You’d expect pinko Jada Pinkett (actress) to be a stalwart opponent of free markets and to praise a communist. Ditto Eva Longoria (actress). Freedoms such as Thomas Jefferson espoused engage the rational mind. Marxism such as these females espouse engages the uterus; it requires a menstrual cycle. No more. This Jada Pinkett and Eva Longoria possess. For the rest, these women are not working with much.
Coughing up furballs over Hollywood pea-brains like Pinkett and Longoria is plain silly. The real issue: why are these deeply silly people treated as if they’re capable of sound judgement? They take themselves seriously because America at large takes them seriously.
GREG GUTFELD: “So, last week, we saw Robert Redford crawl up the butt of the Weather Underground, bona fide terrorists who killed innocent people.”
Now, it’s Jada Pinkett, who’s gone pinko, showing her new flick on Angela Davies, the commie who tried to help a murderer flee form jail. Her boyfriend George Jackson had committed five armed robberies before killing a guard. He also wanted to poison the water system of Chicago. Great guy.
In 1970, his brother Jonathan entered a courthouse armed with shotgun that Davis had bought. That gun blew a judge’s head off.
So whatever became of Davis? Surprise. He was awarded a faculty job and a salary far beyond a prison guard’s widow. How funny is that left-wing academics mock law abiding folks with guns, yet somehow always embrace armed radicals who want to destroy America?
I guess one is cool and the other isn’t, which is why Jada is hawking her flick, “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners.” How objective was she when covering her subject?
Here Jada describing Davis, quote, “She never apologized for her politics or her association and she always looked fabulous doing it.”
So, look fab and have the right politics and Hollywood bends over. What dirt bags. Thankfully, though, Jada strongly condemns bullying.
Yes, bullying, the go-to issue for celebrities who cannot condemn deadly behavior. I guess being called names is far worse than getting your head shot off. So hurray for Hollywood, a place where terrorists get tribute and Charlton Heston gets humiliated. Hollywood, it’s how we speak to the world and we’re telling the world that we suck.
In “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” it was observed that, while “Hollywood and the rest of the glitterati and literati make abundantly clear in all their tired scripts and messages that the older generation has nothing on the youth, especially when it comes to technology smarts—this is manifestly false. The electronic toys our dim, attention-deficient darlings depend on to sustain brain-wave activity are made, for the most, by ‘older people’ with advanced engineering degrees.”
In my opinion, the reason highly creative individuals in hi-tech are able to create for The Kids is that they have enjoyed the benefits of a less laissez faire, more traditional education, involving a core curriculum—and if lucky a literary canon—the hardest of sciences, discipline, all coupled with parental moral instruction and guidance.
Now it appears that these hi-tech elites are designing gadgets that stunt an already stunted generation.
WARNING. This NYT article about the effects of time spent interacting with electronics on socialization and intellectual development is itself a product of a disorganized mind. The writer seems incapable of deciding—and developing a systematic argument—as to whether a child’s focus on these passive, quick-fix electronic stimuli detracts from overall healthy socialization or stunts the ability to be alone.
Missing is a line or two as to the two states-of-being—solitude vs. togetherness—being facets of a healthy psyche.
I live with an individual who is intimately involved in the design of some wonderful gadgets. Yet he himself hardly uses them in the little spare time he steals for himself. They frustrate him; they don’t seem to satisfy his creativity or sate his intellect. His greatest pleasure is found in composing and playing complex thematic pieces of music in his home studio. To do so he follows eternal, timeless rules of composition. Low-tech, if you like.
Myself, I have no interest in hand-held devices. I use my well-appointed PC for work. Away from the PC—during a jog, for instance—I think. Ideas flood my mind during physical exertion and solitude. On the rare occasions that we both go away on vacation, we do not take our work along.
I was wrong. “The Americans,” a period drama from the FX network, is not trite TV. I should not have fallen so fast into dismissive mode—but, then, can you blame me? Hollywood’s record of producing abysmally acted, amateurish, sub-intelligent scripts is solid. It speaks for itself.
In “The Americans,” Keri Russell kicks more than corporeal ass as a complex, introverted (now that’s novel), and most interesting character.
Matthew Rhys as her spook husband is magnificent; intense, authentic and manifestly conflicted.
The plot, script and attention to detail deserve high marks too.
And lo and behold, the Russian characters in the series are not just American extras with bad accents; they’re for real, accent and all.
So good is “The Americans” that Holly Taylor and her slightly less offensive brother, as the spy couples’ horrid kids, do not spoil the viewing experience. The children are straight out of 2013, down to their awful vernacular (lots of “like” to preface every sentence), and the staccato tart tones of Taylor’s voice.
“The Americans,” as I see it, is better entertainment than “Justified,” whose protagonist is well-acted (but I don’t like him one bit; I like the “Drew Thompson” outlaw and the prostitute he rescues from a sure death).
It’s all good TV courtesy of Sony Pictures Television and FX Productions.
UPDATE I: From the Facebook thread. “Nicki Fellenzer: Tell me more. I can’t get enough of this series. I’m a fan. Good, fun TV, harking back to a better time in our American history. The fact that Keri Russell looks so all-American works in her favor and with the script: Of course her Russian handlers would have chosen an American-looking Russian girl to be the spy next door. More Nicki.
UPDATED II: We were cheated out of the new episode tonight. Sorrows were duly drowned in the delights of the Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory. Cooper is an animated, wonderful creation (which Wikipedia delights in maligning as a sicko. What’s new?).
