactly what Clinton has to put up with.
...an ancient Semitic city in present-day Homs Governorate, Syria. Archaeological finds date back to the Neolithicperiod, and the city was first documented in the early second millennium BC. Palmyra changed hands on a number of occasions between different empires before becoming a subject of the Roman Empire in the first century AD.
...settled in the late 17th century by Swedes, marking the northernmost border of New Sweden. A farmhouse built in 1761 by the third generation settlers still remains as the oldest house in Palmyra.[21] Farming was the primary use of land in Palmyra and the surrounding area until after the construction of the Camden and Amboy Railroad in 1834 with a station in the area, after which railroad workers built homes on lots they purchased along the railroad right of way. The community was originally known as Texas, but a local landowner, Isaiah Toy, a descendant of the original Swedish settlers and a stockholder in the Camden and Amboy Railroad, who wanted to have a post office established in the community, convinced the railroad to change the name of the station in 1849 to Palmyra, which came from his love of ancient history.[22] Palmyra was the name of an ancient trading center located in central Syria.
a. the term "alpha male" describes something outside the evo-psycho imagination;
b. said alpha males are more concerned about incipient megalomaniacal robots than everybody else; and
c. women are less power-mad than men, by nature
What is the role of interest in this world? Interest, classically (and I do mean classically, as in Mr. Keynes and the), is the reward for waiting: there’s supposedly a social function to interest because it rewards people for saving rather than spending. But right now we’re awash in excess savings with nowhere to go, and the marginal social value of a dollar of savings is negative. So real interest rates should be negative too, if they’re supposed to reflect social payoffs.
This really isn’t at all exotic — but obviously it’s a point wealth-owners don’t want to hear. Hence the constant agitation for monetary tightening.
This evening, autumn chills me—But there will be a day
The Burke show is worth watching just for this explanation of space ship navigation techniques alone. |
Albee in his loft in 1991 - I was in that very same loft eight years later - albeit Albee wasn't there at the time. |
And good old Stephen Colbert makes an excellent point in this clip - the previous three presidential races were also tied in mid-September. So maybe hold off on that Canadian citizenship application for the time being...
Then there are those who traffic in angst professionally, who are straining to consider even the chance of a Trump election.
“The possibility of that is too horrifying to broach,” Larry David, the “Seinfeld” co-creator and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star, wrote in an email. “It’s like contemplating your own death.”
Surely Mr. David had done that, too?
“I can’t go there,” he said.
In Mr. Bartlett’s “Love, Love, Love” (the title is a sly riff on the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”), she plays Sandra, a rapacious woman who ages from 19 to 64 in the course of the drama, exemplifying the egotism of the Me Generation, often at the expense of her children. (Mr. Bartlett’s New York breakthrough was as the writer of “King Charles III,” on Broadway last season.)I hate generational generalities anyway, but especially a woman standing in for "Me Generation" egotism. Yeah those horrible women, thinking of themselves first, instead of the kids, like they're men or something. This play sounds incredibly reactionary.
His word-balloon reads: "all religion is in antagonism with the culture" |
The Comic Strip series BUTZ & Schopenhauer puts the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) in our time. Together with his life Companion, the Poodle Butz, is the great thinker as modest pensioners among us. It traverses the public spaces of the modern city: the pedestrian areas, the Department stores and the city parks. He finds himself in communication and conflict with the Types and characters of our time. Our contemporaries Schopenhauer speaks with those wonderful and scarce resounding aphorisms that have made him famous and cited to this day a lot. With the power of his language he represents our world to the test ; But our world is A tough test for him. Not infrequently gets his philosophical composure falter, and the eloquent spirit man must rely on the emotional backing his dumb dog BUTZ .
This is essential, since for “Blackbird” to work, you have to accept it as a love story — a tragic, horrible love story that destroys lives, but a love story all the same. Mr. Daniels and Ms. Pill are extraordinary in guaranteeing this acceptance.In spite of the Ray character having a cellphone, the play BLACKBIRD is pretty much obsolete in the United States. In the play there is apparently no sex offender notification laws so that only Una and, maybe, Ray's wife know that a convicted child rapist has access to another twelve-year-old girl. The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act has been the law of the land in the United States since 2006. So the play was already obsolete by the time of its first off-Broadway production, let alone the recent Broadway production.
But the far more troubling error is that Una depicts, in several flashbacks, what happened when Una was 13. To its credit, Una knows her statutory rape was horrifying; less to its credit, it can’t figure out a way to visually reflect that horror. Thus, the flashbacks have a strange romantic, erotic charge that really shouldn’t be there.
And yet, all the same, neither film can entirely escape the fact that it was written and directed by a man. They might feature women as protagonists, but the thing both films want you to think about is ultimately something that has nothing to do with those women: the thought of being a rapist who is understood, yes, but also absolved, and maybe even forgiven.
