Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
The Boy Scouts of America have had a well-deserved bad reputation of being generally reactionary in their attitudes and in particular hostile towards the LGBT community. They have tried to redeem themselves by removing most of the restrictions and now have even announced that they will allow girls to enroll and as part of that move they have announced that they will change their name to Scouts BSA effective February 2019.
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My uneven relationship with this mega-franchise continues. After reasonably enjoying the first three installments (episodes IV, V, VI), I was totally turned off by the first of the prequel trilogy (episode I) and swore off the next two. When the series was rebooted, I heard good things about episode VII The Force Awakens and found it reasonably enjoyable, although it seemed to be simply a remake of the original episode IV. Last night I watched the most recent episode and it was really awful.
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It looks like Donald Trump’s choice to be ambassador to Germany has got off to a great start, peremptorily telling his host nation that they had better get in line or else. As Robert Mackey writes, Richard Grenell took up his post on Tuesday, the day that Trump announced his withdrawal from the Iran deal, and immediately sent out a tweet saying ” As @realDonaldTrump said, US sanctions will target critical sectors of Iran’s economy. German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.”
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I have noticed in public discourse an increased use of the phrase ‘going forward’ or alternatively ‘moving forward’. It is used usually in sentences such as “This is what we should we do going forward” and what is noticeable is that the phrase almost never serves any useful function and can be dropped without any loss of meaning, since the rest of the sentence already implies some future action. It seems to be there purely as a filler.
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A member of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, who happens to be a Sikh who wears the traditional turban, was singled out for extra scrutiny by US officials at the Detroit airport as he was returning to Canada after an official visit to the US.
Officials from the Trump administration issued an apology after a security agent at a Detroit airport repeatedly demanded that a Canadian cabinet minister remove his turban, the minister has revealed.
Navdeep Bains, the country’s minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, described the incident in an interview with the French-language paper La Presse on Thursday.
Bains was returning to Toronto after meetings with Michigan state leaders in April 2017 and had already passed through regular security checks, but because he was wearing a turban, a security agent told him that he would have to undergo additional checks, according to La Presse.
An ABC News poll finds a decline in religious affiliation among Americans between the years 2003 and 2017.
Ray McGovern is a 27-year veteran of the CIA who worked at high levels in the White House of George H. W. Bush, but who has since become a vocal critic of what he sees as the wrong policies of the CIA and the US government. See what happens to him when he protests at the hearing for torture-lover and war criminal Gina Haspel’s nomination to head the CIA. The brutality and sheer excessive force shown to a 78-year old man simply for speaking out is disgusting to see.
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You would think that an election system that allows people to vote for the person who most closely represents their views would be the one that is preferred. A system that comes close to this ideal is the preferential voting system where people rank order their votes for the candidates. After the first round of counting of only first place votes, if no candidate gets an outright majority of 50% plus one vote, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and the second choice votes of those who gave that person their first choice are then added to the totals of the remaining candidates. This process goes on until one candidate wins a majority. In this system, no vote is ‘wasted’ in the sense of people voting for someone who has little chance of winning, because their other preferences still count.
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… I would keep my mouth shut and hope that people just forget about me. Polanski is the film director who pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year old minor after drugging her, and then fled abroad to escape serving his punishment. Following the recent spate of charges of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has expelled him, along with Bill Cosby. Why it did so long after his conviction is clear. Cosby was recently found guilty for his actions and expelling him while keeping Polanski would have raised awkward questions.
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