The Trump administration is desperately trying to not get tarred with the sick video of a digitized Trump massacring reporters and his opponents in a church, It's done by a third party, they cry.  It's not us, they cry.  There are unfortunately a few problems for them here --

The video was shown at an "American Priority" event organized by a pro-Trump group.  It was held at his Mar-a-Lago property.  His son Don Jr. was there.  His former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was there.  And Trump himself has just to comment a single word condemning it.

There are so many perspectives from which one can attack the video and slam the Republican, conservative and "evangelical" hypocrisy to it all -- but I'm going to put all that aside (which is a whole lot to put aside) because one comment alone transcends everything about it.

Tim Murtaugh, the director of communications for Trump’s 2020 election campaign, said the “video was not produced by the campaign, and we do not condone violence.”

Here's the biggest problem.

Trump does condone violence.  Of course, Trump condones violence.  He's condoned it since he began running for president, and it hasn't stopped.  He told his earliest rallies that if anyone was arresting for beating up protesters there, he's pay their bail.  He's told more recent rallies that it's a shame protesters aren't getting beaten up like they used to, because that would stop things.  He's told a police organization that when they arrest people they shouldn't be shy about being rough putting them in police cars.  He's retweeted graphics of him beating up a reporter named "CNN."  He recently lamented that it was a shame we didn't hang spies like we used to.  There's a lawsuit going on right now in which Trump's security guards roughed up protesters at Trump Tower.  When Turkey's brutal leader Erdogan visited Washington, D.C., his security guards beat up protesters, and there was no outraged criticism from Trump.  When Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville during a rally of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, Trump explained that there very fine people on both sides.  On and on and on and on and on and on....

Trump separated immigrant children from their parents, as families tried to migrate into the United States.  That's an emotional violence from which some may never recover.

Trump made a detail with Turkey's brutal Erdogan, withdrew U.S. troops protecting the Kurds in Syria, and it's unleashed the Turkish army that's in the midst of massacring those in their path.  And Trump went to play golf and wished Turkey, Syria, and Russia well.

It's being going on long before he ran for president.  When the Central Park 5 were being tried in 1989, Trump took out a full-page ad in 1989 calling for them all to be executed.  They were all later found not-guilty.

"We do not condone violence," weeps Trump spokesman Tim Murtaugh.  Promoting violence is Trump's lifeblood.  It's one of the core tenants of fascism.  Of course the campaign promotes violence.  It's what they do.  Building up people's fear and hatred and anger until the bullies and devoted acolytes explode into violence.  And Trump defends and condones it all.  And it's what brought us this sick massacre video.

And the Republican Party enables it all, is silent about it all, and is complicit in it all.  So, they condone violence, too.  

And they are every one a part of this sick massacre video -- shown at the properly-named pro-Trump "American Priority" event -- which (let us not forget) oh-so-appropriately for today's faux-evangelical GOP takes place in a church and is tied to them all like a mighty iron anchor that they all drag around with them every day.  Because they brought it about.  "We wear the chains we forged in life," Charles Dickens wrote, as Jacob Marley tried to warn Ebeneezer Scrooge.

All that's missing from Trump and the Republican Party's ongoing condoning of violence is one, big, group cry of "Bah, humbug."

​That, and Trump explaining that many of the people who made the video are very fine people...

A while back, I posted a video that I titled, "The most epic safety video ever made."  But that wasn't my name that I gave to the little film, it was what Air New Zealand called their own video.  And the thing is -- it is.  It turns out, though, that Air New Zealand has a history of making outlandish, funny and extremely wonderful safety videos.  I've tracked a bunch of them down and will post them here in the coming days.

But first, as a reminder, or for new people to these pages, before we get to the others, I thought it best to repeat that original video.  So, here is it is and the article I posted about...

"The Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made."

                                                                               *   *   *


And no, that is not hyperbole.

