Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 659

Trump’s attack on Black America: Birtherism was always about more than Obama’s birth certificate

Donald Trump speaks to the media in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on April 27, 2011, after having addressed Barack Obama's release of his original birth certificate earlier that morning. (Credit: Getty/Matthew Cavanaugh)

Last Friday at a press conference held at his new Washington, D.C., hotel, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made the following announcement about President Barack Obama’s place of birth:

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”

Here was Trump, once again, engaging in an act of shameless compulsive mendacity: Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is not the wellspring of the birther conspiracy theory. In reality, Trump has spent five years fanning its fires. That Trump would then want praise and credit for ending a lie that he actually gave life to is beyond absurd.

Ultimately, Trump’s disavowal of his claim that Obama was born outside of the country — and is thus ineligible to be president of the United States — will do nothing to change the minds of the 61 percent of Trump supporters who have embraced such a fiction. And there may be a backfire effect to Trump’s recent announcement: It is the nature of conspiracy theories that the more they are denied and refuted that their credibility and power often grows among the faithful.

At its core, birtherism is an effort to delegitimize Obama, the United States’ first black president. This ploy did real harm to Obama’s ability to conduct the people’s business and confront the dire challenges facing the United States after the disastrous George W. Bush presidency. Plain and simple: Birtherism was and is a national distraction and embarrassment.

On a fundamental level, it’s just tedious, run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory fare mated with white supremacist invective. U.S. presidents are often dogged by conspiracy theories — that America’s first black president Obama would be targeted by a conspiracy theory that mines white racism for its force and power should not be surprising.

But there is a deeper, uglier and more vicious element to Trump’s birther conspiracy theory — one little commented upon by the American corporate news media. For birthers, Obama is a black usurper and “affirmative action” candidate whose life accomplishments are unearned and unwarranted. To that end, in the birther imagination Obama was not qualified to attend Columbia University and is a fraud who somehow conned or was given unearned special dispensation and privileges in order to become a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Trump has repeatedly returned to these themes in the five years that he has spent advancing birtherism.

Such claims are a slap in the face of black America. To suggest that Obama’s life successes are a result of his being a racial “token” or “unqualified” minority are charges that many African-Americans — especially those who are the first black people to hold their job titles or to work in formerly all white spaces — can deeply relate to. For this and many other reasons, African-Americans overwhelmingly support Obama and are fiercely protective of him because in his fight to defend his competency and ability on the global stage, they also see their own personal struggles.

The assertions that black and brown men (and women) are taking opportunities from white men that the latter are “entitled to” and have “earned” are absurd. These claims are the fitful projections of white racist paranoiac thinking. Unfortunately, such delusions hold great power over white conservatives. The feeling that “undeserving” black Americans are somehow “taking” opportunities from white people is a hallmark of the white racial resentment and overt bigotry that Trump and other Republicans have used to fuel their political campaigns

For example, a June 2016 public opinion poll by Reuters/Ipsos found that “nearly half of Trump’s supporters described African-Americans as more ‘violent’ than whites.” It also discovered, “The same proportion described African-Americans as more ‘criminal’ than whites, while 40 percent described them as more ‘lazy’ than whites.” In addition, Reuters found, “Some 31 percent of Trump supporters said they ‘strongly agree’ that ‘social policies, such as affirmative action, discriminate unfairly against white people,’ compared with 21 percent of Cruz supporters, 17 percent of Kasich supporters and 16 percent of Clinton supporters.”

Political scientists have documented how white racial resentment and overt bigotry are driving partisanship and support for Trump specifically and the Republican Party more generally.

These social forces operate within a larger context: As the 2016 American National Election Studies has documented more than half of white respondents believe, “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if black people would only try harder they could be just as well-off as whites.”

The white rage and racial resentment embodied captured by these public opinion polls and other social science research is the beating heart of the right wing’s crusade “to take back our country” and “Make America Great Again.” Trump and the Republican Party’s revanchism are deeply tied to the color line and cannot be easily decoupled from it.

Ultimately, Obama’s two terms in office have not been a panacea for black America. He has not pursued targeted economic and political policies that would help remedy the specific challenges and harms done to African-Americans. The black community has not yet recovered from the economic calamity of the Bush years. Black youth unemployment remains too high — at about 19 percent. Obama too often defaults to the mode of “lecturer in chief” when speaking to black Americans about the problems in their communities.

