Joan Smalls, Emmy nominee? Perhaps one day.
The 28-year-old Puerto Rican runway vet has officially scored a major gig that’ll carry her into bonafide actor territory. According to Deadline, she’ll star alongside Zoey Deutch, Lucy Liu, Taye Diggs, and Glen Powell in Set It Up, a new romantic comedy headed to Netflix. The storyline focuses on Harper (Deutch) and Charlie (Powell), two assistants who seek revenge against their bosses by setting them up. Smalls will portray Suze, Charlie’s girlfriend, naturally making one hot on-screen couple.
Of course, she’s excited. “Words cannot describe this feeling!” she wrote as the caption to an Instagram sharing the news. “So extremely lucky and honored to be part of such an insanely talented cast and team. Thank you to everyone who made this possible.”
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Though this will mark her acting debut, Smalls has technically been on your TV screen before, making appearances on RuPaul’s Drag Race and, unforgettably, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Of course, she’s also taken on the role of one of Beyoncé’s too-bad squad members in the singer’s “Partition” music video.
Our eyes will be on Smalls once Set It Up hits Netflix.
If you’re keeping up with the Kardashian-Jenner feud, Kim Kardashian West stopped by The View Monday morning to update fans on her relationship with Caitlyn Jenner, who was married to her mother, Kris Jenner, for 22 years.
Kardashian West admitted that she had not spoken to Caitlyn in the last couple of months, but also expressed hope that they would mend the rift soon. “She’ll always be a part of me,” Kardashian West said. “We’re not that kind of family. We’re just taking a breather. We’ll get it together. It’ll work out.”
The reality star elaborated on the source of the rift between her family and Caitlyn Jenner, whose memoir included accounts about Kris Jenner that Kardashian West has called “hurtful” and “unfair.” She told the hosts of The View, “I was a little shocked by putting things out there that just weren’t true or didn’t make sense or were hurtful when I feel like, at the end of the day, my mom and Caitlyn had a 25-year relationship, and you just have to have some respect for it.”
“I don’t want to discredit her feelings or her account, but when all of us there were witnessing some things and seeing things really different, it was just a little bit surprising to me,” she said.
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Kardashian West asserted that she believes things will blow over eventually because their family is so close. “She’ll always be my stepdad and always be a person that raised me and taught me so much in life,” she said. “I’ll never forget what Caitlyn instilled in us as kids and was a part of who I am today.”
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At least 31 Somali refugees are dead after the boat they were traveling in from Yemen to Sudan was attacked by what might have been a U.S.-made Apache helicopter.
International Organization for Migration (IOM) confirmed “dozens of deaths and many dozens of survivors brought to hospitals.”
A local coastguard officer told Reuters that “the refugees, carrying official [United Nations Refugee Agency] documents, were on their way from Yemen to Sudan when they were attacked by an Apache helicopter near the Bab al-Mandeb strait.”
If the reports are true, Yemen Peace Project director of policy and advocacy Kate Kizer noted online, the Apache helicopter “likely was U.S. sold, #Saudi manned (last sale last fall).”
Journalist Samuel Oakford wrote:
Middle East Eye reported: “Photos from the scene showed bodies of men, women, and children laid out on the ground at a small harbor, covered in pieces of colored fabric.”
The outlet added:
It was not immediately clear who carried out the attack, although the Saudi-led coalition is known to fly Apache helicopters near the strategic Bab al-Mandeb strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and carries millions of barrels of oil per day.
Local news site Aden al-Ghad reported that jets from the Saudi-led coalition—which has led a ground and air campaign against Houthi rebels since March 2015—had “intensified its strikes” in Hudaida on Thursday.
“Coalition planes launched dozens of strikes on coastal areas of Hudaida, in support of advances by troops on the ground,” a local source told the site, which is known to be opposed to the Houthi rebels.
The Guardian further reported:
There was no immediate comment from the coalition. Saudi Arabia, which is leading a coalition in the war in Yemen, has U.S.-built Apache A-64 Longbow attack helicopters.
The kingdom’s Al-Madinah class frigates, one of which was damaged in an attack by a Houthi militia in January, are also capable of carrying a single helicopter. Other naval forces operating in the area are also equipped with helicopters, including the U.S. military.
The U.N. Refugee Agency said it was “appalled” by the incident.
“As conditions in Yemen deteriorate as a result of the ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis, refugees and asylum seekers are increasingly fleeing onwards, following established migratory routes, including across the Red Sea to Sudan with the intention of heading onwards to Europe,” said agency spokesman William Spindler. “This tragic incident is the latest in which innocent civilians, including Yemenis, refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants, continue to suffer and disproportionately bear the brunt of the conflict in Yemen.”
