SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

NEWSWEEK GUSHES – From Newsbusters:   Journalistic love for Barack Obama certainly hasn’t gone away. Newsweek’s Twitter page on Tuesday hyped, “Has there been any president cooler than Obama?” The magazine, which barely publishes these days, features contributions from a website called Quora. That article wondered, “OBAMA, THE FIRST POP CULTURE PRESIDENT?”  The piece is written by Stephanie Vardavas, a 2008 Democratic National Convention delegate. She rhapsodized, “Along comes a youthful, vigorous, brilliant black man, with a lively interest in popular culture (especially sports and music) as well as the serious issues of the day. He gets elected president—twice—which still seems like a miracle to me when I think about it.”  A dead magazine proves there is liberalism after death.  And Obama worship.  And adolescent minds.

A NEW CRISIS – Can America survive?  From Daily Beast:    Hollywood’s perceived gender bias has become a cause célèbre in recent years thanks to Patricia Arquette, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, and other powerful women in the industry who have spoken out about the issue.  Now, in a move that brings a new level of seriousness to the issue, the feds are investigating gender discrimination in the industry.  The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced the news on Wednesday, a year after they first urged the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate discrimination against women film and TV directors.  Seven months after the EEOC began interviewing female directors, they’re now conducting the same process with studio executives, showrunners, male directors, agents, and other industry players.
“We are encouraged by the scope of the government’s process and are hopeful that the government will be moving to a more targeted phase,” said Melissa Goodman, director of the LGBT, Gender and Reproductive Justice Project at the ACLU of Southern California, in a statement released Wednesday.  I'm against all discrimination in the industry, but this is frightening.  How do you prove discrimination in an artistic medium?  If you want a film with a black point of view, would you hire a white director?  If you wanted a youthful, hip point of view, would you hire a 70-year-old director?  If you were making a huge action film, wouldn't you hire the best action director, regardless of gender?  It's chilling that the government can intervene in artistic decisions to fill out quotas.  But that is what will happen. 

YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS UP – From Fox:   Particle physics and string theory pose plenty of interesting questions, but educators at Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week wrestled with yet another vexing dilemma: "Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming?"  That was the topic at a Monday panel at the venerable Boston school whose alums include Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Michael Bloomberg and Charles and David Koch. The presentation, sponsored by the school's Global Studies and Languages Department, looked at “an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation,” according to an online advertisement for the event.  Now the world is clearer to me.  Muslims would feel more free if I stopped driving my Honda.

May 13, 2016