But African-Americans are politically sophisticated. They understand the structural and personal limitations imposed on Obama because of his skin color and by an obstructionist Republican Party that has abandoned any pretense of responsible governance in order to try to bring down the country’s first black president. Black Americans also value the symbolic progress and opportunities made possible by Obama’s twice being elected to the White House, as well as the material and substantive improvements he has made to their lives by making health care more accessible and improving the overall economy.

Along with having “the talk” about how to survive day-to-day encounters with America’s police, young black folks are also told by their parents and other mentors that that they have to do twice as well to get half as far as white people. As African-Americans watched President Obama succeed despite the racist opposition he faced, we knew that he too had learned the same lesson. Obama’s successes are our successes. And this is why we feel the barbs, racism and vitriol thrown at him so intensely and also smile so earnestly when, with his effortless cool pose and sharp intelligence, he triumphs over the opposition.

When President Obama produced his birth certificate at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he mocked and embarrassed Trump. Black Americans savored that moment because Trump’s racist birther conspiracy theory was an affront to our national belonging and citizenship as well.

Trump’s rejection of birtherism can and will do nothing to remedy his racist insults toward Obama and black America. The slur is too great, the racist vitriol too toxic. And thus no amount of “black outreach” by Trump or the GOP can undo this harm or bridge the chasm they actively created.

What Hillary and Britney have in common: “There is no way you can actually do ‘being a woman’ correctly in the public eye”

Hillary Clinton; Britney Spears (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster/Getty/Michael Loccisano/Photo montage by Salon)

“Wanting attention is genderless. It’s human,” model Emily Ratajkowski wrote in a recent piece for Glamour that swiftly went viral. “Yet we view a man’s desire for attention as a natural instinct; with a woman, we label her a narcissist.”

And boy, doesn’t author Sady Doyle know it. The feminist writer’s new book “Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why” explores this very double standard. Women who seek public attention, as Doyle has documented, can expect to have their sex lives, mental health and personal relationships picked apart in ways that men are generally spared. Men have sex, have messy personal lives and even have mental health problems, she has noted, but they still get to be portrayed as heroes and artists: See, for example, the legacies of Lou Reed, David Bowie, David Foster Wallace, Hugh Hefner and Miles Davis.

But women? Women with the same kind of lives — Amy Winehouse, Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, Whitney Houston, Kim Kardashian — are regarded as train wrecks, moral lessons for other women about the supposed dangers of being in the public eye instead of staying at home. And this has been going on, as Doyle has documented, for centuries.

I spoke with Doyle about her new book and why feminists need to stand up for a woman’s right to be as imperfect and flawed as our male counterparts. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Quote from you: “Women who have succeed too well at becoming visible have always been penalized vigilantly and forcefully in public spectacles.” Why is this?

There is an idea that women should not try to enter the public sphere at all, that women should be silent, that they should have mainly private lives. And that’s a way to keep women from exerting influence on the world. This is something that there have been actual laws passed into the books about.

But nowadays we can’t exactly say that it is illegal for a woman to vote or to run for public office or to speak too loudly and piss off the neighbors, which, believe it or not, was a gender-specific law back in the day.

What we can do is make visibility uniquely dangerous for women. You know, these women, whether they are doing things that you and I might consider serious — like running for public office or writing high literature — or whether they are doing things we might see as pop-cultural entertainment — releasing albums, showing up on TV shows — they are all marked as highly visible and, in some senses, uniquely successful women.

So what we do is we say, “Well you wanted us to look at you. Let’s see how much we can make you regret having our attention.” And that means that they are subject to uniquely invasive coverage of their bodies, whether that is upskirts or hackers leaking their nudes and sharing them around the internet. It means they are subjected to incredibly intense scrutiny of their personalities.

Nobody that has our attention for 24 hours a day is always going to be nice or always going to be perfect at all of their relationships or always going to behave in a totally dignified fashion. But we tend to find whatever flaws we can in these women, whether it is getting dumped or going to clubs a lot or being loud or insensitive or provocative in the way that they speak. And we blow that up until it becomes the entire narrative. It is more profitable and popular to scrutinize their personalities and their personal choices than it is to actually consume the work that they make.

Your book covers women who get the “train wreck” treatment, from Britney Spears to Hillary Clinton. What do these two women have in common as far as how they are perceived in the public?