Dick is abundant and low value. I had gotten my new motto amidst the worst break-up of my life. Shaken to my core by the degrading insults my ex had hurled at me but also mourning the permanent departure of some poetically good dick, I was spending a day mindlessly refreshing Twitter and reading up on how to spot sociopaths. I came across two tweets from Madeleine Holden, a lawyer and writer who regularly entertains the Twitter masses with her unapologetic analyses of toxic masculinity and her praise of amazing female-identified people:
In my memory, those last six words emerged from the screen with their outer edges glowing like the inscription in the Dark Tongue of Mordor on the One Ring. I was transformed, nay, transfigured, by the message.
Conversations were governed by the same rules as matches. Lead with a pussy joke about my cat? Dick is abundant and low value. Choose a meeting place that doesn’t account for my commute there? Dick is abundant and low value. Ask for nudes too soon? Dick is abundant and low value. Cancel twice? Dick is abundant and low value. Send an unsolicited photo of your lower body in your laundry-day underwear with your hand suggestively but not sexily placed over your semi and not even bothering to crop out your poor cat? Dick is abundant and low value.I'm going to start sending the motto to the random assholes I meet on dating sites. Speaking of which - thanks so much for the offer, random pudgy man.
For the uninitiated, mirroring is designed for one purpose – to prevent women from chasing down men who are not interested in them. It is not a game. It is not a throwback to the 1950’s. It requires no thought and very little effort. Mirroring presumes one basic thing about that guy you like: if he’s interested in you, he’ll let you know.
So…
If he texts you, text him back right away.
If he calls you, call him back right away.
If he says he wants to see you this weekend and you’re free, say yes.
If he says he wants to be your boyfriend and you feel the same, say yes.
Mirroring is reactive, not proactive.
It gives men the space they need to choose you, prevents you from looking needy and desperate, and reveals what men are thinking – all without doing ANYTHING.
Mirroring is based on confidence, not insecurity. You should never have to chase a guy down and remind him that you’re alive and available and want to see him. All you have to do is be warm, enthusiastic and available when he reaches out to you.
The primary exception to mirroring comes in the form of beta/feminine men. Beta/feminine men are often some of the best husbands out there, but they conduct themselves in a passive way, leaving women wondering how they feel. In short, these nice guys are so insecure about pursuing you and making a move that they often wait for YOU to express interest in them. “You can call me, you know,” might be their mantra. Which is fine. However, this puts you in your “masculine energy,” and forces you to be the one to reach out to him to gauge his interest and availability.
As a dating coach for women, I don’t like that model. Nor do most of my clients. They may be proactive superstars in real life, but they tend to prefer being courted by men.
Which brings us back to the beginning. When a man is interested in you, you don’t have to do anything except say yes. You never have to reach out to him because he will do it for you. It’s in his best interest – whether he wants to get laid or whether he wants to be your boyfriend. You have to trust that.
...Five months later, in May 1968, she turned up at a press conference being given by Paul and John at a New York hotel. ‘I managed to slip him my phone number,’ she recalled later. ‘He rang me up and told me they were leaving that evening, but he’d like it if I was able to travel out to the airport with him and John. So I went out in their limousine, sandwiched between Paul and John.’
Eventually, Yoko’s dogged pursuit of John became so blatant that it developed into something of a private joke between the married couple. Yoko’s grande atrocity occurred one night when she turned up at the Transcendental Meditation lecture John and Cynthia were attending in London. When it was over she followed them out of the lecture hall and into the backseat of John’s psychedelically hand-painted Rolls-Royce limousine and sat herself down between them. Cynthia and John exchanged embarrassed smiles over her head until the chauffeur dropped her off at Park Row, where she was living with her husband.
Introduced at a party in 1998, one year after he had split from his second wife, Marla Maples, "I saw Melania and I said, 'Who is that?' " Trump recalls. "She was a very successful model. She was terrific. I tried to get her number, and she wouldn't give it to me."
He came to the party with a date!" Melania explains, laughing. "I had heard he was a ladies' man, and so I said, 'I'm not one of the ladies.' He said later that he sent her to the ladies' room so he could get my number. I was like, 'Oh what a sneaky way!' "Clearly when a man is attractive, women will pursue him and the man won't necessarily be turned off by being pursued. And if Lennon and McCartney are examples of "beta males" why would any woman want any other kind?
Still, Melania says she liked his "sparkle" and took his number. After returning from a modeling gig in the Caribbean, she called him, and on their first date, "we talked for almost the whole night," she says.
Standard commentary about Clinton’s candidacy—which focuses on her email server, the Benghazi attack, her oratorical deficiencies, her struggles with “authenticity”—doesn’t explain the intensity of this opposition. But the academic literature about how men respond to women who assume traditionally male roles does. And it is highly disturbing.
Over the past few years, political scientists have suggested that, counterintuitively, Barack Obama’s election may have led to greater acceptance by whites of racist rhetoric. Something similar is now happening with gender. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is sparking the kind of sexist backlash that decades of research would predict. If she becomes president, that backlash could convulse American politics for years to come.
To understand this reaction, start with what social psychologists call “precarious manhood” theory. The theory posits that while womanhood is typically viewed as natural and permanent, manhood must be “earned and maintained.” Because it is won, it can also be lost. Scholars at the University of South Florida and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported that when asked how someone might lose his manhood, college students rattled off social failures like “losing a job.” When asked how someone might lose her womanhood, by contrast, they mostly came up with physical examples like “a sex-change operation” or “having a hysterectomy.”
