Mediaboss Marketing

Among the gifts I received from my dad, Les Gibson, were a love of reading and history, of arcane knowledge and trivial facts the latter of which made the game show Jeopardy! must-see TV. My earliest memories are of us kids riding in the car as he, a typesetter by trade who never went to college, would quiz us on one subject or another presidents, state capitals, great moments in American history.

He was Art Fleming in a Ford Falcon, and my brothers and I would shout answers as if our very status in the family depended on it and, when youre the only sister, mine did.

Dad, ask us the state capitals again, Id say, and Id be ready with Augusta or Pierre or Montpelier.

So Jeopardy! was a mainstay in our family, from Fleming in the 1960s to the return of the show with Alex Trebek as host in the 1980s, each of us trying to be the first to shout out the questions, which were really the answers.

At its core, Jeopardy! has always been a show where facts are facts, right is right and wrong is not only wrong it has consequences.

It was the show my dad and I watched every day together for seven weeks last spring from his retirement community in Florida, while he was on hospice with pancreatic cancer. The one half-hour where there were no sides in the culture wars, no arguments over cable news channels, no labels of liberal daughter and conservative father. Just answers and questions. The fact that Trebek was also battling pancreatic cancer was not lost on us. If Trebek could show up, dad would too.

He showed up every night for our Jeopardy! ritual until about four days before his death on June 5, answering questions such as, The northernmost city in the Andes Mountain range. Bogota, he said, in a voice faintly audible from his easy chair, a destination that each night took every bit of his strength to get to. Bogota, it turns out, was the peak on a mountain of knowledge from a lifetime of watching a TV game show.

After he died, I continued to watch, knowing that at least Trebek was beating cancer. Until he wasnt.

Alex Trebek died on Nov. 8, 2020, just 10 days after taping his last show. So we knew last Friday, the airing of his final show on Jan. 8, was coming. But that it came during one of the worst weeks of American history who could foresee that? Jan. 6, 2021, when an angry mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, will go down as one of those historic dates a young dad would have asked his daughter to recite.

Meanwhile, Jeopardy! goes on, and we do too, hoping to find a democracy where labels no longer define us. Trebek had some parting words for us, perhaps knowing he was nearing his end.

Were trying to build a gentler, kinder society, he said, and if we all pitch in just a little bit were gonna get there.

See the rest here:
The Answer Is... | Webster Kirkwood Times | timesnewspapers.com - Webster-Kirkwood Times, Inc.

Charities are facing increased hostility from politicians and the media, with some in danger of being reduced to fodder for phoney culture wars, according to a leading campaigning group.

The Sheila McKechnie Foundation said its annual survey of campaigners showed that nearly two-thirds thought politicians were becoming increasingly negative and less tolerant towards charities which actively fight for social justice.

It said the hostile political environment felt by many included politicians shutting down channels of communication, and attacking campaigners and their allies as a threat to the common good.

Examples included the bitter criticism of the National Trust by the so-called Common Sense group of Tory MPs for publishing a report into historical slavery links at some of its country house properties. The MPs accused the trust of pursing a Marxist, woke agenda.

Also cited was Priti Patels targeting of do-gooders and lefty lawyers in a speech at Tory party conference in October, despite Law Society complaints that the home secretarys earlier comments about activist lawyers had led to a racist assault on an immigration lawyer.

The UN aid charity Unicef was accused last month of a political stunt by Jacob Rees-Mogg after it funded food support for deprived children in south London, while Tory MPs reported Barnardos to the charities regulator after it published a blog discussing racial inequality and white privilege.

The foundation said the findings came after years of ever-tightening restrictions on charity campaigning, including lobbying restrictions, and the use of gagging clauses in grants and contracts to prevent charities openly criticising government policy.

Nine out of 10 campaigners said they thought the freedom to organise, speak out or protest was under threat. Over half (56%) felt conditions had got worse over the past year, while 72% said negative media coverage was a threat to their freedom to campaign.

The survey suggests that politicians and the media are out of touch with public attitudes to campaigning. Over half of respondents felt the public was increasingly positive about social justice issues, citing widespread support for the Black Lives Matter campaign, and the footballer Marcus Rashfords action over food poverty.

Halima Begum, the director of the race equality charity Runnymede Trust, was criticised in parliament on Wednesday by the women and equalities minister, Liz Truss, after saying the government sought to divisively prioritise the white working class at the expense of ethnic minorities.

