…ual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from be…
…ly swarm to three million persons! But others travel to Jeddah too on this flight, including Muslims and non-Muslims. Jeddah is a port city; and as the major airport hub for Saudi Arabia, this flight has all types. Now, I’ve been on many planes, but this is the first time I’ve been on a plane where 50% of the seats are business- and first-class. Sorta gives you an idea who comes to the Kingdom, among Muslims and non-Muslims alike: big business. Ok…
…ssues in the broader culture and the long history of oppression of African Americans justified creating this protected space. There is a parallel to be made to the situation on the plane. Women have long been marginalized by men. A man asking a woman to move on a flight may reasonably be interpreted as another chapter in a seemingly never-ending story. I am sympathetic to such a view. But haven’t Orthodox Jews experienced a long history of oppress…
…quite successfully, worked to dismantle the secular liberal foundations of American law and jurisprudence in place since the New Deal. Ultimately, we need to ask how it’s been so easy for the Federalist Society to gull the nation for so long and with such ease. The answer probably lies in the “historical innocence” of Americans about which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. With no feudal past to constrain us, with Protestantism…
…n relegated to living in ghettos. As a result, Rothstein told me, “African American family incomes are about 60% of white family incomes, but African American wealth is about 5% of white family wealth. And that difference is heavily attributable to federal race-based housing policy.” It might be psychologically satisfying to blame unemployment on individual laziness, or segregation on prejudiced white homeowners, but this would miss the forest for…
…elligence (CSETI) and in 1991 Greer’s team reported their first successful contact with a UFO, which appeared in the sky and blinked its lights at them. CE5 has continued to grow over since. In April 2020, Greer was featured prominently in the documentary Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact has Begun, directed by DC’s friend Michael Mazzola. As DC recalls, the film was perfectly timed to coincide with Covid lockdown: It was the middle of C…
…also why dissatisfied customers at restaurants want to get their dish for free, or get a free glass of wine, or a free dessert, because that balances out the input-output equation. So if the customer service agent gives you something, then you feel compensated, then you’re okay, and it’s not such a cognitive puzzle, and also not such a frustration to deal with the amorphous agent of the airline as a whole. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the custo…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…ng an imperial vision of American power that imposes its hybrid-version of American democracy/American gods around the world through support of dictators considered “men of God” (Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier, for whom Family members arranged congressional support, Efrain Rios Montt, the Guatemalan killer championed by Pat Robertson, etc.). That, sadly, is the link between the killer bunny and its ostensible victim, fundamentalism and the establishmen…
…d gathering—on his way to a lurching belly-flop in an adjoining field. But Flight, like most of the other religiously-themed scripts to which Washington agrees to lend his star power, is no Kirk Cameron morality play. As in The Book of Eli, in which Washington played a post-apocalyptic loner who creates a trail of gore during a violent spiritual pursuit of the lone remaining copy of the Bible, the celluloid preaching in Flight is rated R. In addit…
…Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has brought millions of people into new or renewed political activism. But many of them are struggling with questions about where and how to invest their energy. I hope my book provides some clarity for them and a path forward—an understanding that our fight encompasses all of us against the 1 percent. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Entertain them? Piss them off? An effective organizer agitates people…
