Society's ChildS


Binoculars

Opinion: Sacha Baron Cohen isn't funny - especially when he's mocking the powerless

James Delingpole
The Spectator
Sat, 28 Jul 2018 09:00 UTC
Dick Cheney Sacha Baron Cohen


His satire is often a perfect example of what impeccable progressives like Baron Cohen are forever accusing conservatives of doing: punching down

Sacha Baron Cohen's latest series Who Is America? isn't funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let's be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G.

Obviously, they had their moments: the 'mankini' - that bizarre, electric green, giant-thong-like swim wear worn by Borat; the classic late-Nineties catchphrase 'Is it because I is black?' And sure it must have taken some nerve - even in character - to explain to a clearly impatient and unimpressed Donald Trump his business plan for some anti-drip ice-cream gloves.

Comment: It's actually a good point. Some of Cohen's victims are certainly ripe for mocking, such as the American right politicians so ideologically possessed on gun rights they'll actually accept and promote 2 year olds being armed, or others unquestioned allegiance to Israel having them willingly jumping through the most ridiculous hoops to show they're part of the team. Yet when he aims at the common man, Cohen's humor comes across as more vindictive than actually witty or insightful. Picturing the average liberal, educated elitist sipping craft beers and having a good laugh at the mocking of honest working class Americans with their lowly, proletariat opinions, takes the air out of much of Cohen's 'comedy' bits.

See also:

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Arrow Down

UK's Guardian still clueless about Russia

Paul Goncharoff
Y!2B
Fri, 27 Jul 2018 11:14 UTC
Russia
The other day I received a URL to an article from The Guardian in the UK. It was titled "Vladimir Putin's Russia is a creaking ship. Don't fall for the propaganda" (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/25/propaganda-putin-russia-elections).

I read it, and wondered if the writer ever has spent any time in Russia. I do not mean as a footie tourist, but actually lived and worked in the country. The recently held World Cup was certainly a well thought through showcase event as it would be anywhere in the world. To call it an "illusion" strikes me as simply spiteful and false. Life pre-World Cup and post-World Cup is the same here, only with less tourists. This I can say with great certainty as I have lived and worked here for the past 20+ years.

Years ago, before the birth of the Russian Federation, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) one could have said about the country as the writer did "now the sports pageantry is over, Russians are back to the grey reality of everyday life, and a dire lack of prospects". That statement caught my eye and made me wonder whether she was writing about Russia at all. It is not the Russia I work and live in daily, which certainly is not grey nor is it without constantly evolving opportunities and prospects from the Baltic to the Pacific.

Comment: Maybe not that odd. The West and its fake news media outlets are on a mission - to misrepresent and demonize Russia every chance they get.

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Broom

3 daughters stab father to death after years of alleged abuse in Moscow horror drama


RT
Mon, 30 Jul 2018 19:49 UTC
The Khachaturyan sisters
The Khachaturyan sisters. Images from social media.
His body lacerated with dozens of stab wounds, Mikhail Khachaturyan stumbled from his Moscow flat and collapsed dead by the elevator. Disturbingly, for his teenage daughters, his death came as a relief after years of abuse.

Khachaturyan's daughters - Kristina, 19, Angelina, 18, and Maria, 17 - have been detained and charged with stabbing their father to death on Friday, Russian law enforcement has confirmed.

While Mikhail Khachaturyan strove to present himself as a decent, religious type, neighbors called him a controlling, "abusive""mafia boss" and his daughters readily admitted to the murder, claiming that they'd violently snapped after years of physical, mental and sexual abuse.

"We hated him and we wanted just one thing to happen - either that he disappeared or that we never knew him," Kristina told the police. "We wanted him just to go away and never come back."

Friends and neighbors claimed that Khachaturyan was a tyrannical father and husband, who had developed a heroin habit and reportedly had connections with the criminal underworld. Khachaturyan's abusive behavior drove away his wife, the girls' mother. Khachaturyan's son, in his 20s, also lives away from home.