There are a lot of leaps in the book. I think my Paris Hilton to Mary Wollstonecraft is in the first chapter and I just thought, Well, if they can read past that connection, then maybe my crazy nonsense will maybe work for them.

I think that Hillary and Britney are interesting to me because they arose at the same moment; they arose out of each other. One of them was sort of demonized really intensely throughout the ’90s for being old and for not being seen as sexy. There was a lot of nasty coverage.

For example, Bill Clinton’s infidelity focused on the idea that he sort of had to do it because his wife is so awful and so unlovable. She was very much stereotyped as the frigid, uptight, yuppie wife, you know, feminazi shrew — what have you.

At the same moment, we are starting to create perfect girls, and we wind up with someone like Britney Spears, who is really marketable for her ability to sell sex, and the specific porny sex as a teenager, while simultaneously claiming to be a virgin. You know, she had to be hypersexual in her image, while also staunchly denying having any sexual feelings whatsoever.

They both arose out of the debate over what a worthwhile woman would look like and specifically what the sexual politics of being a good woman were.

You know, you couldn’t be like Hillary. You couldn’t be this old, unsexy wife who thought she was so smart and wanted to work on health care. But you also couldn’t be young and dancing around in a bikini without people calling you a skank.

Monica Lewinsky is another one. You would think that if people hated Hillary so much, this woman who Bill Clinton had an affair with — we’d be sympathetic to her. But we weren’t. All of her press coverage was about how she was crazy and unstable and driven by her immense sexual appetite. She wore thongs and gave blow jobs. And what good woman would do such a thing?

So to have the three of them together, to realize that we had the prude and we had the quote unquote slut and then we had Britney, who simultaneously had to be both a Madonna and a whore. And all three of them were just loathed for doing that.

It shows that there is no escape outlet. There is no way you can actually do “being a woman” correctly in the public eye and not get people who just hate you and want you to shut up and go away forever.

Speaking of Mary Wollstonecraft, your book has a lot of historical examples of women getting the train wreck treatment. Like many of your readers, I thought of Mary Wollstonecraft as an 18th-century feminist philosopher and the mother of the woman who wrote “Frankenstein” and I hadn’t thought more past that. But in her day she was considered a train wreck. Why?

Mary Wollstonecraft’s actual ideas are so common now. For the good Lord’s sake, one of her most controversial positions was that women should be able to learn botany! Which was a real debate back in the day because if you learned about botany, you were sort of indirectly learning that sex existed — like the plants were so suggestive that if we let our daughters know about all their plants parts, it would corrupt them forever.

So we can think of her as boring because who cares about whether women should learn botany. But she was in some senses very radical within the context of the 18th century.

She was specifically sexually radical. She did not believe in marriage. And she had two relationships, one of them very serious, a live-in relationship, without being married. That second relationship was with a man named Gilbert Imlay and, you know, to this day, historians are trying to figure [out] what she saw in him because he turned out to be a horrible person.

They have their daughter and they were in the middle of war-torn, revolutionary France. He left her with a newborn, did not tell her what was going on for months and months, and she kept writing to him like, “When are you coming back?” And he’s like, “Oh, in a minute. I have some business prospects to attend to. Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”

She began to become very depressed and very sort of unmoored. She took a dark turn and when she found out what had happened, which was that Imlay was living in London with another woman, she tried to commit suicide twice.  

She eventually got married to a man who loved her so much that when she died, he chose to write a biography, and publish all of her letters. Every single scandalous thing about her sex life and or mental health was revealed all at once.

You cannot imagine what a gift that was to the right-wing press of the day. These guys, who were writing poems about botany and about how we’re turning our daughters into sluts by letting them study plant sex, they were able to point to it and say, “And you know who said your daughter should study botany? This woman, the woman with the illegitimate baby who tried to kill herself two times.”

She was called a maniac, an unsexed woman. The Anti-Jacobin Review, which was the real hard-core right-wing publication at the time, just straight up called her a whore and a usurping bitch. Her bad reputation lasted for a long time. It lasted for most of a century, until the beginning of the 20th century. 

There is this train-wreck narrative that I think your readers are familiar with, that is pushed by TMZ and Perez Hilton and even in the mainstream media. But the audience for it is mostly female. It’s women more than men who are reading these blogs, who breathlessly follow every supposed heartbreak of Jennifer Anniston, etc. Why is this more of a women’s thing than a men’s thing, when it is so obviously sexist?

