04:33:14 12/31/2016
https://youtu.be/KkIJvxmtSo0
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This Year Of Misery Ends Today
It’s Saturday morning, children. More importantly, it’s the last day of 2016. We’re finally getting this year out of our way and praying that next year isn’t actually worse, as some are predicting. Temps are on the warm side this morning in Indianapolis, but it’s incredibly windy so it still feels cold. You’ll definitely want to bundle up if you are among those daring to go out this evening.
We’re walking right past the continuing talk about Russia and hacking, even though it now appears they hacked a Vermont utility. We’re also watching but not commenting on a North Carolina judge blocking the state legislature’s attempt to strip power from the incoming Governor. We’ll save those for next year. Instead, we have 5 things you really should know.
China Is Shutting Down Its Ivory Trade
Ivory comes from one primary source: the tusks of bull elephants. As the elephants have been hunted into near extinction, most Western countries, including all of Europe and both American continents, have banned the trade of ivory. While that ban has been in place for several years, one lone holdout has created an incredibly large black market: China. Now, that is all changing as China announced yesterday that they are banning the trade of ivory by the end if 20171.
You should know that China had previously announced plans to shut down its commercial market this year, but what makes yesterday’s announcement so important is that they will now stop processing ivory so that it can even be used in the commercial market. All processing of ivory in the country ends in March of this coming year. This is a huge deal for the safety and longevity of African elephants who have continued to be poached despite bans on hunting them across the African continent.
Of course, there’s always a dark side to changes like this. The ban will almost certainly fuel an even stronger black market for existing ivory pieces. Laws for trading existing ivory are much more spotty and differ dramatically from country to country. There are also some exceptions to China’s ban. Still, this is ultimately a good move toward a more sustainable planet.
A Different Kind Of Police Shooting
We have been watching this story with some curiosity as it has grown over the week. On Monday, the Greek Ambassador to Brazil, Kyriakos Amiridis, went missing. On Wednesday, his wife finally reported him as missing. On Thursday, the ambassador’s body was found in a burned-out car. Then yesterday, a police officer admitted to killing the ambassador and by the end of the day it was discovered that the police officer was having an affair with the ambassador’s wife. Both the wife and the police officer are now in custody2.
I know, it really sounds like the plot of a best-selling mystery book, doesn’t it? I’m sure the tale will get even more interesting as the entire story unravels. What you should know is that the ambassador’s wife is a native Brazilian, so she likely won’t be able to hide under diplomatic immunity laws in the country. A cousin of the police officer is also being held on charges that he helped move the ambassador’s body. Police say that blood stains on the sofa indicate that the ambassador was stabbed several times before being moved to the car in an attempt to cover the crime.
Officially, the Greek government has not commented on the event at all, which seems a bit strange. Brazil’s Prime Minister apologized, which is standard protocol for incidents such as this. It doesn’t seem likely that anyone with direct government ties was involved, though. This does give Rio another black eye, however, and is likely to further hurt an already struggling tourist business.
When Your Birth Certificate Is Wrong
Mistakes happen just about everywhere, but when they happen on a birth certificate getting them fixed can be challenging, and that’s when the error is something simple. On Tuesday, however, 55-year-old Sara Kelly Keenan finally got her corrected birth certificate in the mail and it’s one for the record books. In the “gender” field, instead of saying male or female, Keenan’s gender is listed as “intersex,” the first time that designation has been made on a birth certificate in the United States3.
Understand, this isn’t a matter of Keenan preferring to identify one way or another. She was born with male genes, female genitalia, and mixed internal reproductive organs. Intersex. Keenan uses female pronouns when referring to herself, but even that comes after no small amount of confusion. When she was born, her parents and doctors agreed to keep her intersex status a secret. Back in the 1960s, intersex people were referred to as “hermaphrodites,” a term that carries a lot of social bias. For three weeks, she was listed as a boy, and then issued a new birth certificate that said she was female.
When did everything change? Her father finally confessed in 2012 that they had hidden the information from her. This comes after years of hormone replacement therapy and confusion. The new birth certificate is important not only for Keenan, however, but for thousands of intersex people for whom neither the male or female gender fits. Given the importance of birth certificates for things such as which bathroom one uses in North Carolina, this is a tremendous step forward that will affect a lot of people from here on out.
Recognizing The Right To Learn
Speaking of gender, A huge step forward in transgender rights came in India this week where a school exclusively for transgender students opened, admitting 10 students who had previously dropped out of school4. India has a transgender population of over two million people. In 2014, transgender people there were given equal rights under the law, including the right to marry and inherit land. That doesn’t mean that they are quickly welcomed into society, however, and still face a tremendous amount of bias and sometimes violence. Transgender people are often thrown out of their homes and can have tremendous difficulty finding jobs.
