It’s good to be the king or, failing that, rich

Some may recall a post of mine from back in August that dealt with how the extremely wealthy people living along a private street known as Presidio Terrace in San Francisco failed to pay the appropriate taxes for it and the city went ahead and sold the street at auction to a couple of investors who planned to charge the residents for parking. Naturally, this caused an outrage.
[Read more…]

Can there be redemption for those who have behaved badly?

I believe that people can redeem themselves, that just because they have done something wrong at some point in their lives does not mean that they are beyond the pale and permanently unworthy of our regard and even friendship at some later point in their lives. Hence I try not to be too judgmental about others. Part of this is admittedly self-interest. In my own past, I have believed, said, and taken stands on issues such as race, gender, sexuality, and a whole host of other political and social issues that I now deeply regret and am ashamed of. All I can say in mitigation is that I did not know any better then. I like to think that over time I have grown, matured, and perhaps even become enlightened. I would hate to be thought of now as the person that I was then.
[Read more…]

Sleazy sting artists get badly bitten

Project Veritas and its head James O’Keefe are a sleazy right wing outfit whose mode of operation is to interview people in any organization that does not serve their agenda and then misleadingly edit their footage to make it appear that the organization is deceitful and unlawful. They recently tried to come to the aid of Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused by many women of pursuing them when they were teenagers, and engaging in sexual contact with a girl when she was just 14.
[Read more…]

The M-word

In my review of the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, I wanted to discuss one weakness and that was the role played by Peter Dinklage but I faced the quandary of how to describe him without being offensive. I was not sure if the word ‘dwarf’ was acceptable. I had read somewhere that the term ‘Little People’ was preferred by members of the community but it seemed a little awkward (to my ears at least) but I was not sure if it had become the exclusively preferred term.
[Read more…]

The assault on American higher education

If you have been following news about things happening on US university campuses, you might have got the impression that they are hotbeds of indoctrination and intolerance, where radical students have taken them over and are imposing a rigid orthodoxy in speech and thought. This is an image that is being widely promoted by the right-wing as part of their assault on higher education, as this article illustrates.
[Read more…]

Hipster racism

I tend to skip any news story that has the word ‘hipster’ in the title, thinking that it will deal with some trivial and ephemeral social trend that I am not part of nor wish to be part of and that will have disappeared by the time I learn what it is by the process of news osmosis. What I basically knew about the word ‘hipster’ was that it was used pejoratively against people who tried to differentiate themselves from their peers by adopting some lifestyle that was supposedly ironic and avant garde but could just as easily be described as pretentious.
[Read more…]

How many wrongs will it take?

Russia, Russia gate, overthrow, regime change, propaganda, coup d’état, 2016 presidential election, hiking, interference, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, 81 wrongs, Cold War, covert, CIA

As cartoonist Ted Rall says: “The United States tried to overthrow or directly interfere in the elections of at least 80 countries throughout the Cold War alone. How exactly is it in a position to complain if it turns out to be true that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election?”