I don’t want to dump on people who are into gossip. I obviously would not have written an entire book about this if I weren’t fascinated by it and if I didn’t read it and consume it myself.

It is very much about policing femininity, finding women who are doing “femininity” wrong and humiliating them as a way to enforce social norms around what a good women is.

Women are taught to police their own femininity harshly all of their lives. Every day you wake up and you try to be a woman and you try not to do being a woman wrong. Women, more so than men, are taught to define their own value based on whether or not people like them.

We are constantly looking for some pressure-release valve. It is so easy to look at a woman who is clearly doing it quote unquote wrong: “Britney Spears has gained weight and she is stumbling around and why can’t she just get her life together.”

That feels good because you can look at that and say, “Well, at least I’m not her. At least I am doing my femininity a little bit better than she is.”

Another part of our fascination with these women, and potentially a really healthy part, is that they get to live out things like pain or heartbreak or just not being able to get it together on a certain day, when we are taught to hide and suppress that.

We can either look at them as a way to sort of pull ourselves up a little bit by pushing someone else down. Or we can look at them and admit that they are going through things that all of us have gone through. They just happen to be going through them very publicly. And we can sort of start to build an empathetic connection with them.

I think there is a reason after she had a breakdown [that] so many people changed their tune on Britney Spears. People feel very protective toward her now, and they really did not when she was just the “Baby One More Time” girl. Even when she was mid-breakdown, people definitely were enjoying the spectacle of this broken woman who had it all and fell apart in public. But even as that was happening, more and more people were beginning to identify with Britney Spears, the woman with problems, in a way that they never did with Britney Spears, the perfect teenager who was both sexy and never had sex ever.

Stop obsessing over movie trailers: Snap judgments based on commercials take their toll

"Bridget Jones's Baby;" "Suicide Squad"

If trailers were an indicator of quality, “Suicide Squad” would be the greatest comic-book movie ever made. Following the grim “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” a movie so utterly joyless that it made “Angela’s Ashes” look like “Singin’ in the Rain,” David Ayer’s superhero-villain mashup promised to make blockbusters fun again. A preview released in April, just weeks after “BVS” proved a disappointment, recalled Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” a lighthearted romp that didn’t take itself too seriously.

The problem was that the movie viewers were promised wasn’t the one Ayer actually made. The director’s original cut of “Suicide Squad” was dark and gritty, created in the Warner Bros. model of superhero movies. This was a studio that, following the success of Christopher Nolan’s noirish “The Dark Knight,” mandated that its franchises contain “no jokes.” But the online buzz — coupled with test screenings in which audiences were shown two different versions of the film, one rollocking and the other somber — convinced Warner Bros. to reshoot “Suicide Squad,” bringing it closer to the tone of the trailer.

Allowing buzz to dictate how a film is produced turned out to be a bad bet for the struggling studio. The “Suicide Squad” that debuted in theaters was a poor patch job — a stitched-together tangle of the competing visions for the film. A constant stream of pop songs punctuated the soundtrack, as if to suggest that the film was a comedy when it was not. The movie’s biggest laugh is Batman (Ben Affleck) punching Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) in the face. “Suicide Squad” is so incoherent that as Devin Faraci pointed out, Deadshot (Will Smith) is “introduced no less than three times.” The movie that was supposed to save WB signaled that the studio has no idea what its audience wants.

Trailers are an important way to build anticipation and excitement during an era where the stakes of success have never been higher. Movies cost more to make and market than ever before, despite declining theatrical attendance in recent years. The number of movie tickets sold this summer, weighed down by costly flops, hit a 24-year low. In a crowded, high-pressure marketplace, it’s more important than ever that trailers make an instant impression, satisfying our desires for cinematic escape. This burden has created a culture where audiences are more likely to judge a film without having seen it — and that’s awful news for the cinema as we know it.

***

“Bridget Jones’s Baby” finally debuted in theaters last weekend after months of controversy over its trailer.

