Great moments in evangelical hypocrisy

One of the amusing things to observe is how so many leading lights in the evangelical Christian movement have abandoned all pretense of upholding moral standards in their efforts to defend their support of Donald Trump. That support was always highly hypocritical even at the best of times, excusing vicious assaults on the poor and the LGBT community and other marginalized groups as long as the politician opposed abortion and spouted pieties about their god and family values. But now even that fig leaf is gone and they have been revealed to be absolutely shameless in their abandonment of even the rhetoric of morality.
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Film review: The Young Karl Marx (2017)

Today marks the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth (1818-1883). I recently watched this film that covers the period when the young Marx became friends with Friedrich Engels, a relationship that lasted a lifetime. It deals with the period from 1843-1849, a time as Marx, his wife Jenny, and his young daughter moved from Paris to Brussels before ending up in London. The film ends with Marx and Engels publishing the Communist Manifesto.
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Why is Giuliani still around?

Rudy Giuliani happened to be mayor of New York when the attacks of 9/11 happened and that put him at the center of events and he has since milked his fame to the last drop, speaking of that event whenever he gets the chance. I was never impressed with him, seeing him as someone who was not very smart, a loudmouth who just blusters and attacks the weaker elements of society. So it baffled me that Donald Trump would hire him as his personal lawyer at a critical time.
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The lies of the Customs and Border Protection agency

The Customs and Border Protection is an agency whose members were ardent supporters of Donald Trump in the last election. So it should be no surprise that it too plays fast and loose with the facts to advance Trump’s and their agenda by trying to portray undocumented immigrants in the worst possible light in order to deflect attention from their harsh treatment of them. Debbie Nathan exposes the latest CBP attempt to further the Trump agenda of hyping hatred against undocumented immigrants by inflating statistics about the number of border patrol agents assaulted by them.
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Misguided advice about reading books

I know that ‘listicles’ (articles that are lists of things, often ranked in order of preference) are often purely clickbait. They consist of preferences of the writers of the article and have no deeper meaning. However, I am a sucker for lists of books and films and so often follow up the links just to see how my tastes compare with that of the author. This list consists of 21 books that the editors of GQ magazine think are highly over-rated and for each book they provide lesser-known alternatives in the same genre that they think would be time better spent reading.
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