UPI reported Thursday that Boeing just this week “received a $3.2 billion contract modification to support the U.S. Army’s foreign military sale of Apache helicopters to Saudi Arabia.” The U.S. has already sold dozens of Apaches to Saudi Arabia, along with billions in additional arms. On Tuesday, Amnesty International urged the Trump administration to halt future sales immediately.
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NATO is pushing all allies to deploy more troops and military equipment to Russia’s borders, further ratcheting up tensions as the West prepares for “its
“With the U.S. openly talking [about] a war with Russia, the continued deployments seem far from a purely defensive measure.”
Click Here: liverpool mens jersey—Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com“The battle groups will be backed by NATO’s 40,000-strong rapid-reaction force,” noted Deutsche Welle, “and if need be, further follow-on forces, for any potential conflict, which could move into Baltic states and Poland on rotation.”
Prior to Wednesday’s North Atlantic Council meeting,
“Yet with the U.S. openly talking [about] a war with Russia, the continued deployments seem far from a purely defensive measure,” argued Antiwar.com‘s Jason Ditz:
Diplomats also suggested it was only partly about sending a message to Russia, and that the real point of the latest push is to get a bunch of nations involved as a “message” to U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has complained the U.S. is spending too much defending Europe and that Europe isn’t doing enough on its own.
That underscores the cynical nature of the deployments, and indeed the sort of thing adding to the sense of NATO being obsolete, that they feel they can afford to organize major deployments just for the sake of scoring political points in member nations’ elections.
These moves are shortsighted, to say the least, wrote Gilbert Doctorow of the American Committee for East-West Accord: “America’s steady campaign of expanding NATO, […] its vilification of Russia, and its information war based on lies” are part of “a dangerous game” that is pulling all sides inevitably closer to war, Doctorow argued.
Expectant mother Whitney Port has previously dished on the less glamorous side of pregnancy during her first trimester, opening up about feeling “gross all the time” and the “weird” changes happening to her body in a candid video series.
Now, the star is ready to say goodbye to her growing belly and hello to her little bundle of joy more than ever. During an interview with the LadyGang Podcast on Wednesday, Port revealed that she just “can’t feel sexy” while on her journey to baby, which is seriously affecting her sex life with husband, Tim Rosenman.
“It is so not for me! It’s not,” the mom-to-be confessed. “I feel so uncomfortable with my body that I can’t get into the mood. Like, I can’t feel sexy.”
The lifestyle maven, who has openly struggled to accept her changing figure on her YouTube series, “I Love My Baby, But I Hate My Pregnancy,” admitted that once her “belly really started happening,” her reluctance to get intimate rubbed off on her hubby.
Astrid Stawiarz/Getty
“I think if I was one of those pregnant women that loved it and was confident, then he’d be into it,” the entrepreneur said. “I think I’ve turned him off of it because I’m like, ‘Don’t look!’ I’ll even not say anything and he’ll see me getting undressed and be like, ‘I’m not looking, I’m not looking!'”
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In addition to finally doing the deed post-pregnancy, the former reality star said that she’s looking forward to hitting the gym again to shed the excess baby weight: “I’m so excited to get back in shape. I love it. That was such a big part of my life. It made me feel so good.”
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Kate Middleton looks ready to sail the high seas in her latest nautical ensemble.
While making an appearance at a sailing roadshow in London on Friday as patron of the 1851 Trust—a foundation that aims to inspire young students to pursue science and math subjects—the Duchess of Cambridge looked to be in high spirits. At the event, the royal took dressing for the ocasssion quite literally, giving us a lesson in styling surprisingly affordable nautical separates into a picture-perfect look.
VIDEO: The 10 Cheapest Things Kate Middleton Has Ever Worn
The mom of two was a J.Crew dream, as she modeled a pair of tapered navy blue cropped trousers embellished with gold buttons (shop a similar style here) and gray tweed pumps from the brand. The rest of the royal’s ensemble was just as affordable, with a slim cut white blazer from Zara, which was lined with a row of brass buttons, draped over a plain white T-shirt.
Mark Cuthbert/UK Press via Getty
Per usual, we couldn’t help but be mesmerized by Middleton’s lustrous locks that she offset with a pair of gold connected hoop earrings from jewelry designer Mirabelle Lolita ($40, mirabellejewellery.co.uk).
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The duchess’s sailing-ready outfit proves that you don’t need to break the bank for winning summer style.
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Pressure is mounting for a transparent investigation into alleged ties between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence, following a New York Times report that shows officials on both sides were in contact before the 2016 election.
