Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 900
January 7, 2016
“If Donald Trump is president of the United States it will be the end of the world”: 4 times J. Law got all leftie on us






No compassion: This amazing Ted Cruz video proves that “compassionate conservatism” is truly dead
This, by the way, is why Democrats would be nearly as excited to see Cruz win the GOP’s nomination as they would be if the nominee were Trump. Because what this clip says to millions of Latinos and Hispanics is, quite simply, that they are not welcome in Ted Cruz’s United States of America — even if it is the only country they’ve ever really knows; even if they did nothing wrong. That’s what “conservatism” means in the Republican primary. Compassion was once sold as a feature. But those days are over; now it is a bug. If you’re left of center (and if you’re reading Salon, I think it’s fair to guess that you are) you won’t want to do what I’m about to ask of you — but stick with me and do it anyway. Take your mind back to the halcyon days of American Empire, when the economy was humming, wages were growing, crime was dropping, and the nation was at peace. It was a time before Facebook, before Twitter; before iPods and iPhones and Chrome and Google Glass. It was a time when you were still supposed to like Bill Cosby; a time when a reference to “nine-eleven” presumably meant someone was trying to call an ambulance or the cops. Yes, I’m asking you to return in your mind to the year 2000, when life — for many Americans, at least — was better, politics was nicer, and everyone was coming to terms with the fact that the new Star Wars movie sucked. Why am I asking you to do this? Not because I want to relive those days, myself (I was 9 at the time; I assure you that I do not). Rather, I want you to turn the clock back to 2000 in order to remind yourself of a concept that is not only all but forgotten in our politics, but is, with every new cycle, beginning to look increasingly absurd. It was called “compassionate conservatism,” and it was, we were told, the game-changing, barrier-breaking P.R. coup of a generation, one that would put Republicans — and a Bush, no less — in the Oval Office once again. Compassionate conservatism was always much more of a branding exercise than an actual political philosophy (though it does have some roots within American right-wing Catholicism). Its purpose, generally understood, was to allow its main office-holding proponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, to distinguish himself from regular conservatism, which at the time was largely associated with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It was an attempt, in other words, to persuade Americans that a person could be conservative — and a person could vote for a conservative — without being a dick. Now let’s fast-forward to 2016. The Republican Party’s presidential frontrunner is Donald Trump. The candidates are fighting over who is going to be “strongest” on all manner of moochers — the young and the poor, of course; but especially immigrants. Compassion is not part of the equation. In fact, it’s a hindrance: One of Jeb Bush’s biggest “gaffes,” as far as many Republicans are concerned, was calling immigrating to America “an act of love.” This is the context in which you need to understand this video, which garnered some attention on Thursday when it was posted to Twitter. It shows Sen. Ted Cruz, the candidate most likely to supplant Trump — at least in Iowa, where the video was shot — responding to a question from a so-called “dreamer” (an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the country by their parents at a young age and effectively grew up as an American). Her question, in essence, was whether Cruz, if he became president, would try to have her deported. It’s a question that other dreamers have asked other Republican candidates — and one that GOPers are generally loathe to answer, because the “right” answer for a Republican primary electorate is the exact opposite of the “right” answer for the American electorate, at large. But Cruz, perhaps to his credit, didn’t shirk from answering. He told her, in so many words, that he would indeed want to deport her. Not because doing so would do either her or the United States any good, but because, he said, she had broken the law. He tried to do this while adopting the soft, plaintive, “I-feel-your-pain” pose that countless politicians have tried in the years since Bill Clinton made it into an art. But the takeaway — yes, I will deport you — was clear all the same:Ted Cruz looks a young woman brought to the US as a child in the eye and tells her he’ll deport her. It’s chilling. https://t.co/n6onPPT3FI
— Matthew McGregor (@mcgregormt) January 7, 2016
This, by the way, is why Democrats would be nearly as excited to see Cruz win the GOP’s nomination as they would be if the nominee were Trump. Because what this clip says to millions of Latinos and Hispanics is, quite simply, that they are not welcome in Ted Cruz’s United States of America — even if it is the only country they’ve ever really knows; even if they did nothing wrong. That’s what “conservatism” means in the Republican primary. Compassion was once sold as a feature. But those days are over; now it is a bug. If you’re left of center (and if you’re reading Salon, I think it’s fair to guess that you are) you won’t want to do what I’m about to ask of you — but stick with me and do it anyway. Take your mind back to the halcyon days of American Empire, when the economy was humming, wages were growing, crime was dropping, and the nation was at peace. It was a time before Facebook, before Twitter; before iPods and iPhones and Chrome and Google Glass. It was a time when you were still supposed to like Bill Cosby; a time when a reference to “nine-eleven” presumably meant someone was trying to call an ambulance or the cops. Yes, I’m asking you to return in your mind to the year 2000, when life — for many Americans, at least — was better, politics was nicer, and everyone was coming to terms with the fact that the new Star Wars movie sucked. Why am I asking you to do this? Not because I want to relive those days, myself (I was 9 at the time; I assure you that I do not). Rather, I want you to turn the clock back to 2000 in order to remind yourself of a concept that is not only all but forgotten in our politics, but is, with every new cycle, beginning to look increasingly absurd. It was called “compassionate conservatism,” and it was, we were told, the game-changing, barrier-breaking P.R. coup of a generation, one that would put Republicans — and a Bush, no less — in the Oval Office once again. Compassionate conservatism was always much more of a branding exercise than an actual political philosophy (though it does have some roots within American right-wing Catholicism). Its purpose, generally understood, was to allow its main office-holding proponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, to distinguish himself from regular conservatism, which at the time was largely associated with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It was an attempt, in other words, to persuade Americans that a person could be conservative — and a person could vote for a conservative — without being a dick. Now let’s fast-forward to 2016. The Republican Party’s presidential frontrunner is Donald Trump. The candidates are fighting over who is going to be “strongest” on all manner of moochers — the young and the poor, of course; but especially immigrants. Compassion is not part of the equation. In fact, it’s a hindrance: One of Jeb Bush’s biggest “gaffes,” as far as many Republicans are concerned, was calling immigrating to America “an act of love.” This is the context in which you need to understand this video, which garnered some attention on Thursday when it was posted to Twitter. It shows Sen. Ted Cruz, the candidate most likely to supplant Trump — at least in Iowa, where the video was shot — responding to a question from a so-called “dreamer” (an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the country by their parents at a young age and effectively grew up as an American). Her question, in essence, was whether Cruz, if he became president, would try to have her deported. It’s a question that other dreamers have asked other Republican candidates — and one that GOPers are generally loathe to answer, because the “right” answer for a Republican primary electorate is the exact opposite of the “right” answer for the American electorate, at large. But Cruz, perhaps to his credit, didn’t shirk from answering. He told her, in so many words, that he would indeed want to deport her. Not because doing so would do either her or the United States any good, but because, he said, she had broken the law. He tried to do this while adopting the soft, plaintive, “I-feel-your-pain” pose that countless politicians have tried in the years since Bill Clinton made it into an art. But the takeaway — yes, I will deport you — was clear all the same:Ted Cruz looks a young woman brought to the US as a child in the eye and tells her he’ll deport her. It’s chilling. https://t.co/n6onPPT3FI
— Matthew McGregor (@mcgregormt) January 7, 2016
This, by the way, is why Democrats would be nearly as excited to see Cruz win the GOP’s nomination as they would be if the nominee were Trump. Because what this clip says to millions of Latinos and Hispanics is, quite simply, that they are not welcome in Ted Cruz’s United States of America — even if it is the only country they’ve ever really knows; even if they did nothing wrong. That’s what “conservatism” means in the Republican primary. Compassion was once sold as a feature. But those days are over; now it is a bug.Ted Cruz looks a young woman brought to the US as a child in the eye and tells her he’ll deport her. It’s chilling. https://t.co/n6onPPT3FI
— Matthew McGregor (@mcgregormt) January 7, 2016






Is drinking urine a new health trend or just outrageously disgusting?






