Meryl Streep was joined by her three daughters and husband Don Gummer at the Performing Arts for the Kennedy Center Honours gala in Washington DC. AP photos via Daily Mail
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The Obamas hosted the Kennedy Center Honors reception at the White House Sunday evening. Photo by Yuri Gripas/Reuters via Mrs-OMeryl Streep, pictured above husband Don Gummer and three incredibly gorgeous daughters, was honored with four other artists Neil Diamond, Barbara Cook, Yo-Yo Ma and Sonny Rollins, at the Kennedy Center Honors awards last night. Entertainment Weekly writes:
Writer Nora Ephron said Streep’s talent, versatility and resemblance to Clinton made it “inevitable” that she would one day play the secretary of state and former first lady. Clinton, who flew home for 36 hours to celebrate the honorees over the weekend, just laughed, while Streep stood up for a better look at the nation’s top diplomat.
CBS will broadcast the show on Dec. 27.
2011 Culture Club
New York Magazine’s new issue is devoted to a ‘culturati caucus’ on the best books, exhibitions, performances, films, theater and lots more from 2011.
Russian Rebuke
Members of Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth movement, held a victory rally in Moscow on Sunday night.James Hill for The NYTimes Russian Election Results. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party has suffered surprisingly large losses in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. Three minority parties — the Communist Party, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and Just Russia, a social democratic party — all made unexpectedly strong gains, rendering Vladmir Putin not quite as powerful as he was days ago. Given Putin’s intention to return to the presidency for another six-year term — if not two terms — Russian voters have said “not so fast”. Read on at the NYTimes.
WSJ writes that organizations monitoring the vote this weekend call it marred by apparent manipulations and “serious indications of ballot box stuffing.”
“To me, this election was like a game in which only some players are allowed to compete,” said mission head Heidi Tagliavini at a news conference. “And the game was tilted in favor of one of the players.”
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Fundamentally for fundamentalists
In 2009, Lazar Stankov published “Conservatism and Cognitive Ability” in the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence. The article’s abstract confirmed:
Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated … At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, vocabulary, and analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education … and performance on mathematics and reading assessments.
Clarifying that Stankov wasn’t referring to economic conservatives but social conservatives, Jason Richwine wrote in The American, online magazine of the American Enterprise Institute:
The Conservative syndrome describes a person who attaches particular importance to the respect of tradition, humility, devoutness and moderation; as well as to obedience, self-discipline and politeness, social order, family, and national security; and has a sense of belonging to and a pride in a group with which he or she identifies. A Conservative person also subscribes to conventional religious beliefs and accepts the mystical, including paranormal, experiences.
Recent brain scan tests indicate that conservative and liberal brains do actually work differently. Taking up the topic of social conservatives and intelligence is really “asking for it” but we say the future of America is at stake.
Within this context, we find NYMagazine’s article Fundamentally: Newt Gingrich’s Favorite Word to be hilarious — and also very sad. Talk about playing to your audience. Dan Amira writes:
I started in the present day, and made it all the way to the beginning of 2007 before I had to stop, for my own health and sanity, which, according to my editors, was beginning to suffer in noticeable ways. The list below contains only unique usages — for example, if he said the phrase “fundamental change” five different times, we only included it once — and, obviously, we only included remarks that were public and recorded in some way. Scroll onward, if you dare, to behold all loosely alphabetized 418 entries. Read on at NYMag
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The Rise and Fall of the real Herman Cain CNN
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A Global Facts of Life Perspective That Turns Our Vision Of The Whole World Inside Out | Perhaps God Is Just Resting
Our dear Lisa Catherine Brown shared this slideshow that has traveled the Internet for more than a year. Called Lightening in Jar or The Lightening Catchers, it apparently appropriated a photograph (last one) by Bryan Allen without his permission. Allen writes that he would gladly given it for use in such a wonderful slideshow.
And it is just that … a sobering reflection on our privileged lives as AOC readers. (Note, sources and year of data aren’t confirmed). The good news is that most of us understand our exceptional fortune and try to live our lives as Smart Sensuality people: intelligent, sexy and acting with heartfelt, global awareness and intention.
As a spiritual secularist and humanist, I am frankly tired of getting my head bashed in by the religious right and fundamentalism around the world. When you look at these facts, all the arguments about self-reliance and the enabling power of religious institutions to improve people’s lives seem like paper dragons.
Seriously-speaking, if this is what humans have accomplished in thousands of years on Mother Earth, we must reconsider our strategies. It is time for female-centric values to gain prominence in the world. If nothing else, women deserve a chance to fail as miserably as men have, in creating a Panet Earth ecosystem with an ounce of equity and genuine life improvement built into it.
Reading these statistics, it does indeed seem that God is either totally detached from human existence (an idea that many believers embrace); God is on vacation or perhaps busy making new worlds in the universe, having learned from current mistakes.
I wonder how we could change people’s lives if each of us adopted one small initiative, just one ongoing action that we can embrace, BUT it must have quantifiable results. Right or wrong, my sense of charitiable giving is that most of it comes with religion’s strings attached: no birth control, anti-homosexual agendas, keeping men in charge of family and national budgets, and similar God-approved initiatives.
Even the US military believes that if we don’t put women first, life will get so much worse for all of us in the 21st century. WORSE than these statistics — which is frankly incomprehensible to me.
Anne of Carversville is dedicated to telling women stories, from fashion to flogging. However bad these statistics are for humanity, they are even worse for women and children. Love to Lisa for sharing this incredible slideshow. Anne Read Lisa’s A Day of Peace | For 24 Hours, Give Peace a Chance, an article that has resided in our top 5 for months now, competing against all those sexy fashion editorials.
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