Comment: While it may be hard for some of the neighbours to believe, the scenario is not that uncommon among psychopaths in families. They craft an image to the outside world that is quite opposite to their controlling, cunning and abhorrently abusive nature. And the evidence does appear to support the girls story: drugs and weapons were found and many other neighbours saw through the fathers mask of sanity. As is often the case, the victim learns to live with the abuse but as the abuser further deteriorates and becomes increasingly violent, it reaches a crescendo where the victim is left with little choice but to defend themselves:

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Attention

Finer order of control: Federal whistleblowers reveal TSA's "Quiet Skies" secret surveillance program for ALL travelers

Nicholas West
Activist Post
Mon, 30 Jul 2018 00:00 UTC
TSA frisk
It appears that, once again, the government narrative that TSA surveillance and groping is needed to keep Americans safe from the terrorists "over there" is nothing but a justification to violate the rights of everyone.

Thanks to a group of federal air marshals displaying good conscience, we are now learning about a new program that shows the full web of physical and digital surveillance that is being employed by the government to track people far beyond even the dubious "terror watch list." Not only are these marshals ready to talk - they are equipped with documents.

According to the group of marshals who first contacted the Boston Globe, the Quiet Skies program has been active since March. The group stated that immediate concern was registered when it became clear that what they were being asked to observe and document was an expansion of the established protocol of putting attention on people connected to a documented terror watch list. Their duties clearly included domestic surveillance of people who were under no formal suspicion and had no reason to be targeted other than vague behavioral observations and/or made it to the radar due to connections made by artificial intelligence programs regarding their data.

Comment: Like the frog in the proverbial pot of boiling water Americans are slowly being acclimated to being totally surveilled, maneuvered and ultimately controlled - by those who seek an almost unprecedented level of power over others.

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Broom

Robert Gore: Now or never

Robert Gore
Straight Line Logic
Mon, 30 Jul 2018 21:46 UTC
Strike while the iron is hot.
iron
There can be no better advertisement against Democrats, neoconservatives, and never-Trumpers than their display after the Helsinki summit. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

The Democrats' destruction began long before Trump. They are wholly associated with government, their answer to all problems and the source of their identity and power. Where they once had a healthy hostility towards the military and the intelligence agencies, they are now among their stoutest defenders. Their ideology, such as it is, is simply more: more government, taxes, laws, regulations, revenues, power, surveillance, wars, and programs, in short, more blob.

Comment: Perhaps the deep state has more power than Mr. Gore realizes? For more see:

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Violin

French inmates complaining of overheated cells get little compassion from social media commentators


RT
Mon, 30 Jul 2018 18:48 UTC
Villepinte Seine-Saint-Denis prison
© Philippe Lopez / AFPVillepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis) prison
French inmates have released a video showing them being kept in an overheated and sealed cell during the hottest days of summer, but didn't find a lot of compassion online as commentators said it was what the criminals deserved.

Last week, the prisoners of the Villepinte facility in Seine-Saint-Denis, northeast of capital Paris, complained about the unbearable conditions in their cell during the European heatwave and shot a video to back their claims.

"It's 50 degrees (Celsius). It's impossible to breath," one of the inmates says in the footage, which was filmed illegally and passed to Europe 1 by the relatives of the inmates.
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Briefcase

Trade spat with Mexico accelerating US' decline as global wheat supplier

David Alire Garcia and Karl Plume
International Business Times
Fri, 27 Jul 2018 07:35 UTC
Russia wheat export
© Alexey Malgavko / Reuters
Mexican bread, pasta and flour-tortilla makers are seeking alternative suppliers of wheat to reduce their dependence on the United States as trade relations between the two neighbors deteriorate.

Mexico, the top importer of U.S. wheat, is increasingly turning to cheaper supplies from Russia, which surpassed the United States as the top global wheat supplier in 2016.