In the improbable third installment of the series, Renee Zellweger returns to the role that made her a household name — as  a boozy flibbertigibbet whose biggest worry is winding up alone, her body being half eaten by wild dogs. Bridget Jones is charming and lovable precisely because she doesn’t have it all together. Fifteen years after the original film became an international hit, Bridget is up to her old shenanigans. After rediscovering her inner sex goddess, she becomes pregnant. The issue is that she isn’t sure who the father is: old beau Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) or new flame Jack Quant (Patrick Dempsey), an awkwardly named health enthusiast who runs a dating website.

The film’s trailer was reviewed very harshly after hitting the web in March. Best-selling author Jo Piazza wrote in Elle that “Bridget Jones’s Baby” was a disservice to the character that she loved so fiercely, someone who frequently made mistakes but was slowly coming into her own. In 2004’s poorly reviewed “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” Bridget finds herself on the cusp of maturity. “She gained a newfound confidence and success in her career,” Piazza wrote. “She stopped making all the wrong decisions about men. She was slowly but surely on a trajectory to becoming an adult.”

“Bridget Jones’s Baby” seems to indicate that the character has taken a step back from adulthood, playing out a similar plotline as the previous two films. In the 2001 original, Darcy must compete with Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), his former best friend and Bridget’s boss, for the hand of our beloved compulsive eater. The two eventually get into a brawl so popular that it would be repeated in the sequel — but in a fountain instead of the street.

What’s refreshing about “Baby,” however, is that it subverts many of the hallmarks of the original movies. Darcy once described Bridget as “verbally incontinent” and an “appallingly bad public speaker.” While introducing a respected author, she stumbles over the name of her leering creep of a boss, who is able to think only of the nickname she’s given him: “Mr. Titz-pervert.” Now a top news producer, the Bridget of today displays poise and confidence; she’s capable of even delivering a last-minute speech at a funeral. This is the woman we knew — but now imbued with age and experience.

Even her romantic leads have grown up considerably. Instead of treating each other as rivals, Darcy and Jack learn to support one another, becoming good friends. The men agree that no matter who the father is, the child will be loved. The vibe is so convivial that during the third act, “Bridget Jones’s Baby” threatens to turn into “Design for Living.” In Ernst Lubitsch’s pre-Motion Picture Production Code screwball comedy, Gilda (Miriam Hopkins) can’t decide between two eligible bachelors (Frederic March and Gary Cooper), so she chooses them both.

“Bridget Jones’s Baby” is both subtly progressive and very good — a surprise to those who had written it off months earlier. If Piazza claimed that the issue is that Bridget has not changed, Variety’s Owen Glieberman griped that she was too different. Zellweger, known for her trademark pursed lips, emerged out of a years-long hiatus in 2014 with plastic surgery that transformed her features. “Celebrities, like anyone else, have the right to look however they want, but the characters they play become part of us,” Glieberman wrote. “I suddenly felt like something had been taken away.”

Note that neither one of these people nor any other member of the public had actually seen the film when they wrote these reactions. The same was true of the (largely male) denouncers of “Ghostbusters,” who urged a boycott of the all-female reboot before production had even wrapped. The film’s trailers struggled with packaging its loose, freewheeling vibe into a two-minute highlight reel, and when the first teaser dropped in March, the effects had not been finished. This is extremely common, as big-budget tentpoles have to start building buzz months — even up to a year — before they come out.

“Ghostbusters” never quite recovered from the poor reception its trailer received, a massive fan outcry that led at least one reviewer to take a very brave stand against seeing the film. The Paul Feig-directed movie actually earned positive notices, sitting at 73 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Reviewers particularly praised a star-making turn from Kate McKinnon (“Saturday Night Live”) as a subtextually queer gadget girl. The damage, however, had largely been done: “Ghostbusters” finished with just more than $200 million globally, hit with a $70 million loss that all but rules out a sequel. Adding insult to injury, detractors still insisted that it received largely negative reviews.

The impact of online snap judgements appears to have also taken its toll on “Bridget Jones’s Baby.” The critically acclaimed film is nestled at a strong 78 percent on Rotten Tomatoes but is expected to finish with about $44 million domestically — about half of what the original made in theaters. It’s also little more than “The Edge of Reason,” an embarrassing misfire that became a punch line on “The Office,” earned back in 2004. The domestic box office was weak indeed for the opening weekend of “Baby,” but it did very well internationally, especially in the character’s native U.K. and has already earned back its relatively modest $35 million budget.