Fawning over the male feminist: When Ryan Coogler says “women are better filmmakers,” people actually listen
“Women, Soloway said, are naturally suited to being directors: ‘We all know how to do it. We fucking grew up doing it! It’s dolls. How did men make us think we weren’t good at this? It’s dolls and feelings. And women are fighting to become directors? What the fuck happened?’”If you're like me, you read that quote and you wanted to see it go viral, because it makes so much sense it’s infuriating. You wanted to log on to Facebook and see everyone you know posting it with a one-word comment: "Yes." (Or "Yasss.") But that’s not exactly what happened. And although many people read and shared that interview, Soloway's quote didn't seem to inspire new headlines in other magazines and responses from Twitter like the ones we're seeing now that Ryan Coogler made a very similar statement about female directors in a recent Variety interview. Like most others, I was excited to see that the "Creed" director, recently announced as the director of Marvel's upcoming "Black Panther" movie, was so bold as to say this aloud: “I really feel like, you know—this is off the record—I feel like women are better filmmakers than men.” At the suggestion of writer Kristopher Tapley, Coogler decided to go ahead and put it on record, and further expounded upon his feelings about why women are better equipped, emotionally and otherwise, to bring a stories to film. The headlines that followed highlighted this quote above all the others in the interview. That's exciting. And that's important. And Ryan Coogler is currently one of my favorite directors — I believe that he meant what he said. But I also know that he's not the first to say it, and it’s the round of applause from the internet over this quote (and not what Coogler himself said) that should be interrogated. Because our tendency to listen to one man, when hundreds of women—or even one equally qualified woman—have said the same thing (let alone when they say the opposite thing) is a dangerous practice that affects nearly every facet of our society. Coogler's quote is really just another plea to let female directors in the room. The world of filmmaking—as wonderful as it already is—will be infinitely better with more women telling stories. Yes, these are facts. But because men and women are still programmed to take the word of a man (even on a woman's issue, or especially on a woman’s issue) over the word of a woman, it seems like we are going to be waiting for many more men like Coogler to speak out and say—on the record—that they want a film industry that includes more women auteurs. The myth that we continue to embrace here is that a man has no stakes in supporting a woman, so his words are somehow more pure. Consider what might have happened if a female comic, instead of Hannibal Buress, made that same joke about Bill Cosby being a rapist in 2014. The response would have been very different, or even nonexistent. It would have sounded, to many ears, like another woman standing by her complaining little girlfriends (which is still, for many, the basic definition of feminism). But when Buress says something, well — it must be true or at least worth investigating, because no man would ever speak out for women merely for the sake of doing so. He stands to gain nothing—as if women speaking out for women are more likely to be doing so to get ahead, or to secure some privilege for themselves. Many have already noted how we (we, as in the media, and the public) didn't even take the word of all those women together—but needed the casual statement of a man who seemingly stood to gain nothing by lying (again, as if women, on the other hand, are more likely to lie in an attempt to spread rumors about great men so that they might... take over the world?). Similarly, Coogler saying that women make better directors than men seems like it would be counterproductive for Coogler, a man, who surely wouldn't suggest a studio pass him over for a coveted project just because of his gender without a very good reason. When Soloway makes a similar suggestion—and she’s cosigned by the many other women around her, demanding room—it sounds opportunist to ears that have been tuned to hear women's demands in that way. The reality is that Coogler stands to lose nothing at all by saying what he’s said—hell, if anything, he gains the admiration of women the world over (myself included). But the next question for these men who believe women directors belong in the film world is whether or not they’d take a real risk to stand behind this belief. Some of the biggest male names in the comic book world quickly banded together and organized a boycott of the prestigious Grand Prix d’Angoulême when no female comic creators were nominated. Would any of our acclaimed male directors decline their Oscar nominations if the director category proves to be another boys-only affair (as it was last year)? Bradley Cooper, who pledged to work with the women he co-stars with in films to close the pay gap, might be the one example we have of such a move, but even his promise isn’t likely to cost him anything. And again, one has to ask, isn’t he simply doing the right thing here? How much credit must we give another privileged man for speaking up for the women around him? It all comes down to whose words hold value in our society. Even when a group of people is saying the same thing, who do we choose to listen to? Who gets the clout and the privilege of cast public acknowledgement and exaltation? When we celebrate men for supporting women, it’s not unlike celebrating white people for speaking out against racism. If a black actor took a selfie with the book “The New Jim Crow,” and urged his followers to read it, he might be met with some applause, but nothing like the thunderous, viral reception of which Matt McGorry was on the receiving end recently. Is it wonderful that he's reading Michelle Alexander’s text and encouraging his fans to do the same? Absolutely. Does that make him a better white male celebrity than, say, Stephen Amell? Yes, I think so. But isn't it also troubling how much attention Matt McGorry gets for learning about how much attention he gets as a white man, and how that privilege is on the other end of a spectrum where black children’s killers go unpunished? As a white man of privilege (and an actor who starred on "Orange is the New Black"), Matt McGorry is exactly the kind of person who should be reading “The New Jim Crow.” And yet, we can't help but celebrate his doing so, because we've been taught to expect less—in the same way that we can’t help but be grateful for Hannibal Buress and Ryan Coogler. We've been taught to expect so little from men and from male directors, that when one of them speaks out and states the obvious, echoing so many other women the world over, we want to scream the news from the mountaintops. It's another way of saying, "See? We're not crazy. It's not just Jill Soloway and Gina Prince-Bythewood demanding that women direct. It's also a man—and a man who just made the latest “Rocky” movie, no less!" This is a fair reaction, but it's also the result of a dangerous message we are continuously sent about the worth of women in this and so many other industries—that such worth is difficult to measure, without the weight of a man's voice behind it. But there’s also another way of looking at the choice words of these two directors, who I admit I’ve singled out as a huge fan of both their works (and, interestingly enough, Coogler mentions Soloway in the Variety piece, as one of his reasons for wanting to explore TV directing). Although their overall message is the same, it has to be said that Coogler and Soloway deliver it very differently. Soloway doesn’t merely say that women should be directing—she goes so far as to feminize (insomuch as the feminine is as performative as the masculine) the act of filmmaking. She implies that filmmaking is for women, perhaps even more than it is for men. This is even more bold than simply suggesting that women should be embraced, because they are great filmmakers too. It almost makes the world of filmmaking a stolen domain that women have to reclaim; whether they ever visibly dominated it or not is irrelevant. But if we accept such an interpretation, and manage to convince a few women that, not only do they belong in the room, but the room was rightfully theirs to begin with, we’ll just be asking for trouble. Better to stick with the idea that this industry, too, is a man’s world, but women have some great stuff to contribute to it, and should be given the chance to do so. Right?The next time you see a little girl playing with her dolls, don't tell her she's going to make a good mommy or a good big sister or a wonderful thrower of tea parties. Tell her that she could be the next great film or TV director, because that's all directing is — dolls and feelings. I wish I could take credit for that gem, but “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway said it in this powerfully good read at The New Yorker. In a conversation with Ariel Levy, the Golden Globe winner verbally dismantled the patriarchal structure masquerading as the TV and film industry:
“Women, Soloway said, are naturally suited to being directors: ‘We all know how to do it. We fucking grew up doing it! It’s dolls. How did men make us think we weren’t good at this? It’s dolls and feelings. And women are fighting to become directors? What the fuck happened?’”If you're like me, you read that quote and you wanted to see it go viral, because it makes so much sense it’s infuriating. You wanted to log on to Facebook and see everyone you know posting it with a one-word comment: "Yes." (Or "Yasss.") But that’s not exactly what happened. And although many people read and shared that interview, Soloway's quote didn't seem to inspire new headlines in other magazines and responses from Twitter like the ones we're seeing now that Ryan Coogler made a very similar statement about female directors in a recent Variety interview. Like most others, I was excited to see that the "Creed" director, recently announced as the director of Marvel's upcoming "Black Panther" movie, was so bold as to say this aloud: “I really feel like, you know—this is off the record—I feel like women are better filmmakers than men.” At the suggestion of writer Kristopher Tapley, Coogler decided to go ahead and put it on record, and further expounded upon his feelings about why women are better equipped, emotionally and otherwise, to bring a stories to film. The headlines that followed highlighted this quote above all the others in the interview. That's exciting. And that's important. And Ryan Coogler is currently one of my favorite directors — I believe that he meant what he said. But I also know that he's not the first to say it, and it’s the round of applause from the internet over this quote (and not what Coogler himself said) that should be interrogated. Because our tendency to listen to one man, when hundreds of women—or even one equally qualified woman—have said the same thing (let alone when they say the opposite thing) is a dangerous practice that affects nearly every facet of our society. Coogler's quote is really just another plea to let female directors in the room. The world of filmmaking—as wonderful as it already is—will be infinitely better with more women telling stories. Yes, these are facts. But because men and women are still programmed to take the word of a man (even on a woman's issue, or especially on a woman’s issue) over the word of a woman, it seems like we are going to be waiting for many more men like Coogler to speak out and say—on the record—that they want a film industry that includes more women auteurs. The myth that we continue to embrace here is that a man has no stakes in supporting a woman, so his words are somehow more pure. Consider what might have happened if a female comic, instead of Hannibal Buress, made that same joke about Bill Cosby being a rapist in 2014. The response would have been very different, or even nonexistent. It would have sounded, to many ears, like another woman standing by her complaining little girlfriends (which is still, for many, the basic definition of feminism). But when Buress says something, well — it must be true or at least worth investigating, because no man would ever speak out for women merely for the sake of doing so. He stands to gain nothing—as if women speaking out for women are more likely to be doing so to get ahead, or to secure some privilege for themselves. Many have already noted how we (we, as in the media, and the public) didn't even take the word of all those women together—but needed the casual statement of a man who seemingly stood to gain nothing by lying (again, as if women, on the other hand, are more likely to lie in an attempt to spread rumors about great men so that they might... take over the world?). Similarly, Coogler saying that women make better directors than men seems like it would be counterproductive for Coogler, a man, who surely wouldn't suggest a studio pass him over for a coveted project just because of his gender without a very good reason. When Soloway makes a similar suggestion—and she’s cosigned by the many other women around her, demanding room—it sounds opportunist to ears that have been tuned to hear women's demands in that way. The reality is that Coogler stands to lose