It may be a Day Late.  But there’s always time for a little Romance in this topsy turvy world.

Photo Above. Lady and the Tramp

Deutsche Welle 2.14.2019

Pucker up, buttercup! For Valentine’s Day, we look at the best smooches of all time — from those on the big screen to the most memorable real life kisses captured on camera.

Golden kiss

The most famous of Gustav Klimt’s paintings comes from his so-called Golden Phase, in which he used a gold bronze, reminiscent of Christian paintings from the late Middle Ages. The works of art gain a touch of preciousness with the color, employed here in “Kiss,” a quadratic 180 x 180-centimeter piece completed between 1908 and 1909.

https://www.dw.com/en/15-unforgettable-kisses-for-valentines-day/g-19379406

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 2.14.2019

The Jewish Museum Berlin has banned Iranian state broadcaster IRIB from filming on its premises, arguing the station spreads anti-Zionist propaganda. The decision has drawn backlash from German press associations.

Nongovernmental organization Reporters Without Borders, however, took a different position, arguing that the Iranian state broadcaster is the mouthpiece of a “government which denies Israel’s right to exist.” That is why the organization respects the museum’s decision, managing director Christian Mihr told DW.

The Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) is currently showcasing an exhibition titled “Welcome to Jerusalem,” which attracted criticism from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said it adopts a one-sided Muslim and Palestinian perspective. Netanyahu even demanded the German government cut back its financial support for the museum.

The JMB, however, decided to ban the Iranian broadcaster from filming on its premises. In a statement explaining the decision, the museum said that “the coverage of state-run broadcaster IRIB is clearly anti-Zionist, and has disseminated anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic propaganda.” The JMB expressed concern IRIB will “instrumentalize” the exhibition to further “its own agenda” and capitalize on the “Welcome to Jerusalem” exhibition to produce fake news for Iranian television. The museum added that IRIB has in the past provided a platform for Holocaust deniers “to disseminate false claims which constitute a criminal offense in Germany.”

https://www.dw.com/en/jewish-museum-berlin-bans-iranian-state-broadcaster-irib/a-47509946

Excerpted from The Guardian and Deutsche Welle 2.13.2019

Above Photo. Mata Hari

A former US air force intelligence officer who defected to Iran in 2013 has been charged with espionage, giving away the identity of a US agent and other secrets.

Monica Witt, aged 39, was a cryptologist and a counter-intelligence investigator for the US Air Force for more than 10 years before working as an intelligence analyst for the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton for five months in 2008 and doing other private sector work.

According to charges unsealed on Wednesday by the Department of Justice, she defected to Iran in August 2013, taking with her details of US counter-intelligence agents she had worked with who were then targeted by Iranian hackers, four of whom are named in the indictment and charged alongside Witt.

Following her defection to Iran in 2013,  the Department of Justice alleged in its indictment,  “Ms. Witt was recruited by Iran as part of a program that targets former intelligence officers and others who have held security clearances. Following her defection to Iran in 2013, she is alleged to have revealed to the Iranian government the existence of a highly classified intelligence collection program and the true identity of a US intelligence officer, thereby risking the life of this individual.”

Witt served as an counterintelligence and Farsi linguistic specialist, working as a special agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigation from 1997 until 2008. After leaving the armed forces, she worked as a Defense Department contractor.

The former agent was “granted high-level security clearances and was deployed overseas to conduct classified counterintelligence missions,” according to the Justice Department. An FBI official said the Bureau warned her that she was vulnerable to Iranian recruitment.

The indictment suggests Witt defected for ideological motives, and was recruited when she visited Iran in February 2012 to attend a conference on US cultural influence called “Hollywoodism”.

The conference was organised by an group called New Horizon, which was put under US sanctions on Wednesday for allegedly serving as a front from the Quds Force, the external arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC-QF).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/13/monica-witt-air-force-charged-spying-iran

https://www.dw.com/en/us-charges-double-agent-monica-witt-in-iran-conspiracy/a-47509398

Excerpted from New York Times 2.13.2019

Federal prosecutors in Arkansas announced racketeering charges against 54 people who they say belong to a white supremacist gang that kidnapped, maimed and tried to kill to protect its drug-trafficking operations.