In fact, the video itself begins by saying on-screen, "The most epic safety video ever made."  And it's being low-key and polite.  To be fair, "Epic," in this case, is sort of a tongue-in-cheek reference, as you will see.  But it's nonetheless epic in the generally accepted sense, as well.  This is far and away like no in-flight safety video you've seen, or likely will ever seen.  It's so far away that everything else is in third place.  Just leave second place empty.  And, honest, that's not an exaggeration.

The in-flight video is for the safety explanation aboard Air New Zealand flights, and...well, let's just say as a reminder that New Zealand is where they filmed The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.  And we'll leave it at that, and let your imaginations take over..  

There are twists and turns here, and a lot of tongue-in-cheek fun, and some surprises.  And further, when is the last time you ever saw credits at the end of an in-flight safety video?

As a safety video, I'm going to guess that patrons aren't going to be paying the closest attention to what's being told them, which probably isn't ideal.  On the other hand, a) most people by now have a pretty good idea of the safety procedures on an airplane, b) in some ways, people are going to watch this much closer than the regular in-flight safety videos they zone out of, and c) this is going to be see FAR more by people who are not on an airplane, so there's no risk of going down in the water.

Which brings up the other point.  

Beyond being the Greatest (and Most Epic) In-Flight Safety Video Ever, this is also a brilliant promotional video for  the next film in The Hobbit series.  If I had the opportunity to bet all my cash money, it will go viral around the world, if it hasn't already.  However much it cost, there will be no need to buy TV air-time (which is so expensive), and you wouldn't anyway, since it's 4-1/2 minutes long.  Maybe they'll cut down a 30-second version, but it's really not necessary, and it won't do it justice.

This is so wonderful and so smart.  Just a brilliant idea, and whoever came up with the idea deserves a major promotion and bonus, and hats off to all the people on both sides of the aisle who approved doing it.

So, here, then is the most epic in-flight safety video ever made.  Really.

No, really.

As I mentioned last week, I happily was able to track down four episodes (for now...) of the wonderful 1964 NBC series, The Rogues, which I've long felt had the greatest cast of any series in TV history.  It starred two of Hollywood's great romantic leading men, Charles Boyer and David Niven, as well as Oscar-winner Gig Young, and featured one of the grande dames of the theater, Oscar-winner Gladys Cooper and Robert Coote (who played Col. Pickering in the original Broadway and London productions of My Fair Lady).

Following up on the episode I posted last week, I have another one today, "The Day They Gave Away Diamonds.".  There's a bit of a treat with this one.  As I noted previously, only on a very rare occasion would the full cast appear each week.  Usually, only one of the three main leads would star, though every once in a while another of the Big Stars would make a short appearance.  Gladys Cooper and Robert Coote however were the uniting figures and in every episode.  Well, this is one of those occasions when all three of the stars show up.  The main lead is Charles Boyer, though Gig Young has a substantial role to play, as well, and David Niven makes a brief appearance.  The series is very much of its era, and is hardly a great, meticulous "con" show, but it makes up for that in acting and monumental charm.

For those who missed last week's episode, you can find it here.  The Rogues was about a family of elegant con men whose standards were very high, and they would only trick the most wealthy and reprehensibly unscrupulous marks. 

And again, ignore what the video shows as the length of the episode.  It's 20 minutes shorter than that and runs around 51 minutes.

Today's guest contestant on the 'Not My Job' segment of the NPR game quiz show is former race car driver Danica Patrick, the first woman to win a NASCAR race.  She and host Peter Sagal have an amusing conversation about her driving habits off the track, and then it morphs into the challenges of growing up in Chicago as a Bears fan and living now in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with her boyfriend Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

On this week's Al Franken Podcast, he takes a u-turn.  There is absolutely nothing political in it.  His guest is Chris Rock.  And rather than me write about it, I'll let Al --

"This week on the Al Franken Podcast, Chris Rock discusses key moments in his life, including the one where I saved his career.  Which is really more about Chris realizing that HE had to CREATE his career. Rock talks about his early influences, including his grandfather, a philandering preacher who killed a guy and spent time in prison. During Chris’s Wonder Years – he spent a lot of time with Grandpa, who in addition to being a murderer, a womanizer, and a preacher, drove taxi around Brooklyn – often with young Chris in tow. See, Grandpa wrote his sermons while driving cab, and Chris got to see his process – he never wrote it down word for word – just outlined it.

