On December 20th Lisa Levy and I appeared for a taping of the People’s Court on behalf of Waggytail dog rescue (read the post here).  The air date for the show is April 23.  There was drama.  So tune in then to see me and my dog Little Man defending a dog rescue.

One of the most excellent spectacles to behold in Israel was the amazing high energy of famous Israeli deejay Offer Nissim as several thousand men and women went insane.  The entranced audience must have been what Jonestown looked like before the Kool-Aid, except here the elixir was slamming beats fast and furious.  Special thanks to Ron Shoshani, Itzik Edri, Sean Katz, Itay Cohai and Yossi Kalfon
for acting as my guides.

Below are my portraits of Nissim for Wikipedia, taken March 27 at TLV nightclub for the theme “Tel Aviv Forever”:

(Note: all photos are licensed Creative Commons 3.0)

I announced that Woody Allen will be opening the Tribeca Film Festival.  My credentials for Wikipedia were just received in this e-mail:

Thank you for your interest in covering the eighth annual Tribeca Film Festival, presented by founding sponsor American Express, taking place Wednesday, April 22nd through Sunday, May 3rd, 2009. We have processed your press credential request; the following member(s) of your staff is hereby APPROVED:

David Shankbone – APPROVED

Dear readers, during the day I am photographing Israel’s towns and countryside, and at night I’m trying to document its nightlife.  This has left little time to write about the experiences as they happen.   When I return to New York, I will be filling you in on the trip and the photography.  You can, of course, click on my Flickr Photostream to the right of this message to see some of the photos.

By the way, this picture is really special to me.  I went out to one of the most amazing resort hotels ever, the Hotel Mizpe Hayamim, where they grow, on the property, all the food and raise the animals for guests.  All organic and humane.

Goats are typically not this friendly, but this little baby goat, who I named “Bucky”, wagged his tail and followed me around, friendly as can be.  I just absolutely loved him.

In 2002 I was at a bar called Hell in the Meatpacking District of New York City, which is where I met Shepard Smith.  At the time, Shep was just coming to terms with his sexuality, and we spent a good deal of time talking about what it means for him to be a gay man.  I’m not the first to report this.

Shep showed some interest in me–we were introduced via a mutual friend, an actor named Mark–but all we had was conversation.  I thought he was a nice guy.  I snapped photos of him and his female friend with the handkerchief on her head, whose name I have long forgotten.  I sent him those photos.

But as I watch Fox News, and the diatribes they air and the complete reaming of reality that they undertake daily that only serves to incite the worst in Americans, I wonder:  Shep – do you ever feel like you are selling yourself out completely just for your career?  When you said “it gets frightening sometimes” did you really mean it?  Your career is so developed that you could now hop to another network.  Why don’t you?  Why do you stay at a network that appeals to the worst in American society, and practices one of the most debased forms of infotainment?

At the time you and I met you at Hell, Shep, I was seeing someone and made that clear in our conversation; I would never have cheated.  But through the years, as I watch what Fox News does, I wonder if you and I had started to date–do you date, or do you just have one-night stands?–whether I would be okay with who you work for and what you do every night.  I don’t have an answer.

I imagine, Shep, that your career is fulfilling, but I also suspect that you go home every night and wonder what you are doing, and whether getting your face plastered all over the Rockefeller Center subway station and across America is worth it that you have found nobody with whom to build a life.  You are alone, and you are probably frustrated that your personal life is in the crapper because you have sold yourself out.

You’ve already made your name, Shep.  You just haven’t done anything with it beyond what every talking head does.  You could start by coming out, and exploring a side of who you are more openly so that you are no longer terrified that it will endanger your working life.  It won’t, and you’ve already banked your financial security.

Update: Why did I write this post?

My first day in Israel was spent walking around Jerusalem.  Below are a few of the photos and where they are found on Wikipedia:

Tefillin

Mount of Olives

Jerusalem stone

Temple Mount

Wikipedia “scandals” have become a staple in the news; but how about one that was completely made up by WorldNetDaily and reported on by Fox News?

I missed this story last week, but it involves a few of my favorite themes:  Israel, Wikipedia and the joke that is the right wing media.   WorldNetDaily, the “Conservapedia of News,” was recently caught with its pants down after Aaron Klein, one of its partisan hacks, fabricated a Wikipedia scandal.  I will leave it to the reader to decide what is more comical: the “scandal”, or Aaron Klein trying to thump his chest in indignation when he is caught.

Aaron Klein becomes the face of shoddy right wing reporting.

Aaron is chief of WND’s “Jerusalem bureau” and he decided to test a theory.  Aaron’s theory was that the editors of Barack Obama’s Wikipedia article will not allow criticism on the page.  So what does smarty pants Aaron do?  He tries to insert the bizarre fringe theory that Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen eligible for the Presidency.  Here’s what Aaron wrote:

There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts.

This is one of the more pathetic right-wing conspiracy hopes.  Even though Obama provided a certification of live birth in Hawaii, the right wing foamers-at-the-mouth do not feel that is enough.

