“Peace Pipe” – New song & video out now!BRONX VI is OUT NOW: https://thebronx.lnk.to/bronxviDirected by: Craig StecykShot and Edited by: Jarrod AnthoneeSite:…
via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNz1TroooYg
The Texas abortion law is the latest example of a harrowing trend.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/opinion/texas-abortion.html
But perhaps the most shocking thing about S.B. 8 is the power it gives abortion opponents — or simple opportunists — over their fellow citizens. The law is written so that they, not the police or prosecutors, get to enforce it, and potentially profit off it. Under S.B. 8, any private citizen can sue others for “conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.”
John Pierce has been a combative advocate for those accused of participating in the Jan. 6 attack, but he’s missed court appearances for a week.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/nyregion/capitol-riots.html
“I’m like Gerard Butler in ‘300,’” Mr. Pierce said in an interview before dropping out of sight, comparing himself to the action star who played a Spartan king. “I’m in the hot gates at Thermopylae, holding the pass against the million-man Persian army.”
The U.S. has extricated its military from a two-decade-long conflict, but the country, and tens of thousands of Afghan allies, have been abandoned to the Taliban.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/bidens-chaotic-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-is-complete
A high-school teacher at an American school in Taiwan tried to fly out seven young leaders and their families. Working with others, the teacher was able to get three of the seven families out. “Only three weeks ago they were holding a conference practicing their conflict resolution and negotiation skills,” the teacher, who asked not to be named, told me. “They were the future of what was possible for Afghanistan.”
For many who served in Afghanistan, the flawed evacuation efforts have brought feelings of shame and betrayal.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-veterans-struggling-to-save-afghan-allies
“Do you understand what it’s like to have people send you messages saying, ‘You promised me you’d get me out,’ ‘I’m being hunted,’ ‘You can’t get me out,’ ‘Why are you betraying me?,’ ‘You left me behind’?” Zeller said. “Imagine now it’s someone you served with and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Tolo came to prominence with hard-hitting news, raucous reality shows and lurid Turkish soap operas. Now there are ominous signs that a violent media clampdown is underway.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/world/asia/afghanistan-tolo-taliban.html
But journalists and human rights advocates say there are ominous signs that a violent media clampdown is underway. Taliban fighters hunted a journalist from Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, who had already left the country, shooting dead a member of his family and seriously injuring another, according to the broadcaster.
Serbians and Albanians have clashed in the mountains and valleys of what is now Kosovo since the fourteenth century. In 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army of ethnic Albanian fighters openly fought Serbian police and faced retaliation from Serbian militar
via Columbia Journalism Review: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/in-kosovo-own-truth.php
Between 2013 and mid-2016, police received sixty-two reports of threats or attacks on journalists. In 2020, someone tried to light journalist Shumbin Kajtaji’s car on fire with gasoline, and four months later, someone shot six bullets into the same car on the same street in Mitrovica, just north of Pristina.
Soldiers were told that we were champions of the rights of mankind.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/american-purpose-after-the-fall-of-kabul
The next time that feeling comes around, remember what it wrought. 9/11 unified America. It overcame partisan divides, bound us together, and gave us the sense of common purpose so lacking in today’s poisonous politics. And nothing that we have done as a nation since has been so catastrophically destructive as what we did when we were enraptured by the warm glow of victimization and felt like we could do anything, together.
Last week, the Afghan filmmaker Sahraa Karimi hastily packed a few things, made it onto a flight, and watched from the airplane window as her city got smaller and smaller.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/as-told-to-the-flight-from-kabul
I was running, and in the middle of my running some people made fun of me, especially the men: “Oh, the director of Afghan film is running! She is afraid of the Taliban! Ha ha ha!” I was surprised. Some girls were just walking. I said to them, “Why are you walking? The Taliban is coming!” And they started running, too.
For five years, a mysterious figure has been stealing books before their release. Is it espionage? Revenge? A trap? Or a complete waste of time?
Back at Norstedts, Mörk also received an email from Varotto. “Sorry Catherine,” the message read. “Could you please give me the Hushmail code?” Altrov Berg dashed off a separate message to Varotto, asking if everything was okay.
Suddenly, her phone rang. “Why are you sending me this?” Varotto asked. Altrov Berg explained what was happening. Varotto was confused. She hadn’t sent any emails to Norstedts all day.