nothing at all by saying what he’s said—hell, if anything, he gains the admiration of women the world over (myself included). But the next question for these men who believe women directors belong in the film world is whether or not they’d take a real risk to stand behind this belief. Some of the biggest male names in the comic book world quickly banded together and organized a boycott of the prestigious Grand Prix d’Angoulême when no female comic creators were nominated. Would any of our acclaimed male directors decline their Oscar nominations if the director category proves to be another boys-only affair (as it was last year)? Bradley Cooper, who pledged to work with the women he co-stars with in films to close the pay gap, might be the one example we have of such a move, but even his promise isn’t likely to cost him anything. And again, one has to ask, isn’t he simply doing the right thing here? How much credit must we give another privileged man for speaking up for the women around him? It all comes down to whose words hold value in our society. Even when a group of people is saying the same thing, who do we choose to listen to? Who gets the clout and the privilege of cast public acknowledgement and exaltation? When we celebrate men for supporting women, it’s not unlike celebrating white people for speaking out against racism. If a black actor took a selfie with the book “The New Jim Crow,” and urged his followers to read it, he might be met with some applause, but nothing like the thunderous, viral reception of which Matt McGorry was on the receiving end recently. Is it wonderful that he's reading Michelle Alexander’s text and encouraging his fans to do the same? Absolutely. Does that make him a better white male celebrity than, say, Stephen Amell? Yes, I think so. But isn't it also troubling how much attention Matt McGorry gets for learning about how much attention he gets as a white man, and how that privilege is on the other end of a spectrum where black children’s killers go unpunished? As a white man of privilege (and an actor who starred on "Orange is the New Black"), Matt McGorry is exactly the kind of person who should be reading “The New Jim Crow.” And yet, we can't help but celebrate his doing so, because we've been taught to expect less—in the same way that we can’t help but be grateful for Hannibal Buress and Ryan Coogler. We've been taught to expect so little from men and from male directors, that when one of them speaks out and states the obvious, echoing so many other women the world over, we want to scream the news from the mountaintops. It's another way of saying, "See? We're not crazy. It's not just Jill Soloway and Gina Prince-Bythewood demanding that women direct. It's also a man—and a man who just made the latest “Rocky” movie, no less!" This is a fair reaction, but it's also the result of a dangerous message we are continuously sent about the worth of women in this and so many other industries—that such worth is difficult to measure, without the weight of a man's voice behind it. But there’s also another way of looking at the choice words of these two directors, who I admit I’ve singled out as a huge fan of both their works (and, interestingly enough, Coogler mentions Soloway in the Variety piece, as one of his reasons for wanting to explore TV directing). Although their overall message is the same, it has to be said that Coogler and Soloway deliver it very differently. Soloway doesn’t merely say that women should be directing—she goes so far as to feminize (insomuch as the feminine is as performative as the masculine) the act of filmmaking. She implies that filmmaking is for women, perhaps even more than it is for men. This is even more bold than simply suggesting that women should be embraced, because they are great filmmakers too. It almost makes the world of filmmaking a stolen domain that women have to reclaim; whether they ever visibly dominated it or not is irrelevant. But if we accept such an interpretation, and manage to convince a few women that, not only do they belong in the room, but the room was rightfully theirs to begin with, we’ll just be asking for trouble. Better to stick with the idea that this industry, too, is a man’s world, but women have some great stuff to contribute to it, and should be given the chance to do so. Right?The next time you see a little girl playing with her dolls, don't tell her she's going to make a good mommy or a good big sister or a wonderful thrower of tea parties. Tell her that she could be the next great film or TV director, because that's all directing is — dolls and feelings. I wish I could take credit for that gem, but “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway said it in this powerfully good read at The New Yorker. In a conversation with Ariel Levy, the Golden Globe winner verbally dismantled the patriarchal structure masquerading as the TV and film industry:
“Women, Soloway said, are naturally suited to being directors: ‘We all know how to do it. We fucking grew up doing it! It’s dolls. How did men make us think we weren’t good at this? It’s dolls and feelings. And women are fighting to become directors? What the fuck happened?’”If you're like me, you read that quote and you wanted to see it go viral, because it makes so much sense it’s infuriating. You wanted to log on to Facebook and see everyone you know posting it with a one-word comment: "Yes." (Or "Yasss.") But that’s not exactly what happened. And although many people read and shared that interview, Soloway's quote didn't seem to inspire new headlines in other magazines and responses from Twitter like the ones we're seeing now that Ryan Coogler made a very similar statement about female directors in a recent Variety interview. Like most others, I was excited to see that the "Creed" director, recently announced as the director of Marvel's upcoming "Black Panther" movie, was so bold as to say this aloud: “I really feel like, you know—this is off the record—I feel like women are better filmmakers than men.” At the suggestion of writer Kristopher Tapley, Coogler decided to go ahead and put it on record, and further expounded upon his feelings about why women are better equipped, emotionally and otherwise, to bring a stories to film. The headlines that followed highlighted this quote above all the others in the interview. That's exciting. And that's important. And Ryan Coogler is currently one of my favorite directors — I believe that he meant what he said. But I also know that he's not the first to say it, and it’s the round of applause from the internet over this quote (and not what Coogler himself said) that should be interrogated. Because our tendency to listen to one man, when hundreds of women—or even one equally qualified woman—have said the same thing (let alone when they say the opposite thing) is a dangerous practice that affects nearly every facet of our society. Coogler's quote is really just another plea to let female directors in the room. The world of filmmaking—as wonderful as it already is—will be infinitely better with more women telling stories. Yes, these are facts. But because men and women are still programmed to take the word of a man (even on a woman's issue, or especially on a woman’s issue) over the word of a woman, it seems like we are going to be waiting for many more men like Coogler to speak out and say—on the record—that they want a film industry that includes more women auteurs. The myth that we continue to embrace here is that a man has no stakes in supporting a woman, so his words are somehow more pure. Consider what might have happened if a female comic, instead of Hannibal Buress, made that same joke about Bill Cosby being a rapist in 2014. The response would have been very different, or even nonexistent. It would have sounded, to many ears, like another woman standing by her complaining little girlfriends (which is still, for many, the basic definition of feminism). But when Buress says something, well — it must be true or at least worth investigating, because no man would ever speak out for women merely for the sake of doing so. He stands to gain nothing—as if women speaking out for women are more likely to be doing so to get ahead, or to secure some privilege for themselves. Many have already noted how we (we, as in the media, and the public) didn't even take the word of all those women together—but needed the casual statement of a man who seemingly stood to gain nothing by lying (again, as if women, on the other hand, are more likely to lie in an attempt to spread rumors about great men so that they might... take over the world?). Similarly, Coogler saying that women make better directors than men seems like it would be counterproductive for Coogler, a man, who surely wouldn't suggest a studio pass him over for a coveted project just because of his gender without a very good reason. When Soloway makes a similar suggestion—and she’s cosigned by the many other women around her, demanding room—it sounds opportunist to ears that have been tuned to hear women's demands in that way. The reality is that Coogler stands to lose nothing at all by saying what he’s said—hell, if anything, he gains the admiration of women the world over (myself included). But the next question for these men who believe women directors belong in the film world is whether or not they’d take a real risk to stand behind this belief. Some of the biggest male names in the comic book world quickly banded together and organized a boycott of the prestigious Grand Prix d’Angoulême when no female comic creators were nominated. Would any of our acclaimed male directors decline their Oscar nominations if the director category proves to be another boys-only affair (as it was last year)? Bradley Cooper, who pledged to work with the women he co-stars with in films to close the pay gap, might be the one example we have of such a move, but even his promise isn’t likely to cost him anything. And again, one has to ask, isn’t he simply doing the right thing here? How much credit must we give another privileged man for speaking up for the women around him? It all comes down to whose words hold value in our society. Even when a group of people is saying the same thing, who do we choose to listen to? Who gets the clout and the privilege of cast public acknowledgement and exaltation? When we celebrate men for supporting women, it’s not unlike celebrating white people for speaking out against racism. If a black actor took a selfie with the book “The New Jim Crow,” and urged his followers to read it, he might be met with some applause, but nothing like the thunderous, viral reception of which Matt McGorry was on the receiving end recently. Is it wonderful that he's reading Michelle Alexander’s text and encouraging his fans to do the same? Absolutely. Does that make him a better white male celebrity than, say, Stephen Amell? Yes, I think so. But isn't it also troubling how much attention Matt McGorry gets for learning about how much attention he gets as a white man, and how that privilege is on the other end of a spectrum where black children’s killers go unpunished? As a white man of privilege (and an actor who starred on "Orange is the New Black"), Matt McGorry is exactly the kind of person who should be reading “The New Jim Crow.” And yet, we can't help but celebrate his doing so, because we've been taught to expect less—in the same way that we can’t help but be grateful for Hannibal Buress and Ryan Coogler. We've been taught to expect so little from men and from male directors, that when one of them speaks out and states the obvious, echoing so many other women the world over, we want to scream the news from the mountaintops. It's another way of saying, "See? We're not crazy. It's not just Jill Soloway and Gina Prince-Bythewood demanding that women direct. It's also a man—and a man who just made the latest “Rocky” movie, no less!" This is a fair reaction, but it's also the result of a dangerous message we are continuously sent about the worth of women in this and so many other industries—that such worth is difficult to measure, without the weight of a man's voice behind it. But there’s also another way of looking at the choice words of these two directors, who I admit I’ve singled out as a huge fan of both their works (and, interestingly enough, Coogler mentions Soloway in the Variety piece, as one of his reasons for wanting to explore TV directing). Although their overall message is the same, it has to be said that Coogler and Soloway deliver it very differently. Soloway doesn’t merely say that women should be directing—she goes so far as to feminize (insomuch as the feminine is as performative as the masculine) the act of filmmaking. She implies that filmmaking is for women, perhaps even more than it is for men. This is even more bold than simply suggesting that women should be embraced, because they are great filmmakers too. It almost makes the world of filmmaking a stolen domain that women have to reclaim; whether they ever visibly dominated it or not is irrelevant. But if we accept such an interpretation, and manage to convince a few women that, not only do they belong in the room, but the room was rightfully theirs to begin with, we’ll just be asking for trouble. Better to stick with the idea that this industry, too, is a man’s world, but women have some great stuff to contribute to it, and should be given the chance to do so. Right?