An indictment unsealed on Tuesday describes the gang, the New Aryan Empire, as a highly organized outfit that sold “copious amounts” of methamphetamine around the Arkansas River Valley. Its leaders kept members in line with threats and acts of violence, and the gang viciously attacked people it suspected of collaborating with the authorities, prosecutors wrote.

“The N.A.E. is reprehensible in its admiration for Nazi imagery and racist views, but even more alarming are the crimes and violence perpetrated by these defendants,” said David Rybicki, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

New Aryan Empire began in a county prison in Russellville in 1990, and was affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood, the indictment charges. It quickly grew and expanded outside of prison as members were released, and they collaborated with White Aryan Resistance, or WAR, in the drug trade, according to prosecutors.

The United States attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Cody Hiland, said his office was prosecuting the case using the RICO law, the federal statute enacted in 1970 to combat organized crime. The law — its full name is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — allows prosecutors greater flexibility to hold anyone who is part of a criminal enterprise responsible for its acts.

The superseding indictment unsealed on Tuesday adds 10 defendants and additional charges to an indictment announced in October 2017. At that time, the authorities said that investigators had seized more than 25 pounds of methamphetamine, 69 firearms and $70,000 in drug proceeds.

The authorities announced the new charges at the Police Department in Russellville, about 75 miles northwest of Little Rock, where the authorities said the group — believed to have 5,000 members — was founded.

Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again

In the 1970’s, impecunious and unknown, the only way I could get into the legendary Studio 54 was under the sponsorship, so to speak, of someone older and more established. The velvet rope parted only one time; it wasn’t the night Bianca Jagger rode across the dance floor on a white horse, but it was close.

There was a balcony where you could go if you were seriously tripping, as I was, to get out of the mayhem. That night the rows of theater seats were empty except for a few couples making out in the back. I collapsed into a chair. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I became aware of someone else in my row. There he was, solitary in the shadows, standing with his arms crossed and one hand to his chin, staring at the revelry below. The trademark wig, in the pulsing light of the dance floor, looked not so much silver as made of straw. He glanced at me briefly, seemed about to speak, changed his mind. I was of no interest to him, just another stoned kid.

Andy Warhol combined social and pictorial intelligence in a way not seen in this country since John Singer Sargent. In one of the most unexpected artistic transformations of the last century, he found a way to make a highly synthetic, semi mechanized kind of painting feel authentic. His attitude and posture, his public persona, and his forays into film making and other media were radical in the world of high art, but his aesthetic inclinations were more traditional. They harked back to, and partially bridged, two widely divergent tendencies in American art: social realism and abstraction, the Yankee peddler and the Transcendentalist.

 

February 11, 2019

The scurrilous attacks on Ilhan Omar are shameful. The Congresswoman is stating a long held Truism. American politicians will vilify anyone who dares to speak up in favor of Palestinian civil rights. These politicians are so wedded to the State of Israel that its government can commit any outrage and be assured it will not be held accountable by its protectors in American government.

American Flag Photo:  Lee Heidhues – 10.12.2018 Frankfurt, Germany

February 11, 2019

At the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum Liz and I saw  “Show Me As I Want to Be Seen.”

How do we depict “the self” if it is unknowable, inherently constructed, and ever-changing? How does the concept of portraiture shift when categories are in crisis and visibility itself is problematic? Jewish thought on performed and fluid identity can be interpreted in the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible, an archetypal story of an empowered declaration of Jewish identity. Likewise, the Talmudic notion of svara is a potent entry-point to Jewish practices of self-determination, themes that animate Show Me as I Want to Be Seen.

Taking the work of French Jewish artist and writer Claude Cahun (1894–1954) and her lifelong lover and collaborator Marcel Moore (1892–1972) as its starting point, Show Me as I Want to Be Seen examines the empowered representation of fluid and complex identity. Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe) were pioneers in their bold representations of an unfixed self. This exhibition positions their work in dialogue with ten contemporary artists working in painting, sculpture, photography, video, and 3-D animation. The contemporary artists in the exhibition—Nicole Eisenman, Rhonda Holberton, Hiwa K, Young Joon Kwak, Zanele Muholi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Gabby Rosenberg, Tschabalala Self, Davina Semo, and Isabel Yellin—also address notions of the opaque, constructed, and shifting self.

https://www.thecjm.org/exhibitions/108

Following a tour of the exhibit we visited the CJM library where Liz found the following.

