Local officials in Rotorua, a popular tourist destination in New Zealand for geothermal activity and geysers and mud pools that I have actually visited, are under fire for spending about $70,000 in public funds to import five tons of mud from Boryeong, South Korea for a mud and music festival known as Mudtopia. What’s wrong with their own mud, which attracts people to that region?
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North Korea has fired off yet another missile, triggering another round of belligerent rhetoric from the US and more joint military exercises with South Korea with Donald Trump also castigating China for doing nothing. Why is North Korea doing this? It is because they have learned the lesson that has been painfully clear as even US intelligence chiefs recognize – that giving up your nuclear capability is an invitation for the US and its allies to invade you.
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The Room (2003) which has Tommy Wiseau as writer, director, producer, and star is such a terrible film that it has acquired cult status with special screenings so that true aficionados of bad films can watch it in the company of others and collectively revel in its sheer awfulness. I reviewed the film back in 2011 and described some of the things that made it, as one wag wrote, the Citizen Kane of bad films.
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There is a new documentary The Problem with Apu by comedian Hari Kondabolu that looks at the role that the iconic character on The Simpsons has played in creating Indian stereotypes.
One of the truths of law enforcement is that if you give police extra powers that are supposed to be invoked only in extreme situations, they will find ways to use those powers more routinely, either to enrich themselves (as we have seen with civil asset forfeiture) or to show off their power and might, as we seen with the use of surplus military style equipment that has been distributed to local police departments. SWAT team that are supposed to be used in extremely dangerous situations are instead used indiscriminately because police love the drama and visibility of SWAT raids. It looks good on the nightly news.
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Her correspondent Michael Rubens tries to understand why Republicans are so infatuated with tax cuts for the rich and with economist Arthur Laffer’s theory that such cuts will lead to massive economic growth.
Can you guess if this man (who was pulled over by a police officer for a minor violation that required him to fix something on his car) is white or black and what kind of location (poor or well-to-do) he resides in? The driver actually tells you the answers in the video but I’m sure that you would have guessed long before he does so.
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I had an amused reaction to this paper titled Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief by Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan (Science vol. 336, p. 493-496, 27 April 2012) based on a set of studies that looked at the correlation between analytic thinking abilities and beliefs in god. The authors use the language of System 1 and System 2 thinking to describe intuitive and analytic reasoning respectively, terms that that I have discussed in some detail earlier here and here.
We see that the new White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci has claimed his first high-profile victim. White House chief of staff Reince Priebus has been fired and replaced by the head of Homeland Security John Kelly. If you are keeping score at home, others who have departed within six months include the national security adviser Michael Flynn, deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh, press secretary Sean Spicer, and press aide Michael Short. The scale of this kind of turnover does not happen by chance. It happens because of rot at the very top.
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While all attention has been focused on the Obamacare repeal drama, Russia has finally retaliated against the US for president Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats and seizure of properties that he did in the waning days of his tenure.
Russia has retaliated to new US sanctions by telling Washington to cut its diplomatic staff to 455 and barring the use of some properties.
The new US embassy staffing level would be the same as at Russia’s embassy in Washington.
The Russian foreign ministry also said it was seizing holiday properties and a warehouse used by US diplomats.