Is this normal?

As a blogger, I get quite a few emails from people I don’t know. As I see it, there are various forms of salutation that are polite when writing to a stranger: the formal ‘Dear Mr. Singham’ to the more casual ‘Dear Mano’ to the even more casual ‘Hi Mano’. Some use the ‘Dear Mano Singham’ which is helpful if one feels that using the just the first name is too familiar but is not sure what gender prefix to append to the last name. All these modes are fine by me.
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Which side are you on? The choice the Democratic party can no longer ignore

As a result of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win, the Democratic Socialists of America are reporting an increase in their membership. Matt Taibbi has a roundup of the alarmed reactions to this result from the political-media establishment and says that the Democratic party leadership and the media pundits are dumping on AOC’s victory because she represents a different world from their comfortable one.
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How fat cells work

I have long been curious about what happens to the body when we gain and lose weight. People talk about ‘fat cells’ but I was not clear as to whether we have a relatively fixed number of such cells and weight fluctuations simply consist of the size of these cells changing, or whether the number of cells also changed. David Prologo, a professor of radiology and imaging sciences at Emory University, has a nice article explaining what is going on when we gain and lose weight.
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Why do police use excessive force? Because they can

Shuan King sent out this Tweet showing police tasering a man for no reason even though the man was just sitting on the curb. Why? Because they can.

Attacks on Ocasio-Cortez begin already

I had expected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be attacked by the political-business-media establishments for her progressive views, for calling herself a democratic socialist, and for her highlighting of the deaths of dozens of protestors in Gaza at the hands of Israeli Defense Forces. The loss of her opponent, incumbent Joe Crowley is being mourned by lobbyists and business-friendly pundits, though Crowley himself was extremely gracious to her in conceding his loss.
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This woman is always shocked

Here is a photo of a woman who is clearly shocked by something she sees on her phone.

Mark Frauenfelder points many photos that Ernie Smith has found where this same woman is shocked.

She really should get some help. It is not good to be shocked so often and so easily by so many things.

Michelle Wolf on news talk shows

One periodically reads news stories of spokespersons for Donald Trump going on news talk shows (other than Fox News) and then being taken to task by the hosts for their evasions or lying. “That’s great!” you think, someone is finally telling it like it is to these people. But Michelle Wolf, in a very good segment, exposes this for the charade it is. It is all a game played by the media and politicians and their spokespersons to provide entertainment to the rubes, with the same scenario played out over and over again.

The reverberations of Ocasio-Cortez’s win

The political media is abuzz about the implications for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shocking win over fourth ranking Democrat long-term incumbent Joe Crowley by a 15% margin in the New York primary election.

Ocasio-Cortez represents in many ways the new face of progressive politics growing in strength on the left flank of the Democratic Party. She is a young woman of color whose campaign platform included Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a universal jobs guarantee, protection for Dreamers and a “clean campaign finance” system. You couldn’t have written a more liberal platform if Bernie Sanders – for whom Ocasio-Cortez worked as an organizer in 2016 – had written it himself. Late Tuesday night, Sanders said in a statement: “She took on the entire local Democratic establishment in her district and won a very strong victory. She demonstrated once again what progressive grassroots politics can do.”

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