Queer Theory and the Jewish Question – David Boyarin, Daniel Itz Kovitz and Ann Pellegrini

Columbia University Press – New York, Copyright 2003

Explores the relationship between Jewishness and Queerness, Homophobia and Anti-Semitism, Queer Theory and Theorizations of Jewishness.

Stereotypes of the Jew frequently underwrite pop cultural and scientific notions of the Homosexual.

There may be just something queer about the Jew. And something well, racy, about the Homosexual.

The popular notion that Jews embodied non-normative sexual and gender categories is long-standing.

Disgraceful American political behavior. Members of both parties have been intimidated for too long.  For a Muslim congresswoman to speak out in behalf of Palestine and  say a negative word about Israel opens her up to vicious attacks. Israel is not sacrosanct.  Congresswoman Ilhan is to be applauded for having the courage to voice her opinions and telling the truth to power.

Excerpted from Haaretz 2.10.2019

The Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives said he would take action against two Democrats who have sharply criticized Israel if the Democratic majority did not do so.

“If they do not take action I think you’ll see action from myself,” Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, said according to Capitol Hill reporters writing for a number of newspapers. “This cannot sustain itself. It’s unacceptable in this country.”

It’s not clear what statements McCarthy particularly found offensive, but both lawmakers embrace the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, and both have been accused of tweets that cross the line to anti-Semitism:  Rashida Tlaib in January when she appeared to accuse senators of dual loyalty for advancing a bill that would protect states penalizing commercial Israel boycotts; and Ilhan Omar in 2012 when she said Israel was “hypnotizing” the world. Omar has in recent days apologized multiple times for that tweet.

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/kevin-mccarthy-promises-action-against-ilhan-omar-and-rashida-tlaib-1.6917751

Providing police misconduct records to the Public is a basic Civil Right in a democratic society. The police and their handlers need a consistent reminder of this fact.

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 2.9.2019

A new California law requiring cities to unseal police misconduct records applies to past records as well as new ones, a judge decided Friday in denying injunction requests from several police unions fighting to prevent the release of pre-2019 records.

Kathleen Guneratne, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, said that police unions were well aware of the effects of SB1421 as it was making its way through the Legislature, and unions fought it then, too.

She said there essentially is no “retroactivity” argument, and that public records laws apply to any documents currently maintained by a government agency.

Guneratne called the unions’ court battles “a last-ditch effort to subvert the will of the people and the statute.”

Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Charles Treat’s decision is the first in a wave of lawsuits across the state by unions that say the state’s transparency law, SB1421, should not force cities and counties to release police misconduct records created before the law took effect on Jan. 1.

Six law enforcement unions in Contra Costa County — in Concord, Richmond, Antioch, Martinez and Walnut Creek, as well as the Contra Costa County Deputy Sheriff’s Association — sought preliminary injunctions to bar officials in their cities and county from releasing pre-2019 personnel records. Several law enforcement associations in Southern California have filed similar suits in their own counties.

Treat said the attorneys for the unions in Contra Costa County failed to convince him the law should apply only to new documents. He denied their requests for preliminary injunctions.

The California Supreme Court has already declined to weigh in on the matter, after the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Employees’ Benefit Association filed a similar suit with the high court.

This leaves the cases to be handled by local courts. Treat was the first to officially rule one way or another, but his order doesn’t set a precedent for other counties.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Contra-Costa-County-judge-rejects-police-13602945.php

I started reading Michael Grothaus 2016 debut novel Epiphany Jones.

My first exposure to this novel came when I read an article in Foreign Affairs about Deepfakes. My curiosity was aroused. I researched Deepfakes on Wikipedia. Wikipedia mentioned the novel Epiphany Jones in discussing Deepfakes in literature. Interestingly, Epiphany Jones is unavailable at the San Francisco Public Library despite its popularity with critics and readers.