Understanding the European Union election results

The European Union elections have been released and it looks like the fears of an overwhelming victory by the Euroskeptics did not materialize. They did do better than they did in the 2014 election but did not gain enough seats to seriously challenge the existence of the union. As far as I can tell about how elections to the EU parliament work, the elections for seats are held in each country and contested by parties in those countries, but then those elected members form umbrella parties with like-minded members from other countries. The Guardian provides a graphic of the provisional results for each of the 10 umbrella parties in the 750-seat assembly.

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Reactionary Alabama

The state of Alabama has been in the news as one of the wave of states passing highly restrictive laws on abortion, including a recent one that bans all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, so early that many women might not even know that they are pregnant. The only exception being the woman’s life being in serious danger, and not even for rape or incest. Doctors who perform abortions can be imprisoned for up to 99 years. Alabama already has only three clinics in the state where women can get abortions.
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Pardoning war criminals

The US penchant for absolving those in the military who murder foreigners is once again on full display. It begins with the US government hardly ever prosecuting those who commit such crimes and then even on the few occasions when the crime is so egregious that someone is tried and convicted (usually on lesser charges than they deserved), the punishment is often very lenient. But even that is considered too much and presidents often intervene to pardon or commute the sentences. A famous example is how the officers of the troops responsible for the murders of an entire village of Vietnamese people in My Lai were given mere slaps on the wrist.
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Coroners in the US

I like watching British police procedurals and a key person in those stories is the forensic pathologist who determines the cause of death and other particulars that help the investigators solve the crimes. These people are portrayed as highly trained, highly skilled medical professionals. I had assumed that in the US, the people who did similar work were similarly trained. Silly me. You would think that by now I would know better.
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Pete Buttigieg at the Fox News Town Hall

He spoke about why the Trump show is captivating but also why we need to change the channel because that show is taking our attention away from the unpopular positions of Trump and the Republicans.

He then addressed the question of whether Democratic candidates should appear on the Fox News network and makes pretty much the same point that I made in an earlier post.

What Game of Thrones says about America today

As I have said many times before, I had no interest in watching Game of Thrones but have been fascinated by it as a cultural phenomenon that garnered a huge amount of media attention. So I was interested in this article by Jon Schwarz titled THE RISE OF GAME OF THRONES WAS PART OF THE FALL OF AMERICA because he is enough of a fan that he watched the entire series and yet can provide a dispassionate analysis about what the show’s popularity says about its audience, by which I mean all of us, not just those who actually watched the show.
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Degree of passion may motivate EU election results

The UK election to the European parliament on Thursday, May 23 is being viewed as a gauge to determine the current sentiment on Brexit. But interpreting the results is going to be problematic since the whole process is a shambles. The latest is that the talks between the Conservative and Labour parties in the hope of arriving at deal they can agree on have broken down. Not that there was much hope of success anyway. Given that neither party speaks with a unified voice on this highly divisive issue, a consensus solution emerging would have been nothing short of a miracle.
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Sex Ed for legislators

We have seen a spate of highly restrictive anti-choice laws passed by mostly male legislators who do not seem to understand basic facts about pregnancy. So Samantha Bee provides some lessons.

Of course, these legislators don’t give a damn about facts. They want to control women’s bodies (and by extension women in general) and hate the idea of people having sex at all.

Liberals sign on to supporting regime change

The obsession of liberals and the Democratic party establishment with this idea that Russia influenced the last US elections sufficiently to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency has led them down a rabbit hole to old Cold War attitudes, in which they see Russia as an arch-enemy that must be combated everywhere. This has led them to supporting regime change in those countries such as Venezuela and Syria that have support from Russia, despite the disastrous effects of previous regime change efforts in Iraq and Libya.
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