The lies paving the road to an attack on Venezuela

I expect that most people have seen this photo that shows shipping containers blocking a bridge.

Western media reports have said that these containers were placed by Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro across the Santander bridge connecting Venezuela to Colombia to prevent food and medicines and other humanitarian aid from reaching the people there. The photo has been widely used to depict Maduro as a callous leader willing to see Venezuelans suffer rather than acknowledge that the country is facing serious shortages. The US government promoted this and the media obligingly repeated it unquestioningly

That is a lie.

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How police lie

In the county I live in, one police officer is called the top person for catching OVI (Operating Vehicle while Intoxicated) offenses. But a cell phone video taken by one of the people he stopped showed that not only did he lie in his official reports about the results of a field test he administered that he claimed showed the driver was impaired, but that he was even willing to lie even in court.


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Trying unsuccessfully to convince flat Earthers

National Geographic had a segment about the Flat Earth movement. The ten-minutes piece begins at about the 11:30 mark.
What surprised me is that it said that 2% of the American population believes in it. That works out to about 6 million people and is said to be growing. The other thing that disturbed me is that there seemed to be a lot of young people in the group. The video shows a small model of a flat Earth.
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Do people really do this?

In Sri Lanka, some people who are highly concerned about hygiene have developed the skill of pouring liquid from a container straight into their mouths without their lips touching it. Sometimes people do this even if they are served in a glass, because they fear that the rim of the glass may be unclean. I would not be surprised if this practice has its roots in the odious caste system that said that touching anything touched by supposedly ‘low caste’ people made you unclean.

But I have observed the other extreme many times in films and on TV in the US. Someone opens the refrigerator in a home, takes out a carton or bottle of milk or juice, and then drinks straight from it, putting their lips to the mouth of the container. This is even when the people live in a home they share with family members who presumably use the same container. This strikes me as pretty gross. But I have seen it so many times that I think it must be more common that I would have expected.

Is that the case?

Film review: Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)

This latest offering from documentary filmmaker Michael Moore looks at the election of Donald Trump as president and asks the question: How the hell did that happen?

He says that the precursor to Trump was Rick Snyder who, a businessman with no political experience who won the Michigan governorship in 2010 on promises much like Trump’s, that his background in business was what the state needed. He then proceeded to run the state for the benefit of the wealthy, gutting democracy by putting major cities in the state under a state of emergency and installing how own people as administrators to run them, sidelining the local elected officials.
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Samantha Bee shines light on the Sacklers

I have written repeatedly about the awful Sackler family and how they are hiding behind the veil of philanthropy the ugly fact that they are largely responsible for the opioid crisis through their aggressive and deceptive marketing of the drug OxyContin by Purdue Pharma, the company they own.

So I welcome Samantha Bee dragging their name and their association with the drug epidemic into the spotlight.

The growing list of behaviors that become suspicious when done by black people

This one, if you can believe it, involves a black man who was merely picking up trash on his own property using a clamp designed for that purpose. Such items are commonly used to avoid bending down and using one’s hands pick up trash. But he was accosted by a police officer who drew his gun and other police soon swarmed to the scene.
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