"Chris talks about his NINE years being bussed, so instead of going to crappy black schools in Brooklyn he could ride an hour each way to crappy white schools, where he was often the only Black boy. In his nine years, how many times was Chris invited to a classmate’s house? Hint. If you guessed zero, you’d be wrong – but extremely close.

"During the podcast, Chris gets a call he has to take. From Super-Producer Scott Rudin.  We only hear Chris’s side, but it’s good news on a movie for Rock to star in. It could be cinematic history. Judy Garland hearing she’s playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and saying things like 'Great!' 'Uh huh' and 'Okay.' It’s as exciting as audio can get.  And most crucially, short.

"Fun! Funny! Educational! It’s got everything you’ve grown to expect from The Al Franken Podcast. Except a deep dive into a critical public policy issue. Unless you consider race a critical public policy issue. And if you consider hearing a few funny stories from Chris’s life, most of which have nothing to do with race, a deep dive.

"Give a listen to one our funniest and most thoughtful comedians. Won’t you?"

Let's head back Out and About for another interview with my fave Jiminy Glick.  This time he sits down for a talk with Billy Crystal.

It turns out that Dennis Prager has a video out with him "pontificating wisely" (tm) in front of a fireplace with a personal observation that he tries to make oh-so very clear is not for every man but...well, but for "some," and not just some, but "enough that I can make this point" -- so, despite his insistence, it's clear that this pertains to a lot.  A LOT.  And it's that "enough" men today are growing beards because "feminism and the Left have crapped on masculinity" and they need to say "hello, I'm not a female."

Interestingly, that is the exact same reason that was given for men having beards in 19th century England! And also in 1250 B.C. Jerusalem.

And Donald Trump Jr. and Ted Cruz in 2019.

And Santa Claus.

And Abraham Lincoln, father of the Republican Party.

And Jesus.

Reading or listening to what Dennis Prager has to say is an ethereally mind-numbing experience.  Not always.  Some of the time.  And enough of the time that I can make this point.

Actually, now that I think of it, it's most of the time.  I was just being polite before.

And it got me to thinking of an article I wrote about Mr. Prager on the Huffington Post back in 2010.  It was the result of an exchange of emails I had with a friend who's a reasonably well-known public figure, very right-wing and a friend of Prager.  Initially, when I decided to re-post this here, it was only because I think "enough" of what Dennis Prager writes and says is crushingly empty, made under the seeming guise of sage advice, and I wanted to follow-up on his little video chat with my encore from the past.  But as I re-read the article, I realized that in many ways the two pieces are connected, that indeed both of them have a similar theme of Mr. Prager -- a total mis-understanding of historical fact, and insistence that the cause of the world's ills, which tend to be things different from him as seen through his small, myopic view of life, are due "enough" to liberals.

By the way, this is an especially-ludicrous perspective to have, given that conservatism is about protecting what's good about the past, and liberalism is about finding what's good about changing and progressing into the future -- and 10,000 years or so of history have shown that, in fact, life actually changes.  A lot. 

But then, as I said, not understanding history and the reality of life is so-very Dennis Prager.  Well, okay, not understanding some of it.  And enough of it to make this point.

June 3, 2010
​
                       Dennis Prager:  Making the World a Crueler Place, One Word at a Time



A conservative friend has me on his mailing list.  He forwards me diatribes from his circle about how the world will end because of liberals, a term loosely defined as "anything that isn't conservative."  

These articles have two things in common.  One is that they all border on fear, and the other is their relationship to facts is similar to P.T. Barnum's.  

What is unfortunate is that my friend - and his circle - accept them all on faith.  And the problem of accepting temporal matters on faith is that it doesn't develop the power to think for oneself.

The other day, the latest forwarding was an article by Dennis Prager.  It was an essay that, on the surface, appeared to discuss a philosophic argument comparing religion to the evils of the secular world.  In reality, it was just bulldozing facts to make a political point. 

