Comedic round up of the news

This has been a manic week in US politics even by Trump standards, and the comedy shows were hard pressed to cram in all that happened. Both Seth Meyers and Samantha Bee paid close attention to the student walkouts all across the nation is support for real gun control. This clearly has the NRA and Republicans worried because political views are often shaped by one’s experiences as a young adult so they fear losing this generation. Being total reactionaries on women’s, minorities, and LGBT rights was bad enough but did not cause this kind of mass protests.
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Facebook implicated in Sri Lankan religious clashes

The Sri Lankan government has accused Facebook of not acting swiftly enough to take down and counter posts that the government says have inflamed passions among Buddhist hardliners in the country who have been instigating mobs to attack Muslims and destroy their homes and businesses. The government has now moved to block many social media platforms.
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What a surprise! Ben Carson is a liar too

Lost in the news about the Tillerson firing and that Democrats seem to have won the seat long held by Republicans in the special election in Pennsylvania is that the latest to be exposed as a lying grifter in this administration is the oh-so-pious Ben Carson. Carson had said that he was shocked to learn that an expensive dining set had been ordered for his office at a time when his department was cutting funding for projects aimed at alleviating the conditions of the homeless. He said that this had been done without his knowledge and that once he learned of it, he had requested that it be cancelled.
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Trump seems scared of firing people

Normally the way that someone gets fired is their boss calling them in to their office and telling them directly. Depending on the boss, the words used may be gentle or they may be callous but they are usually done in person, especially if the person being fired is high-ranking in the organization. To fire someone by text or email would be highly unusual and by Twitter would unthinkable.
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The Trump slide continues

Donald Trump has fired his secretary of state Rex Tillerson. The turmoil in this administration has become so routine that when I heard the news this morning, my only sense of surprise was that he was the person who was fired since the on-going speculation had pointed to other figures as being the next to go. What is noteworthy, though not surprising, is how ungracious Trump was in taking this action. Rather than telling him personally, Tillerson apparently first heard of it when Trump tweeted the news out to the world.
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A refreshing self-examination by National Geographic

I was never a regular reader or subscriber to the National Geographic magazine but it is famous for its photograph-filled articles from all over the world. But it has faced charges that its portrayal of many countries and its peoples were at best condescending and at worst racist, reinforcing stereotypes of people who did not conform to western standards of looks and living as being somehow inferior. It was particularly famous among schoolboys in Sri Lanka as the place to see photographs of bare-breasted women, and the fact that they were exclusively of color from the developing world was a subliminal message.
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