The school in the city of Kochi aims to help reduce some of the problems by helping transgender adults sit for exams necessary to graduate high school. The program is very similar to the GED in the United States. The school has admitted six students so far, with more waiting to be admitted. The students all have a sponsor covering the cost of the education as well as food and housing. The centre also pays for gender reassignment surgery at government hospitals.
Opening the school hasn’t been easy. The school’s founder, who is also transgender, says she approached over 700 property owners before finding a suitable location. Most, she said, didn’t understand what she was trying to do, thinking that she wanted the space for prostitution. While the school is starting small, organizers hope to create a model that can be used across all of India. Approximately 56% of transgender people in India dropped out of high school, so this could be a dramatic turning point for all of them.
And Finally …
Normally, when you think of older people collecting things, one thinks of memorabilia such as pottery or antique furniture and the like. No one ever expects them to be hoarding a fortune in artwork, especially not in their garage. Yet, that is exactly what an elderly French couple was convicted of doing yesterday5. The court found Pierre Le Guennec and his wife Danielle guilty of illegally procuring the artwork of Pablo Picasso from the Picasso home and handed down a two-year suspended sentence.
This has not been an easy case to decide, however. The couple didn’t exactly sneak into the Picasso home and steal the art in the dead of night. Pierre was an electrician who was working in the Picasso home at the time of the artist’s death in 1973. The argument has been that the couple was given the artworks by Jacqueline Picasso, who may or may not have had a right to give the artwork away. A feud as to who holds the rights to Picasso’s work lasted until Jacqueline’s death in 1986. Claude Picasso is now generally considered to be the rightful heir of the Picasso estate.
What you should know is that no one knew the couple had the more than 180 paintings and a book with more than 91 sketches until Pierre took them to have them appraised about seven years ago. The artwork is supposedly in good condition despite having been in the garage the past 40 years. The current appraisal stands at about $105 million but could likely go quite a bit higher.
And that’s it. We are done for the year. We are taking a break tomorrow so that we can consider possibly trying to stay awake to see in the New Year. We’ll hopefully be back bright and early Monday morning. Until then, we hope you have a good day. Happy New Year!
5 Things You Should Know: 01.02.2017
04:23:13 01/02/2017
https://youtu.be/aYmeL9wosV0
This is how we choose to start the year? Really?
Hello there, welcome to another Monday, the first of this new year. For some, this is the first day back to work after the holiday, though many still have today off given the fact that New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday. This is why you went to school those extra four or five years. We’re looking at clouds with a chance of rain this evening and overnight in central Indiana, but another severe winter storm threatens the Northern Plains today, which is largely why no one really wants to live there.
For all the bitching we did about 2016, it really isn’t looking as though 2017 is getting off to a much better start. The president-elect thinks he knows secrets about hacking, North Korea says its ready to test ICBMs, and a number of cities set new records for homicides. We’re obviously not quite as smart as we think we are. That’s why we have 5 Things You Should know this morning.
A deadly end to the year
By now, if you were sober enough to pay any attention to the news yesterday, you already know that a shooting at a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey left at least 39 dead and more than 70 injured1. A massive manhunt is underway for the shooter who somehow made it out of the club alive. This morning, the dirt wads calling themselves ISIS are claiming responsibility for that attack, which doesn’t really surprise anyone. At least we know the gunman wasn’t dressed as Santa Claus as some outlets reported earlier.
That wasn’t the only mass shooting to ring in the new year, though. Shortly after midnight local time, a heavily-armed man in Campinas, Brazil, walked into a home and killed his ex-wife, his son, and seven others before killing himself2. It took some time for neighbors to realize what was going on. Those who heard the shots thought it was merely people celebrating the New Year. Very little is known about the shooting at this time beyond the fact that it happened.
While the two shootings are totally unrelated, what they underscore is an increasing trend toward mass violence, not just from terrorists but from people we might otherwise consider to be “normal.” I sat in my living room a large part of Saturday night listening to various semi-automatic weapons being fired into the air by my neighbors, wondering why they felt they even needed that type of weapon in the first place. I worry that we may be entering a year where there is no “safe place.”
We call this a cease fire?
Funny how things don’t always mean what you think they’re supposed to mean. Take the words “cease fire,” for instance. One might be tempted to think that such a term means that there is no firing from either side, that everyone puts down their guns and their bombs for a minute and at least has a fucking spot of tea. But no, that would not be the case in Syria, where apparently no one has a fucking dictionary, probably because they’ve blown them all up.
The Syrian government apparently thought 24 hours was enough of a cease-fire and resumed bombardment of rebel-held locations near Damascus on Sunday3. This Russia-Turkey-brokered cease-fire was shaky to begin with. Rebel leaders had already said they would ignore the terms of the cease-fire if the Syrian government continued its bombing. After all, it’s hardly a cease-fire if both sides don’t actually cease.