It’s possible that a film like “Bridget Jones’s Baby” will find its stateside sea legs when its target audience gets to the theater and finds out that, previews be damned, the movie is a real charmer. Many, though, will stay away. A 2014 study from Unruly found that trailers earn 42 percent of their social shares within the first 24 hours after being released on the internet. The conversation that happens during that period — when we judge a film based on gut-check reactions — is very crucial. The Think Insights research group found that there’s a direct correlation between what trailers people are searching for online and the film’s resulting box office performance.

When you’re appraising a movie based solely on its trailer, you’re not even judging a book by its cover. You’re judging a book by its marketing campaign. The issue, of course, with deciding your viewing habits on what amounts to a glorified sales pitch is that, just like any other hyped-up product promise, trailers can lie. Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” was packaged as a light comedy in order to heighten its terrifying impact. “Rope” was sold using fake footage shot just for the trailer. When tasked with getting audiences to “The Minus Man,” a justly forgotten Owen Wilson movie, marketers ditched previewing the movie at all. Instead the trailer featured two people discussing the film, having just seen it. Given the movie’s mediocre quality, that was a savvy choice.

A great trailer reminds us why we go to the movies. It stirs up our primal longings to be scared out of our wits, to laugh until our stomachs hurt or to see something unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. In the cases of “Prometheus,” “Sucker Punch,” and “Suicide Squad,” the previews are so good that the final product leaves us feeling disappointed and empty, promised a film that doesn’t exist. There’s a lesson in that anticlimax: When audiences and film studios let 60-second teasers decide our entertainment choices for us, we get the movies we deserve.

Space oddity: Undeterred by Falcon 9 explosion, Elon Musk plans to travel “well beyond” Mars by 2018

In this image released by SpaceX, an unmanned Falcon rocket lifts off from from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Friday, May 27, 2016, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The first stage of the unmanned Falcon rocket settled onto a barge 400 miles off the Florida coast, eight minutes after liftoff, It's the third successful booster landing at sea for the California-based SpaceX. This one came after the rocket launched an Asian communications satellite. (SpaceX via AP) (Credit: AP)

Telsa CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is nothing if not ambitious, that goes without saying — what surprises even his biggest boosters, however, is how he’s spent the better part of 2016 becoming noticeably more so.

In April, he announced plans to arrive on and colonize Mars by 2018, six years ahead of schedule. on Monday, Musk — despite the spectacular and still inexplicable June 28th prelaunch explosion of the Falcon 9 rocket — the Tesla co-founder declared that he would press on, not merely colonizing Mars but traveling “well beyond” the Red Planet.

Many believed the Falcon 9 explosion would slow Musk’s roll, but on Monday he claimed that with the improvements spurred on by Falcon 9, it turns out the [Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT)] can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name”:

Turns out MCT can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2016

Maybe Ultimate Spaceship, Version 2? Mostly because it is not the ultimate and there isn't a version 1.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2016

Musk teased also tweeted a slightly less serious image of the interplanetary transport system on September 17th:

Preview of the @SpaceX interplanetary transport system at @IAC2016https://t.co/Rz4XmeAoRw

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 18, 2016

Watch footage of the real explosion of the Falcon 9 rocket, courtesy of The Daily Mail:

Jim Carrey hit with wrongful death lawsuit in ex-girlfriend’s suicide

Jim Carrey (Credit: AP/Dennis Van Tine)

A wrongful death lawsuit was filed on Monday against actor-comedian Jim Carrey in connection with his ex-girlfriend, Cathriona White’s, suicide, according to a New York Daily News report.

Filed on Monday by White’s estranged husband, Mark Burton, the lawsuit claims Carrey distributed “highly addictive drugs” under the pseudonym Arthur King.

According to the lawsuit, Carrey provided White with drugs despite knowing “full well” that she was “prone to depression and had previously attempted to take her own life.”

White died last year after consuming “a lethal cocktail that included Percocet and Ambien,” which, according to the lawsuit, Carrey had supplied.

Burton is “seeking the funeral costs” that the suit alleges Carrey offered to pay and failed to follow through on, “as well as real and punitive damages.”

Read the full report — including scans of the lawsuit — over at The New York Daily News.

