Dispatches From the Culture Wars - Loaded Year-End edition

Unhappy end; Lesson from Ukraine; Brass fears Trump; Mansplaining Lolita; I$I$; BSUs cut off private prisons; Suing the school system for science; NOLA dethrones the Confederacy; Yannis Behrakis

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A Syrian refugee holds his children as he struggles to leave a dinghy on Lesbos,Yannis Behrakis/Reuters


Dave Barry’s Year in Review: The sad thing is, we’re not making this up!
By Dave Barry
December 23, 2015
Washington Post
Okay, critics: We have heard you. This year, instead of dwelling on the negatives, we’re going to start our annual review with a List of the Top Ten Good Things That Happened in 2015. Ready? Here we go:
1. We didn’t hear that much about Honey Boo Boo.
2. Okay, we’ll have to get back to you on Good Things 2 through 10.
 

Mirrors Brought to Protests: Police Forced to Look at What They’ve Become
By Filming Cops

In a move that is picking up international attention, the people of Ukraine have begun bringing mirrors to their protests.
They say they’re doing it to force police to look at their own reflection, in a piercing psychological reminder of what they’ve turned into.
The idea came about after police were seen violently attacking hundreds of Ukrainians who are upset with their government.

Pentagon Officers: We Quit if Trump Wins
By Nancy A. Youssef
December 16, 2015
The Daily Beast

In the halls of the Pentagon, officers are privately contemplating what they would do should Trump become their commander-in-chief. And more often than not, they proclaim they will leave.
This Daily Beast correspondent has heard such sentiments from at least a dozen commanders in the past few months. Such conversations can also be heard at common areas—in cafeteria lines and around lunch tables.
 

Men Explain Lolita to Me
By Rebecca Solnit
December 17, 2015  
Literary Hub

I sort of kicked the hornets’ nest the other day, by expressing feminist opinions about books. It all came down to Lolita. “Some of my favorite novels are disparaged in a fairly shallow way. To read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov,” one commenter asserted, which made me wonder if there’s a book called Reading Lolita in Patriarchy. The popular argument that novels are good because they inculcate empathy assumes that we identify with characters, and no one gets told they’re wrong for identifying with Gilgamesh or even Elizabeth Bennett. It’s just when you identify with Lolita you’re clarifying that this is a book about a white man serially raping a child over a period of years.
 

Military Contractors Caught On Tape Bragging About Future Profits From War On ISIS
By Colin Taylor
December 7, 2015
Occupy Democrats

A secretly recorded speech at a Credit Suisse investor conference reveals that the arms manufacturers and defense contractors of America are applauding the escalation of conflicts in the Middle East, salivating at the thought of the profits to be made by pumping the region full of dangerous and expensive military materiel. Top executives from Lockheed Martin (the designer of the much-maligned and exorbitantly expensive F-35 fighter jet program), Oshkosh (producer of infantry fighting vehicles) and Raytheon (producer of cruise missiles and electronic warfare devices) all gathered to celebrate the apparently imminent escalation of the US bombing campaign against Daesh (ISIS/ISIL), the intrusion of Russian forces into the Syrian Civil War and the Saudi Arabian bombing campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
They congratulated each other for convincing Congressional Republicans to allot the Department of Defense $607 billion dollars, knowing that the bulk of that money would go to them: “budget-wise, our programs are well supported. We think we did very well. It’s great to have that [budget] deal done, and to have greater certainty, that benefits ourselves.” Within the past week, Lockheed Martin has already been given a $279 million contract to finish their fourth Freedom-class littoral (shallow water) warship, the USS Cooperstown, $302 million for the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile program, a $940 million contract for maintaining Sikorsky helicopters, and yet another $49.1 million for “ship integration” of the Aegis missile defense system.

UC Divests from Private Prisons After Pressure from Black Student Unions
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
December 17, 2015
Daily Nexus

The Afrikan Black Coalition (ABC), which encompasses the University of California's nine Black Student Unions, issued a resolution Thursday demanding that UC divest from private prisons and companies that support private prisons. Later on Thursday, a spokesperson from the UC Office of the President (UCOP) confirmed the University’s shares in private prisons, which were part of a broader portfolio, had been sold on Dec. 1.
UCOP’s Director of Media Relations Dianne Klein said after ABC announced in November that UC had $25 million invested in private prisons, the University decided to sell its shares in the companies.

Boca Raton Father, Son Sue School District for not Teaching Evolution
By Angela Rozier
December 16, 2015
WPBF

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A Boca Raton father and son have filed a lawsuit claiming the Palm Beach County school board isn't teaching the theory of evolution.
Brandon Silver, 11, and his father, attorney Barry Silver, filed an 18-page lawsuit last month but plan to serve the board Wednesday night.
"We've been taught about adaptations to the environment but that's not really a direct concept to evolution," said Brandon Silver.
"It's such a magnificent story and it's being neglected. The students are being deprived of learning from it because certain religious people don't like the story because it contradicts the Bible and we think it is terrible that children shouldn't learn the truth about where they came from," said Barry Silver.
 

New Orleans Votes to Remove Confederate, Civil War Monuments
By Ben Brumfield and Ralph Ellis
December 17, 2015
CNN

A large crowd broke into cheers Thursday after the New Orleans City Council voted to remove four monuments to the Confederacy from prominent places in the city.
The 6-1 vote means officials will take down statues of Gens. Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy. An obelisk dedicated to the Battle of Liberty Place will also go.
It's one of the strongest gestures yet by an American city to remove symbols of Confederate history, following a trend in many Southern states to take down the Confederate battle flag.
Historic societies in the 300-year-old city supported the removal of the monuments, and the proposal was introduced by a majority of City Council members.

Guardian Photographer of the Year 2015: Yannis Behrakis
December 21, 2015
The Guardian

This year the Guardian picture desk has chosen Yannis Behrakis of Reuters as our agency photographer of the year. Here are the most astonishing moments he captured in two of the biggest stories of 2015 – the refugee crisis and the financial implosion in his home country Greece