Truss called Begums comments appalling, adding that they reflected an attitude on the left of politics that says: If youre not from an oppressed group, youre not entitled to an opinion, and I think that is fundamentally wrong.

Begum told the Guardian: It is a grave concern to see charity leaders being attacked at a time when charities funding is drying up. Increasingly, the government appears to engage with independent charities in a one-way process, making clear that its their way or the highway if you dare disagree with policy.

Sue Tibballs, the chief executive of the Sheila McKechnie Foundation, said: Civil society will keep working to defend rights and build a better world out of the pandemic. Its time for politicians to work with us, even where we dont always agree, not make us fodder in phoney culture wars.

The foundation was set up in memory of the late Dame Sheila McKechnie, a legendary campaigner who ran Shelter, and subsequently Which?, where her work on food quality led to the creation of the Food Standards Agency.

The government has been approached for comment.

View original post here:
Politicians and media getting more hostile towards charities, poll finds - The Guardian

In her latest book, author Katelyn Beaty says todays Christian women should be empowered to feel anything is possible. A successful professional life should not come at the cost of marriage and family. Beaty says its time that conservative Christians truly celebrate the role of women in society and encourage genuine gender equality.

KCRWs Jonathan Bastian talks with journalist and author of A Womans Place: A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, the Home, and the World Katelyn Beaty.

The following interview excerpts have been abbreviated and edited for clarity.

When did you first start to notice this tension between your gender and being a professional?

Katelyn Beaty: I currently live in New York, but I used to live in the Chicago suburbs and work at a magazine in the Wheaton area, where theres a very heavily Christian subculture. I really found in my own life, that tension between what I wanted to do as a professional and what I was hearing in the Christian subculture around me. I started to experience that as I started to really gain some traction in my professional life. I often found that one's work, professional work just wasn't something that was being talked about at church. It was almost like the 40 hours that many of us spend in places of work every week, was just not a point of consideration or importance in those church communities.

But also in many church communities, not only in where I used to live, but across the country, in evangelical subcultures, there is a suspicion of women who have too many professional ambitions and just a reclamation of women as nurturers and caretakers, wives and mothers and of course, nothing that I say or write wants to denigrate the the work of caretaking or parenting or nurturing but I think there's really something that the world loses when women are told they can only be one thing That they can't be many different things.

Being a single person, I didn't really find a lot of space in the spiritual communities that I was a part of to bring my full self, including my professional self, which is a really big part of who I am. I had to imagine in writing my book that there were a lot of other women of faith who felt that same lack, that they also couldn't bring their full selves into their communities of faith. So I wanted to try to remedy that and to cast a more expansive vision for women in the church.

Why do you think some components of the Evangelical Church still uphold so deeply these traditional roles for women?

Beaty: I think a lot of evangelicals find references in Bible scriptures, especially in the New Testament that would delineate really strong roles between men and women between husbands and wives. Of course, so much of reading the Bible and understanding the Bible is interpretation and 10 people can look at the same passage of scripture and come to 10 different readings of what that scripture means. At least in the Catholic tradition, I know that you were asking about the Evangelical world, but there is some overlap there.

Traditional Catholics would find a lot of robust teaching about gender differences and theology of the body and manhood and womanhood and how they complement one another in marriage and I think for a lot of conservative Christians today, whether they're evangelicals or Catholics, they perceive that there's a kind of blurring of gender roles in broader Western culture and that there's a trend towards that. There's a sense that they're something really valuable would be lost to them, if they don't teach really distinct roles for men and women and keep the gender differences really clear.

That would be a significant reason why conservatives, including conservative Christians, in the 60s and 70s, and 80s really railed against second wave feminism, because it was perceived that if more women are encouraged to advocate for themselves in the workplace, then they will neglect or forsake or diminish the role of motherhood. That's where we have such a strong component of the culture wars over the last 50 years which has been about women's entree into the workforce.

How does someone like Judge Amy Coney Barrett pull this off?

