Due to having family members visit us, including my grandson’s first visit which is going to be enormously exciting for me, and taking a few trips, blogging will be highly sporadic during the new two weeks.
Islamic mosques separate people by gender and assign inferior roles to women. Majority Islamic nations and many orthodox Muslims have also had a deeply hostile attitude towards the LGBT community. So it was with interest that I saw this story about a new mosque in Berlin, Germany that operates under quite different rules than traditional Islamic mosques and adopts a far more inclusive attitude.
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Utah Senator Orrin Hatch caused some eyebrows to be raised when he sent out a Tweet that said, “We’re not going back to healthcare. We’re in tax now. As far as I’m concerned, they shot their wad on healthcare and that’s the way it is.” It was the phrase “shot their wad” that caught people’s attention because that phrase is now associated with male sexual ejaculation and not something that one might expect a senator to use in public.
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Let us fervently hope that Donald Trump, who is clearly envious of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, does not release photos from his current summer vacation similar to the ones Putin released from his. I do not think the Republic could survive it.
Fox News seems to one ghastly pit of sexual misbehavior and harassment. Now comes yet another story alleging that Eric Bolling, Fox News host and ardent fan of Donald Trump, sent photographs of his genitals to co-corkers. I must admit I find such actions hard to fathom. If these were adolescents, I could understand. Young people do risky and foolish things all the time, oblivious to possible negative outcomes. It might also be understandable behavior by an adult if it was sent to an intimate partner who expected or asked for such things, though even there one would expect prominent people to hesitate given the fact that emails are hardly confidential anymore.
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Almost on cue after my post yesterday on how ambitious politicians in the US have to fake religiosity, I came across this Tweet that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that he is no longer an atheist and that religion is very important. He had said this last December but I had missed it.
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The fallout of the leaked transcripts of the phone calls between Trump and the Australian and Mexican leaders continues. In an interview with CNN’s Alisyn Caerota, former Mexican president Vicente Fox was brutal about Donald Trump.
One of the cardinal rules of American politics is that if you want to gain high office, you have to express religious beliefs. If you are not a believer or are lukewarm, then you have to fake it. Some fakers are better than others at conveying sincerity but it does not really seem to matter even if you are a pretty obvious phony. All that the religious base cares about is that you pay lip service to the Christian god. If you also push for the policies that the religious right favors (anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-LGBT, and anti-sex), then it does not matter even if you do not go to church regularly or mangle your religious references.
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I wrote recently about how the film The Room was so bad that it has acquired cult status and there is even a film made about the making of it. Thanks to reader Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write I learned about this article by Stuart Heritage about the qualities that go into getting a zero rating on the critics site Rotten Tomatoes, a rarity that means that not a single critic liked it.
Heritage says that there are factors in addition to bad writing, acting, directing, and other cinematic skills that will help you get that rare distinction.
The film War Machine (2017) that I reviewed recently is a satire on US efforts to win the war in Afghanistan that follows a cyclic pattern. A president gets increasingly frustrated with the fact that the war is just dragging along in a stalemate, decides that what is needed is a new strategy and new leadership, fires the existing military commander and appoints a new military commander who has a sterling reputation gained elsewhere, that person says that he needs more troops to deliver a crushing blow to the enemy, gets the troops but the blow fails to be effective, gets fired, and then gets replaced by a new commander and the process begins all over again.
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