Apparently Smarmy Piers Morgan had an interview with Narcissist Donald Trump in Davos, Switzerland. I will definitely not watch it because I cannot take even 30 seconds of either person and seeing both at the same time would make me throw up. Ghastliness is bad enough, ghastliness2 is just too much.
While there have been several cases of high-profile people losing their perches because they sexually harassed and abused people over whom they had power, one cannot help but wonder if after some time has elapsed and they fade from the headlines, they will slowly creep back into positions of prominence. Sometimes, they move quickly into new positions where they still exercise power over people, thanks to the ‘good old boy’ network that protects its own.
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It was 13 years ago today that I decided to try this new thing called ‘blogging’. It was hosted by a newly installed blogging platform at my university and the friendly people working there helped me get over the initial difficulties of learning how to do basic things. I did not expect to blog for long but here I am, still plugging away and having fun.
Hindu extremists in India are threatening violence if a new Bollywood film Padmavaat is released that they allege depicts a romance between queen Padmaavati and a 14th century Muslim ruler Alauddin Khilji. They have not seen the film and the filmmakers say the film does not show this and have offered an advance screening to allay their fears. But hell hath no fury like an enraged religious extremist and now that they have got worked up, they are not going to calm down easily.
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From Pearls Before Swine
If you have hung around much at all with Christian evangelicals like I have done in the past, you will have noticed that they love redemption stories. The sentiment of “I once was lost and now am found”, as expressed in the hymn Amazing Grace is a surefire winner with that crowd, to the extent that they will even exaggerate the extent of their past sins in order to make their salvation sound even more dramatic. I know because I have heard the testimonies of people I knew well.
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The 16-year old Palestinian girl Ahed Tamimi has become a cause celebre across the world after she slapped an Israeli soldier who had entered her family compound. This was after “an Israeli soldier shot Ahed’s 15-year-old cousin in the head with a rubber-coated metal bullet during a demonstration against the ongoing military occupation”. In retaliation, the Israeli authorities arrested her and she remains in custody.
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If we are in a room that contains no sources of light at all and the room is also sealed off so no light can enter from outside, then we will experience total blackness, irrespective of the color of the walls or the objects in the room. But we can, in theory, also experience total blackness even if the room has a bright source of light, provided that the source of light is behind us and everything in the room is black such that it absorbs 100% of the light that falls on it, and no light gets reflected back into our eyes. This is because the color of objects that do not themselves generate light is determined by what light they reflect. Objects that appear to be red reflect light that is largely in the red range of the visible spectrum of electromagnetic waves, and similarly for other colors. Black objects are those that do not reflect any light at all in the visible spectrum.
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Some video clips never fail to crack me up and though I have shown them before, I feel the need to show them again for those who only recently started reading this blog and may have missed it. This one is from back in the early days of the US invasion of Iraq and is from the Australian sketch comedy show skitHOUSE.
Two stories in The Intercept illustrate well how skewed the justice system is in the US.
In the first case, Shaun King writes about a man, clearly inflamed and influenced by Donald Trump’s attacks on the media and in particular at CNN, who phoned in multiple deaths threats to that network.
EARLY TUESDAY MORNING, we learned that Brandon Griesemer, a 19-year-old grocery store clerk from Novi, Michigan, made at least 22 calls to CNN’s Atlanta headquarters where he not only threatened to shoot and kill employees, but used racial and ethnic slurs for both African-Americans and Jews. The calls were made two weeks ago, and Griesemer was charged last Friday.
This was not Griesemer’s first rodeo. On September 19, he was reported to have made similarly ugly calls to an Islamic center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Brandon Griesemer is a bigot.
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