The need to remember when it is not about us

I recently attended an excellent talk organized by the Center of Inquiry of Northeast Ohio. It was by Mandisa Thomas, the founder of Black Nonbelievers, and she provided a concise history of the troubled relationship between the black community and Christianity. After being forced to adopt Christianity while they were enslaved, the church then became a focal point of black life after Emancipation and Reconstruction, providing leadership and refuge during the era of Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle.
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The convoluted tale of Russian hacking

I have been sort-of following the story about possible Russian interference in the US election. I say ‘sort-of’ because it seems to me that the ratio of actual facts to elaborate hypothesizing is tiny. Each day seems to bring with it some new allegation based on anonymous sources that gets people worked up into a frenzy. As I see it, many possible scenarios are being merged into one big mess. Here are the various possibilities as I see them, going from the most serious to the least:
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Another day, another hypocrisy

Egypt’s president, the brutal general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is currently in the US and receiving a warm welcome from Donald Trump. This is not surprising but that Trump is a ghastly president should not result in us viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. But some media are doing just that, suggesting that this visit shows how different he is from his predecessor. But the main distinction between Trump and Obama is that the latter, like many Democrats, maintained a façade of keeping a distance while actually supporting el-Sisi away from the cameras.
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My predictions about Obama

While searching for an old post, I came across two other old posts from back in January 2009 on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, where I predicted what we could expect from him during his term in office. I do not have the best record in making political predictions, to put it mildly, but in reading over them now, I seem to have been pretty accurate at least on the domestic front.
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A novel lawsuit involving climate change

The difficulty with the climate change problem is that it is a long-term one and thus policy makers, who tend to be older people, may not view it with the same sense of urgency since the most adverse consequences will occur after they are dead. It is young people who will pay the price for my generation’s inaction. Hence I was intrigued by this court ruling that I missed when it was handed down on November 10th of last year. It should have got much wider publicity than it did.
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The rapid rise in US punditry of Louise Mensch

I was not aware of who Louise Mensch was until commenter EigenSprocketUK pointed out that she was one of the dubious people that Bill Maher had given a platform to, and gave some background on her right-wing past. I then came across this article by Adam Johnson that says that this former UK Conservative member of parliament seems to be someone who flings around all manner of bizarre theories but that she seems to be riding the wave of the current anti-Russian zeitgeist in US liberal circles that is willing to overlook her generally reactionary views because she is saying something they like.
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So that’s why we have global warming!

Donald Trump has moved to reverse the measures taken by Obama administration to try and mitigate the climate change problem.

President Trump on Tuesday took the most significant step yet in obliterating his predecessor’s environmental record, instructing federal regulators to rewrite key rules curbing U.S. carbon emissions.

The sweeping executive order — which the president signed with great fanfare in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Map Room — also seeks to lift a moratorium on federal coal leasing and remove the requirement that federal officials consider the impact of climate change when making decisions.

The order sends an unmistakable signal that just as President Barack Obama sought to weave climate considerations into every aspect of the federal government, Trump is hoping to rip that approach out by its roots. The president did not utter the words “climate change” once, instead emphasizing that the move would spur job creation in the fossil fuel industry.
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Bye, bye, Rio Grande?

The more the ideas for the border wall with Mexico become concrete, the more problems that emerge. Donald Trump has asked Congress to allocate an initial amount of $1 billion to start work on just 62 miles of his 2,000 mile “big, beautiful wall” that will save the nation from the large bands of marauding undocumented Mexican rapists, murderers, drug dealers, and thieves that are currently roaming the streets of America terrorizing the lawful, god-fearing, peaceful residents.
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