This gif about murderous Ghostbusters almost killed me. |
…It was as though Gertrude Stein had dreamed a dream after a late supper of pickles and ice cream… As to what they were getting at, this corner wouldn’t know, but there has been nothing quite like it since Miss Stein’s trophy, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” a few artistic seasons ago... Probably it is bad, certainly it is not good in the usually accepted sense of the theatre... It has no beginning or end, and lacks rhyme and reason. It tells of a horse that eats a hat, and the owner of the horse must get the owner of the hat another hat because she can’t go home to her husband without it. Because - well, Edwin Denby and Orson Wells have adapted the play from a French farce, and French farces are what they are. They are so much so, in fact, that the WPA, in a throwaway leaflet, issues a sort of quit claim, pointing out that the original “has been studied in school.” It is, in other words, sturdy. On top of this framework, the authors have added various private flights of fancy: actors make speeches to the audience, actors falling over chairs, a fountain which sprays the cast, schemes that are early Joe Cook or late Rube Goldberg.
There was a theater in Philadelphia called the Walnut Street Theatre—it’s still there—and upstairs at the Walnut Street Theatre was Theatre 5, which was a little tiny room that sat 100 people. And they had local grants, federal grants, just grants, grants, grants to put together little experimental theater shows in this 100-seat theater on the 5th floor of the Walnut Street Theatre.
They had all their money paid by the government, and they had to put up one new show, I think it was every six weeks. Teller and I, at this point, were street performers.
We went out to Head House Square in Philadelphia, and I would do a 12-minute juggling show, and I would then pass the hat. I was a very, very successful street performer.
We had a dream of doing a full evening show indoors. We needed a place, and Teller had gone to college with one of the guys who had these grants. But we didn’t know they had grants—we thought they were the same as us, that they made money from ticket sales.
They said that they couldn’t get their show together (six weeks with nothing else to do and they couldn’t do a show? Shakespeare’s in the public domain!) so they said, “You can have our theater to put your show on—you’d only have to pay us a little bit of money, and you can have the whole space and do the whole show.”
We were thrilled to pieces. Just thrilled to pieces! And we worked really hard (I mean, hard for show business.) We went out and did press releases and got reviews. And that 100-seat theater, when we were in there, was sold out for the whole six weeks.
Then the head of the Walnut Street Theatre found out that our show had been so successful—they’d never been successful in there at all—and came and talked to us. We didn’t know we were blowing the G on the joint—to use carny terms. We didn’t know we were giving up a secret, to use, I guess, regular-people terms.
He said, “How much of the grant money did you get?” And we said “Grant money? No, we just happened to have the theater — thank you so much, sir, we really appreciate it. It’s really helpful, you know, that small amount of rent we’re paying.” And he said, “Rent?!” I said, “This has been wonderful! We’re making our living, it’s going great.”
Well, anyway, they lost all their grants. And then there were all sorts of articles written on how Penn and Teller were destroying the arts in Philadelphia because we had lost the federal grants because we went and ratted out the people that were doing the real, important, significant work that we weren’t doing because we were “commercial.”
Then the 80s came around and there was all that controversy over a few artists— there was the Piss Christ art, and there was a New York artist named David Wojnarowicz. They did art that was very, very controversial, and very, very blasphemous.
They lost some of their National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants, and I was then in a very awkward position. I was a freedom of speech nut, and I thought that they absolutely should have the right to do whatever art they wanted.
But I was also remembering my Theatre 5 days in Philadelphia—and I didn’t think that the government should pay for them. And although I was—am—an atheist, my mom and dad were very strong Christians, and I was very close to them.
And I had that image in my head of the gun. I looked at this art that I loved, that was so blasphemous to my mom and dad, and I was appalled by the idea that my mom and dad were having a gun held to their head to pay for art that I loved, but they didn’t.
And that to me was libertarianism in a nutshell. I wanted those artists to have their work everywhere. I wanted those artists to be very, very successful—but I did not want anyone that did not like that art to pay for it, and certainly not to be forced.
So when Wojnarowicz lost the grants from the NEA, I went over to his studio. He was a little surprised that I’d showed up there, because I’d been on TV a few days before saying that I didn’t think the NEA should exist at all, and he shouldn’t get any money whatsoever. I said, “I’d like to buy a lot of your work. I want to buy it because I really, really like it.”So what Penn Jillette wants, essentially is a return to the days of patrons of the arts - people with money who could buy the work of artists, rather than artists being subsidized by the government.
The National Endowment for the Arts gave a grant to Tony, to an individual artist, to write this play. It's important to say that as often as possible: made possible by public support...
The show is one-sided by design: P&T's field interviewers rarely confront their subjects with the evidence against them, preferring to let the crackpots ramble on so that Jillette's voiceover rejoinders can score points without inciting a real argument.
She had certainty. This is what really attracted me emotionally to her that night. She was the first person I had ever met who projected it—she projected that what she knew was true, and that she was sure of it.