Braude: In conversation with Catholic women after the New York Times piece came out, that Catholicism has, despite stereotypes, have done a better job than evangelical communities in affirming women's intellectual gifts and capacities. I have to imagine in terms of her extensive schooling at elite institutions, that Amy Coney Barrett found encouragement from her various faith communities to pursue that kind of intellectual formation and attainment. In terms of practically, how she has managed to, as you said, have a lot of kids and also have this incredibly time consuming and high profile position of power, she would be, I'm sure, the first to point to the fact that her husband, her life partner is 100%. behind her. Both of them probably draw a lot of support from their broader community so that it's not just left to the two of them, but there are many people involved in raising their children and managing a household.

Of course, she is in a position of privilege, not only to attain the education that she has, but also to have that kind of support network. That's something that very few women realistically have access to. That's all the more reason why we need to advocate for workplaces and communities that affirm women's desire to be fully engaged as professionals and also fully engaged as parents and to be creating more flexible workplaces or policies that allow for women to flourish in both areas of life at once.

Do you recognize the work done by women in the workplace by liberals and feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is an interesting comparison in this moment with Judge Coney Barrett?

Braude: Absolutely. When I wrote The New York Times piece, it wasn't so much because Amy Coney Barrett is a personal heroine. At the end of the day, if I had to choose, I would more naturally resonate with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and much of what she championed but I could also see my own faith formation and faith community in the person of Amy Coney Barrett and that is why I wrote that piece about her.

But absolutely, I would not have been able to, for example, attain higher education or advocate for equal pay or advocate for more women in leadership at various workplaces that I've been a part of including my own leadership, we're not for liberal feminists of the last 100 years, pushing for gender equity at all levels of society.

So when conservative Christians are kind of tempted to throw feminists under the bus or kind of lump all feminists together, we have to remember that we have the feminists to thank for much of the inroads that women have made and we're a part of their legacy, we're part of what they championed and we now get to enjoy the fruits of their labors. And we would be remiss not to remember the sacrifices and the cost of what they won for women today, even though we also still have a long way to go.

Originally posted here:
Should the Church embrace a more expansive and empowered vision for women? Christian feminists say yes - KCRW

President Donald Trump has reduced the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan to its lowest level since 2001, but as he prepares to leave the White House, it is clear the latest Forever War is raging here at home.

Acing Defense Secretary Chris Miller announced on Friday that the U.S. military now has 2,500 troops in Afghanistan and another 2,500 troops in Iraq, completing the drawdowns that he announced on Nov. 17.

Miller did not mention Syria, where about 900 U.S. troops are operating as part of a shadowy proxy conflict with Russia.

The nearly 6,000 U.S. troops downrange pales in comparison to the roughly 21,000 National Guardsmen that Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy has authorized to be called up to protect President-elect Joe Bidens inauguration on Jan. 20.

This surge comes amid questions about why the roughly 340 D.C. National Guardsmen who had been mobilized for a Jan. 6 pro-Trump rally that turned into a violent insurrection were not quickly dispatched to the Capitol building, where police had been overwhelmed by a mob of Trumps supporters.

The Defense Department Inspector Generals Office announced on Friday that it is looking into exactly what help the U.S. military was requested to provide before and during the Jan. 6 riots and how the Pentagon responded.

While the attempted insurrection failed this time, it revealed that the partisan divide in this country which is often referred to as the culture wars is looking more like a civil war.

Now the nations capital has been transformed into a gigantic forward operating base out of fears that more insurrectionists will return to attempt to prevent Biden from being sworn in.

The fact that a number of the rioters who came to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 were veterans shows just how deep the political fault lines in the United States run.

While the Defense Department is ostensibly committed to rooting out extremists in the ranks, a recent independent report on diversity found that the Pentagon is not doing enough to track service members who have been radicalized by white supremacist ideology.

As the war on terrorism approaches its 20th anniversary in September, it is clear that we have seen the new enemy, and it is us.

Go here to read the rest:
Trump to leave office with vastly more troops in DC than in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria combined - Task & Purpose

He claims this in part by seeming not to have character at all in the classic sensean internal compass that operates independently of his garish public performance. Even Richard Nixon had brooding, tormented dimensions to his personality, which suggested a conscience, which in turn led him to try to hide cynical and illegal behavior under a mask of righteous piety. By contrast, news and book revelations about outrageous behavior by Trump in private are not remotely in tension with how Trump presents himself in public. He acts as if self-absorption, self-delusion, bullying, bluster and disdain for rules or precedents or standards of propriety are all good things.

