- The times, they are a-changin’….at the place where Jewish
people go to send up their cries for help to Yahweh. With growing dissent over
the recent flurry of recent arrests of women seeking to pray at the Western
Wall with ritual garments in defiance of Israeli law, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu is considering changing restrictions on who can pray at the famed
wall. Netanyahu has asked Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency,
to study the issue come up with solutions to make the site more accommodating
to all Jews. All it took to inspire this request was two decades of civil
disobedience by a group called Women of the Wall against regulations,
legislation and a 2003 Israeli Supreme Court ruling that allow for gender
division at the wall. These
dissident ladies are angry over being denied access to one of Judaism’s
holiest sites, specifically laws that prohibit women from carrying a Torah or
wearing prayer shawls there. Progress in affecting change has been slow and
small in Israel because the nation’s ultra-Orthodox retain great sway over
public life. On a global scale, the issue has deepened a divide
between the Jewish state and Jews living abroad. Factor in the international
heat Israel is taking over its settlement policy and the picture gets murkier
for the country’s leaders. Leaders of groups such as the Reform and
Conservative movements in the United States have argued that the government’s
recent aggressive enforcement of restrictions at the wall has turned the wall
into little more than an ultra-Orthodox synagogue. “The prime minister thinks
the Western Wall has to be a site that expresses the unity of the Jewish
people, both inside Israel and outside the state of Israel,” said Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s
senior adviser. “He wants to preserve the unity of world Jewry. This is an
important component of Israel’s strength.” Anat Hoffman, the chairwoman of
Women of the Wall, was unswayed to Netanyahu’s pledge and said it would not
prevent the Israel Religious Action Center, of which she is executive director,
from filing a Supreme Court petition as soon as next week challenging the
makeup of the heritage foundation’s board. All of this over gender discrimination
at an internationally known religious landmark……..
- Gregg Gillis doesn’t like to be lumped in with the rest of
the DJ world. Even though his musical act, known as Girl Talk, relies entirely
on him sampling other artists who actually bother to come up with original
material instead of copying someone else’s to create new songs, Gillis doesn’t consider
himself a DJ like Skrillex and David Guetta, who both received way too much
praise at last year's Grammy Awards. He also doesn’t consider himself long for
the spotlight and sounds perfectly content with the knowledge that his 15
minutes of fame could end in the blink of an eye. "I'd be really
comfortable if I had, like, 50 total fans again like 10 years from now, and I
was back to the day job and it would just be this cool little thing that
happened," Gillis said. Without putting much of his own source material
into what he does, Gillis may not have to wait 10 years to see his fan base
dwindle back to 50 or so after months of packing outdoor venues at festivals
this year. Sadly, he may have a point when he suggests that the weak,
watered-down, bastardized genre of music known as techno/electronica plays well
to the upcoming generation of shallow, ADHD-addled music lovers who comprise
much of his own fan base. "Now I think young people are trying to find
something to identify with and they wanted this next level of having their own
style. I think [this type of electronic music] kind of raised the bar for youth
culture," Gillis added. Raise the bar or drag it down into the sewer, one
or the other. Still, it is mildly reassuring to know that a glorified club DJ who
has managed to repackage enough samples of other people’s work into disposable
pop garbage to give himself a small blip of success on the musical radar knows
his success is only temporary………
- When smartphones and therefore smartphone apps were
first developed, those conjuring up the latest leap forward in communication
technology no doubt had in mind the day when borderline racist apps would make
it possible to offend people and create societal strife with nary a word being
spoken…right? Yet here we are with a full-fledged, small-scale racial drama on
our hands because of one Google user who believes it's fun to make yourself look Asian by changing the shape of your eyes
and wearing a Fu Manchu mustache and rice paddy hat. “This is just a fun app
(that) lets you indulge you and your friends," says the description of the
"Make Me Asian" app created
by user KimberyDeiss and available on Google Play. There are similar
apps to sufficiently insult other ethnic groups - "Make Me Indian" makes you a Native American with
brown skin, war paint and a feather headband – but “Make Me Asian” is
generating most of the drama. "You can for a few seconds to make
(yourself) a Chinese, Japanese, Korean or any other Asians," the
description adds. “Any other Asians?” Really? Even if the app isn't overtly
offensive, that imbecilic description of it most definitely is. The online
campaign 18 Million Rising,
named after the number of Asian-Americans in the United States, is leading the
charge against Make Me Asian and has launched a petition to get Google to
remove it along with Make Me Indian.
