Remember Uri Geller? The guy who claims to bend spoons with his mind but failed miserably when confronted with a test on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show where Carson has followed James Randi’s advice and prevented Geller from getting prior access to the props? But despite repeated exposure and humiliations, he keeps coming back, even telling gullible people that the CIA and Mossad use his powers.
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I have written many times before about how the US prison system imposes needlessly cruel conditions on those unfortunate enough to get caught in its clutches, The latest example of this is that whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been sent to prison again and is being kept in solitary confinement, a practice that most civilized nations consider barbaric and torture. The US government hates Manning with a passion because she exposed the murderous actions of its troops in Iraq.
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Thanks to commenter efogoto, I saw the second part of the Seth Meyers interview of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez where she explained what the Green New Deal is about and the difference between a resolution and a bill. She also explained a photo that she had posted on Twitter that showed lines of homeless people sitting in the hallways outside congressional hearing rooms. They were not there to plead their own case. Instead she said that lobbyists hire homeless people to keep places in line for them for congressional hearings so that lobbyists end up occupying all the seats in the hearing rooms, shutting out anyone else.
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I came across this article about Selene Saavedra Roman, a young woman who worked as a flight attendant for the American airline Mesa, who was detained for six weeks upon the return of her flight from Mexico because she is the child of undocumented immigrants. She is one of the many ‘Dreamers’, recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, that the Trump administration is cracking down on.
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I have reached such a level of cynicism that now when I hear someone described as a philanthropist, I immediately assume that they must be really awful people who have either got their money by practices that abuse and exploit people or that they are personally abusive to those immediately around them or most likely both, and they are now using their gifts to hide the ugly sources of their wealth or to buy silence. The burden of proof has shifted to them to show that they are not awful people.
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Among other things he asked her why her questioning of people in congressional hearings was so much better than that of so many other congresspeople. She replied that she has excellent staffers and since she pays all her staffers a living wage, two of them could give up the second jobs that they worked in order to make ends meet, and thus can devote all their energy to the work in Congress. She also gave examples of some of the ridiculous questions that Republicans, weaned on an exclusive diet of Fox News, ask of witnesses and also of her.
The fear that has been generated by school shootings in the US has prompted some districts to adopt measures that seem utterly wrongheaded. An elementary school in Indiana ran a drill to prepare for school shootings that involved teachers getting fired at with plastic pellets.
The incident, acknowledged in testimony this week before state lawmakers, was confirmed by two elementary school teachers in Monticello, who described an exercise in which teachers were asked by local law enforcement to kneel down against a classroom wall before being sprayed across their backs with plastic pellets without warning.
“They told us, ‘This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing,’” said one of the two teachers, both of whom asked IndyStar not to be identified out of concern for their jobs. “They shot all of us across our backs. I was hit four times.
“It hurt so bad.”
…One of the teachers said she was waiting in the library with her colleagues as the first small group of teachers was led into a classroom for one session.
…She said she had welts and one spot where the pellet broke her skin. It was scabbed over for several weeks.
What exactly was the lesson being sent by shooting at teachers? That bullets hurt? I think that everyone already knows that. If at all, shooting them with pellets might convey the wrong message that bullets are not lethal.
People go into the teaching profession to teach, not to be police deputies or the targets of a shooting exercise. I find it incredible that school districts agree to this type of ‘training’.
Matt Taibbi has a blistering expose of the massive boondoggle that is the US military budget. He says that it is deliberately designed to be obscure and prevent any proper auditing so that no one really knows how much money is being spent on what. They thumb their noses at any requests for accountability. There is not proper inventory of what they have and what they spend, allowing for massive amounts of fraud and waste.
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Just when you thought that Theresa May had fouled things up so much that she had reached rock bottom, she managed to sink even lower. Yesterday she gave a televised address to the nation where she said that she was not at fault for the current mess and put it all on the members of parliament. (You can see her four-minute speech here, though for some reason the video starts with 44 minutes of showing just the podium.) It is true that parliament has voted down her proposed deal twice but it was hardly a profile in courage to pass the buck like this. MPs were understandably furious, saying that they were already worried about their safety because of threats against them and for May to throw them under the bus was unconscionable.
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Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg is one of the Democratic candidates for president with lower name recognition. He was interviewed on the show Morning Joe about his candidacy and he was clear and articulate, despite facing vapid interviewers who asked the same old clichéd questions framed in trite ways. His responses were in general sharp, except for the one on North Korea that parroted the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment.
The interview is worth watching and he is worth watching because he is very young (just 37) and even if he does not win this time, is likely to be a significant factor in future elections. It is interesting that the fact that he is gay and married to another man is mentioned in passing and seen as just a trivial curiosity, except of course by the nutters who would never vote for a Democrat anyway. It shows how far we have come.