Short movie
Love this trippy new Laura Marling song:
‘Liberal’ Hollywood
You know, I’m not surprised:
When hacker collective Guardians of Peace broke into Sony’s servers on November 24, hundreds of thousands of the entertainment network’s private emails became public. Reporters discovered emotional conversations between executives, plans for upcoming movies, and now, evidence of the gender pay gap in Hollywood.
In an email dated December 5, 2013, a Columbia Pictures president wrote to Sony executive Amy Pascal about how much each actor would get paid for American Hustle, The Daily Beast reports. In it, he refers to “points,” which translate to money each person will receive based on the movie’s box office performance.
While director David O. Russell, Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale, and Jeremy Renner received 9 points for American Hustle, Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams got 7. The email mentions that Jennifer was initially slated for 5.
The Daily Beast calls Lawrence “far and away the biggest star of the picture” because American Hustle was green lit after The Hunger Games, yet the executives don’t recognize that in their financial calculations. Pascal’s response to the points was “there is truth here.”
This disparity is apparent among Sony staffers too. When The Daily Beast analyzed the pay of the two co-presidents of production at Columbia Pictures, they found that the male president Michael De Luca made nearly $1 million more than his female counterpart Hannah Minghella.
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
Darlene Love’s farewell appearance on Letterman tonight
http://youtu.be/RfurmGiKZ5k
We all have our Christmas traditions, and Darlene Love’s annual appearance on David Letterman is one of mine.
First of all, it’s live music, which I almost always prefer to the recorded variety. Something about the raw energy of live performance thrills me, and Darlene Love is a great live performer. David Letterman may or may not be your cup of tea, but you can’t knock his taste in music. I love Christmas, and I love just about everything ever written or produced by Phil Spector.
The Letterman team always finds some way to make this annual appearance special (watch for the sax solo), and since this is the last time, I can’t wait to see how they top themselves.
Holy torture
Conservative Christians are invoking their God-given right to support torture. Somehow, this does not surprise me. After all, conservatives are people who like to ignore the transcendental and instead refer to the Bible as a cosmic penal code.
The Catholic Church has an unfortunate history in these matters (as do the Protestants) but I don’t think anyone should claim those episodes as templates. Or as truly Christian. But that’s just me!
The author quotes Thomas Aquinas reducing criminals to beasts. Maybe Tom was just having a bad day:
Perhaps before he had a chance to clarify his writings on the matter, St. Thomas Aquinas declared he would write no more. On 6 December 1273 he reportedly experienced a long episode of ecstasy during Mass, and later said that such things had been revealed to him that his previous writings seemed nothing in comparison.
You see? He had a transcendent experience that put his writings in a whole new light.
This has always been the problem with religions. Somebody has a transcendent experience, he or she tells their friends, who eventually try to form a group and try to codify the sublime. It’s silly. And conservatives do love their rules, so when you give them authority to use a Bible as a blunt instrument, they’re never happier. Imagine how disingenuous the author of this statement must be:
If we choose not to torture someone so we can save a life, then we are placing the dignity of the criminal over the life and dignity of the innocent person who is about to die.
You have to love that. You’re not “choosing” to torture, the circumstances force you. It’s actually the Christian thing to do! But here’s the hole in that little scenario: The times of which we speak are not episodes of “24.” Nope. There is no timer on a nuclear bomb, we do not “know” anything. We torture on the off chance we’ll get some useful information. And if the person we torture gives us gibberish (because he’s being tortured), let’s torture him some more.
For many years now, representatives of our nation (propped up by the bed-wetting night terrors of our neocon establishment) used this morally bereft argument to torture. And conservative Christians embrace it! The author argues at great length and with a deep fervor that God wouldn’t have a problem with torture. She quotes the Old Testament (conservatives love the Old Testament — none of that pesky “turn the other cheek” stuff) to illustrate that God is actually quite bloodthirsty. So there!
You know, you can argue all you want about torture (incidentally, we did sign the Geneva Conventions, promising not to use it), but don’t go fucking blessing yourself over it. Just don’t.
Everyone knows the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes — and in this case, does.
‘It’s okay to hate Republicans’
Dumb thing to do. She should have said “despise” instead! What synonyms do you suggest?
University of Michigan communications professor and department chair Susan Douglas is facing calls for her resignation following an op-ed she wrote, titled “It’s Okay To Hate Republicans.”
“I hate Republicans,” Ms. Douglas wrote for the nonprofit magazine In These Times. “I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal ‘personhood.’ “
She then accused conservatives of having “certain psychological characteristics,” such as “[d]ogmatism, rigidity and intolerance of ambiguity; a need to avoid uncertainty; support for authoritarianism; a heightened sense of threat from others; and a personal need for structure.”
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Pope Frank is my homeboy
I enjoy just about everything he does:
Wednesday was the Cool Pope’s 78th birthday. What do you think he did to celebrate? Get a few strippers? Eat a pile of molly? Cry to himself silently over a bottle of Grappa about a life lived unfulfilled? No. He bought homeless Romans 400 sleeping bags.
The Cool Pope announced via the Vatican on Thursday that an archbishop would pack up a van full of sleeping bags and distribute them through Rome to provide homeless residents with some much needed winter warmth. Via AFP:
Konrad Krajewski, the archbishop in charge of the pope’s charity work, led an operation in which a minibus packed with 400 sleeping bags carrying a papal ensign toured around the Italian capital on Wednesday evening looking for people to give them to.“This is a gift for you from the pope on the occasion of his birthday,” the Swiss guards who helped in the distribution were quoted as telling the recipients.
At the end of his birthday audience on Wednesday, Cool Pope met with eight homeless people instead of twenty supermodels.
This is interesting
I’ve always hated it when certain things are made of molded plastic. For one thing, it never quite feels clean. Turns out that’s true!
Checking into a hospital can boost your chances of infection. That’s a disturbing paradox of modern medical care.
And it doesn’t matter where in the world you’re hospitalized. From the finest to the most rudimentary medical facilities, patients are vulnerable to new infections that have nothing to do with their original medical problem. These are referred to as healthcare-acquired infections, healthcare-associated infections or hospital-acquired infections. Many of them, like pneumonia or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), can be deadly.
The World Health Organization estimates that “each year, hundreds of millions of patients around the world are affected” by healthcare-acquired infections. In the United States, the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion in the Health and Human Services Department estimates that 1 in 25 inpatients has a hospital-related infection. In developing countries, estimates run higher.
Continue reading “This is interesting”