I am a sucker for good news animal stories like this one from the UK via Carla Sinclair.
According to the YouTube page:
RSPCA inspector Jaqui Miller successfully rescues a dog who had gotten stuck in a frozen river. The inspector was secured with a rope, and prones down to reach the dog without falling through the ice herself. She then frees the dog who then stumbles back to shore.
Last week I wrote about how House Democratics leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, people who have been loudly protesting Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, then turned around and lobbied to pass a bill that would continue to give him sweeping warrantless domestic spying powers. The bill then went to the senate and there too Democrats were instrumental in enabling it to pass, as Alex Emmons writes.
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Most people have heard about David and Louise Anna Turpin who kept their 13 children aged 2 to 29 like prisoners under the most appalling conditions, where they were shackled and starved. These children were not sent to school but kept at home pretty much all the time. It was only after one 17-year old child escaped through a window and called the authorities that the abuse was discovered although it had been going on for years. She was so emaciated that police thought she was just 10 years old.
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As was inevitable, there has been a backlash against the #MeToo movement and from some surprising quarters. The French actress Catherine Deneuve was one of the signatories to an open letter from 100 women that suggested that the movement had gone too far and was risking infantilizing women and denying them agency and becoming puritanical. The letter suggested that the movement seemed to be condemning even flirtatious behavior and defended the right of men to hit on women. She later apologized to victims of sexual assault and, while she herself stood by the letter, distanced herself from some of the other signatories whom she said had distorted the message of the letter in the process of expanding upon it.
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A couple of years ago I wrote a review of the thought-provoking and disturbing 2015 science fiction film Ex Machina that dealt with the interaction of people with highly developed robots that are almost indistinguishable from humans, and what kind of sensibilities we might reasonably expect them to have.
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The Guardian has been running a series called The Mother Load that looks at what happens to pregnant women in the US. Giving birth can be expensive enough even when things go smoothly, but if there are any complications at all, the costs can go so far off the charts that families are ruined. Jen Sinconis writes about what her family went through when her twins were born very prematurely. It is a harrowing tale, not least because while the parents were worrying themselves sick about how to enable their tiny children to survive and grow, they were being socked with massive bills. This was 11 years ago before Obamacare came into being that removed lifetime caps on insurance payments and eliminated pre-exiting conditions clauses that limited coverage. Those two features alone would have made a huge different to them, though they would still have incurred major costs.
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After initially not denying that he used the word ‘shithole’ at a meeting to describe Haiti, EL Salvador, and every single African nation, and even having his aide issue a statement that did not deny the use of the word, Donald Trump later started vigorously denying it, although Democratic senator Dick Durbin and Republican senators Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham confirmed his use of it. Trump accused Durbin of lying and was supported by two Republican senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue who said that he had never uttered the word.
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I have written several posts recently about investigations into the paranormal. While there is no conclusive evidence for such phenomena, many people do believe in them. I also recently had a discussion with some friends who are broadly skeptics but two of whom told me about events that seemed to have no material explanation. It was clear that they were puzzled by not only what they felt was a lack of a material explanation for the events but that the facts suggested that such an explanation was not even possible.
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Now that I have seen Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, I can understand and enjoy parodies of it. Until I had seen its introduction of the new Darth Vader-like villain Kylo Ren, this comedy sketch would have made no sense to me. Now I find it pretty funny.
Glenn Greenwald says that she has much to offer over the existing mediocre do-nothing Democratic incumbent in Maryland, but that has not stopped the Democratic party establishment from already trying to smear her presumably because of her radical politics.
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