Hillary Clinton is on a book tour to promote her new memoir. As is her custom, she is charging high prices for the privilege of listening to her and rich people get to get close to her by paying a higher price. Given the fact that her practice of selling access haunted her during the campaign, and that surely she must not need money anymore given her wealth, why she keeps feeding the image of being greedy is incomprehensible.
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Yesterday I was working on several documents on my computer and so there were several windows open as I shifted my attention from one to another. The overlapping open windows were scattered across the screen so that I could make any one of them ‘live’ by just clicking on it. I noticed at one point that if the document I was going to work on was at the right end of the screen, I would first move it to the left end before working on it.
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I ruminated recently on how the issue of violence has got more problematic recently with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and religious extremists using the language of violence to incite their followers. The group that has come to be known as ‘antifa’ consist of anonymous people, sometimes dressed in black, who have arrived ready to combat these groups with violence if necessary and have become part of counter-protests that have sometimes turned violent. The people on the left have been ambivalent about how to deal with the antifa, some seeing them as allies in the cause though not agreeing with the tactics they adopt.
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One thing the US media loves to do is hype the threat of wars, even highly dangerous ones with the potential use of nuclear weapons such as in the long-standing dispute between North Korea and the US. I am not accusing them of actually wanting to see the outbreak of nuclear war because that would be truly insane but they tend to talk of the situation as one of being on the brink of such a war with no solution in sight, even though there has been one for a long time.
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Louise Linton, the wife of Steve Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s secretary of the treasury who is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and immensely wealthy, came in for some well-deserved and harsh criticisms for the flaunting of her wealth while emerging from a government helicopter, because of her drawing attention to the brand names of the expensive clothing items she wore as if she were a paid spokesperson for them. She then lashed out at an Oregon woman who had the temerity to criticize her for it, replying thusly on her Instagram account.
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The Trump presidency has seen a rise in bigotry as white nationalists and neo-Nazis come out into the open to ‘take back their country’ from those whom they see as not authentic Americans, by which they mean white people and not the indigenous ones that the whites systematically sought to exterminate. Hence news reports such as this one back in February about Andrew King, a resident of Schenectady, NY, have become all too common.
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I recently had two separate interesting discussions with some other expatriate Sri Lankan friends who did not know each other. Each independently recounted their experiences with what is called a ‘light reader’ in Sri Lanka or a psychic or a medium in the US. They both talked about the same person named Hendo Hamy who lived in a village. People would go to him with various problems and he would be able to deduce why they had come to see him, what the problem was, and the resolution of the problem. Both were highly impressed by his abilities.
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Donald Trump has decided to effectively end DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the program that enabled the children of undocumented immigrants who had been brought here when they were young to study and work without fear of deportation
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