Here is the uncomfortable truth, highlighted by yet another impeachment: These are good things, if the goal is to ensure that supporters and enemies alike are obsessing about you in the final hours of a defeated presidency, and even after that presidency ends, while a successor is wanly trying to command attention for a new one.

And they are good things if the goal is to be the emblematic figure of a generation guided by the ethos that the point of politics is not to illuminate and resolve big argumentsit is instead to continue the arguments endlessly, no matter the circumstances.

If the Senate debate follows the House lead, the impeachment exercise will slump to a snarling, ash-in-mouth end. What should be clearit is wrong to claim a stolen election without evidence, wrong to prod a mob to action with a demagogic speechwill somehow turn muddy in an overwhelmingly partisan vote. Perhaps there is a slight chance the complexion in the Senate will be different.

If so, that would require breaking a very old cycle. Trumps generationpeople born in the 1940s, who came of age in the 1960s, and who dominate public life even now in their 70sgrew up in the wake of what Tom Brokaw memorialized as The Greatest Generation, the one that fought WWII as young people and saw the end of the Cold War at the end of their careers. At least in political terms, these baby boomers, now late in their own careers, are a contender for the title of Worst Generation. As with worst presidents, there are other candidates. But there arent many who argued so much and clarified so little, or presided over so much institutional decay.

Argue about ideological wars, about culture wars, about identity politics, about who is the real victim, about who is divisive, about who is the bigger hypocrite and menace to decency. Trumps generationwhich includes Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bushhas been arguing these subjects for more than a half-century. Little surprise that there were raspy versions of the familiar standards in Wednesdays impeachment debate.

Trumps is also the generationone that included Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaughthat invented commercialized contempt and a political-media complex that profits on malice, division and indignation. For accounting purposes it does not matter if these are real or feigned.

As the nation reels from a violent insurrection and a devastating pandemic, President Trump has become the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. So how did we get here?

For most Democrats and 10 Republicans who backed impeachment, it seemed plain the disgust and incomprehension on Wednesday were genuine: How is Trumps postelection behavior not beyond defense?

There were two standard replies. One, with at least a measure of plausibility, came from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who said what Trump did was wrong but that a rushed vote on impeachment for a president who is about to leave is an impractical and divisive remedy. He said he would have backed a resolution of censure, but Democrats werent satisfied. With considerable understatement, he said, I understand for some this call for unity may ring hollow.

But the main defense of Trump was to practice his own brand of accusation and irrelevant distraction. What about rude things that Robert De Niro, or Madonna, or Kathy Griffinall called out by Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.)have said about Trump? What about unruly elements of Black Lives Matter? What about the Red Hen restaurant down in Lexington, Va., which did not want to serve Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders?

Wheres the accountability for the left after encouraging and normalizing violence? said Rep. Lauren Boebert, also a Colorado Republican. I call bullcrap when I hear the Democrats demanding unity.

Boebert is 3440 years younger than Trumpand a reminder that the brand of self-righteous, accusatory politics invented by an older generation is a transferable inheritance.

Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), who is leaving to join Joe Bidens White House, said Trumps false claims and erratic behavior during the transition were merely an extension of behavior throughout his presidency. Simply put, we told you so, Richmond taunted.

In fairness, an earlier generation of conservatives might also have a claim of told-you-so. This old critique of baby boomer culture was that it was too indulgent, too permissive, too willing to blur old lines of right and wrong. Once you start letting standards erode, the line went, you may find that the foundations of a civilized and functional society are more fragile than you knew.

How many Republican leaders, in their private thoughts, might acknowledge that this is fair description of the compromise the GOP made in its embrace of Trump and his brand of disruptive politics?

How many congressional leaders of both parties would acknowledge that letting old standards of institutional respect erode is what often makes life in their branch so unpleasant and unproductive?

In a week, 78-year-old Joe Biden will take office. Among the other most important people in Washington will be 80-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 78-year-old Mitch McConnell, about to go from leading a narrow Senate majority to a narrow Senate minority, and 70-year-old Chuck Schumer, taking over as Senate majority leader.

In the closing phase of their careers, perhaps they will decide they wish to take themselves out of the running for the worst generation. The way to do it is by finding something more constructive to do than continuing an argument about Donald Trump.

Go here to read the rest:
Donald Trump Is the Perfect Leader of the Worst Generation - POLITICO