Seth Meyers is back from a hiatus and he says that following the Parkland shooting, it is the students who are acting like adults.
Mano Singham
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Seth Meyers is back from a hiatus and he says that following the Parkland shooting, it is the students who are acting like adults.
When we die, it is not like turning off a switch that shuts down everything all at once. Different parts of us fall apart at different times. In the March 2018 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich describes the process. (Subscription required)
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William M. LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University, writes about the disingenuous coverage of Russian interference in US elections that portray it as an outrageous violation of the sovereign rights of a nation, when the US has been doing it for so long and in much more overt ways. Such behavior was revealed a long time ago in former CIA agent Philip Agee’s book Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975) that detailed the things he did in Latin America after he joined the CIA in 1957. Like so many things that the US ruling class finds distasteful, this knowledge tends to be repeatedly buried.
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(Via this site.)
Donald Trump has suggested that teachers should be armed with guns to deter killers. Of course, the fact that an actual police offer (and maybe even four) was on site at the Parkland school and did not act shows that having an armed person present is not a solution when there is the ability for any person to buy a rapid-firing weapon that can kill many people in just a few seconds. Teachers are also pushing back saying that they joined the profession to teach people, not to be law enforcement officers.
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The recent spate of revelations about inappropriate behavior in the workplace has largely dealt with pretty serious offenses where the wrongdoing was obvious. But what about gray areas where people may not be sure if something is appropriate or not? To explore this NPR, in conjunction with the polling outfit Ipsos, conducted a survey to see what people thought was appropriate and what was not and reporter Danielle Kurtzleben discussed the results on last Saturday’s episode of All Things Considered.
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On my long flight back from California, I whiled away some of the time by watching some episodes of the comedy show Curb Your Enthusiasm that stars Larry David who plays himself as a somewhat cantankerous and annoying busybody who talks all the time, and deals with his life and interactions with other comedy writers and actors in Los Angeles who makes cameo appearances. I had never seen a full episode of the show before but had seen clips and was of course aware of David himself, especially given his many appearances on Saturday Night Live during the 2016 election campaign where his strong physical and vocal resemblance to Bernie Sanders, including his gruff manner, was exploited to the hilt.
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As I have mentioned, CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) that is currently going on is basically a closed feedback loop where extreme right-wingers come to hear extreme right wing speakers pander to their deeply held prejudices and fact-free views. Michael Steele used to be head of the Republican National Committee in the years 2009-2011. He also happens to be black. At a dinner on Friday evening for the attendees at CPAC, Ian Walters, a spokesperson for the American Conservative Union that sponsors CPAC, said that “We elected Mike Steele as chairman because he was a black guy. That was the wrong thing to do,”
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I linked a year ago to a news story by Iona Craig that described the horrific killings of civilians by the US during a botched raid on the Yemeni village of Al Ghayiil. This was a raid to supposedly capture an al Qaeda leader that was hailed by the Trump administration and much of the mainstream media in the US as a ‘success’ when it was anything but and it was Craig’s report with photographs that revealed the devastation that was wreaked on an impoverished village in a remote area. The Pentagon’s top Middle East commander ‘investigated’ the case US and, despite the evidence, concluded that “he found no signs of “poor decision-making or bad judgment” in a January raid in Yemen that killed 10 children and at least six women, as well as Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens”.
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I mentioned before that the only Winter Olympic sport I would care to watch is curling but since I do not have cable TV, I could not see any because the network broadcasts only show it at weird hours. But I got lucky on my long flight last week because the airline had various TV channels and while surfing through, I managed to catch the US vs. Switzerland women’s curling contest. It was fascinating. The level of strategy involved and the precision with which the teams can aim the ‘rock’ towards the ‘house’ (I am slowly learning the jargon) is amazing.
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