What makes people explode with rage over trivialities?

I have written before about the increasing number of incidents on planes where passengers have become unruly and even attacked flight attendants, who have now started taking self–defense classes. About 4,000 people have been banned from flying just within the past year because of their bad behavior, sometimes mask-related.

But I was surprised at the level of aggression shown by one woman who had unbuckled her seat belt and let down her tray while the plane was still taxiing to the gate, and was so infuriated by being told to rectify those measures that she jumped up and punched the flight attendant, so hard that she knocked out two teeth and bloodied her face so that it later required four stitches. Why would you get so angry over such a trivial matter?
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Showdown at the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch

In an effort to get away from the trans haters and their constant persecution, a group of trans people went out to a remote part of Colorado to start the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, to grow alpacas and other animals and to provide a safe haven for other trans and non-binary folk. They hope that theirs will be the first of many across the country. But when word got out to the local townspeople about who had moved there, some of them tried to force them away.

Samantha Bee’s show had a report on what went down.

To my mind, alpacas look like a creation of the Star Wars special effects team.

Portrait of a careerist

Samantha Power, who was the US ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama administrations and is currently the head of the Agency for International Development, is a good example of how someone starts out wanting to do good and then ambition takes over and corrupts all the ideals, leaving a residue of cynicism and hypocrisy, something that happened to Macbeth as well. (Incidentally the Agency for International Development has been accused of often acting as a front for the CIA.)

Jon Schwarz writes that her recent statement about Sudan joining the International Criminal Court demonstrates her cynicism.


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Mikis Theodorakis (1925-2021)

The Greek composer and left wing political activist who fought against his country’s military dictatorship has died at the age of 96.

The renowned Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, who scored the 1964 classic film Zorba the Greek and was an icon of resistance to the former military junta, has died in Athens, aged 96.

A prolific talent and political maverick, Theodorakis was revered in his home country for his inspirational music and defiance during the junta that ruled from 1967 to 1974.

After the news of his death on Thursday, the Greek flag was flown at half mast at the Acropolis while parliament observed a minute’s silence.

But Theodorakis was perhaps best-known around the world for his film title scores, which also included Z in 1969 and Serpico in 1973. His work ranged from operas to choral music and popular songs, providing a soundtrack to the life of his country.

This is the memorable ending from the film Zorba the Greek where an uptight Englishman played by Alan Bates asks freewheeling Zorba, played by Anthony Quinn, to teach him the traditional sirtaki dance. (Quinn was actually a Mexican-American, one of the earliest Latinos to gain prominence in American films, and was active in civil rights and social movements.)

Sacklers look likely to get the bankruptcy ruling they sought

Just as I feared, a bankruptcy judge has approved the deal that the odious Sackler family sought that would enable them to preserve and even increase the ill-gotten fortunes that they amassed from aggressively pushing their addictive pain-killers on the public, resulting in massive addiction levels and deaths from overdoses.

A US federal bankruptcy judge on Wednesday conditionally approved a sweeping, potentially $10bn plan submitted by the OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma to settle a mountain of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis that has killed a half-million Americans over the past two decades.

Under the settlement reached with creditors including individual victims and thousands of state and local governments, the Sackler family will give up ownership of the company and contribute $4.5bn but will be freed from any future lawsuits over opioids.
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Let’s take a moment to savor a global victory

The news can be depressing so I thought we could use a bit of good cheer. The United Nations announced that the world has finally eliminated the use of leaded gasoline. Algeria was the last country to do so in July.

When in 1921 engineers at General Motors discovered that adding lead to gasoline improved engine performance, it was already known that lead was toxic but they went ahead with it anyway, arguing that small amounts were not harmful. That was wrong. It became increasingly realized that the copious amounts of lead that were being released into the atmosphere was finding its way into people, leading to all manner of problems, including lower IQ and a propensity for violence. (I wrote about this back in 2014.)
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More civilians killed in Afghanistan

Whenever the US suffers a military setback, it reacts the same way. It lashes out in revenge, usually by bombing the hell out of some people in an effort to show that it is still powerful and to distract attention from its failures. While the US military always says that it aimed at and hit military targets, more often than not innocent people are among the victims of its actions. This seems to be the case with Joe Biden’s bombing of targets in response to the bombing near the Kabul airport that killed over a hundred people. The US military’s initial reports, as usual, claim that mostly militants were hit and that any civilian casualties, if any, were inadvertent or even the fault of the targets.
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Corollary of Parkinson’s Law for sociopaths

The Minnesota Republican party is in shambles after multiple complaints that its chair Jennifer Carnahan created and oversaw a highly toxic environment of casual racism and sexism at all levels of the organization that resulted in many people leaving in disgust.

In conversations with seven current and former staffers of the Minnesota Republican Party, most of them women who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, all shared similar experiences of racism and sexual harassment or assault by high-level employees of the state organization. 

Likewise, all outlined a pattern of reprisal from Carnahan targeting anyone who spoke out about these and other issues within the organization, subjecting employees and even some activists affiliated with the party to repeated verbal abuse.
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Faking a vaccination card is a federal offense

I had been curious about the legal consequences of issuing and using fake covid-19 vaccination cards. I had assumed that it would be at most a violation of state laws and would depend upon what the individual states had decided. But it turns out that it is a federal violation and can thus be prosecuted anywhere in the country. This is because the Centers for Disease Control is a federal agency and the CDC logo is on the cards.
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Democrats also practice election shenanigans

I recently wrote about how a socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary to be the party’s nominee to be mayor of the city of Buffalo and, since the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, would almost certainly be elected mayor at the general election in November. So how did the party establishment that had opposed her react? Not well. They are now trying to eliminate the position of mayor.
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