The Times reported Tuesday that current and former American officials say Trump’s associates and campaign staff, including then-chairman Paul Manafort, had “repeated contacts” with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election. The officials cited phone records and other intercepted data.
American intelligence agencies began investigating potential ties between the teams after discovering evidence that Russia was attempting to hack into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), according to the sources.
However, the Times continues, “[t]he officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.”
Indeed, CNN added in its own reporting, “Investigators have not reached a judgment on the intent of those conversations,” and “cautioned the Russians could have been exaggerating their access.”
The conflicting information—and reporting based on intelligence leaks—has bolstered the growing call for an independent probe as the only viable solution to the allegations, particularly as they come after Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, abruptly stepped down on Monday amid reports that he had misled the White House about his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States.
California Sen. Kamala Harris (D) tweeted that “Americans deserve a transparent, independent investigation into Russia’s involvement with the Trump camp.”
Her campaign website also includes a petition demanding the same, reading, “This administration owes the American people a public, transparent, bipartisan fact-based investigation into Michael Flynn’s involvement with Russia and Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election…We need to know the truth.”
Highlighting the detail that the intelligence officials have not yet found evidence of collusion between the teams, The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald wrote, “Seems like an important caveat in an article treated as a smoking gun. Also: shows why this should be resolved w/investigation, not [intelligence community] leaks.”
He added that people can “cogently believe” that both the Trump presidency and the intelligence community’s “abuse of spy powers to subvert” the elected government are dangerous.
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Indeed, the call for an independent probe or special prosecutor has grown so wide that leading Republicans have joined in, with Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Tuesday calling for an exhaustive investigation into the possible connections.
“I think everybody needs that investigation to happen,” Blunt said on KTRS radio. “And the Senate Intelligence Committee, again that I serve on, has been given the principle responsibility to look into this, and I think that we should look into it exhaustively so that at the end of this process, nobody wonders whether there was a stone left unturned, and shouldn’t reach conclusions before you have the information that you need to have to make those conclusions.”
Advocacy groups have also raised the alarm.
“Voters deserve an impartial investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race by a Bipartisan Select Committee,” said Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn on Tuesday. Although some separate Senate panels are planning their own hearings, “this scattered and competing approach… is not the best way to seek the truth.”
“[T]hat can only be accomplished by a joint-, bi-partisan, Select Committee that should be convened immediately,” she said.
Ilya Sheyman, executive director of MoveOn.org Political Action, added, “The question is whether Republicans in Congress are more interested in tax cuts for the wealthy than they are in finding out the truth and defending American security and interests. Nothing less than the safety of our nation depends on the answer to this question.”
The Cree Indians of North America, and many First Nations, have a concept called wetiko, a cannibalistic mind-virus that creates an unnatural desire to continually consume human flesh and gives its host an ‘icy heart.’ Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha describe the wetiko nature of modern capitalism:
Its insatiable hunger for finite resources; its disregard for the pain of the groups and cultures it consumes; its belief in consumption as savior; its overriding obsession with its own material growth; and its viral spread across the surface of the planet. It is wholly accurate to describe neoliberal capitalism as cannibalizing life on this planet. It is not the only truth—capitalism has also facilitated an explosion of human life and ingenuity—but when taken as a whole, capitalism is certainly eating through the life-force of this planet in service of its own growth.
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Since our modern media machinery, and indeed, technology itself, are derivative sectors of our economic operating system, we must ask, in what way is mass media being driven by the wetiko meme? In which ways is it invading our unconscious and subconscious minds, transforming us into a non-human state?
The Roots of Media
“The deepest cause of the present [human] devastation [of the Earth] is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all right on the humans.” —Thomas Berry
With the beginning of the Enlightenment and Cartesian dualism, which split mind and body and embraced a rigid form of rationalism with religious fervor, we began to believe that our human intelligence made us superior beings and granted us the innate right to use “cheap nature” to our own advantage so that we can accumulate material goods, wealth and power. The world was reduced to a picture—an early precursor to today’s mass media which channels and supports the masculine life-destroying cannibalistic behavior that is both the driver and by-product of patterns in human history, including colonialism, the exploitation of nature, and the extreme subjugation of the Other.
“We have become so desensitized and hypnotized that we fail to notice the mutation and have become confused by what it means to be human and what is beautiful.”
Media has become part of our nervous system, framing and manipulating our thoughts, desires, feelings and the way we see reality — hijacking our spirituality, emotions and value systems. It promotes modern culture’s hypnosis through disassociation, consumerism and propaganda. With the support of commercial speech—and its excessive use of pornography, vanity and subliminal messages—our sense of community, interdependence and symbiosis with the natural world is eradicated.