“These racist and offensive portrayals of Asians and Native Americans
perpetuate damaging racial stereotypes and should not be distributed on the
Google play store," said the campaign through an online post. Google
disagrees/enjoys the profits it makes off such apps a little too much and
insists the apps are not in violation of the company's policies that protect
against hate speech. "We don't comment on individual apps," Google
said in a statement. "We remove apps from Google Play that violate our
policies." In defense of KimberyDeiss, he/she/they make(s) apps that
insult across age and physical appearance lines, such as "Make Me Old" and "Make
Me Fat," and other race-insensitive apps including "Make Me Russian" and
"Make Me Irish." Asian blogs and activist groups have increased the
volume of their cries for change in recent days and Washington pastor Peter Chin is largely responsible for
the protest on the website Change.org. He wondered how Google's motto
of "Don't be evil" fits
with the company’s decision to allow the racist apps to stand. "I wanted
to make sure this app isn’t given a pass of approval," he said. "It's
not cool.” Well said, pastor Chin……..
- Newt Gingrich wants a colony on the moon, SpaceX founder
Elon Musk envisions people living on Mars, but could there be other options for
outer-space dwelling places? An international team of astronomers led by Mikko Toumi
from the University of Hertfordshire would answer that question in the
affirmative after discovering five new planets just 12 light years away from
Earth. According to Toumi’s team, as many as two of these planets could
actually be habitable for human life. All five of the planets rotate around the
star Tau Ceti, which is visible in the night sky and is very similar to our
sun. For this study, researchers combined more than 6,000 observations
from three telescopes in Hawaii, Chile, and Australia to detect the five new
planets. The five new planets are all between two and six times the mass of
earth and one them, which is five times the mass of Earth, is located within a habitable
zone know as the "Goldilocks zone." This zone is neither too hot or
cold to allow liquid surface water, making it a solid candidate to support
life. "This discovery is in keeping with our emerging view that virtually
every star has planets, and that the galaxy must have many potentially
habitable planets," said research team member Steven Vogt of the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Combined with these few new exoplanets,
more than 800 planets have been discovered orbiting other stars, but just seven
of these could potentially support life. Known as superterrans, these potentially
habitable exoplanets have all been cataloged in the Habitable Exoplanets
Catalog (HEC), a complex computer program created to measure the suitability
for life of these emerging galaxies and exoplanets. The program combines data
from numerous exoplanet databases, including the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia
and NASA Exoplanet Archive. Information on new discoveries is fed into the
system by research teams and that data is then analyzed and incorporated into
the database once it is ready for public announcement……..
- The NHL lockout will not end any time soon. Owners are
rich and have their other businesses to run, but players unable to find a
league to play in internationally during the work stoppage and millions of
distraught Canadians must find a way to fill their unwanted volumes of free
time. Montreal
Canadiens defenseman Josh Gorges decided to bridge the gap ‘twixt players and
fans at a Montreal rink Wednesday afternoon, during the Boxing Day holiday, by
inviting his Twitter followers to join him for a pickup game. Yes, pickup
hockey. It actually does exist in Canada and Gorges extended an open invitation
to his followers on the social network to join him. To a passerby, the scene
looked no different than those playing out at countless parks and ponds across
the country, with the exception of the larger-than-normal crowd gathered around
a rink in the city's Verdun neighborhood. "I haven't played outdoors in a
long time, but I figured we've got some time and I've got nothing else to
do," Gorges said during a break from the game. "I was just looking to
skate outdoors and I threw it out there on Twitter and so many people were
asking where I'd go play. So I thought, 'Why not set a time and place and we'll
all come and play?'" His jokes about the game in the days leading up to it
created a stir among his 23,000-plus followers on Twitter and hundreds of them
from a wide range of age groups and skill levels showed up for their chance to
skate with an NHL player. Some fans expressed frustration about the lockout,
now in its fourth month, and said that while they appreciated Gorges’ gesture,
what they really wanted was to see their beloved Canadiens and the rest of the
NHL’s teams back on the ice to play what little remains of the 2012-13
schedule…….
No comments:
Post a Comment