For some time now, I have been reading reports that after hurricane Irma devastated that island nearly two months ago, only 30% of the island’s population have had power restored to them. That itself was scandalous and one can imagine the outrage if we were talking about (say) Florida or New Jersey or any other place where ‘real Merkins’ (i.e., white Christians) were the affected population, not Hispanic people.
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Reader Jeff ‘Hyphenman’ Hess takes one for the team and reads the neoconservative rag National Review so we don’t have to, and flags my attention to a recent article that deviates from their usual warmongering to present arguments for the existence of god and a soul. They start by saying that science is what gives evidence for the existence of souls, so you know right off the bat that this is going to be a doozy, and it does not disappoint.
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I mentioned that I was surprised that the avalanche of sexual harassment charges against powerful men in the film and news media industries had not spread to political figures such as sitting members of Congress. But it turns out that in the UK it has, with various MPs being accused and now the secretary of defense Michael Fallon has resigned.
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In the wake of the New York City attack, commentators have criticized Donald Trump for describing the US justice system as a ‘joke’ and a ‘laughingstock’ and initially saying that he wanted to send the driver of the truck Sayfullo Saipov to Guantanamo, though he later walked that back.
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Like many urban elites, I have little or no understanding of the people of central Appalachia, a rural mountainous region that spans southwestern Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and western Virginia. News media accounts (especially during election season which seems to be the only time we pay attention to that region), passing through the occasional town on the way to somewhere else, and seeing films like Deliverance can give a highly misleading picture of the people there as not only poverty-stricken and poorly educated, but even willfully obtuse in acting against their own interests, and being easily seduced by Donald Trump’s bogus promises to bring back coal jobs and rejuvenate the region.
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Via David Pescovitz, I came across this remarkable video of a collision at an intersection when a ‘ghost’ car appears out of nowhere right into the path of another car.
The killing of eight people and the injuring of eleven on the streets of New York City by a man driving a truck has once again shown that in an open society, there is no lack of soft targets that can be attacked by anybody at all. We have to ask ourselves what purpose such attacks on ordinary people serve. One is of course to create fear among the population. But that has no strategic benefit and indeed has negative blowback.
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The negative impact of plastics in our environment is worse than we thought. Earlier alarms had been sounded about plastics concentrating in large areas in oceans, though one must be cautious about how one describes it and calling them ‘giant garbage patches’ is misleading as discussed by the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s Carey Morishige.
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That is what Tom Tomorrow thinks.
