Mass shootings are getting more and more incomprehensible

We have another mass shooting, killing seven and injuring 21 in Texas again, soon after another mass shooting in that state. But while the El Paso shooting was planned and deliberate (the shooter drove 600 miles to get to his targeted group of Hispanic people) this shooting seems to have been triggered by the most inconsequential of acts.

Soon after 3pm on Saturday a man was stopped by state troopers for failing to signal a turn. The man opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle then fled, hijacking a mail truck and shooting people at random.
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The latest suspect, described as a white male in his 30s, was chased and shot dead outside a cinema more than 10 miles from where he was pulled over.

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Review: The Family (2019)

This five-episode mini-series on Netflix is based on a book of the same name by reporter Jeff Sharlet. It is about a secretive group of evangelical Christian influencers know as ‘The Fellowship’ or ‘The Family’ that was originated by someone named Abraham Vereide (1886-1969) and whose mission was greatly advanced by Doug Coe (1928-2017).

Sharlet stumbled into this group as a young man just out of college. Coming from a family in which his mother was a Pentecostal and his father was a secular Jew, Sharlet was looking at various forms of religion when he was recruited by a friend who was in the Family. It had a strange cult-like quality where young men lived together and did menial jobs in the service of influential Washington politicians as a form of bonding. At some point Sharlet left the group and in 2008 wrote the book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power that exposed the working of the group.
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Destroying reputations on the Internet

In these days when we get so much of our information from the internet, we need to be sensitive to how much manipulation of it can occur. While some of this is done by individuals, this Intercept article from 2014 based on information contained in the trove of secret documents released by Edward Snowden shows that government agencies, in particular the GCHQ (the UK’s intelligence arm), resort to all manner of dirty tricks to destroy the reputations of people and disrupt groups that merely oppose government policies and actions, even if they have never been convicted of any crime nor had any connection to any terrorist activity. The ostensible mission of these government agencies is to monitor terrorist activities not legitimate political activism that happens to be against government policies.
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More examples of bias against Bernie Sanders in the Washington Post

I discussed in an earlier post how this newspaper’s ‘Fact Checker’ section showed an egregious example of deception in giving Bernie Sanders’s accurate statement about health care bankruptcies three Pinocchios. But that is not the only case. The Sanders campaign has demanded the retraction of that statement plus two other false assertions made by it.
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Film review: The Unknown Known (2013)

I recently watched this documentary that features Donald Rumsfeld, who served as secretary of defense in the administration of George W. Bush from 2001 to 2006, and thus oversaw the origins of two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that created massive destruction in those countries and killed and injured and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The film was produced and directed by documentarian Errol Morris who did a similar documentary called The Fog of War (2003) about Robert McNamara who was secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and oversaw the massive escalation of the Vietnam war.
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A gross miscarriage of justice

It is well known that women have a very difficult time having their accusations of being sexually abused and even raped being taken seriously. We also know that police officers who commit abuses of any kind are very unlikely to suffer any serious consequences even for the most egregious actions. Natasha Lennard writes about the predictable outcome when both those conditions occur in a single case.
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The Washington Post‘s visible anti-Bernie bias

We know that the mainstream media, even so-called ‘liberal’ ones, tend to be strongly supportive of the status quo and of the interests of the political-business establishment and thus totally against the candidacies of progressives. And one of the ways to observe this bias in action is to note how differently it scrutinizes the statements of candidates it prefers to those it dislikes, setting a low bar for truthfulness for the former and a high bar for the latter.
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The dark side of cruises

People seem to like going on cruises since it is apparently a rapidly growing business, despite some recent horror stories of norovirus outbreaks on the boats. From what I can tell from the advertisements, these things are a floating combination of hotels and amusement parks. But in the latest episode of his show Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj says that underneath all the gaiety and laughter, the business model of these companies is based on ruthless exploitation of labor, dumping of waste into the environment, and a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions, combined with careful avoidance of any responsibility for anything that might go wrong on board, including sexual assault.

Given my slightly introverted nature, I think I would not find cruises enjoyable. Being constantly surrounded by large numbers of people who are determined to have a good time 24/7 and get the maximum benefit from the limited time on board would wear me out pretty quickly. I would likely retreat to my cabin for long periods of time, which would defeat the purpose of going on a cruise.

Boris Johnson is going to prorogue parliament

In his drive to prevent the UK parliament from blocking his attempts to take the UK out of the EU even with no deal, prime minister Boris Johnson has formally asked the Queen to prorogue (i.e., suspend) parliament for five weeks from mid-September. As a constitutional monarch, she had to acquiesce to his ‘request’, disappointing those who fantasized that she might instead ask the royal footman to throw him out on his ear.
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