“A culture of exclusion and unconscious bias”: Gender inequality is cannibalizing the sciences







Did the makers of “Making a Murderer” leave out key evidence against Steven Avery?

The documentary said that part of Avery's criminal past included animal cruelty. To my recollection, it didn't specify exactly what that animal cruelty was....He doused a cat in oil and threw it on a bonfire (this is not relevant to the murder trial, but it certainly diminishes the sympathy some of us felt for him). Past criminal activity also included threatening a female relative at gunpoint. (This is mentioned in the documentary.) In the months leading up to Halbach's disappearance, Avery had called Auto Trader several times and always specifically requested Halbach to come out and take the photos. Halbach had complained to her boss that she didn't want to go out to Avery's trailer anymore, because once when she came out, Avery was waiting for her wearing only a towel (this was excluded for being too inflammatory). Avery clearly had an obsession with Halbach. On the day that Halbach went missing, Avery had called her three times, twice from a *67 number to hide his identity. The bullet with Halbach's DNA on it came from Avery's gun, which always hung above his bed. Avery had purchased handcuffs and leg irons like the ones Dassey described holding Halbach only three weeks before (Avery said he'd purchased them for use with his girlfriend, Jodi, with whom he'd had a tumultuous relationship—at one point, he was ordered by police to stay away from her for three days). Here's the piece of evidence that was presented at trial but not in the series that I find most convincing: In Dassey's illegally obtained statement, Dassey stated that he helped Avery moved the RAV4 into the junkyard and that Avery had lifted the hood and removed the battery cable. Even if you believe that the blood in Halbach's car was planted by the cops (as I do), there was also non-blood DNA evidence on the hood latch. I don't believe the police would plant—or know to plant—that evidence.
In an update to his piece, Rowles adds more evidence to the fire, so to speak. He points out that Angenette Levy, one of the reporters we see throughout the film in the press room, noted that, “Teresa's camera and palm pilot were found in Avery's burn barrel.” This fact goes unmentioned in the film. He also links to the transcript of a conversation between Avery’s teen nephew and alleged co-conspirator, Brendan Dassey, who says Avery molested him several times before the crime took place. Obviously, this doesn’t connect Avery to the murder, but it doesn’t help in terms of his character, either.
None of this is airtight proof of anything. If Steven Avery gets a new trial—though he doesn’t have much recourse left at this point—here’s hoping justice is done. The reason this case has created so much impassioned outcry is because, in a world full of chaos, it feels like there’s a rare chance to right a wrong. Here’s hoping that if that should happen, the filmmakers, who have been steadfast in their commitment to what they did and didn’t include, will be there to shoot another documentary. Surely, it'll be as fascinating and infuriating as the series that launched it all.
(h/t Pajiba)
The documentary said that part of Avery's criminal past included animal cruelty. To my recollection, it didn't specify exactly what that animal cruelty was....He doused a cat in oil and threw it on a bonfire (this is not relevant to the murder trial, but it certainly diminishes the sympathy some of us felt for him). Past criminal activity also included threatening a female relative at gunpoint. (This is mentioned in the documentary.) In the months leading up to Halbach's disappearance, Avery had called Auto Trader several times and always specifically requested Halbach to come out and take the photos. Halbach had complained to her boss that she didn't want to go out to Avery's trailer anymore, because once when she came out, Avery was waiting for her wearing only a towel (this was excluded for being too inflammatory). Avery clearly had an obsession with Halbach. On the day that Halbach went missing, Avery had called her three times, twice from a *67 number to hide his identity. The bullet with Halbach's DNA on it came from Avery's gun, which always hung above his bed. Avery had purchased handcuffs and leg irons like the ones Dassey described holding Halbach only three weeks before (Avery said he'd purchased them for use with his girlfriend, Jodi, with whom he'd had a tumultuous relationship—at one point, he was ordered by police to stay away from her for three days). Here's the piece of evidence that was presented at trial but not in the series that I find most convincing: In Dassey's illegally obtained statement, Dassey stated that he helped Avery moved the RAV4 into the junkyard and that Avery had lifted the hood and removed the battery cable. Even if you believe that the blood in Halbach's car was planted by the cops (as I do), there was also non-blood DNA evidence on the hood latch. I don't believe the police would plant—or know to plant—that evidence.
In an update to his piece, Rowles adds more evidence to the fire, so to speak. He points out that Angenette Levy, one of the reporters we see throughout the film in the press room, noted that, “Teresa's camera and palm pilot were found in Avery's burn barrel.” This fact goes unmentioned in the film. He also links to the transcript of a conversation between Avery’s teen nephew and alleged co-conspirator, Brendan Dassey, who says Avery molested him several times before the crime took place. Obviously, this doesn’t connect Avery to the murder, but it doesn’t help in terms of his character, either.
None of this is airtight proof of anything. If Steven Avery gets a new trial—though he doesn’t have much recourse left at this point—here’s hoping justice is done. The reason this case has created so much impassioned outcry is because, in a world full of chaos, it feels like there’s a rare chance to right a wrong. Here’s hoping that if that should happen, the filmmakers, who have been steadfast in their commitment to what they did and didn’t include, will be there to shoot another documentary. Surely, it'll be as fascinating and infuriating as the series that launched it all.
