Why is it so hard to understand that donning blackface makeup is racist?

I try to avoid the occasional dust-up involving media personalities, since I do not really care about their comings and goings. But the recent flap over Megyn Kelly’s comments expressing puzzlement as to why white people wearing blackface is seen as racist is worth noting. In this case, she was saying that if someone wanted to be Diana Ross for Halloween, then what was wrong with making her face black? As a result of her comments, it appears that she is being fired by NBC. Before coming to NBC, Kelly had a long history at Fox News of racist dog whistles, via statements proclaiming that Santa Claus and Jesus were white.
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Big Bird actor Caroll Spinney retiring

Sesame Street announced that actor Caroll Spinney, who played the parts of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch from its inception in 1969, is retiring at the age of 84. Big Bird became one of the most recognized personalities on the planet. It was not easy to do him, requiring Spinney to hold his hand up above his head in order to manipulate the head and eyes, while looking down at a tiny screen inside the stifling costume that showed him what the camera was showing, all the while reading the script as well.

Sesame Street Season 1 Caroll Spinney and Big Bird

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Mohammed bin Salman goes into damage control mode

In the wake of the widespread outrage over the involvement of the Saudi Arabian government in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has gone into full damage control mode. He has allowed Khashoggi’s eldest son Salah, who had been barred from leaving the country and was forced into a photo op with bin Salman a few days ago, to leave the country. bin Salman is also trying to placate the Turkish president,the person most dangerous to him because of his ability to release all manner of damaging information. After not saying anything for three weeks, bin Salman has now said that Saudi Arabia and Turkey must work together.
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Cleveland Orchestra fires two prominent members

I blogged recently about two prominent members of the Cleveland Orchestra, concertmaster William Preucil and principal trombonist Massimo La Rosa, who had been placed on leave pending investigations into sexual harassment and misconduct. Today, after an outside investigation delivered its report, the two were fired. People outside Cleveland and the orchestra world may not realize what a powerful figure Preucil was in the classical music circles, so this is not an insignificant event. It will have wide repercussions and I hope it will deter such behavior in the future.
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People who remember every day of their lives

I have long been curious about the way memory works and as time has gone by become more convinced that we rarely remember things as they happen but instead we reconstruct memories each time we recall an event, adding some details and eliminating others, and the new story becomes recorded as the memory. Hence I am always wary of relying too much on my own or other people’s memories, especially of things that happened a long time ago, and usually look for some corroborating evidence.
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China builds world’s longest bridge across the sea

Yesterday China opened the world’s longest bridge across the sea, connecting Hong Kong with Macau on the mainland. It is 55km (34 miles) long. It required the construction of two artificial islands so that the bridge can go underwater at places to allow for shipping traffic. It is not the longest bridge overall, just the sixth longest but the five longer ones are also in China. The bridge does not allow private vehicles to use it, just buses, trucks, government vehicles, and other vehicles with special permits, so traffic should be light.
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An offer I can and will refuse

I just got an offer of a complimentary copy of a book if I would be willing to review it. I get these offers from time to time but what was unusual this time was in the choice of me as a potential reviewer. The book is about the Rapture, the supposed end of the world that some Christians believe is imminent and will signal the beginning of a massive, long, and bloody fight between the forces of Jesus and the forces of Satan as represented on Earth in human form by the Anti-Christ, whom some think is Barack Obama.
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Nature can always surprise us

An iceberg has been observed that is in the shape of a square about a mile along a side.

It turns out that this kind of geometrically symmetric icebergs is not unprecedented.

Such objects are not unknown, however, and even have a name – tabular icebergs.

These are flat and long and form by splitting away from the edges of ice shelves.

Kelly Brunt, a glaciologist with Nasa and the University of Maryland, said the process of formation was a bit like a fingernail growing too long and cracking off at the end.

They were often geometrically-shaped as a result, she said.

“What makes this one a bit unusual is that it looks almost like a square,” she added.

These scientists are missing the most obvious explanation, that this is a monolith sent to us by highly advanced extra-terrestrial beings, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey to make us more intelligent about the need to take action to save the planet.

Erdoğan’s speech and the UAE connection to Saudi Arabia

The speech today by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan turned out to be somewhat underwhelming. It had been expected that he would provide at least some of the evidence that Turkish investigators have accumulated on the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. But he did not do so, choosing instead to reject the Saudi account of the killing and pointing the finger at the ‘highest ranks’ of the Saudi government.
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