Disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has been expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by the board of governors after allegations he sexually harassed or assaulted a number of women over the past three decades.

• Board voted "well in excess of the required two-thirds majority" to revoke membership
• Expulsion follows allegations from a number of women that Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them
• Weinstein insists that any sexual contact he had was consensual

In a brief statement, the organisation behind the Oscars said its board voted "well in excess of the required two-thirds majority" to revoke Weinstein's membership during an emergency meeting this morning.

It said its decision sent a message that "sexually predatory behaviour" in the film industry was over.

"We do so not simply to separate ourselves from someone who does not merit the respect of his colleagues, but also to send a message that the era of wilful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behaviour and workplace harassment in our industry is over," the academy said.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-15/oscars-board-expels-harvey-weinste...

I can't wait for the movie — or the series — or the Fuktel special... or may be not... 

Artist at top: Angelo Torres was born in Puerto Rico of all places. May be he should illustrate the life and farts of Donald Trump.

Expert sociologist: Arnie Kogen

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A lot of the perpetrators are profitable — and therefore protected. (Does anyone really believe that if Harvey Weinstein was still raking in Oscars and cash like he did during his heyday in the ’90s and early oughts, he’d have been outed like he was?)

And to the protectors of the bottom line, a lot of this is on you. Know that enabling toxicity isn’t a long play. It will come out. The longer you wait, the more it will crush your stock — and frankly a lot of these guys aren’t doing such a great job anyway. Hire women for the boardroom. Stop making excuses for bad behavior. You will be rewarded with a better, more productive and profitable workplace.

To the perpetrators, I’d just like to say: We see you. And before you get full on Harvey’d, do what we women had to do a long time ago: Get a shrink. Grow up. Forgive your mother (it’s always the mother). Develop some sort of empathy and understand you can’t keep treating other human beings like worthless dirt without it one day catching up to you.

For now, Hollywood’s inability to accept any of this remains deeply rooted, even among the perpetrators themselves. Frighteningly, on Tuesday, as he jetted off to a sex rehab somewhere in Arizona, Weinstein channeled that other beloved Hollywood groper, Arnold Schwarzenegger and vowed, “I’ll be back.”

That’s exactly what we’re afraid of.

Paula Froelich is a journalist and creator of A Broad Abroad

Read more:

http://nypost.com/2017/10/14/this-one-incident-sums-up-how-hollywood-fee...

The lawyers of Summer Zervos, who accused then-presidential candidate Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, have reportedly requested all documents concerning "any woman who asserted that Donald J. Trump touched her inappropriately."

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — They subpoenaed his campaign for all documents related to the claims, local media reported Monday.

In October 2016, Apprentice TV show contestant Summer Zervos claimed at a press conference that Trump forcibly kissed and inappropriately touched her during a visit to his New York office in 2007. Trump refuted all the allegations. In January 2017, Zervos filed a lawsuit against Trump in the New York State Supreme Court.

According to the CNN broadcaster, Zervos' lawyers requested all the documents related to her, as well as all communications with her and about her, and "all documents concerning any woman who asserted that Donald J. Trump touched her inappropriately." The broadcaster noted that the subpoena was issued in March, but it has been revealed recently.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201710161058264120-trump-sexual-misconduct-su...

LOS ANGELES — The groundswell over sexual harassment that has rocked Hollywood moved into California’s capital on Tuesday as more than 140 women — including legislators, senior legislative aides and lobbyists — came forward to denounce what they describe as pervasive sexual misconduct by powerful men in the nation’s most influential legislature.

Women complained of groping, lewd comments and suggestions of trading sexual favors for legislation while doing business in Sacramento. Their grievances, contained in a public letter and detailed in a series of interviews, mark the latest fallout from the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal.

The women who drafted the letter say they were flooded with anguished responses from women who reported enduring, or witnessing, sexual harassment from male legislators, aides and lobbyists, after they began circulating their statement in recent days.

The letter comes as the scandal involving Mr. Weinstein had set off a wave of investigations, recriminations and accusations across the nation, including in state capitals in Rhode Island and South Dakota. Women from all walks of life — from actresses to corporate leaders — have used social media to report instances of abuse, often marked #metoo.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/us/california-women-sexual-harassment-sacramento.html

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Ah, the illusion of security. Most Americans love it, need it, crave it.

