Take a look at these two cartoon strips.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Samantha looks at the links between the two. She also asks a good question: why aren’t these heavily armed groups of white people who roam the streets called ‘gangs’?
Part 1:
Part 2:
Suppose you could get a layer of liquid to stay suspended in mid-air, then you could observe counter-intuitive things such as objects like toy boats floating on both the top and bottom surfaces, being right side up on the top surface and upside down on the bottom surface.
But how could you get such a layer of liquid to defy gravity in this way? It turns out you can, as can be seen in this video.
Massachusetts is a strongly Democratic state with all its congressional and the two senate seats held by Democrats. The governor is an outlier in being a Republican but he has been careful to position himself as a centrist moderate technocrat and distanced himself from the nutjobs that currently make up the Republican party. So the primaries are where the real action is and on Tuesday we saw two proxy battles between the party establishment and progressive insurgents.
In the senate race there was a generational switch in that the incumbent Ed Markey who has been in Congress for 44 years represents the progressive wing and the much younger challenger Joseph Kennedy turns out to be the establishment candidate. Markey has aligned himself with the progressives in Congress, co-sponsoring the Green New Deal with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and they in turn strongly backed him. Kennedy was clearly seeking to use his famous name to move from the House of Representatives (where he currently holds a seat since 2013) to the Senate. No Kennedy has lost an election in Massachusetts and no doubt he hoped to ride the wave of the family name to victory. His problem is that his politics are more Republican-friendly.
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During one of his recent segments, John Oliver took some shots at the city of Danbury, Connecticut. It was entirely gratuitous and had nothing to do with anything else he was saying and I took it as the kind of thing comedians do, and that is pick on some random city to make fun of, whether it deserves it or not. In the state of Ohio for example, Akron and Canton, two perfectly decent and ordinary cities, are often are the butt of jokes, such as the one about Akron’s city slogan being “Akron: We are not Canton”.
But the Republican mayor of Danbury Mark Boughton took umbrage, declaring that in retaliation they would rename their sewage treatment plant the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant.
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It used to be the case that the day after the Labor day holiday in the US (which is the first Monday in September and this year falls on September 7) marked the kickoff of the presidential campaign. Of course that, like most political norms in the Trump era, has gone extinct. We are now in campaign mode all the time, so the second day of September is as good a day as any to take stock of where things stand now to set a kind of baseline and prepare for what is to come. A couple of graphs provide a good gauge of what is to come in the next 62 days before the election.
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As you may have noticed, the site was down for almost two days. This is a really shoestring operation and I am really impressed how smoothly it runs almost all the time, so I hope you will bear with us when this kind of thing happens occasionally.
John Oliver draws a straight line from the white nationalist rhetoric of Donald Trump, the Republican party, Fox News, and Tucker Carlson to the murder of two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin by a white nationalist Trump supporter.
In an age when we are inundated with information from all sides with little time to carefully digest all of it, it should not be a surprise to find that people often read just the headline and the opening sentences of an article before deciding that they agree with the contents and forward it to others. Twitter is making an attempt to discourage this practice.
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Every election cycle, the media fixates on two demographic groups that they claim are central to the success of either political party and towards whom they should pitch their messages. One is white working class men and the other is white middle-class women. Why these two groups are singled out for special attention is a mystery to me but seems to be based on the assumption that they are the most persuadable to switch from one party to another and hence worth targeting. I am not fully convinced that they are more persuadable than other groups since such analyses are usually based on historical data and may not be currently applicable.
For example, the conventional wisdom is that white working class men used to be a strong Democratic constituency that switched to the Republicans following the civil rights era of the 1960ss while white middle-class women used to be strongly Republican but now are peeling away from them. But the key fact is that both targeted groups are white and not poor, which explains why the concerns of the poor and minorities tend to get put on the backburner during election time, which in the US is pretty much all the time.
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