You have to hand it to President Obama that he is a natural when it comes to appearing on TV. He seems to be perfectly relaxed and informal, and yet is able to avoid making the kind of gaffes that can occur when your guard is down. This video of him interacting with children who came to the White House on Halloween illustrates how he can goof around with children without looking awkward or ridiculous.
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In a new poll, people rated Donald Trump as more honest than Hillary Clinton by a margin of 46-38%. This is ridiculous but it just shows the power of Trump repeatedly referring to her as ‘crooked Hillary’ like he referred earlier to ‘Lying Ted’ Cruz, thus shifting attention away from his own repeated falsehoods.
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The British TV series available for streaming on Netflix is set in the near future and each episode features a new story with a different cast and deals with the impact of technology on people’s lives, especially miniaturized communication technology that does not yet exist but seems tantalizingly possible, such as tiny chips embedded in our brains that record every aspect of our lives and can be played back at will or software that, by accessing as much information that exists about a person, can re-create a replica that is indistinguishable from a person who died, or immersive virtual reality worlds that are indistinguishable from the physical one.
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The amount of money that is spent on US elections is ridiculous. Each major party will spend around the order of a billion dollars on presidential elections. The reasons for this are many. The fact that the date of the elections are fixed in advance means that a new campaign starts as soon as the earlier one ends, and even earlier, and more time correlates with more money. Another reason is that campaign finance laws are almost non-existent, thus enabling wealthy players to buy access and thus influence candidates via campaign contributions.
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Although the media is in a lather over the latest news about the FBI director James Comey’s letter that there have been new emails regarding Hillary Clinton, to be quite honest, I cannot see that there is anything there. After all, the emails are not to or from her. I do not expect this news to create a major shift in people’s decisions on how they will vote because the news is vague and the whole email story so old. It does seem that Comey seems to be too anxious to hold press conferences and put out statements on issues, contradictory to the usual protocols. I commented on this tendency back in July.
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Donald Trump has the habit of effusively praising anyone who supports him or says something nice about him. So when in the last debate, he spoke about meeting with “high representatives of India”, people scratched their heads wondering whom he might have been referring to, since there seemed to have been no meeting with any representatives of the government of India.
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The excellent radio program This American Life on their show today tried to understand how it is that the voters who identify as Republicans seem, in this election, to have ditched all their traditional concerns about small government, less regulations, and lower taxes and replaced it with an overwhelming concern about stopping the immigration of Mexicans and Muslims and how this change is threatening to split the party apart.
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When I was in Boston over the last few days, I was in a waiting room for about two hours and, as usual, they had a TV set on. I noticed that no one, neither the staff nor the visitors, was watching the TV and so I asked the person at the desk whether it could be turned off or the volume at least lowered so that I could read my book. I was seated as far from the TV as possible but it still distracted me. When the person tried to comply, it turned out that the volume setting was fixed.
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The boasts of sexual assault by Donald Trump has triggered a wave of many women who have said that it was not mere ‘locker room talk’ but that he actually carried out those actions. Trump’s defenders have suggested that the women are not credible because they did not make these charges public at the time the assaults occurred, though many did confide in friends and relatives.
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