Birds in flight are the very symbol of liberty. Yet what do people do to the most sentient, socially and intellectually evolved among them? We cage them and maim them by clipping their wing feathers.
He has dedicated himself to reversing the destruction humans have wrought on the Cape Parrot. What a heroic commitment he and his team (including Cape communicator Rodnick Biljon, who captures the Cape Parrot on film) have pledged to rescuing the Cape Parrot from extinction, brought about by the decimation of the Yellowood forests of the Eastern Cape. (Your host hails from Cape Town.)
The Cape Parrot Project is one of my favored charities. Owned as I am by an Un-Cape Parrot (a genetic relative to the wild Cape Parrot), I’ve had the privilege of experiencing first-hand the intense brilliance of these precious Pois (mine is Poicephalus fuscicollis; the Cape Parrot is Poicephalus robustus). We rescued Oscar-Wood from a cage in a store, where he had languished for 4 years, plucking his feathers down to the pink skin beneath. This, after having been sold into the trade by a well-known breeder in Hawaii.
LOOK at him then (2009):
Another heartbreaking image (2009):
Here Oscar-Wood is today (2012), fully flighted, nesting in a bag of tortillas. This state of relative well-being has come about only because I work from home and am able to give him the attention and freedom he requires to thrive. And still he plucks; once acquired, this neurotic habit is hard to eliminate.
Oscar-Wood has a facility with … wood (all parrots require wood, preferably from a tree, in the wild):
WARNING. Do not try the above at home. By all means, rescue an abandoned and abused parrot, but do not fuel the wicked pet parrot trade, which everywhere and always involves breeding mills, inhumane by definition. As to wild-life traffickingg … words fail.
Those who’ve bothered to get to know a parrot in flight, if hobbled horribly by the walls of a house (the Cape, for example, can fly hundreds of kilometers in a day), know this: Out of a cage, free to be adorable and impossible as only hookbills are—parrots are so much smarter than any of the domesticated animals (and than some of your neighbors).
Even showmen such as parrot whisperer Clint Carvalho attests that the larger parrots are “twenty times smarter than dogs.” I’m not sure how Carvalho quantifies his findings, but these sound about right.
Know a politician with this magic macaw’s problem-solving skills? Tan’s Japanese admirers are enthralled. As well they should be. Watch Tan solve an impossible magic-cube like puzzle:
What’s positive about Carvalho is that, unlike your average avian dabbler, he has realized that parrots acquire rudimentary language (often greater than those acquired by the bumper crops of illiterates US public schools produce) through conditioning and cognition, just as kids do.
The cognitive capacities of the parrot, however, match his emotional needs.
Unlike dogs and cats, birds are wild animals, ill-suited to captivity. Moreover, they’re flock animals who wither without the physical proximity of a feathered family with which they fly, forage, communicate and mate, often for life.
The trade is fueled by consumer demand.
Being slaves to authority and convention, the mass of humanity doesn’t much like or appreciate the independent-minded individuals among them. Imagine the fate of a creature as smart, as independent-minded and as individualistic as the parrot?
Consider the cruelty of excluding parrots from assorted public-awareness campaigns. Funds are invariably solicited for and awareness raised over the airwaves about abused and needy dogs and cats. Not so for parrots. Despite their popularity as pets and their prevalence in American homes, natural disasters come and go without any mention of the plight of the Psittacine victims.
Most people know about the popular African Grey parrots of central and western Africa, but very few people know about Africa’s most endangered parrot, South Africa’s Cape parrot. Today, there could be as few as 800 Cape parrots remaining in the wild and they are considered Critically Endangered due to continued habitat loss, poor nesting success due to lack of nest cavities, a severe Psittacine Beak and Feather Disease epidemic, historical persecution as a crop pest, and illegal capture for the wild-caught bird trade. If Africa was to lose this “green and gold” ambassador of some of our last-remaining Afromontane forest patches, it would be a sign of very bad times to come… We would have lost one of the last Afromontane endemics clinging onto these forests through their own ingenuity and collective intelligence. Intensive logging in their forest habitat, persecution (e.g. being shot or caught in nets and clubbed to death), nest poaching and mist-netting adults for the wild-caught bird trade, and very little or no conservation intervention, has left the Cape Parrot in ruins with an aging populations in declining physical condition. We need to intervene now and stimulate positive change for Cape parrots in the wild
JP: Point taken, but parrot are picky about friends and partners. The chances of a friendship being struck up are greater when the other parrot is of the same species. Personally, I recommend against taking on two parrots. That’s much like planning for one toddler and learning that you’ll be giving birth to twins. It’s never easier. Better that you be a good parront to one parrot than shortchange both and yourself. Of course, if you do not work, or your work is not too demanding (because parrots are), have a large enough house and homestead (maybe even place for an outdoor aviary)—by all means. Caring for parrots under the right conditions is rewarding. There is nothing like the love of a parrot, once earned.
Baby is currently doing lapse from his cage to kitchen cupboard (or what’s left of it; our kitchen has not been renovated and we’re delaying that job until we can think of how to parrot proof Sean’s planned maple-wood cabinetry).
Oscar-Wood is also talking up a storm. Singing his musical repertoire; knocking, and then demanding, “Hello, hello”; asking if I’m going, “Bye-bye-bye?” and if he’s been a “bad bird?” He’s also doing his raspy chest cough, because he knows the sound worries me. Should I dare to attempt to bathe him (parrots bath themselves pretty thoroughly), it’s an indignant, “Hey, hey!” Tell me that’s not a very decent attempt to communicate.