The world famous cellist is noted for his genial personality and his untiring efforts to use music to promote understanding between the peoples of the world. He has not been overtly political but he just brought his Bach Project to the sister cities of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, playing at the border. There were also performances on the Mexican side. He also spoke decrying the building of a border wall.
Bernie Sanders spoke at a town hall sponsored by Fox News. More than 2.5 million viewers watched the event, the largest audience for any of the town halls held so far. You would think that the audience at an event sponsored by the cable news channel that is a fervent supporter of Trump and held in an area that voted strongly for Trump would be unsympathetic to Sanders’s message but it turns out that they responded well.
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I have a friend who is a dedicated calorie counter. In order to control her weight, she carefully notes the calorie value of all the food she eats and the amount of exercise she needs to take to burn it off. If she indulges in an extra treat, she will note it and compensate by working out more the next day, according to a formula that relates the type and duration of exercise to the amount of calories that need to be burned. This requires a lot of bookkeeping but she is a very organized person.
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There is a heartwarming story of people working on an oil rig 220 km from the coast of Thailand who spotted an exhausted looking dog paddling in the water. They rescued the dog, washed off the salt water, nursed him back to health, and then sent him back on a tanker that was heading to shore, where the dog was taken to a vet’s and is reportedly doing well. They suspect that the dog was swept overboard from a fishing trawler.
There are plenty of nice photographs at the link.
And since I am thinking about dogs, here’s a comic strip involving dogs.
Cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, is a climate change skeptic who repeats the well-worn anti-science tropes of that community. Usually he attacks the credibility of the climate change models that are used to predict the scale of climate change and the potential consequences. But in this cartoon, he goes further and seems to be attacking the whole idea of random statistical sampling.
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I would have thought that child marriage was illegal in the US, but apparently not. Based on a survey, it was estimated that between 2000 and 2010, about 248,000 children, some as young as 12, were married in the US, 77% of them young girls married to adult men. The highest rate of child marriage was in the state of Idaho and a bill to stop it was recently defeated in the Republican-controlled state legislature.
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I have written repeatedly about the abuse of the so-called ‘civil asset forfeiture’ provisions in the law that many government authorities use to seize the assets of people simply because of the suspicion that they may have been involved in a crime. The government holds on to these assets even if the person is not even charged with the crime. It should not be surprising that it is mostly low-income people who are at the receiving end. The people whose assets are seized have to sue the government to get them back, a complicated and expensive process, and many of the affected people simply do not have the resources to do so, so they end up losing their homes and their cars, which are often the only assets they have.
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So says faux journalist Jonathan Pie, in response to the attempts of defenders of the status quo to marginalize anyone who challenges the dominance of the oligarchy and constantly urge political leaders to move to the so-called ‘center’. Although he was speaking in the context of the Brexit debacle where there were defections from both the Conservative and Labour parties, his message applies to the US too. (Language advisory)
The exposure of the Sackler family as the owners of the company Purdue Pharma that is responsible for creating much of the opioid epidemic by aggressively marketing those drugs has resulted in many of the institutions wondering what to do with the gifts that the Sacklers gave to them. Professor of law Terri Lynn Hegee looks at the legal issues faced by these institutions involved in distancing themselves from disgraced donors.
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The US does not adopt two simple practices that are standard in many countries: the first is to provide free tax filing software to all people and the second is that the government could calculate the first draft of your taxes for you and let you know and you sign off if you agree. Right now in the US, you have to use commercial tax preparation software that offers it free only to people who have income below a certain threshold but do not advertise that service so few take advantage of it.
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