While attention is focused on what Donald Trump is doing to the Republican party, whether he is splitting it into two, transforming it into his own image, leading it into the ditch, or successfully channeling all the racist, sexist, and xenophobic impulses that seems to be quite widespread in the nation, there are some interesting goings on within the Democratic party.
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I find Eddie Izzard to be always worth watching, whether he is doing a stand up act or not. He set himself a goal of running 27 marathons in 27 days, a total of 707 miles in all, to raise money for charity and completed in March of 2016. The target number was set to commemorate the 27 years Nelson Mandela spent in prison and he ran in South Africa. Because he could not run on one of the days, the 54-year old Izzard had to run two marathons on the last day to meet his goal
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This roughly 4.5-hour long series spread over eight episodes was created by Funny or Die and currently streaming on Netflix, is a satire on the true crime genre that has become increasingly popular in recent times. This is where there has been a real crime that has either gone unsolved or where there has been a conviction and the case is considered closed. But then a private group, usually journalists or lawyers, start looking closely at the case and discover new evidence that either exonerates the person who had been thought guilty or, for an unsolved case, draws attention to a possible suspect.
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We have recently seen three Republican senators (Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and John McCain) voice harsh criticisms of Donald Trump. But each of them have almost unfailingly voted in favor of issues that Trump supports, such as voting to advance the Republican budget and in yesterday’s vote to reduce consumer protections against fraud by the banks that issue credit cards. This is not surprising. These senators are all solid conservatives and supporters of the oligarchy. What is surprising is that they are being lauded as heroic truth-tellers when they are not. All three are not running for re-election, the first two choosing to withdraw and the third due to ill-health. So only those people not interested in re-election feel free to say what they feel about Trump. That is not heroism, just face-saving.
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Following my recent post and discussion on the issue of psychics, I read three very different books on the subject, all shedding different perspectives. The first of these was the memoir In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist (1996) by Susan Blackmore that I reviewed two weeks ago. The second of these was the book Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief & Experience (2014) by Christopher C. French and Anna Stone who are both academic researchers, the former at the University of London and the latter at the University of East London.
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Jordan Klepper’s new show The Opposition had a good piece by Kobi Libii who investigated the antifa movement to examine the claim, made by many in the establishment media, that they are as bad as the fascists they are protesting against. Watch Libii put one of those people, columnist Eli Lake of Bloomberg News, on the spot.
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[UPDATE: On November 7, 2017, Syria said it would also sign the Paris accord leaving the US as the only holdout.]
Nicaragua has agreed to sign on to the Paris accord on climate change, leaving the US and Syria as the only two nations on the planet who are not signatories. Nicaragua held out for so long for reasons opposite to that of the US, in that it felt that the accord did not go far enough in protecting the environment. The reasons for Syria’s abstention have not been made clear.
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In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, more and more women feel confident to come forward with their own stories of being sexually harassed, groped, and raped where once they chose to remain silent because their attackers were powerful people and they feared being shamed and retaliated against. Some of these things happened years ago. One of latest allegations comes from Jennifer Listman who is now an anthropological geneticist working at New York University. In a detailed blog post, she describes how in 1989, when she was 19 years of age, she was shocked when she was groped by Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel during a photographing at a public charity event. Wiesel died in 2016 at the age of 87.
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