Need an example? Let us examine everyone’s least favorite (and ever present) national ritual. We’ve all been there: you queue up, empty those pockets, undo the belt, (maybe) kick off your shoes, do a final liquid check, and wait your turn for airport security. Depending on the day and the culture of the town, you listen as a cynical, jovial, or sometimes even clever TSA agent rattles off familiar instructions. “No metallic objects…blah blah blah…liquid…ounces…step back…step forward.” Wait, wait some more, then we raise our hands in a—for me—familiar pose of enemy surrender.

If you’re lucky, the whole affair consumes less than 20 minutes. Then you load the plane, do a cursory check for vaguely Arab faces—feel a tinge of liberal guilt about that—and settle in for the miracle of flight.

But realistically the sharper minds among us know we’re not really safe. Motivated terrorists are inevitably smarter than the average TSA agent, and the entire ritual (usually) only deters yesterday’s threat. The rational mind recognizes the illusion of it all. One is never truly safe from terrorism—or lightning strikes for that matter—in any absolute sense. Nevertheless, life goes on. It must.

There’s just one problem. At the macro level, policymakers, politicians, and the public alike actually expect total security from terrorism. Well, at least one kind of terror: as President Trump so loves to enunciate: Radical. Islamic. Terrorism. Never mind that more American deaths stem from right-wing extremists, or that the chances of dying in a terror attack are comparable to drowning in your own bathtub. Because the public, and our elected leaders, demand absolute security from terror, the United States has spent the last decade and a half shipping people like me on one quixotic adventure after another across the Middle East.

Brace yourself for an uncomfortable fact: the blame for today’s indecisive wars doesn’t rest with George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump alone. Rather, these quagmires represent symptoms of an entirely American problem. While it is quite satisfying to blame Iraq and Afghanistan on a group of neoconservative, interventionist zealots in the Bush administration, that explanation will not entirely suffice. A combination of three factors has enabled the lengthy, inconclusive, and unnecessary “wars” of the 21st century: optimism about the efficacy of force, our current all-volunteer system of military service, and a fixation on absolute security.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-quest-for-absolute-s...

Roy Moore has been talking with God. It’s a brilliant October afternoon in downtown Montgomery, Ala., and inside the weathered brick home serving as the headquarters for Moore’s Senate campaign, the twice-removed former chief justice of the Alabama supreme court leans back in his chair and shares what the Lord has told him.

“Our rights come from God,” the 70-year-old Baptist says. “The Constitution was founded upon God. It was made for moral and religious people. It is the fallen nature of man that the Constitution meant to restrain.”

Moore is favored to win the Dec. 12 election to fill the Senate seat that was vacated when Jeff Sessions stepped down to become the nation’s Attorney General. And while several conservative rabble-rousers have joined the Senate in recent years–both Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas come to mind–there is nobody in Washington quite like Moore: a judge who recites anti-abortion poetry, rejects the theory of evolution, doesn’t think Muslims should be allowed to serve in Congress, fought to keep antiquated wording in the Alabama constitution requiring school segregation and suggested the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were God’s punishment for America’s sins. His first priority in the Senate, he says, will be to fight to impeach the five Supreme Court Justices who voted in 2015 to give same-sex couples the right to wed from coast to coast. (Such a move would make history: the last attempt to remove a Supreme Court Justice began in 1804, and proved a failure.)

Moore is not only a culture warrior. He is a populist Christian and a soldier in the larger Republican revolution that is rooted in frustration with Washington and prizes anti-establishment anger over all else. The same uprising that carried President Donald Trump into the White House looks poised to deliver an even more disruptive figure, one the party cannot control.

