Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Human beings are easily the biggest killers on the planet, killing not only other members of their own species but also of other species. The number of homicides alone is close to 500,000 per year. But what animal is the biggest killer of humans? It turns out that it is the mosquito, causing the deaths of about twice as many people as humans do. But the mosquito is not really the killer, it just serves as a vector for diseases. If one eliminates vector-carriers such a mosquitoes, flies, bugs, snails, and worms, the top four killers are in the order: snakes, dogs, crocodiles, and hippos.
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The way that the US forces left Afghanistan left the whole world aghast at its utterly chaotic nature. It has become a cliche to describe Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires, humbling the British, the Soviet Union, and the US. But not all such attempts by empires ended as pitifully as the way that the US did. The NPR radio program Morning Edition compared the US exit with that of the Soviet Union in 1989.
One feature that is similar is that by its end, the occupation was seen as a tragic blunder by the Soviet Union.
By the time the Soviet army withdrew, the war was seen by most Soviet citizens as a mistake. Fifteen thousand soldiers had been killed, thousands more wounded. And an estimated million Afghans had died in the fighting. After a decade of war, many Soviets couldn’t understand what the USSR was even doing there.
Jason Torchinsky writes that the left-turn signal on the back of the Mini has an arrow that points to the right while the right-turn signal points to the left.
Seriously?? pic.twitter.com/XEKHdDGdCH
— Tri(Motor) Texan (@TriTexan) September 22, 2021
The reason for this design choice is so that the two lights taken together is supposed to look like the British flag, the Union Jack.
If the idea was to playfully invoke the image of the Union Jack, it failed as far as I was concerned because I did not recognize the two lights as the flag until it was pointed out to me. A representative from the company said that he did not think other drivers would be confused as to the direction in which the car was planning to move. That may well be so but it does seem to be an unnecessary distraction. Switching the two designs would be simple and make a lot more sense.
The European Union is planning to require uniformity in phone cord chargers.
The European Union announced plans Thursday to require the smartphone industry to adopt a uniform charging cord for mobile devices, a push that could eliminate the all-too-familiar experience of rummaging through a drawer full of tangled cables to find the right one.
The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, proposed legislation that would mandate USB-C cables for charging, technology that many device makers have already adopted. The main holdout is Apple, which said it was concerned the new rules would limit innovation, and that would end up hurting consumers. iPhones come with the company’s own Lightning charging port, though the newest models come with cables that can be plugged into a USB-C socket.
Watch as 67-year old Joe McCarron, hospitalized with Covid-19 in Ireland, is urged by a fanatical anti-vaxxer and covid-denier to check himself out of the hospital while a doctor calmly, kindly, and patiently explains why that would not be a good idea for someone in his condition and urges him to stay, saying that he was very ill and could die if he went home. But the person with McCarron badgered him to leave and he finally acquiesced. Two days later, he was back in the hospital with breathing problems and subsequently died.
Jordan Klepper continues his journey among the vaccine deniers and MAGAheads. He went to meetings of local school boards which have become the new focal point of the anti-maskers who have been using the public comments portion of the meetings to vent their feverish conspiracy theories. I linked to a compilation of those comments recently.
One of the things I noticed in the Klepper video below is that a couple of the people rationalized their weird beliefs by saying that they had done ‘research’ on it. They seem to think that the scientific-sounding word ‘research’ means finding some sources on the internet that support their beliefs, rather than an evaluation of actual research results supported by empirical data that has been done and carefully analyzed by credible experts.
The new slogan of those opposed to any anti-Covid 19 measures for children that are mandated by the government seems to be “I don’t co-parent with the government”.
I did learn something new, and that is that Satanist rituals involve people wearing masks and standing six feet apart from each other. What more evidence do you need that masks and physical distancing are evil? Wake up, sheeple!
I was chatting at my local bridge club with a visiting couple from out of town and they mentioned that they do not watch sports because of the protests during the playing of the national anthem. As long time readers of this blog know, I think patriotism is a bad thing and so am not a fan of the symbols used to promote it such as national anthems or flags. But in the US, those two symbols are fetishized as being somehow sacred and any sign of disrespect is enough to bring down strong disapproval. Look at how football players kneeling during the national anthem created such a brouhaha.
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The much-ballyhooed ‘audit’ of the presidential election results in Maricopa county in Arizona that Joe Biden won by a huge margin is over. It appears that even though this ‘audit’ was done by a highly partisan Trump-supporting group under the most dubious of conditions, the results were unchanged and that buried in the report is the information that Biden’s lead actually increased by a small amount.
This must have been a huge disappointment to Trump and his cult members who had been banking on their delusion that Trump won would be validated. The report managed to obfuscate its findings with other falsehoods that the cult has seized on to pursue similar audits in the other states that Biden won in 2020 that Trump won in 2016.
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The US Congress as usual falls over itself in its eagerness to provide aid to Israel, with both parties competing to see which can be more generous to that apartheid state. But recently, progressives in the Democratic party have started balking at this largesse.
The top House Democrat on Appropriations introduced a bill on Wednesday that would provide $1 billion for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, after the funding was abruptly pulled from a government funding package Tuesday.
Democrats were forced to toss the money from a stopgap spending bill aimed at avoiding a government shutdown at the end of the month amid objections from progressives. The incident, which temporarily derailed a vote on the continuing resolution, illustrated the long-simmering internal tensions within the party over supporting Israel, a longtime U.S. ally in the Middle East.
…Iron Dome, which is built by a joint venture of U.S. defense contractor Raytheon Technologies and Israeli firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, enjoys wide support on Capitol Hill. The U.S. has consistently funded the missile defense system on a bipartisan basis to help Israel defend itself against rocket attacks from terrorist groups in Gaza, including Hamas.
…But those funding efforts have faced progressive resistance in recent years, with more liberal members of the party demanding that U.S. military aid to Israel be conditions-based. Their push has frustrated moderate Democrats, who worry about being portrayed as anti-Israel.