(h/t Pajiba)





10 more reasons Wall Street would hate Bernie Sanders








January 6, 2016
He’s made the Middle East worse: Let’s be honest, Obama bears as much responsibility for this mess as predecessors who shaped them
“Vehicles, carrying oil, [are] lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon,” Putin asserted . “Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there—empty. We are talking about a commercial-scale supply of oil from the occupied Syrian territories seized by terrorists. It is from these areas and not any others. And we can see it from the air, where these vehicles are going.”Other reports alleged that this activity is not the doing merely of middlemen operating on the Turkish-Syrian border. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev alleged “direct financial interest of some Turkish officials relating to the supply of oil products refined by plants controlled by ISIS.” It soon emerged that the chain of beneficiaries may well run up to the presidential palace by way of Erdoğan’s son and son-in-law: Between them, they run Turkey’s largest energy-trading company and the energy ministry. There is no need to take the Russians’ word for this, although I find the evidence presented in Moscow persuasive, and the activities of Erdoğan’s family members are a matter of record. David Cohen, Treasury’s undersecretary for financial intelligence, had already made the Russian case in October—a month before the matter got as hot. Cohen put the Islamic State’s income from oil sold directly or indirectly into Turkey at $1 million a day. A few days after the incident, I had a lengthy note from a very well-placed source with extensive interests in, and therefore knowledge of, European investment and commodity markets. What he or she wrote fits like a glove with what had then begun to emerge. Here is some of it, in the form it arrived. The oil prices stated obtained at the time:
For more than 2 yrs I have heard from contacts in Turk,—contacts among people who would know about such things—that the oil was delivered to the Turks and that it was then run through the system, with some of it entering the pipeline which carries crude to the Medit coast for then delivery to W. Europe... I am told that there is a handsome profit of around 15$/bar on this—that is, for example, they buy it from Daesh [the Islamic State] through middlemen at a discount of 30$ and then, “cleaned,” it hits world markets at 45$.... The trade runs on the basis of this 15$ spread. If it is, say 25K bar/day, that = 136M$ for yr (15x25Kx365). So it is not just small change. I understand that the money goes through Turk and Qatari banks. Once the oil is “cleaned,” they don't even need to launder it through Qatari banks, or any other banks. I further hear that much of the proceeds are then recycled into real estate in W. Europe. So if you are draining off 136M$/yr and, say, you leverage that 2:1, as is typical for commercial real estate, that would mean that after 3 yrs, you are running a 1.2B$ real estate portfolio....“Surely Treasury knows all this,” concluded my source, whom I have known for more than 25 years. “Eyes wide shut!” Given I cannot name this source, let me apply the same criterion to his or her information that I suggested for the Russian accounts just summarized: You can take it as it is or not, but you cannot leave it without investigation unless you are into chicanery: The implications are simply too large. But we have had none and heard nothing. Within a day or so of the Su-24’s downing, Sigmar Gabriel, vice-chancellor in Angela Merkel’s coalition cabinet, exclaimed thus in an interview with DPA, the German press agency: “This incident shows fir the first time that we are dealing with an actor who is unpredictable…. That is not Russia. That is Turkey.” Gabriel was right about the revelatory aspect of the Nov. 24 events. The American alliance with Turkey makes no sense whatever if you take the administration’s word that it earnestly desires to defeat the Islamic State and restabilize Syria. But it makes perfect sense if, with 1979-80 Afghanistan in mind, you look past all the lies and conclude that, now and probably into the future, Washington finds extremist militias in Syria useful in its pursuit of another “regime change.” I had an interesting note from a source in Moscow the other day, and I offer it as the take-home on this topic. Russia’s entry into the Syrian conflict in late September, he or she suggested, has effectively put Washington on notice: There is to be no more “regime change” for the Americans without vigorous Russian response. My source’s reasoning is interesting, and suggestive of Moscow’s gravity on the matter: Between Ukraine and Syria, he or she said, Putin knows perfectly well that the regime the U.S. truly wants to change is his. * The Saudis, of course, are the other American allies in the Middle East in the cause of who can say what at this point, and suddenly this relationship, too, is exposed in all its abhorrent aspects. I predicted in this space three autumns ago, when the just-elected Hassan Rouhani appeared at the U.N. to extend Iran’s hand westward, that any opening to the Islamic Republic was fated to shake loose all of Washington’s bedrock relations in the region. I was thinking, optimistically, of U.S.-Israeli ties, but correcting these will take much more time. The Saudi case, plainly, is upon us now. I have no expertise in Saudi politics, but I wonder if the old alliance between Washington and the House of Saud might have survived the tensions caused by the success of last year’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran had King Abdullah not died a year ago next week. He was 90 and had been high in the Saudi political scene for decades. A tried-and-true relationship, based on Saudi oil and Washington’s silence in the face of the kingdom’s anti-democratic repressions, had been in place since the 1930s. King Salman has proven to be a few things his predecessor was not since he acceded to the throne. He is 80 but seems to have the temperament of a hot-blooded youth—“more interested in action than deliberation,” as Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution told the New York Times the other day. He is even more nervous about Iran’s emergence as a regional power than Abdullah was, the nuclear accord having been signed seven months into his watch. And he is plainly more extreme in his intolerance of dissent at home and his determination to assert Wahhabist ideology, the radically conservative interpretation of Islam that now informs Sunni extremists such as the Islamic State. In short, with Salman’s accession the longstanding Saudi component of American policy in the Middle East was bound to come a-cropper. And with the beheading last weekend of Nimr al-Nimr, the Shiite critic of the Saudi regime, so it has with a resounding crash. One truly would not want to be on the Middle East desk at State or any White House adviser tasked now with keeping this relationship in place and explaining why the fatal flaws at its core from the first remain acceptable. There is Riyadh’s false commitment to eradicating the Islamic State as a keystone member of the coalition formed against it. There is the criminally indiscriminate air campaign against Shiite Houthis in Yemen. Coalitions being the fashion these days, Riyadh announced just before the holidays that it had formed one of 34 Muslim nations to fight terrorism. The proposition reeks. Who can say what the Saudis mean when they say they are going to fight “terrorism” wherever it may arise? Some nations the Saudis listed among its ranks immediately said they had heard nothing about it. Even if we take the membership count at face value, it is 100 percent Sunni. We are to look forward to a first round of talks bringing all parties to the Syrian conflict to the table later this month. Look at this lineup: Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the two hood ornaments Washington mounts to betoken a regional commitment to oppose ISIS, are hopelessly compromised—beyond retrieval, in my view. If the talks come off at all, and this remains a question, I predict a short-run circus with too many rings to count. I can only wager on this point at the moment, but like a careful horseplayer I have a $2 saver on it: It could be that King Salman took off al-Nimr’s head last weekend as part of a strategy to scuttle the Syria talks, wherein Saudis are to sit opposite Iranians—if not before they convene, quickly after they do. * There is a certain consistency to Obama’s Middle East position, one has to say. It is perverse, but it holds: Ally with those subverting your cause—or the cause you declare, at any rate—and subvert those who are your natural allies. Russia and Iran qualify in this latter category, but let me restrict this commentary to those in the region. The Iranians were clear as bells during the long negotiations on the future of their nuclear program. They were pleased to open the door to the West, having suffered decades of difficult isolation, but they had no intention of abdicating any of their rights under international law. Washington, in particular, was to have no room to make it up as it went along—suggesting as it did, for instance, that Iran had no right to enrich uranium because the U.S. had not conferred it. Tehran reiterated this point within a month of signing the nuclear accord. Last August it announced completion of a new surface-to-surface ballistic missile, the Fateh 313. The point should have been clear. Since then, the Iranian military has tested the Fateh twice, and the point should have been clearer: We have enemies in the neighborhood, Iranian officials have explained incessantly. The need to maintain a modernized defense is self-evident. I wondered from the first whether the Obama administration was up to managing the running consequences that were certain to emerge after the nuclear accord was concluded. It is not, we must now conclude. There is simply no dexterity in the thinking within the policy cliques. Russia and Iran, strange as this may sound to readers of corporate-owned newspapers, are natural allies across a range of shared interests. The United States is simply incapable of (1) understanding this and (2) making good use of opportunities. To wit: In response to Iran’s missile tests, the Obama administration now threatens a new round of sanctions against the Iranians. The White House acknowledges that the tests do not contravene the terms of the nuclear agreement, and good enough it stays with the truth this far. Instead, it argues that the tests run afoul of a U.N. Security Council resolution passed in 2010, wherein it was agreed “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology.” Did Iran violate UNSC Resolution 1929 last fall? Given the language above it seems open and shut that it has, and Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador at the U.N., asserts this with the evangelical vehemence we have come to expect of her. The greater Power’s convictions, the warier one must be: The rule never seems to fail. Read further in the document, please. Get to the part no one seems eager to mention, where it states that the U.N. “shall suspend the implementation of measures if and for so long as Iran suspends all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.” In plain English: Halt your enrichment operations and the sanctions declared herein will drop. As all