And the revolution is about to spread well beyond Dixie. Its field general, former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon, says he is recruiting a slate of insurgent outsiders who will vow to topple the Republican ruling class. “Right now it’s a season of war against the GOP establishment,” Bannon told a gathering in Washington on Oct. 14. Three days later, Bannon showed up in Arizona to endorse the right-wing Senate candidate Kelli Ward, who is running against incumbent Republican Jeff Flake, a Trump critic. Bannon’s allies say they plan to challenge sitting Republican Senators in Nevada, Mississippi, Montana, Wisconsin and West Virginia. “The anger we all saw bubble up in 2010 is even more pronounced now,” says Andy Surabian, a top Bannon lieutenant. “Every Republican who hasn’t lived up to their promises should be watching their backs.”

read more:

http://time.com/4989044/roy-moore-how-could-disrupt-trump-gop/

Here one can observe Trump's Lieutenant, Bannon, still working as a free-agent for Trump, to remove the obstructionists in the GOP... Despite appearances, Trump and Bannon are still joined at the hip...

of shampooing and the art of symmetrical anthropology...

It is also interesting to speculate: If Hillary were in the Oval, would some women have failed to summon the courage to tell their Weinstein horror stories because the producer was also a power behind the Clinton throne? As Janice Min, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, told me, when Barack Obama stepped off a stage and into Weinstein’s arms for a big hug after giving a $400,000 speech as an ex-president in the spring, it sent a signal that the ogre was in a protected magic circle.

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And, finally, would Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and other liberals still be saying in the past few days that Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency over his own sexual misdeeds if he now occupied the first lady’s quarters and reigned over a potent Clinton political machine?

Or would feminists and liberals make the same Faustian bargain they made in 1998: protect Bill on his retrogressive behavior toward women because the Clintons have progressive policies toward women? So what if a few women are collateral damage, they might ask — again. Wouldn’t you rather have Bill and Bill’s enabler, Hillary, than Donald?

You may wonder why in the year 2017, after so many graphic and scalding national seminars on sexual predation over the last 26 years, we are still trying to come to terms with it.

Perhaps because in those earlier traumatic sagas, both the left and the right rushed in to twist them for their own ideological ends. The stench of hypocrisy overpowered the perfume of justice.

First, with Clarence Thomas, a feminist lynch mob tried to kill off a conservative Supreme Court nominee over sex when the real reason they wanted to get rid of him was politics. Then, with Bill Clinton, a conservative lynch mob tried to kill off a Democratic president over sex when the real reason they wanted to get rid of him was politics.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/opinion/sunday/the-hillary-effect.html

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in this 1975 Mad magazine exposé, one recognises the events of today...

Note: the seat said "DIRECTOR". I changed it to "PRODUCER". Nil diff...

Mad magazine, a US institution famous for the grinning face of jug-eared, tiny-eyed mascot Alfred E Neuman, is to stop being a regular fixture of newsstands.

The satirical magazine will no longer be published monthly with new material from the autumn, its owners DC Comics said. Instead there will be end-of-year specials and magazines with classic and best-of content which will be sold in comic shops and direct to subscribers.

While Mad magazine is not disappearing, it is not going to be the force it once was.

The comedian and musical parodist Al Yankovic, a former guest editor, was one of many to take to social media lamenting the decision. He said he was “profoundly sad … I can’t begin to describe the impact it had on me as a young kid – it’s pretty much the reason I turned out weird. Goodbye to one of the all-time greatest American institutions.”

The comic book artist Bill Sienkiewicz tweeted: “I hope people understand what this means to us as a nation, both as a culture and as a functioning critical society.

“MAD wasn’t JUST a humor magazine. It’s not just the end of an era; it’s the end of…”

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jul/04/the-end-of-satire-mad-ma...

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MAD magazine is (was, will be?) a virulent and accurate funny exposé of the social failures. It has been somewhat superseded by the actors themselves — the Donald, the Macrons, The modern Mussolinis and us taking selfies on the edges of cliffs. We don't need the reflection of our discontented idiocy anymore. We now live permanently inside a circus hall of distorting mirrors. The chilly wind of satire cannot enter our reinforced concrete abode because we don't care — as long as we rake in the cash. Now please don't satirise cash... This would be a SIN.

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Now he’s talking about the moon landing.

“We are thrilled to have here tonight the famed flight commander, Gene Kranz”, who led the moon landing mission. 

He promises Kranz that soon “we will plant the American flag on [long pause] Mars.”

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2019/jul/05/donald-trump-delive...