Obama can do nothing to ever convince people like Aaron Klein and the rest of the deluded right wing (who should be more deluded with the fact that they supported a President like George W. Bush, who trounced every notion of “conservative values”).  If Obama produced whatever document they asked for, they would find some reason to doubt its authenticity.  “There’s no amount of evidence or data that will change somebody’s mind,” says Michael Shermer, who is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a columnist for Scientific American.   ”The more data you present a person, the more they doubt it … Once you’re committed, especially behaviorally committed or financially committed, the more impossible it becomes to change your mind.”

Alex Koppelman wrote on Salon about how the vast birth certificate conspiracy knows no bounds:

For believers, it works like this: So what if Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the director of Hawaii’s Department of Health, released a statement saying she has verified that the state has the original birth certificate on record? So what if she said separately that the certification looks identical to one she was issued for her own Hawaii birth certificate? Why didn’t her statement specify Obama’s birthplace? So what if a Hawaii Health Department spokeswoman later clarified that Fukino meant that Obama was born in Hawaii? So what if researchers for FactCheck.org actually saw the physical copy of the certification and debunked much of the key “evidence” supposedly proving that the image posted online is a forgery? They’re not really independent. They’re funded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Obama once (with Bill Ayers, no less) ran an entirely unrelated program that happened to be paid for with money donated by Walter Annenberg. And on and on and on.

Aaron Klein has now made himself part of that conspiracy by trying to insert this fringe theory on to Obama’s Wikipedia article, and then acting shocked that it was removed.   When Aaron was called out on this, he tried to deny that he was the one who did it.  Wired magazine demonstrated how people like Aaron often don’t use intelligence when they try to game Wikipedia, which is why they are caught engaging in unethical behavior:

Curiously, it turns out that Jerusalem21, whoever he or she might be, has only worked on one other Wikipedia entry since the account was created, notes ConWebWatch. That’s Aaron Klein’s entry, which Jerusalem21 created in 2006, and has edited 37 times.

When Gawker exposed Klein’s fabrication of a scandal, he demanded a retraction:

First, I am not “Jerusalem21,” but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story, which focused on investigating allegations I had received from others of Wikipedia scrubbing Obama’s page. I wanted to personally oversee whether indeed criticism of Obama was being deleted. For your information, often investigative journalists engage in exactly this kind of testing – like seeing if they can bypass mandatory disclosures while donating to a candidate (several newspapers did this prior to the November election), or if they can register a dog to vote in Illinois. Thus, even if I had personally edited Obama’s page as a test to investigate allegations of scrubbing, this is entirely legitimate journalistic practice.

Gawker refused to retract the story, stating, “In other words, Klein masterminded the creation of the supposed scandal he wrote about.”   Klein’s crap defense is the same one he gave Wired, which like Gawker, called him out on his BS:

What’s missing from [Aaron Klein's] treatise on investigative journalism is the reporter’s obligation to disclose when he’s engineered events on which he’s reporting. In a follow-up e-mail, Klein acknowledges that he should have made that disclosure, but suggests he’s guilty of nothing more than an accidental omission in a hastily written story.

“It just slipped my mind,” he writes.

Interesting. Let’s look at some of the original text [DS: the following is text from the WND story]:

Indeed, multiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately and were banned from re-posting any material on the website for three days.

In one example, Wikipedia user “Jerusalem21″ added the following to Obama’s page:

“There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts.”

As is required on the online encyclopedia, that entry was backed up by third-party media articles, citing the Chicago Tribune and WorldNetDaily.com

The entry was posted on Feb. 24, at 6:16 p.m. EST. Just three minutes later, the entry was removed by a Wikipedia administrator, claiming the posting violated the websites rules against “fringe” material.

[...]

When the user “Jerusalem21″ tried to repost the entry about Obama’s eligibility a second time, another administrator removed the material within two minutes and then banned the Wikipedia user from posting anything on the website for three days.

That’s a lot of mind-slippage. You’d think at some point in the writing, Klein would have a revelation, slap his head and say, “Silly me! Here I am writing about my researcher following my instructions, and I’m making it sound like I don’t even know the guy! Glad I caught that.”

The only other example in Klein’s article of a user being suspended from Wikipedia also traces back to a Jerusalem21 edit — this time about William Ayers. That example found its way into the Fox News report. But, similarly, Klein forgot to mention that it was the same user — his unnamed researcher — and the same ban: i.e., the one that followed two successive edits accusing Obama of falsifying his birth.

After this was reported by Gawker and Wired, WorldNetDaily removed all references to “Jerusalem21″ and instead put in “one Wikipedia user” as the victim of not having this lunatic theory inserted.

Aaron: you’re a partisan hack who clearly knows very little about journalistic integrity, which is why you work for WorldNetDaily and not a mainstream publication.  You’ll say anything and do anything to cover up your shoddy reporting.   That is clear.   So Aaron, when the Israeli Foreign Ministry brings me out to Israel next week to photograph for Wikipedia, I’ll be sure to do a better job of constructing reality than you appear able to do.

