Communicating with the dead

I was talking with someone recently and during the conversation, she started telling me about the psychic she visits who had been very helpful in enabling her to communicate with her dead husband who had given her various kinds of advice. She said that the psychic has also told her many things that were accurate. She also said that on one occasion, she had seen her dead husband in the corner of the room and had made eye contact with him. She said that another person who was with her had also seen her husband.

I got to know this person just within the last couple of years, and while we are not close friends, she is very nice and I like her. While she was telling me this, I simply kept silent, even though I am dyed-in-the-wool materialist who does not believe in the existence of the afterlife and the spirit world. I am also aware that psychics and mediums use cold reading and other methods to give the impression of channeling the voices of dead people. And yet, my friend was so obviously happy with her experience that I did not have the heart to try and disabuse her of her belief.
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Now that’s optimism

I was struck by this news item.

The billionaire mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose conservative media empire spans the globe, is engaged to marry for the fifth time at the age of 92 years old, he told an interviewer in his own tabloid newspaper, the New York Post.

“I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love – but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy,” Murdoch said of his new fiancee, Ann Lesley Smith, 66, whose late husband was Chester Smith, a country singer as well as radio and TV executive.

The pair intend to get married in the summer. “We’re both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together,” Murdoch said. [My italics-MS]

Good luck with that!

The people who lied us into the Iraq war

The Iraq war began twenty years ago. Jon Schwarz says that those who lied us into that disastrous war that led to the destruction of Iraq and neighboring countries have not faced any consequences. His review includes George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, John Bolton, Condoleeza Rice, David Frum, David Brooks, Jeffrey Goldberg, Judith Miller, and Joe Biden.

THE U.S. AND its allies invaded Iraq 20 years ago in Operation Iraqi Freedom. President George W. Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer twice accidentally referred to it as Operation Iraqi Liberation, which was definitely not its official name and would have generated an unfortunate acronym.

The men and women who launched this catastrophic, criminal war have paid no price over the past two decades. On the contrary, they’ve been showered with promotions and cash. There are two ways to look at this.

One is that their job was to make the right decisions for America (politicians) and to tell the truth (journalists). This would mean that since then, the system has malfunctioned over and over again, accidentally promoting people who are blatantly incompetent failures.

Another way to look at it is that their job was to start a war that would extend the U.S. empire and be extremely profitable for the U.S. defense establishment and oil industry, with no regard for what’s best for America or telling the truth. This would mean that they were extremely competent, and the system has not been making hundreds of terrible mistakes, but rather has done exactly the right thing by promoting them.

You can read this and then decide for yourself which perspective makes the most sense.

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Exposing the closeted MAGAts in Congress

There is a lot of crazy people in the Republican party these days. But in terms of their visibility, most of the attention has been focused on people like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz. But there are others who share the same extreme views but have kept a much lower profile, trying to pass themselves off as more mainstream politicians. The group known as Indivisible has decided on a campaign to identify 18 of those crazies who managed to get elected in districts that Joe Biden won in 2020 and make their extreme views well-known to the electorate so that they have a better chance of being defeated in their swing districts at the next election. (I have coined the term ‘MAGAts’ (pronounced ‘maggots’) to label those who are loyal to the Trump MAGA cult. UPDATE: My claim to fame was premature as larpar points out in the comments. Oh well, back to the drawing board!)
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Robert Reich on why he loves Bernie Sanders

As longtime readers know, I supported Bernie Sanders in both of his runs for the presidency in 2016 and 2020. But I started supporting him much earlier ever since I became aware of how, in his long political career, he has been so consistent and passionate in his support for those who are less well off and his excoriation of the greedy wealthy people who make obscene amounts of money while using every trick in the book to avoid paying taxes that come anywhere close to being a reasonable fraction of their income. His relentless advocacy for a single-payer health insurance system and his attacks on high drug prices in the US, especially for essential ones like insulin, while the drug companies make huge profits and pay lavish salaries and bonuses to its top executives, has resulted in those issues becoming part of mainstream political discussions and undoubtedly has paved the way for the recent drops in the prices of insulin drugs. He has been a supporter of civil rights from the days when as a college student he was arrested in 1963 for taking part in demonstrations. He was found guilty for resisting arrest and fined.
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Galileo knew the answer to this question

It is not a silly question.

The reason is that when we are on a moving vehicle, we have the same velocity as the vehicle and when we jump up, the velocity in that direction does not change and we keep moving in the same direction, with only air resistance to slow us down.

Some time ago, an elementary school teacher in Cleveland asked me a variant of this question. She asked, since the Earth rotates on its axis, instead of flying to California which takes about five hours, we could not just go up in a balloon and wait for three hours so that the Earth’s rotation would bring California to us, saving us time and all that fuel.

Is there any limit to the silliness that the MAGA world will accept?

The ridiculous efforts to gin up right-wing outrage continues apace. The latest are the proposed regulations to make washing machines more energy and water efficient. Naturally, this has been seized on by right-wing media to suggest that our clothes will come out dirtier. This follows the general manufactured anger over similar developments like low-flush toilets. These are being used as examples of the ‘wokeness’ that is destroying the American way of life. They are even blaming the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on the management being more focused on being woke than financial matters. Yes, really.
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Can we stop ‘going forward’?


In reading and listening to news items, I find many people using the phrase ‘going forward’. It has become so overused that I find it grating to hear. It is often redundant but seems to be a more a rhetorical device, a filler, to end a sentence. For example, an analyst discussing financial news might say “It is not clear what the Fed will do going forward” when “It is not clear what the Fed will do” conveys the same sentiment. After all, ‘will do’ implies the future and besides, the Fed cannot go backwards anyway.

Other phrases that have become cliches are ‘perfect storm’ and ‘think outside the box’. Mercifully the latter seems to seems to be going out of vogue, probably because everyone is sick of hearing it so much and it is the kind of corporate jargon that managers like to inflict on their employees.

These are my personal pet peeves. My dislike of them is largely because of their overuse, not necessarily because there is something wrong with them. This article lists other ‘junk’ words and phrases that the author thinks people should try to avoid for various reasons.

Making new friends as an adult

Friendships are important to one’s well being, even for introverts like me, with quality being more important than quantity. It is easier to form friends when one is younger, during one’s school and college days, when one is thrown together with peers for extended periods of time with few responsibilities and relationships can develop organically. But once one starts working and settles into a nuclear family, it becomes more difficult to form new friends, since work place friendships can be tricky to handle. Also, when one starts working, one tends to move to different locations and lose not only the physical proximity that is conducive to maintaining existing friendships but one has fewer opportunities to make new friends.
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John Oliver on the abuse of TANF

The program known as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) “provides states and territories with flexibility in operating programs designed to help low-income families with children achieve economic self-sufficiency.  States use TANF to fund monthly cash assistance payments to low-income families with children, as well as a wide range of services.”

On the latest episode of his show, John Oliver describes how this program has been abused so that a lot of the money does not go to the people it was meant for.

Part of the problem is that although it is a federal program, rather than the federal government giving the money directly to needy people, conservatives lobbied to have the federal government give it in the form of block grants to states who were given guidelines on how the money could be spent. But the guidelines were loose enough to allow states to siphon money away to build things like a new college volleyball stadium. This is why proposals to convert federal programs into block grants to states should always be viewed with extreme caution.