Transgender and third gender in Pakistan

I have been harshly critical in the past about Pakistan’s slide into religious intolerance, with its Muslim fundamentalist zealots killing and otherwise threatening non-Muslims under the cover of the state’s odious blasphemy laws. The prohibitions, discrimination, and harassment campaigns against the LGBT community in the Islamic world are also well documented. But I heard an encouraging story about a Pakistan TV station having its first transgender news anchor. Maavia Malik is a former model and her selection has not caused the kind of uproar one might have expected in a conservative Muslim country but was instead greeted with an overwhelmingly positive response.
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These students keep impressing me more and more

Siblings Lauren and David Hogg, both students at the Parkland high school where 17 students were killed, were on CNN after the rally being interviewed by Alyson Camerota. Just watch the interview and you will be impressed by how skillfully they countered Camerota’s repeated suggestions that they tone down their rhetoric against politicians and the NRA so that we can all ‘come together’ to solve the issue, the bogus ‘kumbaya’ bipartisanship rubbish that mainstream media love to promote as a means of maintaining the status quo. She was quite condescending in the way she spoke to the Hoggs, treating them as if they were naïve about political realities. They were having none of it and quickly shot down her suggestions using cogent arguments. It should perhaps be noted that Camerota used to work for Fox News before shifting over to CNN.
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I got suckered yet again into watching TV, dammit!

I have been vaguely following the Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) and Donald Trump story as just one more tawdry detail about the political world. I have a TV but no cable and almost never watch any broadcast programs mainly because the constant interruptions for commercials drive me crazy. So it takes considerable prodding for me to watch a program. The much-hyped 60 Minutes interview of Clifford was on last night and I had heard so much about it being explosive that I decided to check it out. The program was due to start at 7:00pm but the preceding basketball game went into overtime so it did not get going until after 7:30, so I got to watch a huge number of commercials.
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How Cambridge Analytica got people’s Facebook information

Much attention has been focused on how the British firm Cambridge Analytica used various forms of dirty tricks to try and influence elections in various countries. The level of success achieved by them is hard to gauge since, unlike with advertisements aimed at selling products where there is a measurable outcome, electoral success is harder to gauge since we don’t know how individuals actually voted and also so many factors go into how people vote that drawing a straight line from cause to effect is hard. Pointing to the fact that winners in some close elections, like Donald Trump in the US and Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya, were clients of CA as evidence of their effectiveness is interesting but we don’t know how many of their other clients lost.
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That was a powerful rally

I kept the livestream of the March For Our Lives in the background as I worked on my computer today and I must say that I extremely impressed by what I saw and heard. The speakers kept their speeches short but strong and passionate under the slogans of ‘Never Again’ and ‘Enough is Enough’. There were some popular singers mixed with the speakers but since I am an old fogey who is completely out of touch with pop culture, I could not identify them. But the fact that the crowd seemed to know the words to their songs and sang along with them suggested to me that they were big names in the music world.
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From evolution wars to climate wars in the classroom

The war over teaching evolution in the classroom, that was such a huge issue in the last century and even prompted me to write a book about it, seems to have subsided after the latest incarnation known as intelligence design getting severely smacked down in a Pennsylvania courtroom in 2005. But Katie Worth writes that now there is a new war in the classroom, this time involving climate change. Wealthy people who oppose any action to combat climate change, like the Koch brothers and the Heartland Institute, are trying to influence teachers in schools by mailing them free packets of misinformation. But once the pro-science community got wind of this move, they fought back with mailings of their own, a project headed by the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI).
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Reports on March For Our Lives [UPDATED with new live video link]

UPDATE: Here is a link to live coverage of the event.

I love the way the students are ridiculing the ‘thoughts and prayers’ escape route (and its putative substitute ‘prayers and condolences’) favored by politicians to not take action or even debate the issue.

About 500,000 people are expected to attend the rally to end gun violence in Washington, DC along with satellite rallies around the country. Pro-gun counter-demonstrations are also expected at various places. In DC it is being sponsored by the NRA and will be held, tellingly, at the Trump hotel. Donald Trump has decided that it is perhaps safer to be away from DC today and has gone to Florida presumably to play golf because that is more important to him that discussing what to do about gun violence with articulate and determined high school students.
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