Great moments in merging

Moving from one lane to another in traffic is a delicate dance involving at least two drivers that when done well goes off smoothly. Ideally, the person wishing to change lanes signals their intention and the person already in that lane drops back and allows them to do so, sometimes signaling that they have created space by flashing their headlights or even a gentle honk of the horn. Then after merging, the lane changer thanks the other driver with the standard signal of the raised forward facing flat palm. Most of the time, that is what happens, and life is good.
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The Fox News dilemma for Democrats

There has been some controversy over the issue of whether Democratic candidates should appear on Fox News programs and on the ‘town halls’ that they sponsor, where their hosts interview candidates before an audience. Some have chosen to do so while others have declined. Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg have chosen to appear but Elizabeth Warren was particularly stinging in her rejection of their invitation, calling Fox a ‘hate for profit racket’. The Democratic party has said that they will not allow Fox to sponsor any of the debates of their candidates.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raises the bar yet again

She had already declared that all her full-time staffers’ salaries would start at $52,000 thus freeing them from having to work second jobs just to pay the rent in expensive Washington DC. Interns would be paid $15 per hour plus benefits. She has now said that her staffers would also get three months full pay parental leave.

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When dating began

That is a blatantly clickbait-and-switch post title. Anyone expecting to read about the origins of romantic outings involving two people will have to look elsewhere. What this post is about is how the idea of assigning consecutive numbers to the years originated.

We now routinely assign a numbered year to events in recorded history, so that I can write that Bishop Ussher’s year of the creation of the Earth was 4004 BCE or that the American revolution was in 1776 CE. This sequential numbering of the years enables us to immediately fix an event in relation to other events. The system seems so natural that one feels that it must have always been in place and did not have to be invented at all, let alone have a definite beginning. But classicist Paul J. Kosmin says that there was a time when this system of numbered years did not exist and that events were placed in a historical sequence using various circumlocutions that had only local validity.
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Why was no penalty called?

Australian rules football is noted for the fact that there are few rules (there is no offside rule, for example) and as a result the game is fast moving with few interruptions, unlike the snooze-fest that is American football where in a game that lasts for over three hours, there is usually only about ten minutes of actual action.

But this minimalist attitude was tested when during a recent amateur game in Melbourne, a two-year old child wandered on to the field. Surely one of the sides should have been penalized for having an extra player?

Renewed violence in Sri Lanka

Curfews have been reintroduced in Sri Lanka as a result of violence aimed at Muslims presumably in retaliation for the deadly Easter Sunday attacks by Islamists that killed 253 people and injured hundreds more.

Sri Lanka has imposed a nationwide curfew for the second night in a row after a wave of anti-Muslim violence in the wake of the Easter bombings.

A Muslim man was stabbed to death while rioters torched Muslim-owned shops and vandalised mosques during Monday’s attacks.

Police have arrested 60 people, including the leader of a far-right Buddhist group.

The United Nations has called for calm and a “rejection of hate”.

A nationwide curfew, declared for the second night running, will come into effect at 21:00 (15:30 GMT) on Tuesday.

The country’s North-Western province, where the worst violence flared, will be shut down for longer, police said.

This kind of retaliatory violence against innocent people that leads to increased tensions between communities is of course exactly what the bombers want. They want to destabilize societies by inflaming sectarian passions and those who are behind these new attacks are playing right into their hands.

Watch the propaganda for war with Iran unfold

CBS News correspondent David Martin sent out this alarming tweet.

Notice how he starts out as if stating an incontrovertible fact “Iran or Iranian-backed proxies used explosives to blow holes in four ships — two Saudi oil tankers and two others — near the Strait of Hormuz” before adding a bit of information that undermines the whole thing: “according to an initial assessment of the U.S. team sent to investigate.” In other words, this is what the US government, that has been demonizing Iran as a prelude to war, has simply asserted via anonymous sources with no supporting evidence. He ends by saying he “confirms” it. But what has he confirmed? That Iran was behind a bombing? Or that anonymous US government sources say so? There is a big difference between the two.
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The smearing of Bernie Sanders ramps up

The field of Democratic candidates for the 2020 election have embraced many of the ideas that Bernie Sanders ran on back in 2016, even though back then those same plans were denounced by the party establishment as too radical and unrealistic for voters, as part of their strategy to have neoliberal Hillary Clinton be the nominee. We know the result. Clinton lost to possibly the worst presidential candidate in the last century. And now we are being told that Joe Biden, who is pretty much Clinton 2.0 (or Clinton 3.0 if you consider Bill Clinton to be version 1.0) as the ‘moderate centrist’ who can win over Trump voters. Yes, they are running the same old losing playbook that they ran last time.
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