I mentioned that I was surprised that the avalanche of sexual harassment charges against powerful men in the film and news media industries had not spread to political figures such as sitting members of Congress. But it turns out that in the UK it has, with various MPs being accused and now the secretary of defense Michael Fallon has resigned.
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In the wake of the New York City attack, commentators have criticized Donald Trump for describing the US justice system as a ‘joke’ and a ‘laughingstock’ and initially saying that he wanted to send the driver of the truck Sayfullo Saipov to Guantanamo, though he later walked that back.
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Like many urban elites, I have little or no understanding of the people of central Appalachia, a rural mountainous region that spans southwestern Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and western Virginia. News media accounts (especially during election season which seems to be the only time we pay attention to that region), passing through the occasional town on the way to somewhere else, and seeing films like Deliverance can give a highly misleading picture of the people there as not only poverty-stricken and poorly educated, but even willfully obtuse in acting against their own interests, and being easily seduced by Donald Trump’s bogus promises to bring back coal jobs and rejuvenate the region.
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The killing of eight people and the injuring of eleven on the streets of New York City by a man driving a truck has once again shown that in an open society, there is no lack of soft targets that can be attacked by anybody at all. We have to ask ourselves what purpose such attacks on ordinary people serve. One is of course to create fear among the population. But that has no strategic benefit and indeed has negative blowback.
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The negative impact of plastics in our environment is worse than we thought. Earlier alarms had been sounded about plastics concentrating in large areas in oceans, though one must be cautious about how one describes it and calling them ‘giant garbage patches’ is misleading as discussed by the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s Carey Morishige.
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That is what Tom Tomorrow thinks.
There is a long and boring profile of former speaker John Boehner that will likely be of interest only to diehard political geeks who are interested in the minutiae of political maneuvering. But there is one interesting nugget about what happened when, as speaker, Boehner promised to get rid of ‘earmarks’, the practice by which money is allocated to fund the pet projects of congresspeople in their districts and are popularly seen as a means of bribing them for their votes and loyalty. This led to something that looks like it would be seen as too extreme even for the series House of Cards.
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David Dayen explains the complicated money-laundering schemes indulged in by Paul Manafort, former campaign chair for Donald Trump and one of the three people indicted today by special counsel Robert Mueller. What we are going to see in the days to come is increasing attention to the connections between corrupt US politicians, banks and businesspeople, foreign governments, and shady international organized crime figures.
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Using archival footage, Marshall Curry has produced a seven-minute documentary A Night at The Garden about a rally that was held in Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939 that drew 20,000 people. It was a highly disturbing event but even more extraordinary is how it has disappeared from public consciousness. I had never heard of it. It is better to simply watch the documentary and let it sink in than me trying to describe it.
In the wake of all the men who have been outed as sexual harassers and weak attempts at excusing their behavior by them and their apologists, Kate Harding sent out a tweet and that and the replies to it are well worth reading as beautiful examples of the power of role reversals to reveal hypocrisy.