Using my Flickr photostream, to the right of any screen on Shankblog you will see candid street photography I have snapped in New York City.  My primary photo stomping ground is in the historic Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of Manhattan, my  home for the last eight years (the longest I have ever lived in one place my entire 34 years). 

I genuinely find people fascinating, and I personally like to imagine their thoughts and lives when I review the photographs I have collected of people going about their day.  This one in particular is a favorite of mine.  The boy’s expression is very nice, but I particularly like the dog’s expression.  Dogs are some of the best creatures on this Earth, and I thought this dog’s good-natured, love-filled gaze as he strains to give the little kid a kiss shows exactly why so many people love them.

A boy and his dog in the Tompkins Square dog park in New York City

Showing that the world has not forgotten what went down the last eight years, former President George W. Bush gave his first speech since leaving the White House as howls of protests greeted him:

“He is a war criminal who fought an illegal war, and there are some who say he was never elected democratically, so there are some who say he should be arrested as soon as he comes here,” said a woman dressed as a Guantanamo Bay prisoner, who called herself Ivana Nomobush.

 

She had brought with her a makeshift “shoe cannon” that catapulted footwear, but complained that security personnel were not letting her use it.

Bush was in Calgary, one of Canada’s most conservative cities and the seat of its oil industry, At least two protesters were arrested by police.   As Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe & Mail (the New York Times of Canada) wrote, Calgary is perhaps “the only city in Canada that would have him” as Bush’s legacy shadows him:

What happened on the Bush watch, and now in its aftermath, is something more sweeping still: a sharp decline in the world predominance of the United States, now a debtor nation as no country has ever been indebted before in peacetime, a country whose economic model no longer commands envy or respect given its collapse, one whose students do poorly in international tests relative to those in most other advanced industrial countries, a country that commanded the world’s sympathy and support after 9/11 but frittered most of it away under Mr. Bush’s presidency. 

During the speech, which was closed to the press, Bush said he would not comment on Barack Obama and his nascent Presidency.  “I’m not going to spend my time criticizing him. There are plenty of critics in the arena,” Bush said. “He deserves my silence.”  Bush also indirectly trounced Rush Limbaugh’s repeatedly expressed hope that Obama fails.  “I love my country a lot more than I love politics,” Bush said. “I think it is essential that he be helped in office.”

The number of Americans who identify as Christian is 76 percent, down from 86% since 1990.  Thirty percent of married couples did not have a religious ceremony and more than one in four Americans will not be buried in a religious ceremony when they die.

These are the findings of the American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College of Hartford, Connecticut.  These findings comport with a similar study conducted in 2007 by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.  Partly the reason people do not identify with religion anymore is because of the hypocrisy of the evangelical movement over the decade.  As the United States tortured people held in our custody; detained prisoners with no access to a trial to discover their guilt or innocence; rejected any role as “custodian of the Earth” in regards to climate change; created a situation where Wall Street looted the American economy; and rejected scientific research and findings in favor of previously-held conclusions; it’s no wonder people feel less religious.   All of the policies of the last eight years were upheld by the evangelicals, who raised nary a whimper as everything that people believe it means to be an American was put through a shredder. 

Americans are waking up to many falsehoods:  that those who espouse religious values often do not follow them (e.g. Ted Haggard, et al.); that the market does not always do what is best; that our leaders will ditch our values if it helps them attain power (Dick Cheney, George Bush, Tom DeLay, et al.). 

So it’s interesting that Pope Benedict XVI, on a recent trip to Cameroon, once more provided an example of how Big Religion holds back human progress: in an area hit hardest by the AIDS crisis, the Pope told them that condoms actually exacerbate the problems of AIDS (emphasis added):

The pontiff, speaking to journalists on his flight, said the condition was “a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems”. [....]

“It is of great concern that the fabric of African life, its very source of hope and stability, is threatened by divorce, abortion, prostitution, human trafficking and a contraception mentality,” he added.

More than two-thirds – 67% – of the global total of 32.9 million people with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Three-quarters of all Aids deaths in 2007 happened there.

One has to wonder why anyone listens to the religious institutions anymore, when they clearly have an agenda that works against humanity.   That is one reason why people feel less religious.  Leonard Pitts, Jr. at the Seattle Times has his own theory:

What is the cumulative effect upon outside observers of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker living like lords on the largesse of the poor, multiplied by Jimmy Swaggart’s pornography addiction, plus Eric Rudolph bombing Olympians and gays in the name of God, plus Muslims hijacking airplanes in the name of God, multiplied by the church that kicked out some members because they voted Democrat, divided by people caterwauling on courthouse steps as a rock bearing the Ten Commandments was removed, multiplied by the square root of Catholic priests preying on little boys while the church looked on and did nothing, multiplied by Muslims rioting over cartoons, plus the ongoing demonization of gay men and lesbians, divided by all those “traditional values” coalitions and “family values” councils that try to bully public schools into becoming worship houses, with morning prayers and science lessons from the book of Genesis? Then subtract selflessness, service, sacrifice, holiness and hope.

Do the math, and I bet you’ll draw the same conclusion the researchers did.