Spirit photography

There is a very strong desire among some segments of the population to make contact with dead people. This desire has been exploited by charlatans, people who claim that (for a fee, of course) they can channel your loved ones. The methods used have varied over time. In the US, the rise in interest in communicating with the dead coincided with the Civil War that saw massive numbers of dead people that left their families devastated and seeking some form of comfort.

In the mid-19th century, in the early days of photography, the husband and wife team of William and Hannah Mumler created a sensation by taking photographs of people that showed the ghosts of their dead loved ones hovering around them, such as this one of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln standing behind his wife Mary Todd Lincoln.
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Lata Mangeshkar (1929-2022)

Many people in the west may not have heard the above name but this force of nature has died at the age of 92 after testing positive for covid-19. She was a giant in the Indian film and music world, as can be seen in the response to the news of her death.

Lata Mangeshkar, one of India’s most beloved singers, has been cremated in Mumbai with full state honours.

Mangeshkar, whose voice was the soundtrack to hundreds of Bollywood films, died aged 92 on Sunday.

PM Narendra Modi and stars of the entertainment industry attended the funeral, where large crowds gathered to pay their respects.

Her extraordinary career spanned more than half a century and she recorded thousands of songs in 36 languages.

Two days of national mourning will follow the funeral and the national flag will be flown at half-mast throughout the country.

She was what we used to call a ‘playback singer‘ in that it was her voice that was heard in the songs in films while the actor lip-synced the words. India is a nation of many languages but whatever the language of the film and whoever were the actors, it was a pretty safe bet that the singing of the female lead in the film was being done by Mangeshkar. Given that so many Indian films feature multiple songs, she was everywhere, recording thousands of songs. Even I, who watched hardly any Indian films, knew about her and could recognize her distinctive voice.

Here is an example of her singing.

Here we go again – US making allegations without evidence

The war rhetoric against Russia over Ukraine keeps getting ratcheted up. We have representatives of the US government making all manner of allegations about the threatening actions by Russia, including that they are planning false flag operations and crisis actors to provoke an invasion (as if Russia taking its cues from Alex Jones) without providing any shred of evidence.

In an exchange with State Department spokesperson Ned Price, AP reporter Mike Lee presses him to provide more than assertions and reminds him about WMDs in Iraq where similar US government assertions that they had solid evidence turned out to be flat-out lies meant to serve propaganda purposes and lay the groundwork for the invasion of that country.

Watch this exchange as Lee presses Price to provide any evidence at all only to be told by Price that him merely asserting something should be all the evidence that is necessary. Lee reminds him about the Iraq lies.

More reporters should follow Lee’s lead and demand that the public be given more than their “Trust us. We know but can’t tell you” rubbish.

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Great moments in yacht design

I am puzzled by this news report that says that Dutch authorities in the city of Rotterdam are considering temporarily dismantling a bridge in order to allow the yacht commissioned by Jeff Bezos to reach open water.

A plan to temporarily dismantle a recently restored historic bridge in the heart of Dutch port city Rotterdam so that a huge yacht, reportedly being built for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, can get to the North Sea is unlikely to be plain sailing.

Reports this week that the city had already agreed to take apart the Koningshaven Bridge, known locally as De Hef, sparked anger with one Facebook event set up calling for people to pelt the multimillion dollar yacht with rotten eggs.

However, a spokeswoman for Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb told The Associated Press on Friday that while a request has been submitted by a shipbuilder for the bridge to temporarily be taken apart over the summer, no permit has yet been sought or granted.
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The current Hef railway bridge was opened for trains to cross the Maas River in 1927 and taken out of service in 1993 when it was replaced by a tunnel. Public protests spared it from demolition and it eventually underwent a three-year renovation that ended in 2017. The middle section of the bridge can be raised to allow ships to pass underneath, but apparently not high enough for the new yacht’s masts.

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Amnesty International issues damning report on Israel’s apartheid practices

Amnesty International is the latest mainstream organization that has finally come to the conclusion that what Israel practices with regard to the Palestinians is apartheid, joining other human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem that said similar things a year ago. The 280-page report outlines in great detail the reasons for saying so, pointing to what it calls decades of oppression. It says that Israel achieves this through four main methods.

Fragmentation into domains of control

At the heart of the system is keeping Palestinian separated from each other into distinct territorial, legal and administrative domains

Dispossession of land and property

Decades of discriminatory land and property seizures, home demolitions and forced evictions

Segregation and control

A system of laws and policies that keep Palestinians restricted to enclaves, subject to several measures that control their lives, and segregated from Jewish Israelis

Deprivation of economic & social rights

The deliberate impoverishment of Palestinians keeping them at great disadvantage in comparison to Jewish Israelis
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More Than Millennials by Mano Singham

I published this article More Than ‘Millennials’: Colleges Must Look Beyond Generational Stereotypes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. LVI, no. 7, October 16, 2009.

I wrote it in response to what I saw as a lot of disparaging remarks made about the cohort of young people that have been labeled as ‘millennials’. This was not just in the media but also among educators. I spent much of my teaching career teaching members of this cohort and felt that they were being maligned, because my own experience with them was nothing like what was described.

More Than Millennials

Axes of good and evil

All people are flawed but we are not flawed equally. There are many axes that can be drawn along moral and ethical dimensions and each one of us will fall at different points along them, having different strengths and weaknesses. It is next to impossible to extract an overall single score that would define our ethical and moral worth for comparison purposes, unless one decides to pick one axis as determinative over all the others. Doing so is what enables some people to feel morally superior to others. But even then, while it is hard to do that for positive values, there can be a particular moral and ethical dimension where someone is so bad that it overrides everything else and we can conclude that they are simply bad people, even if they have some redeeming qualities in some area. Sociopaths fall into that category.
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