An Australian journalist was asked to leave the premises of the parliament because because her outfit was too revealing in that “you can allegedly see too much skin”. I naturally had to click on the article to see what scandalous clothing had prompted this decision. See-through blouse? Plunging neckline? Very short skirt? Here is a photograph of Patricia Karvelas in her offending outfit.
Remember when I wrote about the 13-stop North American tour that Bill and Hillary Clinton were going to make where people were charged pricey amounts to watch them talk on stage, though if you were willing to fork out even more hundreds dollars, you could also get a brief meet-and-greet with them? I wondered at that time whether we hadn’t had our fill of the Clintons and whether enough people would be willing to pay such amounts.
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Some time ago, I wrote about the The Negro Motorist Green Book , which was a travel guide written by Victor Hugo Green. It was first published in 1936 and regularly updated to inform black Americans during the Jim Crow days what places they could shop, eat, and stay the night during road trips across the US, and what towns were “Sundown Towns” where black people were banned from being outside after dark.
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Whale evolution has always fascinated me, ever since I learned that their evolutionary path took them from sea to land and then back to the sea. Here’s an animation showing how the land-to-sea-again transition may have occurred.
The death of the 41st president George H. W. Bush has resulted in the usual gushing and fawning obituaries that are used to paint a rosy picture of US politics by ignoring all the awful things he did. Today’s front section of the Plain Dealer was pretty much devoted to praising him, extending over 12 pages. Even this obituary that did not go overboard in praising him ignored his failings.
Fortunately there are people like Mehdi Hasan who do not forget and are disdainful enough of the false privilege we give to public figures to remind us of the more unsavory aspects of his career, such as his war crimes, racism, and obstruction of justice, not to mention that he was also a serial groper of women.
There has been an outcry about the decision by a Chinese scientist He Jiankui to use the new CRISPR gene-editing technology to modify the genes of two human embryos before they were placed in the mother’s womb. He had disabled a gene known as CCR5, thus blocking a pathway for the HIV virus and thus gave them some immunity from that disease.
As you may have noticed, the entire FreethoughtBlogs network was down for most of yesterday, but now seems to be up and running normally.
It was due to a technical issue and we are confident that neither Goerge Soros nor the Illuminatti were behind it.
Readers may remember when I wrote about this business in Japan founded by Ishii Yuichi that will supply you with a fake family or friends that will meet your specific needs.
So far, Yuichi has amassed about 800 employees to fulfill just about every role imaginable. Yuichi himself has been keeping up elaborate lies for years. Since the early days of the business, he has been pretending to be the father to a young girl, whose biological father left when she was just a baby. The girl believes Yuichi is her real dad.
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I have written before about how plea bargains are used against poor people to get them, even if innocent of the crime were originally arrested for, to plead guilty to some other charge and accept a lower penalty, even if it includes jail time. Poor people do not have the resources to mount a vigorous defense and do not have access to the top prosecutors who make the decisions about who to prosecute and how vigorously. With rich people, it is the other way around, as I have described before with the way that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. treated leniently the wealthy and influential and well-connected and those who contributed to his campaigns (like Harvey Weinstein and members of the Trump family) but went after the poor and Chinese immigrants.
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I just watched this film, based on a true story, that is set in the town of Colorado Springs in 1978. John David Washington plays Ron Stallworth, the town’s first black police officer who, pretending to be a white man, responds by phone to a newspaper advertisement placed by the Ku Klux Klan for new recruits. For actual meetings with the local KKK branch members, he sends in his colleague Flip Zimmerman (played by Adam Driver) who is Jewish. The two of them continue to play their parts as Stallworth, once the KKK people were satisfied that did not “have any Jew in him”, rises in the organization and he even becomes friends over the phone with David Duke, then the Grand Wizard of the KKK (played by Topher Grace).
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