We are nowadays awash with news stories based on dubious and/or anonymous sourcing. The goal of such stories seem to be to fire up those who want to believe the stories because it supports their preconceptions. While I understand the power of confirmation bias, I am surprised that some people are so willing to believe things that are so obviously outrageous.
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The administration of Donald Trump probably has the most wealth of any administration in US history. It is also the administration that has the most open contempt for ethics and thus one can expect that many of them will have no compunction about using their offices to enrich themselves by making decisions that are advantageous to their private interests. This was also likely true for many members of previous administrations but the Trump cohort will be different in that they think they are entitled to do so. After all, the head of this corrupt organization, Trump himself, clearly sees being president as a way to advance his business interests.
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Forget his difficulties with getting funding for his beloved wall. Forget his failure to repeal Obamacare. Forget the fact that he has had to reverse himself and commit to an indefinite war in Afghanistan. What Donald Trump really, really cares about is that he be able to command large crowds of adoring fans at will to stoke his ego that people love him, they really, really love him. This is the main reason that he is having campaign rallies almost from the time he took office where he can regale his followers with an imaginary reality. He even bragged about the size of the crowd that came when he visited the areas stricken by Hurricane Harvey.
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The city of Cleveland has been reeling from high profile cases of the use of excessive force. Today comes news of the death of a young man in police custody in the neighboring city of Akron that is troubling to say the least, because the official report of the events is so astounding.
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I recently watched the 2016 British TV documentary Exposure. It deals with the horrendous murders of atheists and other secularists in Bangladesh and elsewhere by religious fanatics in the Muslim world and how that hate has spilled over to the threats faced by Muslim apostates in the UK. You can see the full 47-minute video online.
Back in 1983, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case Marsh v. Chambers that the practice of ceremonial opening prayers of the Nebraska state legislature was constitutional. In his strong and cogently argued dissent, justice William Brennan warned that allowing any ceremonial prayer at all, whatever the constraints imposed, would result in the Supreme Court getting involved in endless disputations about what kind of prayer and settings should be allowable and what should be disallowed.
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In his highly successful old show The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert adopted the persona of a right wing TV blowhard modeled on Bill O’Reilly. His departure to host a more traditional late night TV talk show has created a vacuum in that niche and now another Daily Show alum Jordan Klepper has moved to fill it, modeling himself on an even more extreme character like Alex Jones. He is going to face the challenge of being constantly compared to Colbert but Klepper has good comedy chops and should be able to withstand that scrutiny.
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August 22 was to be the first day in a new school for Palestinian children who had previously had to walk a long distance to their old school, itself an overcrowded one in a converted car garage. But the night before opening day, as part of its ongoing US-supported efforts to make life hell for the Palestinians it rules over in its apartheid state, Israeli forces destroyed the children’s school so that when the children turned up, there was nothing there.
Israeli military jeeps came barreling down towards Jubbet al-Dhib’s first and only primary school late Tuesday night, terrifying locals who had been finishing preparations for the school’s grand opening set for the next morning. Soldiers shot tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets as they cleared the way for bulldozers and flatbed trucks brought in to take the school.
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ExxonMobil is under threat of litigation by the attorneys general of several states that they “violated, variously, racketeering, consumer protection, or investor protection statutes through their communications regarding anthropogenic global warming (AGW)”, as stated by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes in their paper Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014) that appeared in the August 23, 2017 issue of Environmental Research Letters (vol. 12 (2017) 084019). Supran and Oreskes show that the internal ExxonMobil documents and research supported and done by ExxonMobil largely supported the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change while their public stance was largely at odds with it.
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Ryan Zinke serves in Donald Trump’s cabinet as Secretary of the Interior. His daughter Jennifer Detlefsen is a navy veteran and in an Instagram post that purportedly comes from her, she had some choice words for Trump’s decision to bar transgender people from enlisting in the military.
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