Gregg Popovich is the coach of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team who has had a very successful career. He is also someone who has progressive views and does not hesitate to speak his mind. On September 26, he spoke about the controversy over athletes kneeling for the national anthem. He spoke openly about what many people dance around, that “Race is the elephant in the room”. He then went on to speak about the responsibility of those who are in privileged positions to use that benefit positively.
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The policemen who went into a rage because a nurse in Utah properly refused to give him a blood sample from an accident victim, and forcibly handcuffed and arrested her (see my earlier post about it that has the video that went viral) has since been fired and his supervisor demoted. The officer had previously been reprimanded for sexually harassing a female co-worker.
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As he began his second term as Chinese president at the opening of Communist Party’s 19th Congress, Xi Jingpin gave an over three-hour speech outlining the party’s vision for the future. One thing was clear: that he is a strategic thinker who sees China playing an increasingly dominant role on the global stage. Given that it is expected that within the next five years the size of China’s economy will exceed that of the US, this is not an idle dream.
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I am finally home again after a week on the road. Most of the time was spent playing with my grandson, who has just learned to crawl and so is always on the move, proudly showing off his new skill. He is also exploring all the different sounds that can be made by banging two objects together. Since the objects he has at his disposal are toys that have been carefully designed for safety and are mostly made of plastic, the range of sounds he can produce is limited but do have subtle variations that he is studying.
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The TV show Black-ish presented a brief animated story I am a slave sung by The Roots in the style of Schoolhouse Rock. It is too painful to be funny but it is true and something that should be widely viewed.

The motives of Stephen Paddock, the person who killed 58 people and injured hundreds in a shooting spree in Las Vegas, remain a mystery. Investigative journalist Greg Palast writes that he went to school with Paddock and recounts his impressions of him from that time. He says that he and Paddock lived and went to school in a poor part of the greater Los Angeles area, where their proximity to the elites of Beverly Hills constantly rubbed their noses in the fact of the sheer unfairness of class privilege that some were born into and which opened many doors for them, and others were not.
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