Now the U.S. market share decline is accelerating as Mexico casts about for more alternative suppliers in Latin America and elsewhere to hedge against the risk that U.S. grains will get more expensive if the Mexican government imposes tariffs, according to interviews with three large Mexican millers, international grains traders, the top Mexican government agricultural trade official and government and industry data analyzed by Reuters,

"It's important to send signals to Mr. Trump," said Jose Luis Fuente, head of Canimolt, a Mexican trade group which represents 80 percent of Mexican millers. Mexico will keep buying American wheat because of its proximity, he said, but "we can't continue to have this absolute dependence."

The shifting supply deals are alarming for the U.S. industry, which has supplied the vast majority of Mexico's wheat since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect.

U.S. wheat exports to Mexico dropped 38 percent in value, to $285 million, in the first five months of 2018. U.S. wheat exports to all countries, valued at $2.2 billion, dropped 21 percent.

Comment: The US is finding its influence waning as countries realize there are now viable alternatives to being bullied by the global hegemon.

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Books

The Children of 'Shōgun' and cultural appropriation

Kevin Mims
Quillette
Mon, 30 Jul 2018 11:46 UTC
James Clavell
© YouTubeJames Clavell
This summer marks the 25th anniversary of the completion of James Clavell's epic Asian Saga-six novels, totaling 6,240 pages in paperback, published between 1962 and 1993. The high point of the saga was the publication in 1975 of Shōgun. Set in the year 1600, it chronicles the exploits-nautical, martial, political, and erotic-of John Blackthorne, a British seaman who finds himself shipwrecked in feudal Japan along with a few other survivors of the Erasmus, a Dutch pirate ship he helped pilot. By order of publication, Shōgun is the third book of the series, but by internal chronology it is the first. It is also, far and away, the most commercially successful book in the series. By 1980 it had sold more than 6 million copies and become the source of one of the most successful TV miniseries in history. It was preceded by King Rat (1962) and Tai-Pan (1966). It was followed by Noble House (1981), Whirlwind (1986) and Gai-Jin (1993).

Grady Hendrix's 2017 book Paperbacks From Hell admirably chronicles the way that a single novel-Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby in 1967-created a boom in cheap paperback horror novels that flourished throughout the 1970s and 80s. Shōgun was the Rosemary's Baby of a somewhat similar publishing phenomenon. It triggered a boom in massive historical adventure novels set in Asia but generally featuring English-speaking protagonists, usually either Americans or Britons. I've long been a big fan of these books which, for lack of a better term, I refer to collectively as 'The Children of Shōgun.'

Comment:

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Video

Film review: 'Broken: A Palestinian Journey Through International Law'

Avi Shlaim
Middle East Eye
Sun, 29 Jul 2018 01:27 UTC
Al-Ram separation wall
© AFPIsrael's separation wall is considered to be illegal under international law.
Film by Mohammed Alatar sheds light on the intersection between law and politics in one of the world's most persistent trouble spots

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most complex, multi-layered and protracted conflicts of modern times. One of the many merits of Mohammed Alatar's documentary Broken: A Palestinian Journey Through International Law is that it does not attempt to cover, as so many other programmes have done, the entire history and tangled politics of this conflict.

Instead, it focuses on only one aspect: the separation wall that Israel started building in 2002 in the West Bank and the question of whether it is in keeping with international law.

At first sight, it may seem that the answer is simple and straightforward. Since most of the wall is built on occupied Palestinian territory, and since it is designed to protect Israeli settlements that are themselves illegal, the wall itself must be illegal. But this is not purely a legal issue; rather, it is a bitterly contested political issue.
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Evil Rays

James Corbett: Pricking the mainstream newsfeed bubble (VIDEO)

James Corbett
The Corbett Report
Sat, 28 Jul 2018 00:00 UTC
pricking bubbles
Recommended videos. Tailored newsfeeds. Personalized search results. Know it or not, we are increasingly living in filter bubbles that are being determined by algorithms we know nothing about. Worse than that, we are increasingly retreating into the online echo chamber bubbles of our own making. So where is this all heading and how can we steer ourselves away from this precipice? Join James for this edition of The Corbett Report podcast to find out more.


Comment: Corbett takes a little time to get warmed up but makes some excellent points in the following video. Enjoy!


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