“No class at all”: Trump supporters trash Jimmy Kimmel on Twitter after Emmys monologue

In this photo provided by ABC, Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, left, talks with host Jimmy Kimmel during a taping of the ABC television show, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” on Wednesday, May 25, 2016, in Los Angeles. Trump made an appearance as a guest, along with musical guest Greg Porter on the late night show, which airs every weeknight at 11:35 p.m. EST. (Randy Holmes/ABC via AP) (Credit: AP)

Jimmy Kimmel hosted the 68th annual Emmy Awards on Sunday night, opening with a joke about Donald Trump and his current wife, Melania (whom Kimmel called “Malaria” Trump). This didn’t sit well with a somewhat representative sample of the Republican presidential nominee’s supporters, who hurled charges of misogyny, hypocrisy, and favoritism at the “Jimmy Kimmel Live” host on Twitter.

Trump’s supporters were already — perhaps fairly — complaining of a double-standard after Democrats criticized “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon for humanizing Trump by mussing his signature hairdo in an interview last week. Meanwhile, Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, enjoyed positive headlines after opening a pickle jar on Kimmel’s show only a few weeks prior.

“If it wasn’t for television, would Donald Trump be running for president?” Kimmel opened on Sunday night. “No. He would be at home right now, quietly rubbing up against his wife, Malaria, while she pretends to be asleep.”

The backlash:

Jimmy kimmel is an A–hole! Making fun of Trump's wife!

— Becky V. (@BeckyV8) September 19, 2016

Low Life Emmy Winners and Low Life Jimmy Kimmel Criticize Donald Trump During Awards Show https://t.co/h0NK37C4Xf via @YouTube

— joseph price (@joeyyeo13) September 19, 2016

Looks like no one watched Trump-bashing Hollywood elites giving SJW awards to themselves.https://t.co/VvpYNAO7NQ

— Daily_stir #FreeMilo (@daily_stir) September 19, 2016

Malaria? Jimmy Kimmel likes to rub up against his wife UGLY FATSO MOLLY

— PRESIDENT TRUMP (@npina11) September 19, 2016

After Kimmel butt-kissed Trump on his own show There's nothing he can do to Make up for it! Nauseating. https://t.co/fR9skA2t5D

— Mike Glick (@wsidemike) September 19, 2016

@JimmyKimmelLive thinks he's funny with the trump joke, the real joke is kimmel. He could live 100 lives and never accomplish what trump has

— Terry butler (@Terrybu46320496) September 19, 2016

Emmy host Jimmy Kimmel referred to Melania Trump as "Malaria" – that's a liberal's idea of a joke. Classy. https://t.co/iPqckuSXy4

— Karen Townsend (@penguinponders) September 19, 2016

Jimmy Kimmel should be ashamed of himself call and Donald Trump's wife malaria, typical Hollywood Brown nosing bullshit. No class at all

— Frank Stallone (@Stallone) September 19, 2016

Kimmel & others absolutely disgusting-All controlled by this EVIL administration! Never watch them again #TrumpTrain https://t.co/Lism3ZWfQa

— Trump In It To Win (@starknightz) September 19, 2016

 

Oklahoma welcomes first new abortion clinic since 1974

South Wind Women's Center in Oklahoma City (Credit: AP/Sue Ogrocki)

Despite strict anti-choice laws, the state of Oklahoma has opened its first abortion clinic since 1974. A Kansas-based foundation named Trust Women began serving patients in Oklahoma City last week at the new South Wind Women’s Center.

Six licensed physicians are now providing services at the center, including abortions, OB-GYN care, family planning, emergency contraception, and adoption.

Earlier this year, Oklahoma Legislature passed a bill that would effectively ban abortions by making the procedure a felony for performing doctors. Republican Gov. Mary Fallin vetoed the measure, however, though not because of her beliefs on reproductive rights. A staunch pro-lifer, Fallin did not approve the controversial bill because it was too “vague” and “would not withstand a constitutional legal challenge.”

Trust Women says Oklahoma City was the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. without an abortion provider. The only other abortion providers available in the state are in Norman and Tulsa.

“If you look at this part of the country, there is a lack of access to reproductive health care, and frankly a lack of access to health care across the board,” said Julie Burkhart, the founder and CEO of Trust Women, to Associated Press.

Burkhart estimates the Oklahoma City clinic will provide about 1,500 abortions in its first year.

