Watching 'The Crown' With the QE2 Falling Apart In Dubai & John Boehner's Tears Long Gone From Trumpworld

Watching 'The Crown' With the QE2 Falling Apart In Dubai & John Boehner's Tears Long Gone From Trumpworld

Could we agree that any woman trying to lead the free world, who cried in prime time, would be run out of Dodge? I finally tuned into the Netflix series 'The Crown', and I assure you that the young queen Elizabeth will be steely and duty-driven -- keeping it together when her father dies. And that is exactly how the second episode ends, with Elizabeth burying her adoring love and grief for her dead father deep in her heart, now masked by royal obligations to her public and the entire British Empire.

Watching 'The Crown' knowing that the electoral college voted on Monday for Donald Trump as America's next president, I can't help thinking about Republican John Boehner's arrival as Speaker of the House.  He wept through his 2010 60 Minutes interview, a reality that did not amuse me in the least, given the Republican agenda for America. In fact, those tears are typically called a charade when a damsel in distress turns on the floodgates.

Indeed when I wrote about Boehner's intentions to lead the charge against abortion and contraception rights in America, it was after after watching a chilling meeting with his chief of staff Mick Krieger accepting one of those tiny plastic babies in perfect form meant to represent a six-week old embryo. In reality, those cells and molecules are a blob about the size of a pomegranate seed, and I don't mean to be disrespectful in any way. But it's another example of post-factual information suggesting that these perfectly formed cereal box creatures (I am not making this up. Republicans put them in cereal and candy boxes at state fairs) are in any way representative of the actual pregnancy process.  To me the meeting signalled the hell that poor women in America would go through as Republicans ripped away not only abortion rights but also access to contraception and general health care for women living all over America in impoverished communities. There is no satisfaction in saying that my instincts were correct.

Melinda Gates Takes The Lead Worldwide In Delivering Birth Control To Poor Women

Melinda and Bill Gates on first trip to Africa in 1993.

The commitment of the Gates Foundation to gender equity globally will surely take another uptick with the upcoming probability that the Trump administration will shut down all funding for Planned Parenthood internationally and in the US. The first order of the incoming Obama administration was to reverse the Bush administration's commitment that no taxpayer dollars fund contraception projects around the world. And Hillary Clinton as Secy of State created a new position, the Office of Global Women's Issues, to prioritize the drive for gender equality worldwide.

The strategic thinking, fact-based female half of the world's largest foundation knows: "“You empower a woman and you change the world. We know that if a woman is economically empowered inside her family, all kinds of magical things happen.”

In 2012, when the Gates Foundation announced its support of a $4.3 billion public-private partnership designed to give 120 million women in the world’s poorest countries voluntary access to contraceptives by 2020, Melinda chose multiple international public stages, ranging from a TED talk to the London Summit on Family Planning, with the goal of underlining her unyielding commitment to the issue of birth control. Her decision put the devoted Catholic at odds with her church, and she has never looked back.  “We have 220 million women asking us for contraceptives, and we’re not delivering them,” Gates says. “Because of the political controversy, we backed away from the issue as a world. And yet women are dying in childbirth because they have child after child after child, and their children are dying because they’re coming too quickly.”

Women Artists Score Big In Virtual Reality, Scoring Big In Male-Dominated Tech Space

A mere tech child or not, virtual reality is expected to be a $150 billion industry by 2020. In Virtual Reality, Women Run the World writes New York Magazine . Silicon Valley and gaming Internet culture in general are known for their hard-ass mentality about women in their midst. Because virtual reality is truly an original opportunity for creators, women are -- for once -- operating in a relatively level playing field. There is “no formalized industry, and therefore no industry hierarchy, making it particularly welcoming to outsiders and newcomers,” explains Julia Kaganskiy, director of the New Museum’s New Inc. incubator. “Effectively everyone is a newcomer, and there are virtually no insiders.”

Women populate VR panels, conferences, support groups, and mentor relationships in significant numbers. Four of the 11 virtual-reality projects in the New York Film Festival’s Convergence division, a creative combo of VR and immersive storytelling, were created by women. and Convergence programmer Matt Bolish, a Convergence programmer, says in the five years of the program, “women have not only been at the forefront as creators, but as producers, writers, and financiers."

Women made a strong showing at the New Frontier VR exhibition at Sundance this past January. Helping celebrate the 10th anniversary of the program,  40% or a record 13 of the 32 lead artists on VR projects were women. “This is really a powerful medium and we have to make sure we do better this time,” says Kamal Sinclair, who directs the New Frontier Labs program. “We saw how women dropped out of computer science in the early ’80s. They were there in the beginning. How do we make sure we learn from those missteps?”