This below isn't whole article by Mr. Prager.  In fairness, I only got through the first four paragraphs.  But I include those four, so that what follows would be in context.

                                                                            *   *   *       
    
May 25, 2010 

The World Is a Cruel Place -- and If America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler
By Dennis Prager

One of the many beliefs -- i.e., non-empirically based doctrines -- of the post-Christian West has been that moral progress is the human norm, especially so with the demise of religion. In a secular world, the self-described enlightened thinking goes, superstition is replaced by reason, and reason leads to the moral good.

Of course, it turned out that the post-Christian West produced considerably more evil than the Christian world had. No mass cruelty in the name of Christianity approximated the vastness of the cruelty unleashed by secular doctrines and regimes in the post-Christian world. The argument against religion that more people have been killed in the name of religion than by any other doctrine is false propaganda on behalf of secularism and Leftism.
 
The amount of evil done by Christians -- against, for example, "heretics" and Jews -- in both the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity --  was extensive, as was the failure of most European Christians to see Nazism for the evil that it was. The good news is that Christian evils have been acknowledged and addressed by most Christian leaders and thinkers.

But there were never any Christian Auschwitzes -- i.e., systematic genocides of every man, woman and child of a particular race or religion. Nor were there Christian Gulags -- the shipping of millions of innocents to conditions so horrific that prolonged suffering leading to death was the almost-inevitable end.
 
                     =================================================
  

This is as far as I got.   It was either keep reading or stop before my head exploded.  I opted for the latter.

The problem, you see, is that there are a great many things Mr. Prager far too self-comfortably and intentionally overlooks.  Like, for example, giving a pass to the Spanish Inquisition and its Auto-de-fe torture.  He does this by conveniently (and simplistically) self-defining religious mass murder on his own very-limited terms, as systematically killing "every" person of a religion.  Of course, in reality, even Nazism didn't systematically kill "every" Jew by his own definition, any more than Spanish Catholics did in the 356 years of the Inquisition.  But what the Inquisition did during those 3-1/2 centuries was pretty darn systematic and massive.  Not to mention that it was torture.
 
And though he eases his conscience by insisting, "Nor were there Christian Gulags...", he again intentionally (because if not intentional, it is ignorantly) overlooks 800 years or more of horrors that cumulatively likely were crushingly worse than any Gulag since they defined nearly a millennium of daily culture.
 
But mainly, I didn't get that far because Mr. Prager showed an unacceptable lack of history and reality when he wrote, "The argument against religion that more people have been killed in the name of religion than by any other doctrine is false propaganda on behalf of secularism and Leftism." 

While this statement sounds authoritative, it is of course backed up by…nothing.  Not a single word of it is backed up by - anything.  It is words strung together.
 
I actually read history.  I have no doubt that Dennis Prager does, as well.  But I can't speak to what he reads, or chooses to remember, or include.  But honestly, his above is a numbing statement.  Last year, I finally finished reading Will and Ariel Durant's brilliant and legendary 11-volume Story of Civilization.  Probably around 8,000 pages.  Up until about the year 1600, probably the bulk of wars were religious-based, and many wars beyond that, through 1800.  National governments were religious for much of history, as kings ruled their nations by divine right, and fought off opposing armies for fear of another king's religious encroachment.  The Holy Roman Empire dominated Europe.  Muslimism, Hinduism, Buddhism dominated much of the rest of the world.  Pure secular rule only came later.  Villages of 20,000 people - 30,000 or 50,000 people - would be wiped out without a thought, becoming almost commonplace, century after century for a thousand years or more, from the beginning of history through the early 17th century.  (In the early volumes, Durant writes of such ghastly massacres with eloquent horror.  Later, as they continued through the centuries, the historian instead wearily addresses them as almost footnotes before moving on to the next.)  The continuing Crusades of Christianity against Moslems were almost unendingly devastating to the society it crossed and ravaged.  For over 200 years, there were 11 of these Crusades, all of them religiously-approved wars.
 