Three days with the star of ‘Loki,’ ‘The French Dispatch,’ and all those movies you know by heart.
via Esquire: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a37227718/owen-wilson-interview-2021/
“There was a lake in the neighborhood that we went to as kids,” Luke says. “One summer, Owen tried a thing where, in order to be in the group, everybody had to do a new trick every day at the lake. So you found yourself just going higher and higher, up into this tree, and it kept getting more and more dangerous, and I remember thinking, I’m gonna die trying to hang out with these guys.”
via Conscientious Photography Magazine: https://cphmag.com/enemy-is-us/
“The single biggest mistake that a photographer can make,” Philip Jones Griffiths once said, “is to believe in the profession, to believe in magazines and newspapers. When that happens, you have already failed. One must work first and foremost to satisfy oneself.” (quoted from: Interview with Philip Jones Griffiths, by Geert van Kesteren, Brigitte Lardinois, and Julian Stallabrass, in Memories of Fire: Images of War and The War of Images, ed. Julian Stallabrass, Photoworks, 2013, p. 68)
In the race to accelerate A.I., the Silicon Valley company Cerebras has landed on an unusual strategy: go big.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-worlds-largest-computer-chip
Cerebras produced its first chip, the Wafer-Scale Engine 1, in 2019. The WSE-2, introduced this year, uses denser circuitry, and contains 2.6 trillion transistors collected into eight hundred and fifty thousand processing units, or “cores.” (The top G.P.U.s have a few thousand cores, and most C.P.U.s have fewer than ten.)
On May 28, a Jefferson County woman whom we’ll call Sarah pulled her car into the driveway of her house on Lake Drive in Cedar…
via Riverfront Times: https://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/murder-at-lake-adelle/Content?oid=36094927&showFullText=true
Sarah had reason to be wary beyond the bizarre nature of the manic appeal. Detectives had been up and down Lake Drive over the past several weeks inquiring as to the whereabouts of a missing man, 36-year-old Jerry Crew, reportedly last seen at Legens’ home. The police had even asked to look at the footage from the security cameras mounted on the house where Sarah lived in the hopes that it might prove their suspicion that Crew had entered Legens’ place but never exited. According to one neighbor, Legens had kept the “routine of a vampire” since returning from jail in 2020, sleeping all day and running loud power tools in his house all night. Thoroughly freaked out, Sarah ran to a neighbor’s house and hid there as the night unfolded in dramatic fashion.
Those of us who fought this war must now wonder: How could we have given the best parts of our lives to such a lie?
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/opinion/afghanistan-war-veteran.html
But the speed of the Taliban’s advance makes clear that this outcome was always inevitable. The enemy had no reason to negotiate, and no reputation for restraint. The only question before President Biden was how many American soldiers should die before it happened. But if leaving now was the right decision for America, it is a catastrophe for the Afghan people whom we have betrayed.
Two years ago, the company brought in a blunt executive to make things move faster and to promote diversity. Then the problems began.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/technology/twitter-culture-change-conflict.html
Mr. Davis, the company’s new vice president of design, asked employees to go around the room, complimenting and critiquing one another. Tough criticism would help Twitter improve, he said. The barbs soon flew. Several attendees cried during the two-hour meeting, said three people who were there.
It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/does-the-great-retreat-from-afghanistan-mark-the-end-of-the-american-era
On Monday, August 9th, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul posed a question to its four hundred thousand followers: “This #PeaceMonday, we want to hear from you. What do you wish to tell the negotiating parties in Doha about your hopes for a political settlement? #PeaceForAfghanistan.” The message reflected the delusion of American policy
The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/23/why-is-it-so-hard-to-be-rational
Often, I asked myself, How would Greg think? I adopted his habit of tracking what I knew and how well I knew it, so that I could separate my well-founded opinions from my provisional views. Bad investors, Greg told me, often had flat, loosely drawn maps of their own knowledge, but good ones were careful cartographers, distinguishing between settled, surveyed, and unexplored territories. Through all this, our lives unfolded. Around the time I left my grad program to try out journalism, Greg swooned over his girlfriend’s rational mind, married her, and became a director at a hedge fund. His net worth is now several thousand times my own.
Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro—they’ve all made their way to the Sunshine State, fueling and profiting from a tabloid culture that turns politics into spectacle, arguably Florida’s greatest export.
via Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/08/the-fury-and-fantasy-of-donald-trumps-florida
At its peak in the 1980s, the Enquirer reached 4.7 million readers. When Pope died in 1988, Haley went to his house in Manalapan, Florida, and viewed the spartan bedroom: a single bed, a big-screen TV, and shelves groaning with VHS tapes of Hogan’s Heroes and Gilligan’s Island. “This is where his head was at, which is pretty much where our readers’ heads were at,” he says.
Their comeback has taken twenty years, but it is a classic example of a successful guerrilla war of attrition.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-return-of-the-taliban
In April, President Joe Biden announced his intention to carry on with the withdrawal, and pull out forces by September 11th. However much he says that he does “not regret” his decision, his Presidency will be held responsible for whatever happens in Afghanistan now, and the key words that will forever be associated with the long American sojourn there will include hubris, ignorance, inevitability, betrayal, and failure.