The Mrs Sri Lanka competition turns into chaos

I had not been aware of this before but apparently there is a parallel competition to the Miss World competition called Mrs World, with corresponding competitions at the national level to select those who will take part. I would normally not have known about it but my sister in Sri Lanka asked me if I had heard about the sensational events at the recent Mrs Sri Lanka contest so I looked it up and, boy, it was a disaster of epic proportions, far outstripping the Steve Harvey debacle from 2015 when he declared the wrong winner in the 2015 Miss Universe pageant.

Here’s the story.

Caroline Jurie won the Mrs Sri Lanka competition in 2020 and went on to win Mrs World. The 2021 Mrs Sri Lanka competition was held two days ago and the winner was declared to be Pushpika De Silva. At that point, Jurie created a sensation when, soon after she had done the traditional act of crowning her successor, she returned and forcibly took the crown off De Silva’s head and placed it on the head of the first runner up, declaring that the winner was divorced and thus not eligible.
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Christian evangelism and the QAnon cult

An interesting fact about the QAnon phenomenon is that even though the mysterious Q has not been heard of in over four months, suggesting that following Trump’s defeat they are trying to wash their hands of this whole thing, the cult keeps going on, though there has definitely been some attrition as some people’s hopes were dashed when Biden’s inauguration went ahead without Trump swooping in and arresting everybody.

Another interesting thing is that the cult members are not easy to pigeonhole and are all over the place, except for one common factor.
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Jordan Klepper tries to become ‘a good guy with a gun’

He realizes that playing the hero if a ‘bad guy with a gun’ lets loose in a public space is not that easy.

It came out during the NRA trial that Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA who loves talking about good guys with guns being the only people who can stop bad guys with guns, hid out on a friend’s yacht because he feared being the victim of shootings.
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The case against tipping

Alex N. Press writes about her own experiences as a waitress to illustrate pernicious effect that tipping has in the sub-minimum wage businesses such as restaurants

Overall, 71 percent of women restaurant workers report being sexually harassed at some point during their time working in restaurants, the highest rate of any industry. While much of this harassment comes from customers, 44 percent of respondents say they have been harassed by a supervisor, management, or restaurant owner.
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But the report, coauthored by Catherine MacKinnon and Louise Fitzgerald, shows that it isn’t simply restaurant work in itself that creates the conditions for harassment; reliance on tips compounds the problem. Relying on tips is already a problem for any worker who hopes for even a modicum of predictability in their income, and in matters of harassment, it aggravates the issue.

“Tipped workers were significantly more likely to have been sexually harassed than their non-tipped counterparts,” write the authors, with 76 percent of tipped workers experiencing harassment, compared to 52 percent of non-tipped workers. Further, tipped workers were sexually harassed more frequently in every way measured in the survey — likeliness of being treated in sexist ways; likeliness of being targeted with sexually aggressive and degrading behavior; and likeliness of being coerced or threatened into sexual activity they did not want — than non-tipped workers.
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It gets crazier and crazier

We have a man at Disney World refusing to have his temperature checked and then being charged with trespassing, handcuffed, and escorted out of the premises.

A man who was arrested after refusing a temperature screening at Disney Springs in Florida told authorities that he couldn’t be told to leave because he had spent $15,000 on his vacation.

The man, Kelly Sills, a tourist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, bypassed the Orlando attraction’s medical screening in February and refused to get his temperature checked when asked by Disney employees, according to a report from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
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Sills also claimed to be a Disney stockholder at another point.

What is surprising is that he was wearing a mask. For some reason, having his temperature taken with the remote sensor that takes a couple of seconds, tops, was too much for him. Did he know he had a temperature and not want it revealed? Or did he think that the thermometer was sending radiation towards him? Some people do believe this, not understanding that the thermometer measures radiation coming from the person.

This enemy of my enemy is not my friend

The ancient proverb “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is often quoted when strategic partnerships are made with someone unsavory to fight a common enemy. But the word ‘friend’ in this context does not have the positive connotations of generally shared values. The word ‘ally’ is better but is not as catchy.

Donald Trump has been waging war on Jeff Bezos for a multiplicity of reasons. Part of it is likely because Bezos owns the Washington Post that Trump sees as being hostile to him, and part of it may be simple envy because unlike him, Bezos is much richer and did not inherit his wealth. This dislike of Bezos may have persuaded some who despise Trump to view Bezos as an ally. But he is no ally of progressives because the Amazon company that Bezos created is a rapacious predatory entity that abuses its employees and uses its market power to destroy competitors. It has managed to avoid a great deal of negative publicity by staying out of ugly political spats and emphasizing its ability to delver goods quickly to its customers who seem to place a great premium on getting stuff the next day even if there is no real reason for the urgency.
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Matt Gaetz is so sleazy even his colleagues are abandoning him

The scandal around Republican congressperson Matt Gaetz keeps swirling and growing. This story has legs, as the kids say these days, meaning that more and more details will emerge as days go by. My feeling is that, even given the penchant that Republicans have for protecting their own at all costs, his days as an elected official are numbered. Even his stated desire to be a TV personality on a right wing news channel seems unlikely to be fulfilled until he spends some time in the wilderness and people forget. That is assuming he stays out of prison. The key thing to bear in mind is that the really serious offense is that he engaged in sex with an underage woman and transported her across state lines. That is the biggest threat to him. Another charge that could put him in trouble is that he used campaign funds to pay for his personal expenses, including presumably for sex.
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