But more than that, as Mr. Prager tries to whitewash what was done specifically to Jews throughout history by focusing on Nazis, let me offer a passage from Volume 6 of the Durants' history, "The Reformation."  Pages 730-731.  An important thing to keep in mind is that this was written in 1957.  After World War II.  After the Nazis.  Written by a renowned historian who made it his life work to study the history of mankind.  Durant begins the passage this way --
 
"The Black Death was a special tragedy for the Jews of Christendom.  The same plague had slain Mongols, Moslems and Jews in Asia, where no one thought of blaming the Jews; but in Western Europe a populace maddened by the ravages of pestilence accused the Jews of poisoning the wells in an attempt to wipe out all Christians."
 
Durant then continues with a lengthy tale of how such "fevered imaginations" swept across all of Europe.  "Nevertheless, some Jews were tortured into confessing that they had distributed the poison...Merciless pogroms broke out in France, Spain and Germany.  In one town in southern France the entire Jewish community was cast into flames.  All Jews in Savoy, all Jews around Lake Leman, all in Bern, Fribourg, Basel, Nuremberg, Brussels were burned."
 
(If Dennis Prager is looking for "systematic genocides of every man, woman and child of a particular race or religion," that long list of "all" is a good place to start.  But I digress...)
 
And then, after this lengthy passage describing these many dark years, Will Durant concludes by writing -- and I repeat, this was written a decade after World War II by a man who made it his life work to study the entire history of man -- 
 
"It would be hard to find, before our time, or in all the records of savagery, any deeds more barbarous than the collective murder of Jews in the Black Death."
 
So, while Dennis Prager wants to whitewash history for the sake of making a political point -- shame on him.

Shame on him.

And his shame extends further.  It's when Prager writes, "The good news is that Christian evils have been acknowledged and addressed by most Christian leaders and thinkers."

"Good news"??  That's the good news?
 
Yes, to Dennis Prager in his political, high-wire, contortionist act, that's the "good news."  It all makes up for the Inquisition and a thousand years of torture and persecution.  Good news indeed!  "Sorry we tortured you and killed you and wiped out entire villages for hundreds of years.  Our bad."  Good news?  That's great news!  Of course, it would have been even better news if all Christian leaders and thinkers acknowledged Christian evils, and not just "most" of them, which could mean only 51 percent...  But hey, who am I to quibble?

Mind you, all Dennis Prager says is that most Christian leaders and thinkers merely "acknowledge" these "Christian evils" - not that they are horrified, repulsed and mortified by them, or ever did anything to make up for them.  Just that they "acknowledge" their existence.  Okay, sorry, "most" do.  (However many "most" is.)   Given that "it would be hard to find," as Will Durant said, "in all the records of savagery, any deeds more barbarous than the collective murder of Jews in the Black Death," I guess that in Dennis Prager's politically conservative world the best we can get is to accept that as "good news."  Swell.

I got no further than these opening paragraphs.  To be fair, maybe in the rest of his article Dennis Prager had a complete change of viewpoint.  But I didn't have it in me to keep going and see if such a miracle had occurred.  Because I was reading empty and dishonest words.  All designed to misinterpret history to make a political point.

None of this is to criticize religion or praise secularism.  There is room for an honest discussion of that.  It is, instead, to note solely that what Dennis Prager wrote is not acceptable.  

Actually, what he wrote is pathetic.  And I'm sorry my friend and others accepted it as the truth.  Because it ignores the reality of history.  If a person wants to share the same political beliefs with Dennis Prager or with anyone amongst themselves, that's fine.  But one should still be willing to tell those you otherwise agree with that they're wrong when they are very wrong.

"Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters," said Albert Einstein, who knew something about pursuing the truth carefully, "cannot be trusted with important matters."

Dennis Prager says the world is a cruel place.  Maybe it just looks that way when you are so careless with the truth.
 

It's time to head back to the kitchen for another of the fun "50 People Try to..." videos from Epicurious.  Today, we take a look at trying to crack open and then separate an egg.  Even if this is something you do, there still are some nice tips at the end.  Besides the fun of watching the 50 giving it their best...
​