Jordan is Palestine

Arabs have been occupying Judea and Samaria for over 50
Years.
As the Palestinian Leader,Mudar Zahran explains, they have a legitimate Homeland in Jordan.

Louis CK is DONE

Illustration: Maarten de Boer/Getty Image

A New York Times Investigation 
 published today put names and specifics to unsourced stories that had been circulating for years, alleging that the filmmaker-performer pressured five female colleagues to watch or listen to him masturbate. A one-line summary on the Times story strikes at the heart of the charges: “As the powerful comedian found success by talking about his hang-ups, he was also asking female comics and co-workers to watch him masturbate.”

The Times investigation by Melena Ryzik, Cara Buckley, and Jodi Kantor arrived mere hours after the announcement that C.K.’s movie distributor canceled the premiere of his new film, I Love You, Daddy, a controversy-stoking two-fer in which C.K. plays a C.K.-like television producer who has a sexual relationship with an actress who’s about to star in his new TV show, while his teenage daughter (Chloë Grace Moretz), a legal minor, is having a fling with a much older, Woody Allen-like film director (John Malkovich). The black-and-white photography and orchestral score are both modeled on Allen’s Manhattan, likewise an uneasy comedy about an older man’s relationship with a teenager. The movie includes a long bit in which the C.K. character’s assistant (Charlie Day) loudly mimes masturbating on an office couch with other people present — including a female producer played by Edie Falco, who looks disturbed but still carries on a conversation with C.K.’s character as if this sort of thing happens all the time. The film’s very release now seems to be in jeopardy.

Sukiyaki

Fifty years ago today, the No. 1 song in America was an import from Japan: a song about young love called "Sukiyaki," sung by Kyu Sakomoto.

Ian Condry, who teaches Japanese culture at MIT, says "Sukiyaki" transcended language because it hit an emotional nerve. The song spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard charts in June 1963 and was already a huge hit in Japan before its American debut. But what most listeners in the U.S. probably didn't realize was how it symbolized Japan's return to the world stage.

"1963 was when Japan was returning to the world scene after the destruction of WWII," Condry says. "1964 was the Tokyo Olympics. And Japan's economy was expanding globally and so, in some ways, the song is kind of an interesting metaphor for that global expansion of Japan on the world scene."

Kyu Sakamoto was the face of this new postwar Japan: a clean-cut, 21-year-old pop idol. But Condry says that underlying the song's sweetness was a story of sadness and loss.

"The lyricist Rokusukay Ey was looking back on the failure of the protest movement in Japan," he says.