Thank goodness that orgy of absolution is over

The weeklong orgy of official lamentation over the death of former president George H. W. Bush, including the mystifying tradition of declaring a federal holiday, is finally over. It has served its purpose of such events, to scrub away all the misdeeds that the president committed and leave everyone with the impression that things were so much better in the past when presidents were decent and honorable people and all the awful acts by the current president are just an aberration that we must endure until he leaves office and the dignity of the office is restored by a new person.
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The Kevin Hart problem

Comedian Kevin Hart was tapped to host the 2019 Academy Awards and then it was discovered that he had made homophobic tweets about a decade ago. When asked about them he said that all that was in the past and that people should not be held accountable for what they said a long time ago and that he has grown since then. He refused to apologize for them. But that did not end the controversy and the Academy asked him to apologize or that he would be replaced. He still refused to apologize but then issued a statement saying that he was withdrawing from the event and also issued an apology of a sort.
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The battle over Christmas is over

The idea that December is now a general season of celebration for everyone has taken hold, aided by the addition of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa to the mix. The commercialization of Christmas, with retailers seeking to draw everyone in to the gift-giving frenzy whatever their religious beliefs further cements that idea, and you can be sure that ‘Happy Holidays’ and ‘Season’s Greetings’ will remain in stores despite all the efforts of the Christian warriors, aided by that extremely religious person Donald Trump, to force people to only say ‘Merry Christmas’, though that too has been largely drained of any religious sentiment.
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BuzzFeed News article on Neil deGrasse Tyson

Most readers of this blog would likely have heard about the charges swirling around Neil deGrasee Tyson about his behavior around women. Azeen Ghorayshi has a long piece about the allegations made against Tyson, including new claims by a fourth woman. It goes into great detail, provides a great deal more background on the rape accuser Tchiya Amet than I had seen before, and has accounts from many people other than the four women.
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Ohio, meet Wisconsin and Michigan

I wrote last month about how, as a result of gerrymandering, the representation of Republicans in the state and federal legislatures far exceeds what they should be entitled to by the proportion of votes they got, with 49.2% of the votes netting them 62.1% of the seats in the state legislature. I wrote that Ohio could be called the gerrymandering capital of the US but it looks like Wisconsin can give it a good run for the money.
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Was Benjamin Franklin a serial killer?

When in 1998 an organization called the Friends of Benjamin Franklin House decided to restore the house that Franklin had occupied while he was the American ambassador to England, workers discovered a trove of about 1200 human bones buried in the basement.

Initial reports said the bones were from the remains of more than 15 bodies — six of them children. Some of the bodies were dismembered, or with trepanned skulls (skulls with holes drilled through them).

The bones were dated to be just over 200 years old, which would mean they were buried around the same time Franklin lived in the house. So where did the bones come from? Did Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, kill people and hide their remains in his London basement or could there be another answer to this creepy story?

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More gravitational waves detected

The first detection of gravitational waves was in November 2015, a century after Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted their existence. It was a discovery of such importance that the Nobel prize for physics was awarded for it soon after in 2017. But since then there have been a flurry of such waves that are caused by the collisions of massive stellar objects.
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