Two Trip Roundup

I have two trips coming up -- one to Colorado to visit my brother and parents, and the second to Seattle to visit friends (and see Liz Miele). I've been shirking my blogging duties of late, and the travel won't help, so here's a roundup to at least get something moving again.

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JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) has launched a new journal, Distinctions, focusing on Jewish issues through a Sephardic and Mizrahi lens.

Nice to see some big Hollywood A-Listers step up and support the SAG-AFTRA's strike relief fund.

Ironically, Twitter deciding to become a site solely appealing to grifters and trolls is making it increasingly useless for grifters and trolls.

Does Cornel West actually want Donald Trump to win, or is his vanity presidential campaign a grift to dig out of his tax debts? Hard to say!

There's a new HuffPo "expose" revealing that Richard Hanania had a history of overt White supremacist writings, and I can be 100% honest in saying that it never occurred to me that Hanania ever presented himself as anything but an overt White supremacist (but yeah, apparently there were folks who tried to push the line that he was a "centrist").\

A new, if long-anticipated, frontier of artificial intelligence has hit, as an Indian politician hit with alleged leaks of scandalous material says that the recordings were actually deep fakes -- and it's really hard to figure out who's telling the truth.

Not really a "roundup" item, but I want to give a quick promotion to the internet series "Jet Lag: The Game". It's an online series where each season basically creates a new, full-scale travel board game -- "tag" but across all of western Europe, or "Connect Four" using the western United States. It's wholesome, entertaining, and just a lot of fun. Jill and I have been binging it for the past few weeks, and I'll recommend to all of you as well.

No Money? No Problem!

Barack Obama is offering his support to the striking writer's guild. The members are pleased, but also confused:

WGA officials were overjoyed with the headline-making gift — even if unsure as to why Obama did what he did. “We don’t even have a PAC, so why he did it is still a question. But we’re delighted,” says Jody Frisch, who shuttles between Los Angeles and Washington as the Guild’s director of policy and government affairs.

That makes me sad, actually. Are we really at that stage where we can't even conceptualize a major politician aiding a cause he believes in absent a big ol' check in his wallet? I guess that's the truth of money in politics, but it's not a good commentary.

On the other hand, it does speak well of Obama, that his rhetoric of moving past the politics of dollar bills is more than just talk. So good for him.

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