Lorryn McGarry, a spokeswoman for Holy Innocents Foundation of Oklahoma, an anti-abortion group, expressed her disappointment in the clinic’s opening, “We are grieved to hear of the abortion industry moving into south Oklahoma City,” she told the Associated Press. “We will do all we can to pray for a change of heart for all involved.”

The rate of abortions performed in Oklahoma has dropped by 34 percent dating back to 2002, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Health. The new clinic will provide services to a city with over 600,000 residents.

Trump campaign drops new Ted Nugent ad: Hillary “will destroy the freedom that is uniquely American”

The Donald Trump campaign on Sunday dropped its newest ad, featuring one of the Republican presidential nominee’s most divisive endorsers, Ted Nugent. The eight-minute ad, titled “#HEARTLAND4TRUMP,” pays particular attention to gun laws as they relate to hunting.

“The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule,” Nugent’s non-diegetic voice begins around the three-minute mark. “We the people choosing our own pursuit of happiness — that doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world.”

“Hunting, fishing, trapping — we the people own these renewable resources,” he continues, appearing on-screen with a guitar and a cammo button-up. “It’s a way of life — why conservation is the greatest success story in the world, here in America.”

“Hillary Clinton is against all these things. She will destroy the freedom that is uniquely American,” he adds. “Donald Trump will safeguard the things that make America the greatest place in the world.”

As MediaMatters’ Timothy Johnson detailed:

“In 2016 alone, Nugent has promoted anti-Semitic content, used a racial slur against a Latino critic, promoted misogynist reasons why guns are better than women, shared a racist meme advertising the fake moving company ‘2 n—-rs and a stolen truck,’ and smeared Minnesota police shooting victim Philando Castile as a criminal. In 2015, Nugent devoted an entire column to praising the use of the word ‘n—-r,’ even in a racist context.”

Watch the ad below:

Lyft founder claims that all its cars will be self-driving by 2021

Lyft (Credit: Courtesy of Lyft)

According to Lyft co-founder and President John Zimmer, the company intends on having an utterly autonomous fleet by 2021 — a mere five years from now. Zimmer wrote an essay in Medium explaining his decision.

“I wanted to write a long piece because this is the stuff we’ve been working about almost 10 years now when we started Zimride in 2007,” Zimmer told Medium’s Darrell Etherington in an interview.

“There are a lot of marketing stunts happening where you put a few cars on the road,” he continued, “or you make announcements and press releases, but the thing that nobody’s talking about is you have this once-every-hundred-year opportunity to – if we work with the right stakeholders – to actually impact how our cities work.”

When asked what this means for the drivers of currents – truck drivers, taxi drivers, etc. – offering instead what amounts to a counter-factual from an urban planning graduate seminar, saying only that in the short-term an automated fleet would benefit the very people whose jobs it would be replacing.

Lyft announced a speculative plan with General Motors to accomplish this in January, at which time Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk said he assumed the network would consist of autonomous car owners renting their vehicles to Lyft, but that was deemed untenable given the potential unwillingness of self-driving car owners to rent their vehicles to unknown cars or individuals.

Moreover, a city with automated fleets means there would be fewer cars sitting idle in parking, freeing urban planners to design buildings and cities around human being as opposed to the vehicles they drive.

As Zimmer noted on Medium, “[r]idesharing is just the first phase of the movement to end car ownership and reclaim our cities [because] as I mentioned before, the shift to autonomous cars will expand dramatically over the next ten years, transforming transportation into the ultimate subscription service.”

Look Again: The day’s most compelling images from around the globe

A Miami police officer holds back protestor Judd Allison, right, as Florida Gov. Rick Scott leaves a news conference at Wynwood Walls, Monday, Sept. 19, 2016, in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami. The governor said the arts district is no longer considered a zone of active Zika transmission. It has been 45 days since the last Zika detection. Allison was protesting the use of the pesticide naled, which was used in the area to combat Zika. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) (Credit: AP)

 

London, England   Matt Dunham/AP

Some 2500 lifejackets worn by refugees who made the sea crossing from Turkey to the Greek island of Chios are displayed in a “Lifejacket Graveyard”

Many in the U.S. — even the Republican-led Congress it seems — have tuned out the growing danger of the Zika virus. But that’s far from the case in Miami, where protesters, like this one on Monday, have been rankled by use of pesticides. Still waiting for the protest from Miami mosquitos, who are probably the most upset about the use of pesticides.

–Pete Catapano, executive editor