What you should know about this situation is that the Syrian government isn’t the only one doing some bombing. The US claims it bombed a major Islamic State mortar position on Sunday4 and Turkish and Russian forces bombed Islamic State targets near al-Bab and Dayr Kak early this morning5. This has consistently been one of the problems with the war in Syria: there are too many different sides. Bombs fall from the sky and no one knows who’s bombing whom until someone takes credit after the fact. This has to be the most stupid way of running a war, ever.
One last swipe at 2016
2016 just couldn’t exit without making a final pass at some of our celebrities. Both William Christopher6, who played Father Francis Mulcahy on the long-running series M*A*S*H and Barbara Tarbuck7 who spent 16 years on the soap opera General Hospital died before the year left us, adding to the already long list of notable deaths for the year.
Christopher, who was diagnosed with cancer a mere 18 months ago, was one of only four actors to appear in all 11 seasons of M*A*S*H, which, for the children among us, was a series that managed to find humor in a mobile medical unit in the middle of the Korean conflict. His part was not initially meant to be a big one, but the character and the actor both proved themselves endearing to viewers. Christopher’s kind, warm-hearted demeanor gave a sense of reality to the passivist priest caught in the middle of war.
Ms. Tarbuck was not as well know among general television viewers. Soap opera fans knew her, though, and after her time at General Hospital she continued acting, most recently appearing in five episodes of American Horror Story: Asylum as Mother Superior Claudia. She appeared in numerous films as well, perhaps most notably as Dwayne Johnson’s mother in 2004’s Walking Tall.
We’re hoping that 2017 isn’t as hard on our celebrities as 2016 was. I won’t mind not reading an obituary for a few months.
Your stylist is there to help
Of course, with the first of the year comes a lot of new laws at the state and local level, many of which go unnoticed until one runs afoul of them. A new law in Illinois, though, is taking a unique approach toward victims of domestic abuse with a program that is almost certain to be copied by other states should it prove successful. Starting this week, almost anyone involved in the beauty industry, stylists, barbers, cosmetologists, estheticians, hair braiders and even nail techs receive an hour of state-mandated training on how to spot signs of domestic abuse8.
Now, for the paranoid among us, this is not another law requiring people who are not experts in a field to report anything they find suspicious or questionable to police. There’s no reporting mechanism to this law at all. Rather, the law is designed to give your stylist information to pass on to a possible victim should they see the signs of abuse. The thinking is that since stylists are aware of bumps and bruises that might be covered by hair or makeup, they can quietly offer a victim help without getting authorities involved.
Kat and I have talked about this issue and the law appears to be a good one. Most decent cosmetology schools at least address the issue of domestic abuse, but the Illinois law goes a step further by giving them the tools to actually help their customers. The law also protects stylists from liability should their assessment be incorrect. There is no requirement for a stylist to report anything to anyone. They are there to help. This is the kind of law we hope spreads quickly across all 50 states.
And finally …
2016 couldn’t just sneak out the back door when it was time for it to leave. No, it had to leave some hilarity and nonsense in its wake and it made sure to not limit those bits of last-minute humor to any one place. What is probably most well-known is singer Mariah Carey’s disastrous night on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest9. All she thought she had to do was lip sync the familiar song, Auld Lang Syne, but technical issues arose and that didn’t go so well. Then, the music started for a song she wasn’t prepared to sing. The disaster lasted far too long for anyone’s comfort.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, someone thought they’d have a little fun with the famous “Hollywood” sign, altering it so it would read “Hollyweed”10. Some mysterious person dressed in black took advantage of the fact that all the local police were protecting larger party venues, scaled the fence, and then used very large tarps to alter the sign. I mean, you have to give whoever did this a lot of credit. The terrain up there is steep and rocky. It took some serious strength to pull off the prank. Everyone laughed, the tarps were down by noon, and it is unlikely charges will ever be filed.
Then, because some issues from 2016 aren’t going away, a couple of protesters hung a banner at yesterday’s football game between the Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears11. The banner protested the involvement of U.S. Bank in the Dakota Access Pipeline. The stadium where the game was played also happens to be named for U.S. Bank. The banner got a lot of attention, which was the point. The two protestors unfurled the banner during the second quarter, then sat up on the girders waving to fans for the rest of the game. They were later arrested on misdemeanor trespassing charges.
Okay, technically I guess we covered a bit more than 5 things you should know for today. It was just that kind of weekend. Let’s hope the entire year isn’t as hectic. We would love to spend more of our time talking about things that don’t involve people dying. We’ll call it a wrap for today, though. Please consider supporting us by helping to sponsor this endeavor. Let’s make this year better than anyone expects, shall we?
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