Things have not been going well for the grandiosely titled ‘People’s Convoy’ of trucks that was supposed to bring life to a halt in the nation’s capital. They first drove all across the country to Washington DC to protest vaccine mandates or something and then hung around for a week or so at an abandoned racetrack about 50 miles north of the city. After that non-event, some of them then returned to California and decided to protest near the Oakland home of a California state assemblywoman.

But they got a hostile reception from the neighbors who were incensed at big trucks clogging up their quiet and narrow residential streets with their loud air horns blaring and told the truckers to get the hell out of there. As the trucks were leaving, they got stuck in traffic near a Safeway grocery store and a large number of people, many of them young, started purchasing eggs from the store and pelting the trucks, forcing them to flee.
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The twentieth century saw the decline of the colonial empires that had controlled much of the world over the previous centuries. Especially following the end of the Second World War, the rise of independence movements led to the colonial powers being forced to hand over power to the people of the countries they once ruled. When we look at the history of colonial rule, somehow British rule has escaped much of the harsh censure that was leveled at the other powers, with some even going to the extent of viewing the British rule as benign, with them largely peacefully handing overpower. They even like to portray themselves as a civilizing influence, brining modernity to backward nations.

That is a myth. What distinguished British colonial rule from that of the others was the great effort that they put into suppressing the brutality and cruelty of their rule by destroying and suppressing all the records of their actions and using their propaganda apparatus to create a mythical story that puts them in a very favorable light, at least in the western world. As they prepared to leave the countries, they put into action a systematic effort to either destroy evidence of their brutal rule or ship the rest of the documents to a tightly guarded facility in the UK so that almost no one even knew the existence of them.

The mask began to be ripped off in the last two decades or so as scholars discovered the existence of these documents and forced the government to reveal at least some of them. They showed how awful British colonial rule was. Some of the pioneering work in this discovery of hidden history was by Caroline Elkins who, while doing field work in Kenya as a student, stumbled across the story of the Mau Mau nationalist movement and rebellion and how it had been misleadingly portrayed by the British. [Read more…]

Although I dislike Donald Trump intensely because of his many awful personal qualities and the policies he pursues (I really do not think I need to list all of them), one thing that has impressed me is his health. He is almost 76 years old, an age when the natural aging process reveals itself in the form of all manner of ailments. And yet, he seems to not have any serious health problems (at least as far as we know) and seems to be able to speak for well over an hour at his rallies. That requires some stamina.

This is surprising since he has all the hallmarks of a heart attack waiting to happen, since he eats junk food, is overweight, and seemingly does not exercise. He does have a florid complexion, but whether that is due to high blood pressure or the tanning and bronzing that he reportedly undergoes in his vanity is hard to say. The only good thing he does is get a lot of fresh air by being outdoors a lot playing golf, even though he rides around in a golf cart, thus foregoing even that little opportunity to walk and stretch his muscles. However he does not drink or smoke, which is a big plus.
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