concerned acknowledge, Iran has shut down its centrifuges and shipped its uranium stockpiles to Russia, per the July accord. Ben Rhodes, who worked hard to get the nuclear deal done, was traveling with Obama in Hawaii last weekend and said this: “I would expect the Iranians to complete the work necessary to move forward with implementation [of the accord] in the coming weeks.” Let me get this straight, Ben. The Iranians have now responded to 1929, which means they are no longer in violation of the resolution. They are in compliance with the nuclear accord, too, which means they are incapable of building a nuclear device, and this means, in turn, your president is prepared to begin lifting sanctions. At the same time, your president proposes to impose new sanctions because Iran has tested a missile capable of bearing one of the nuclear warheads it is incapable of building. I think I have it right. Hassan Rouhani does, this is for sure. On January 1 the Iranian president—he who lit the peace pipe three years ago and took many political risks to get the nuclear pact signed—responded to the suggestion that new sanctions were in the works by asserting their illegality under international law and ordering the Fateh missile program to be expanded and accelerated as quickly as possible. He meant to say “Happy New Year,” surely, to all the “folks” in the Obama White House. What a kettle of something more pungent than fish. I still contend that the confrontation with Russia, conjured from nothing and now the object of something close to national hysteria, will be the ugliest, most consequential feature of the Obama legacy on the foreign side. But the havoc in the Middle East this president has done so much to worsen is coming up fast.It is all there now for us to see. Decades of cynical, poorly devised policy in the Middle East, vacant of any principle our indispensable nation purports to advance, return as we speak to bite our president and his foreign policy cliques on their backsides. The shambles that now ensues serves them right, absolutely. With the sudden ignition of smoldering hostilities between Iran and Saudi Arabia last weekend—the Iranians managing this more correctly than the Saudis—at last the veil drops to expose the gross duplicity, not to say stupidity, of Washington’s alliances in the region. At last we can talk about the unclothed emperor. And it is our responsibility to do so. One would never argue that the chaos into which the Middle East now descends is all President Obama’s doing. It is not, by a long way. The music simply stopped on his watch, and it is he who is left to grope for a chair. No solicitude and no empathy, however. The bitter reality is that our hope-and-change president, as a drone-addicted assassin signing death warrants on a routine basis, bears as much responsibility for the messes he now confronts as any of those predecessors who shaped them. If there is a single moment that crystallized all that has been wrong in America’s conduct across the Middle East for many decades, it came at the weekend, when the administration’s spokesmen could not bring themselves even to comment directly on, to say nothing of condemn, Riyadh’s purposely provocative beheading of a prominent Shiite cleric, a principled critic of the regime, last Saturday. Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, took as few words as he could get away with to say nothing whatsoever. When John Kirby, the dim bulb who fronts for the State Department, noted only “the need for leaders throughout the region to redouble efforts aimed at de-escalating regional tensions,” one knew the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of American policy in the Middle East were both perfectly intact. Numerous readers have written over the months to assert that I assign the U.S. too much responsibility for the Middle East’s violence and turmoil. This is my form of exceptionalism, they suggest. There is a long history of abuse and inhumanity in the region that has nothing to do with America, I am reminded. It has never been my intent to argue otherwise. The new regime in Riyadh, to take an example readily to hand, beheaded 47 people last weekend against the Obama administration’s vigorously rendered advice. And I agreed with Kirby, weirdly, when he told journalists after the executions, “Real, long-term solutions aren’t going to be mandated by Washington, D.C.” My problem—ours, indeed—is that Kirby is a liar to suggest State, the White House or anyone in the defense and intelligence bureaucracies believes this to be so. The hands-off pose, the shrug of the powerless, is default position when the going gets too patently sordid. And that is all it is. No, I will not step back from my contention that the U.S. is the primary author of the disorder and deadly hostility that now engulf the entire region. * One could go back to prewar decades to trace the roots of Washington’s errors and lawlessness in the Middle East. We leave this to the historians for now. For my money, the ridiculous soufflé the Obama administration has made of Middle East policy began to collapse last August, when a Marine general—not a diplomat—negotiated and signed an accord certifying the Erdoğan government in Turkey as an ally in the fight against the Islamic State. Wrong times a hundred. By last year the U.S. had been using Turkey to convey weapons to the imaginary “moderate opposition” fighting the Assad government in Syria for three years. But it had been plain for nearly as long that the proto-fascist Erdoğan intended to turn this policy to his own purposes, which no one of any decency could countenance. Seymour Hersh’s pieces in the London Review of Books have been revelatory in this context. In April 2014 he gave persuasive evidence that, in an attempt to frame Assad, Erdoğan provided extremist Sunni militias with the crudely concocted poison gas that exploded in a Damascus suburb the previous August. In his latest piece, Hersh documents the Pentagon’s many failed efforts to pull the administration off its obsession with developing a coup in Damascus and recognize Islamic terrorists as the threat that matters in Syria. “The assessment was bleak,” Hersh writes of a classified document the Joint Chiefs brass sent the White House in 2013. “There was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the U.S. was arming extremists…. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria.” One cannot agree more heartily. At this point, the alliance with Turkey represents a festival of cynicism our media flatly refuse to describe in any detail or with any substantive accuracy. It is the height of naiveté to think Washington does not understand the perverse uses Erdoğan makes of it. The ink was not dry before the Turkish president took his new pact with the superpower as license to make war against the Kurdish populations of Turkey, Syria and Iraq and pursue a Sunni nationalist agenda while assisting the Islamic State all but overtly in its campaign to destabilize Damascus. Unequivocally, this guy—who favorably cited Hitler as a political model just a few days ago—takes his place in the long line of repellent dictators the cliques in Washington almost always prefer to democrats. For said cliques it is the Cold War redux with the Turks, as the generals at the Pentagon suggested. Once again Washington recruits Turkey as a spear-carrier in its great-power game—previously against the Soviets, now against the Russian Federation. The bitterest truths are now evident: 1) no post-Cold War administration has yet proven capable of new, 21st century thinking of even the most basic kind, and 2) in consequence of 1) Obama has been purposely ineffectual against the Islamic State these past 18 months because he has refused to abandon plans to topple Assad so as to push Russia decisively out of the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean. Humanitarian angst? Wasted lives, the worst suffering on the planet in our time, the shock-horror of Assad’s alleged cruelties? These have nothing to do with what Washington is up to in Syria, and the alliance with Ankara stands as evidence of this. We must consider the downing of a Russian jet in late November by Turkish pilots flying American-made F-16s in this context. After Obama delivered an almost humorously hypocritical defense of this wildly irresponsible act—“Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its air space”—Washington and its clerks in the corporate media made this incident disappear but quick. We have since been treated to a media blackout as brazen as any since the coup in Ukraine two years ago next month. And when you consider the facts available in non-American media, it is no wonder. There has been fulsome coverage of the Turkish incident in the Russian press, needless to say. Before offering even a brief summary of it, this: One may accept it at face value or question it, but there are no grounds for dismissing it or ignoring it altogether, as our media have, simply because the assertions made are Russia’s. They deserve scrutiny and further investigation at the very least, and they have had neither. Most interesting is the “why” of the incident. What lay behind President Putin’s blunt charge that the downing of a Russian plane while it was flying an anti-terror mission in Syria was “a stab in the back by accomplices of terrorists”? I find the answer in one simple fact: Russian jets, it is not to be missed, had begun targeting convoys of trucks carrying oil into Turkey just before the Turks took one of them out of the sky. Moscow has practically gushed with evidence and accusations since shortly after its Su-24 went down. Putin, at a press conference with French President François Hollande, showed reconnaissance footage of truck convoys and strikes against oil-storage facilities in Raqaa, the Islamic State’s declared capital. Hollande, roused by the attacks in Paris at the moment I describe, assented as Putin spoke:
“Vehicles, carrying oil, [are] lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon,” Putin asserted . “Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there—empty. We are talking about a commercial-scale supply of oil from the occupied Syrian territories seized by terrorists. It is from these areas and not any others. And we can see it from the air, where these vehicles are going.”Other reports alleged that this activity is not the doing merely of middlemen operating on the Turkish-Syrian border. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev alleged “direct financial interest of some Turkish officials relating to the supply of oil products refined by plants controlled by ISIS.” It soon emerged that the chain of beneficiaries may well run up to the presidential palace by way of Erdoğan’s son and son-in-law: Between them, they run Turkey’s largest energy-trading company and the energy ministry. There is no need to take the Russians’ word for this, although I find the evidence presented in Moscow persuasive, and the activities of Erdoğan’s family members are a matter of record. David Cohen, Treasury’s undersecretary for financial intelligence, had already made the Russian case in October—a month before the matter got as hot. Cohen put the Islamic State’s income from oil sold directly or indirectly into Turkey at $1 million a day. A few days after the incident, I had a lengthy note from a very well-placed source with extensive interests in, and therefore knowledge of, European investment and commodity markets. What he or she wrote fits like a glove with what had then begun to emerge. Here is some of it, in the form it arrived. The oil prices stated obtained at the time:
For more than 2 yrs I have heard from contacts in Turk,—contacts among people who would know about such things—that the oil was delivered to the Turks and that it was then run through the system, with some of it entering the pipeline which carries crude to the Medit coast for then delivery to W. Europe... I am told that there is a handsome profit of around 15$/bar on this—that is, for example, they buy it from Daesh [the Islamic State] through middlemen at a discount of 30$ and then, “cleaned,” it hits world markets at 45$.... The trade runs on the basis of this 15$ spread. If it is, say 25K bar/day, that = 136M$ for yr (15x25Kx365). So it is not just small change. I understand that the money goes through Turk and Qatari banks. Once the oil is “cleaned,” they don't even need to launder it through Qatari banks, or any other banks. I further hear that much of the proceeds are then recycled into real estate in W. Europe. So if you are draining off 136M$/yr and, say, you leverage that 2:1, as is typical for commercial real estate, that would mean that after 3 yrs, you are running a 1.2B$ real estate portfolio....“Surely Treasury knows all this,” concluded my source, whom I have known for more than 25 years. “Eyes wide shut!” Given I cannot name this source, let me apply the same criterion to his or her information that I suggested for the Russian accounts just summarized: You can take it as it is or not, but you cannot leave it without investigation unless you are into chicanery: The implications are simply too large. But we have had none and heard nothing. Within a day or so of the Su-24’s downing, Sigmar Gabriel, vice-chancellor in Angela Merkel’s coalition cabinet, exclaimed thus in an interview with DPA, the German press agency: “This incident shows fir the first time that we are dealing with an actor who is unpredictable…. That is not Russia. That is Turkey.” Gabriel was right about the revelatory aspect of the Nov. 24 events. The American alliance with Turkey makes no sense whatever if you take the administration’s word that it earnestly desires to defeat the Islamic State and restabilize Syria. But it makes perfect sense if, with 1979-80 Afghanistan in mind, you look past all the lies and conclude that, now and probably into the future, Washington finds extremist militias in Syria useful in its pursuit of another “regime change.” I had an interesting note from a source in Moscow the other day, and I offer it as the take-home on this topic. Russia’s entry into the Syrian conflict in late September, he or she suggested, has effectively put Washington on notice: There is to be no more “regime change” for the Americans without vigorous Russian response. My source’s reasoning is interesting, and suggestive of Moscow’s gravity on the matter: Between Ukraine and Syria, he or she said, Putin knows perfectly well that the regime the U.S. truly wants to change is his. * The Saudis, of course, are the other American allies in the Middle East in the cause of who can say what at this point, and suddenly this relationship, too, is exposed in all its abhorrent aspects. I predicted in this space three autumns ago, when the just-elected Hassan Rouhani appeared at the U.N. to extend Iran’s hand westward, that any opening to the Islamic Republic was fated to shake loose all of Washington’s bedrock relations in the region. I was thinking, optimistically, of U.S.-Israeli ties, but correcting these will take much more time. The Saudi case, plainly, is upon us now. I have no expertise in Saudi politics, but I wonder if the old alliance between Washington and the House of Saud might have survived the tensions caused by the success of last year’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran had King Abdullah not died a year ago next week. He was 90 and had been high in the Saudi political scene for decades. A tried-and-true relationship, based on Saudi oil and Washington’s silence in the face of the kingdom’s anti-democratic repressions, had been in place since the 1930s. King Salman has proven to be a few things his predecessor was not since he acceded to the throne. He is 80 but seems to have the temperament of a hot-blooded youth—“more interested in action than deliberation,” as Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution told the New York Times the other day. He is even more nervous about Iran’s emergence as a regional power than Abdullah was, the nuclear accord having been signed seven months into his watch. And he is plainly more extreme in his intolerance of dissent at home and his determination to assert Wahhabist ideology, the radically conservative interpretation of Islam that now informs Sunni extremists such as the Islamic State. In short, with Salman’s accession the longstanding Saudi component of American policy in the Middle East was bound to come a-cropper. And with the beheading last weekend of Nimr al-Nimr, the Shiite critic of the Saudi regime, so it has with a resounding crash. One truly would not want to be on the Middle East desk at State or any White House adviser tasked now with keeping this relationship in place and explaining why the fatal flaws at its core from the first remain acceptable. There is Riyadh’s false commitment to eradicating the Islamic State as a keystone member of the coalition formed against it. There is the criminally indiscriminate air campaign against Shiite Houthis in Yemen. Coalitions being the fashion these days, Riyadh announced just before the holidays that it had formed one of 34 Muslim nations to fight terrorism. The proposition reeks. Who can say what the Saudis mean when they say they are going to fight “terrorism” wherever it may arise? Some nations the Saudis listed among its ranks immediately said they had heard nothing about it. Even if we take the membership count at face value, it is 100 percent Sunni. We are to look forward to a first round of talks bringing all parties to the Syrian conflict to the table later this month. Look at this lineup: Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the two hood ornaments Washington mounts to betoken a regional commitment to oppose ISIS, are hopelessly compromised—beyond retrieval, in my view. If the talks come off at all, and this remains a question, I predict a short-run circus with too many rings to count. I can only wager on this point at the moment, but like a careful horseplayer I have a $2 saver on it: It could be that King Salman took off al-Nimr’s head last weekend as part of a strategy to scuttle the Syria talks, wherein Saudis are to sit opposite Iranians—if not before they convene, quickly after they do. * There is a certain consistency to Obama’s Middle East position, one has to say. It is perverse, but it holds: Ally with those subverting your cause—or the cause you declare, at any rate—and subvert those who are your natural allies. Russia and Iran qualify in this latter category, but let me restrict this commentary to those in the region. The Iranians were clear as bells during the long negotiations on the future of their nuclear program. They were pleased to open the door to the West, having suffered decades of difficult isolation, but they had no intention of abdicating any of their rights under international law. Washington, in particular, was to have no room to make it up as it went along—suggesting as it did, for instance, that Iran had no right to enrich uranium because the U.S. had not conferred it. Tehran reiterated this point within a month of signing the nuclear accord. Last August it announced completion of a new surface-to-surface ballistic missile, the Fateh 313. The point should have been clear. Since then, the Iranian military has tested the Fateh twice, and the point should have been clearer: We have enemies in the neighborhood, Iranian officials have explained incessantly. The need to maintain a modernized defense is self-evident. I wondered from the first whether the Obama administration was up to managing the running consequences that were certain to emerge after the nuclear accord was concluded. It is not, we must now conclude. There is simply no dexterity in the thinking within the policy cliques. Russia and Iran, strange as this may sound to readers of corporate-owned newspapers, are natural allies across a range of shared interests. The United States is simply incapable of (1) understanding this and (2) making good use of opportunities. To wit: In response to Iran’s missile tests, the Obama administration now threatens a new round of sanctions against the Iranians. The White House acknowledges that the tests do not contravene the terms of the nuclear agreement, and good enough it stays with the truth this far. Instead, it argues that the tests run afoul of a U.N. Security Council resolution passed in 2010, wherein it was agreed “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology.” Did Iran violate UNSC Resolution 1929 last fall? Given the language above it seems open and shut that it has, and Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador at the U.N., asserts this with the evangelical vehemence we have come to expect of her. The greater Power’s convictions, the warier one must be: The rule never seems to fail. Read further in the document, please. Get to the part no one seems eager to mention, where it states that the U.N. “shall suspend the implementation of measures if and for so long as Iran suspends all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.” In plain English: Halt your enrichment operations and the sanctions declared herein will drop. As all concerned acknowledge, Iran has shut down its centrifuges and shipped its uranium stockpiles to Russia, per the July accord. Ben Rhodes, who worked hard to get the nuclear deal done, was traveling with Obama in Hawaii last weekend and said this: “I would expect the Iranians to complete the work necessary to move forward with implementation [of the accord] in the coming weeks.” Let me get this straight, Ben. The Iranians have now responded to 1929, which means they are no longer in violation of the resolution. They are in compliance with the nuclear accord, too, which means they are incapable of building a nuclear device, and this means, in turn, your president is prepared to begin lifting sanctions. At the same time, your president proposes to impose new sanctions because Iran has tested a missile capable of bearing one of the nuclear warheads it is incapable of building. I think I have it right. Hassan Rouhani does, this is for sure. On January 1 the Iranian president—he who lit the peace pipe three years ago and took many political risks to get the nuclear pact signed—responded to the suggestion that new sanctions were in the works by asserting their illegality under international law and ordering the Fateh missile program to be expanded and accelerated as quickly as possible. He meant to say “Happy New Year,” surely, to all the “folks” in the Obama White House. What a kettle of something more pungent than fish. I still contend that the confrontation with Russia, conjured from nothing and now the object of something close to national hysteria, will be the ugliest, most consequential feature of the Obama legacy on the foreign side. But the havoc in the Middle East this president has done so much to worsen is coming up fast.






