The cartoonist has figured out how to combine what many Americans say they want in a leader with good policies.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
The cartoonist has figured out how to combine what many Americans say they want in a leader with good policies.
I had an interesting discussion recently with some friends from my days in college about the extent that one should go to monitor one’s health and take steps to prolong one’s life. The discussion was prompted by an article that discusses one aspect of Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book where she looks at this question.
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A little dog got stuck in a heavy snowdrift and could not make it back to the house. So a big dog came to the rescue, beating down the snow and creating a path for the little dog.
One obvious question is how the little dog got stuck in the first place. It may be that it was placed there to show off the big dog’s rescue.
But it is still a nice example of canine friendship.
Good metaphors can be powerful things, bringing a dull and difficult concept to vivid life by comparing it to something else that is believed to be true and can be easily visualized. But if a once powerful metaphor is found to be based on a false premise, should we continue to use it? This has become the case with the ‘boiling frog’ metaphor frequently used to discuss how we can be oblivious to major and potentially disastrous changes if those changes occur slowly. The metaphor is based on the belief that “a frog immersed in gradually heating water will fail to notice the creeping change in its circumstances, even as it’s literally being boiled alive.”
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Bernie Sanders made his formal announcement for the Democratic nomination on Sunday at a speech in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York, although his political career has been largely in Vermont. In it he spoke of his vision for the country and also his own story, something he rarely does because he clearly prefers talking about issues and disdains personality-driven politics, even though his personal story reveals a lifelong commitment to the causes that he is currently fighting for. He is no Johnny-come-lately, seizing the popular positions of the moment but has been instrumental in pushing the discourse in that direction. This is of course why he is so hated by both conservatives and Republicans but also by neoliberals and the Democratic party establishment and their supporters in the media. They see in him a genuine threat to the status quo and someone who cannot be bought off.
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One of the things that surprise me is that hand-written cue cards are still used on some live TV shows. I would have thought that teleprompters with giant screens and lettering would have replaced a person standing in front and whipping out one card after another. Via Rusty Blazenhoff I came across this video of how Saturday Night Live uses cue cards, as narrated by their head cue card person. He makes a good point that since the show is live, they cannot afford the risk of a teleprompter glitch and that the old fashioned cue cards are fail safe.
She has a knack for how to use this medium, as can be seen by these responses to her critics.
When you’re trying to justify to yourself + others that we should ignore one of the greatest threats to humanity and imperil all children by denying, deflecting, and delaying action on climate change, you say ridiculous nonsense like this. https://t.co/Q03R5lj1kB
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 2, 2019
I have written before about the TV comedy The Good Place and now there is apparently another one called Miracle Workers. I have not seen the latter show because it is on a network that I don’t get but it is based on a novel of the same name by Simon Rich that I read recently. Both shows take an irreverent attitude to the idea of an afterlife but while the The Good Place takes this as an opportunity to examine the question of what ethics and morality consists of and leaves gods out of the picture entirely, Miracle Workers focuses on the life of god and the people who work for him, mainly those who work in the Department of Answered Prayers.
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The administration of Donald trump is so awash in scandals that there is a danger that people are becoming numb to them. But what about the scandals in the Democratic party among those running for the presidency? Trevor Noah has the lowdown.
The anti-vaccination groups in the US seem to be not fazed at all by the outbreaks of measles in parts of the US and elsewhere in the world. They seem to have developed a deep-rooted belief in the rightness of their cause and no amount of scientific evidence to the contrary is going to change their minds, unless perhaps their own children fall sick. They think that those who believe in the safety of vaccines are part of a deep conspiracy to harm them and their children. In this, they are not unlike the right wing climate change deniers and Trump cultists who refuse to hear anything bad about their hero and so it should not be a surprise that there seems to be a burgeoning alliance between the two groups, as Kelly Weill reports.
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