Fighting the internet monopolies

It is well known that people in the US pay more and get worse internet services than people in most other developed countries. Why? Because the major internet companies have pretty much carved up the country into regions that are dominated by one or a couple of companies, thus killing competition, and the government regulators have let them do it. But some communities are going their own way, such as the small town of Charlemont, Massachusetts that has just 1300 residents and covers an area of 26 square miles.
[Read more…]

How confederate monuments perpetuate the lies about slavery

Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler were commissioned by the Smithsonian and The Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute to visit the monuments to the Confederacy in the south to see what messages were being promoted about that turbulent period in American history. Their long report dispels the common idea that these monuments consist mainly of statues of people who made a name for themselves during the Civil War. They say that they go much further and actively promote a series of lies about history: that the Civil War was not primarily about slavery, that most owners treated their slaves like members of their family, and that life under slavery was better for black people than as free people. And what is worse is that many of these are funded by taxpayers.
[Read more…]

Brexit shambles continues apace

The British parliament was due to vote tomorrow (Tuesday) on the deal that prime minister Theresa May arrived at with the EU negotiators but today she canceled the vote. She said that she was doing so because she realized that it would lose badly. It is not unusual for the party in power to cancel a vote on a bill but it is rare that it does so after the debate on it is well underway, as it was the case here where three days of debate had passed and 164 MPs had spoken. It shows a bad miscalculation on the part of May and her chief whip and constitutes a serious loss of credibility.

Her speech in parliament announcing the decision was met with scornful laughter.

[Read more…]

What kind of person would take this job?

Now that Donald Trump has fired his chief of staff, the atrocious John Kelly, he is scrambling to find a replacement because it is the Trump style to take action without thinking things through. While he no doubt thinks that people would jump at the chance to work with him in the White House, that is turning out to not be the case and the names being floated so far do not seem to be panning out. But someone will take the job and although we do not know who it will be, we can make some definite predictions about certain qualities that the person will have.
[Read more…]

Goodbye and good riddance, John Kelly

One thing I have learned to do during the Trump administration is largely ignore the predictions of pundits about two things: what special prosecutor Robert Mueller is doing or plans to do, and personal changes in the White House and Trump administration generally. The former is a waste of time because Mueller seems to be very good at running a tight, leak-free ship so that all speculations lack any basis, and the latter because predicting who will stay and who will go in the Trump administration is a fool’s game when the decisions are being made by some who seems to care little for competence and due process and seems to go by moods and whims. It is best to just wait for an actual event.
[Read more…]

Falling for Jesus, if you know what I mean (and I think you do)

We know that for some reason, many Christians really enjoy all the gory details of the torture and crucifixion of Jesus and can’t seem to get enough of it, as witnessed by the success of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ which I refused to see because I heard that it was one long continuous orgy of violence. There is a Christian theme park in Orlando, Florida (whose multimillionaire owners take full advantage of all the tax loopholes that the US gives to religious groups to enrich themselves) and that also wallows in the violence in staging the crucifixion scene several times a day with lifelike special effects as Jesus gets brutalized by the Roman guards. The audiences apparently love seeing it, which utterly mystifies me.
[Read more…]

Bernie Sanders appears on Stephen Colbert’s show

He received a sustained and enthusiastic response from the audience and then he and Colbert had an extremely substantive discussion about important issues and how so many of the ideas that he pushed that were considered fringe are now part of the mainstream conversation. You can easily see that Sanders, as a lifelong socialist, has held these views for a long time and is not just pushing them for short-term political gain.
[Read more…]

Is no sport safe from bad behavior?

Whenever I rail against unethical and rude behavior in sports, fans of curling have pointed out to me that that game exhibits the highest standards of sportsmanship and it did seem to be the case and I became a convert. Hence I was saddened to read about bad behavior in curling. In one case, a Russian curler was stripped of his Winter Olympics bronze medal after he admitted to doping

Krushelnitsky had initially protested his innocence after testing positive for the banned heart drug meldonium, claiming his drink had been spiked. However on Thursday he dropped his appeal before he was officially banned by the court of arbitration for sport.
…

It means that the medal won by Krushelnitsky and his wife Anastasia Bryzgalova will be awarded to the Norway pair of Kristin Skaslien and Magnus Nedregotten, who had originally finished fourth.

[Read more…]