Through mass media, the Other can now be produced, replicated and stripped of human dignity in a most perverted way so that it can be devoured. We are fed the image of a crying woman holding her dying child, portraying her as a different race or poor so that we can consume her suffering, while at the same time soothing ourselves with the Rolex watch advertised next to her image. Media presents us with superficial ideas of fulfillment, while stifling our true emotions, which are reframed, watered down and relabeled. Our lives and events are turned into narratives for consumption, while simultaneously we are becoming the very emotionless and artificial characters we see portrayed through movies and commercials.
Hyper-masculine Hollywood characters, including most superheroes, villains, robots, and other weaponry, are personifications of the vampiristic spirit of wetiko that is manifested through media—the very medium of memes. We have become so desensitized and hypnotized that we fail to notice the mutation and have become confused by what it means to be human and what is beautiful.
Restoring the Matriarchy
The patriarchy of capitalism found one of its greatest messengers in the modern media apparatus. One of the key avenues mass media employs to distort reality is the ongoing war with the feminine psyche. From the early days of Hollywood, the male and female archetypes were contorted to fit a hetero-normative perspective of masculine power and feminine passivity. The brave warrior and provider always rescued the damsel in distress.
Commercials continue the onslaught of distortion through the promotion of skinny unfeminine bodies. We are shown anorexic teenage girls as representations of the ideal woman’s body and faces that are cold and manipulative. Deep sensuality is taboo because it is too real and dangerous to the neurotic and perverted consumption of a culture that thrives on unattainable pleasures lacking in intimacy, authenticity and connection.
“The empowerment and freedom of woman and motherhood became synonymous with full-time careers, and the ability to maintain success in a patriarchic society.”
Since many cultures see nature as feminine (e.g. Mother Earth), our disconnection to nature required us to re-conceptualize woman altogether. The natural feminine form became too powerful and overwhelming to be admissible, and femininity needed to be conquered—re-framed, dissected, explored and subjugated.
In media, women are often depicted as “neurotic”—see-sawing from possessing an unnatural masculinity in her striving to be an ‘alpha male’ to being reduced to the sum of her exaggerated body parts. The lionization and exploitation of plastic surgery has reshaped our understanding of feminine proportions and desirability. We have lost touch with true femininity and nature, leaving both in a state of unreconstructed despair. The empowerment and freedom of woman and motherhood became synonymous with full-time careers, and the ability to maintain success in a patriarchic society.
The prevalence of C-sections, formula feedings (sometimes due to insufficient maternity leave, especially in the USA), synthetic enhancements, birth control pills and the availability of plastic bottles filled with synthetic toxic milk for newborns have in many ways served as ammunition in the war against the feminine. Infants are being born into the world lacking the touch of their mother’s body or hearing her natural heart beat as mammals do.
At the same time, breasts are enlarged with implanted silicone to assimilate the size and shape of milk-filled breasts meant for nurturing and nursing, but nipples remain strictly covered as they connote sensuality.
Nature has also become a commodity — framed in manmade parks so we can no longer interact with it directly and our freedom to play in it is restricted. We are now encouraged to observe it remotely on the TV screen, without getting dirty and without the risk of “hurting” ourselves. Nature is now mediated by toll-booth capitalism – renting a chair and umbrella on a crowded beach or a lift ticket on a ski slope.
Repelling Wetiko and Reclaiming Our Humanity
The darker forces of wetiko that access our minds and spirits through the mask of media and media technology, impact the future of our humanity by separating us from the rest of nature, each other and our direct life experience replacing it with a subversive ‘reality’ that is anti-life. As Jean Baudrillard says in The Perfect Crime, “in this grim record of the disappearance of the real, it has not been possible to pin down either the motives or the perpetrators, and the corpse of the real itself has never been found.”
Those forces are now being revealed and their faces and motives are being unmasked, showing us what we are to become if we don’t find our way back to our true essence as stewards of life.
We have forgotten humanity is defined through our interaction with each other and our non-human world. It is only when we understand and continuously find ourselves in an unsuspended flux of connectivity and relationship with the Cosmos and the rest of nature that we can be freed from the simulacrum world, the matrix of commodification, patriarchy and consumption that is projected by modern media.
In Culture Jam, AdBusters founder Kalle Lasn provides a beautiful provocation and call-to-arms:
We will strike by smashing the postmodern hall mirrors and redefining what it means to be alive.
Let us reclaim our mental environment and our humanity the same way as we are reclaiming our physical environment. Let us bring back the matriarchal values of interdependence, community and symbiosis with nature, and start to bring into being the better world our hearts know is possible.