Yet another day of drama over Brexit

The UK parliament returned to session today with prime minister Boris Johnson facing sharp questioning over what he is doing with Brexit. One former Conservative cabinet minister has crossed over to the Liberal Democrats, meaning that Johnson has lost his slim one-vote majority, though given the fluidity of the shifting alliances, whether that means anything significant is not clear. Complicating matters is that there are some people in the opposition who are not opposed to a no-deal Brexit while there are other Conservative MPs who say they are opposed to it, making the situation hard to read. Adding to the chaos is that Johnson says he is making progress on Brexit talks while EU leaders say that the talks are going nowhere. There is also confusion on whether Johnson will call for a general election on October 14, before the Brexit deadline of October 31. An election would be a gamble for all sides, since it is hard to read the mood of the electorate on this issue.
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The 1619 Project on the legacy of slavery

When the modern history of the USA is told, it often begins with ships arriving here, such as Christopher Columbus in 1492 or settlers arriving in Jamestown in 1607 or the Pilgrims arriving at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Each of those arrivals is used as a symbolic marker, a portent of future events. But there is one major arrival that has been ignored. It is the arrival in August 1619 of the first enslaved peoples, when 20 to 30 of them (the exact number is unknown) were brought ashore. Thus began the history of slavery in what became the USA. This marked the beginning of events that have had a lasting impact on America down through the ages and its legacy manifests itself everywhere today if one only knows how and where to look.
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How dare he!

This headline from the right-wing site Breitbart was amusing, giving prominence to something that should be taken for granted.

The nerve of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro! Surely he should know that US troops have the right to enter any country at any time and for any (or no) reason and that the only appropriate response is to greet them as liberators and welcome them with flowers? This is why anyone who attacks American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq is automatically branded a ‘terrorist’ and thus subject to the harshest treatment.

Now on the other hand, if any foreign troops were to invade the US, …

Why people stick with the status quo and how to change their minds

In their book Merchants of Doubt that I reviewed very favorably here, authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway make the case that those people and business interests that oppose the scientific consensus that goes against their business and ideological interests (like the perils of smoking tobacco, second-hand smoke, acid-rain, the ozone hole, and climate change) base their opposition strategy on exploiting the way people make decisions.
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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.
…

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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