Keep your man-child antiheroes: The new crush-worthy guy is the quietly competent, grown-up man
***
On the small screen, there have always been competent white male characters, though more often than not they’re supporting members of the cast. That secondary status started to change with BBC’s “Sherlock.” The breakthrough wasn’t Benedict Cumberbatch’s eponymous Holmes, who is a veritable catalog of literary male shortcomings, but Martin Freeman’s calmly effective army doctor, Watson. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Watson is also the chronicler of their adventures, making it clear that he has the power to write himself as the hero of these stories, yet his ego does not require it. The man in the center of everyone’s attention—the brilliant, charismatic Holmes--is there because Watson put him in that position, thereby complicating the power dynamic between them. The success of “Sherlock” landed Martin Freeman on the 10-episode “Fargo: The Series,” where he played the screw-up, Lester Nygaard. It wasn’t until Season 2 of “Fargo: The Series” returned with an entirely new cast that it became a cultural phenomenon, and the surprise was State Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson)-- a “new kind of male protagonist.” Noted Alan Sepinwall for Slate, Wilson “managed to turn Lou Solverson’s quiet decency and assured competence—traits that fly against most of what Quality Drama has taught us make for interesting characters—into riveting TV, in a leading-man performance I didn’t know Wilson had in him.” A veteran of the Vietnam War, Trooper Solverson loves his wife and kids, and tries to do the right thing in an obscenely violent world. So do some of the defense attorneys in the Netfllix series “Making a Murderer,” which focuses on convicted murderer and rapist Steven Avery. Over the course of the 10-hour series, even as many viewers were so outraged by Avery’s situation that a petition was circulated calling for Gov. Scott Walker to pardon him, women found themselves developing a crush on Dean Strang, the convict’s bespectacled, middle-aged defense attorney. Why? The word that comes up, over and over again, is the same word used to describe Trooper Solverson: competent. “I think what I love in particular is he [Strang] is the only competent one in this entire mess,” Lizzie Breyer says. “He fights hard for this guy who everyone else scorns, which is really appealing." “It seems like half the Internet has fallen in love with these two non-descript, middle-aged professionals,” writes Molly Fitzpatrick, noting that the other defense attorney working on Avery’s case, Jerome “Jerry” Buting, has been getting fangirls too. “Buting and Strang are unfailingly brilliant, compassionate, and fiercely competent.” Freeman, Wilson, Strang and Buting are middle-aged white men with pretty good hair, but the other common factor in their unexpected status as sex symbols is that they became more appealing the longer viewers stayed with them. It was their character, not their looks, that captured female hearts (and doubtless a few male hearts, too). It’s in juxtaposition to criminality and incompetence that guys like this start to look really good. “Fargo,” a fiction, purports to be based on real events, even as “Making a Murderer" is a documentary whose persuasive power comes, at least in part, from its low-budget patina of authenticity. The evidence seems real; the various individuals appear sincere. But there is at least a whiff of nostalgia in the rise of the competent white man, who stands for a time when institutional whiteness wasn’t oppressive but just the way things were. But these men are not retrograde even if their values are traditional. They are adults with families and children, accepting responsibility and its consequences, and even accepting social change too. But slowly. As slowly as these series unfolding at a glacial pace, at least by the goldfish attention-span standards of the Internet. It’s not irrelevant that the American locales—Minnesota, Wisconsin--for "Fargo" and "Making a Murderer" are Midwestern rural. In real life, the situation unfolding at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon is producing similar contrasts between #Y’allQaeda and #VanillaISIS on the one hand, and the competent white sheriff on the other. Faced with absurd and dangerous events, David Ward has emerged as a caring man focused on “protecting the residents” of the town and keeping the peace instead of provoking violence. The question isn’t whether these anti-government actors would have been shot if they were black. The question is why more lawmen everywhere, including in the urban areas, aren’t acting more often as officers of the peace. So let’s hope that we see more of the competent white man in all aspects of everyday life, doing jobs that get done because they have to. It’s not that these men are perfect. It’s that they do their damnedest to be decent men because they know that humans are capable of doing terrible things. The more we can focus on and acknowledge people doing the right thing, the better we will all be for it.“A decade ago,” wrote Liesl Schillinger, “when a close friend of mine was going through a wrenching period in his personal life, and asked me if, as a critic, I could recommend a recent novel in which the male protagonist was not unhappy, was not drug-addicted or selfish, was not cynical, was not negative, did not screw up his relationships and let people down, was not on some level a bastard—who did not, in short, fail as a human, I was startled to realize that I could not think of one.” As she points out, a good man is indeed “difficult to write,” because fatal flaws create dramatic tension. Even if they’re not serial killers or drug lords, male literary protagonists tend to be good at getting rich but suck at everything else. What’s the point of “A Little Life” except to uncover the main character’s deep dark secrets? What would be left of Christian Grey without his vanilla kinks? Nobody would read a book about him arguing the finer points of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” with Anastasia, even if he did it while counting out his billions. Yet it’s not entirely the writers’ fault that touchstone male protagonists are jerks. Storytellers create characters, but it’s the public that buys them—or not. Conventional wisdom says that stories about nice guys don’t sell. And so we have reached a point where fantasy narratives have eaten the planet, and antiheros and superheroes are one and the same. Ironman/Tony Stark is a narcissistic womanizing asshole; Batman/Bruce Wayne is a self-absorbed prick; and Steve Jobs/Steve Jobs is a genius but a lousy human being. One man is real, one man is partially based on a historical figure, and one man is totally invented. But all three are filthy rich, fatally flawed (white) men who have achieved mythic status because flawed men are easy to write and the public is all too willing to live vicariously through their unselfconscious, fat-free adventures. Yet escapism offers nothing by way of emulation, which is partly how we learn to participate in a functional society. We cannot aspire to be Superman or Wolverine because they have Powers, even as we are increasingly too-aware of our own political and economic powerlessness. More to the point, why would we want to be them? When they sit by themselves alone, glowering in the dark, these guys wallow in existential misery, as do all of the X-men and the Avengers. Cartoonish, these characters wrestle with personified inner demons, making them fun to watch yet utterly unsuitable as role models for being human. Which is why we are awash in larger-than-life manly men yet Max Olesker could write: “It feels as if, as the traditional ideals of the 20th-century man–strong, stoic, repressed–begin to fade away, nothing has stepped in to replace them. In today’s pop-culture landscape there’s no single archetypal ideal that we’re supposed to emulate.” Arguably, however, there hasn’t been a hegemonic masculine ideal since the aftermath of the World Wars. We may reflexively turn to the Western as the definitive model for American masculinity, but the genre began to critique its own simplistic moral universe with “The Searchers,” 1956, which turned the archetypal white-hat cowboy, John Wayne, into a violent racist antihero. The western has been fracturing and refracting ever since, with the Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) ironically taking the director’s chair and crafting revisionist films such as “Unforgiven.” Today, “cowboys” are rugged romantics on Brokeback Mountain, and at least four of the models playing the Marlboro Man have died of lung cancer. Meanwhile, in the cities, the 21st century birthed the hipster, the metrosexual, the lumbersexual, the ammosexual and other -sexuals, these labels working to create a taxonomy of everyday types in the manner of 19th-century commentators trying to make sense of rapid social change. But even as doofus dads and sad sacks were busily taking selfies and trying mightily to draw attention to themselves, an unlikely new hero has been caught, however unwilling, on camera: the competent white male.***
On the small screen, there have always been competent white male characters, though more often than not they’re supporting members of the cast. That secondary status started to change with BBC’s “Sherlock.” The breakthrough wasn’t Benedict Cumberbatch’s eponymous Holmes, who is a veritable catalog of literary male shortcomings, but Martin Freeman’s calmly effective army doctor, Watson. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Watson is also the chronicler of their adventures, making it clear that he has the power to write himself as the hero of these stories, yet his ego does not require it. The man in the center of everyone’s attention—the brilliant, charismatic Holmes--is there because Watson put him in that position, thereby complicating the power dynamic between them. The success of “Sherlock” landed Martin Freeman on the 10-episode “Fargo: The Series,” where he played the screw-up, Lester Nygaard. It wasn’t until Season 2 of “Fargo: The Series” returned with an entirely new cast that it became a cultural phenomenon, and the surprise was State Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson)-- a “new kind of male protagonist.” Noted Alan Sepinwall for Slate, Wilson “managed to turn Lou Solverson’s quiet decency and assured competence—traits that fly against most of what Quality Drama has taught us make for interesting characters—into riveting TV, in a leading-man performance I didn’t know Wilson had in him.” A veteran of the Vietnam War, Trooper Solverson loves his wife and kids, and tries to do the right thing in an obscenely violent world. So do some of the defense attorneys in the Netfllix series “Making a Murderer,” which focuses on convicted murderer and rapist Steven Avery. Over the course of the 10-hour series, even as many viewers were so outraged by Avery’s situation that a petition was circulated calling for Gov. Scott Walker to pardon him, women found themselves developing a crush on Dean Strang, the convict’s bespectacled, middle-aged defense attorney. Why? The word that comes up, over and over again, is the same word used to describe Trooper Solverson: competent. “I think what I love in particular is he [Strang] is the only competent one in this entire mess,” Lizzie Breyer says. “He fights hard for this guy who everyone else scorns, which is really appealing." “It seems like half the Internet has fallen in love with these two non-descript, middle-aged professionals,” writes Molly Fitzpatrick, noting that the other defense attorney working on Avery’s case, Jerome “Jerry” Buting, has been getting fangirls too. “Buting and Strang are unfailingly brilliant, compassionate, and fiercely competent.” Freeman, Wilson, Strang and Buting are middle-aged white men with pretty good hair, but the other common factor in their unexpected status as sex symbols is that they became more appealing the longer viewers stayed with them. It was their character, not their looks, that captured female hearts (and doubtless a few male hearts, too). It’s in juxtaposition to criminality and incompetence that guys like this start to look really good. “Fargo,” a fiction, purports to be based on real events, even as “Making a Murderer" is a documentary whose persuasive power comes, at least in part, from its low-budget patina of authenticity. The evidence seems real; the various individuals appear sincere. But there is at least a whiff of nostalgia in the rise of the competent white man, who stands for a time when institutional whiteness wasn’t oppressive but just the way things were. But these men are not retrograde even if their values are traditional. They are adults with families and children, accepting responsibility and its consequences, and even accepting social change too. But slowly. As slowly as these series unfolding at a glacial pace, at least by the goldfish attention-span standards of the Internet. It’s not irrelevant that the American locales—Minnesota, Wisconsin--for "Fargo" and "Making a Murderer" are Midwestern rural. In real life, the situation unfolding at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon is producing similar contrasts between #Y’allQaeda and #VanillaISIS on the one hand, and the competent white sheriff on the other. Faced with absurd and dangerous events, David Ward has emerged as a caring man focused on “protecting the residents” of the town and keeping the peace instead of provoking violence. The question isn’t whether these anti-government actors would have been shot if they were black. The question is why more lawmen everywhere, including in the urban areas, aren’t acting more often as officers of the peace. So let’s hope that we see more of the competent white man in all aspects of everyday life, doing jobs that get done because they have to. It’s not that these men are perfect. It’s that they do their damnedest to be decent men because they know that humans are capable of doing terrible things. The more we can focus on and acknowledge people doing the right thing, the better we will all be for it.





Obama’s tears, America’s tragedy: Behind Fox News mockery lies uncomfortable truth about our failed politics





