Why did I suddenly get a lot of pop up ads?

I had never had a serious problem with pop up ads. There would be occasional ones but not so many that they were a nuisance that required action. But suddenly starting with the last week I was flooded with them. They seemed to be mostly from a few legitimate business sites like Hotels.com and another for discounted eyeglasses. I don’t know why they started.

I downloaded AdblockPlus and it has stopped the ads so the problem has gone away. But I am curious why they suddenly exploded. Anyone have any ideas?

The Comey affair

US news is all abuzz with the firing of FBI Director James Comey by Donald Trump and speculation is running rampant as to the possible motives and I thought I might as well put in my two cents. One thing we can ignore right off the bat are the rationales put out by the Trump administration for the firing because Trump is a petulant man-child who lies about everything and sees everything in terms of how it affects him. If he thinks that people are on his side, he praises them. If he thinks someone is disloyal to him, he attacks them viciously.
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The curse of blasphemy laws

The outgoing governor of the Jakarta in Indonesia, who is a double minority in that he is both Christian and ethnic Chinese in a country that has the largest Muslim population in the world and is 85% Muslim, was sentenced to two-years imprisonment for blasphemy. His crime? Quoting a verse from the Koran which he said that opponents were using to mislead people that Muslims should not vote for a non-Muslim.
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John Oliver issues another call to action to ensure net neutrality

He does a brilliant job of explaining why the fight for new neutrality is important for everyone to get involved in and how that neutrality is being threatened by the new FCC chairperson Ajit Pai. His show has set up a website gofccyourself.com to make it easy to go straight to the relevant FCC page. Once there, click on ‘express’ link at the upper right, and leave your comment telling thee FCC that you back strong net neutrality backed by Title II oversight of ISPs. I already did so.

They suspected their actions were illegal – but did them anyway

Alex Emmons writes about a lawsuit filed by the ACLU against two psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen who received lucrative government contracts to devise the most abusive torture methods used by the government. Their work was supervised by Gina Haspel who has been appointed by Donald Trump as deputy director of the CIA.
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One spelling bee mystery solved

I have expressed my puzzlement with several aspects of the national spelling bee competition, especially the fact that the words have become increasingly obscure over time. (For example, in 1932, the winning word was ‘knack’!) One question in my mind is why such a pointless activity as spelling highly esoteric words has become so attractive that young children spend countless hours learning to do so and then subject themselves to sweating it out in front of cameras and large prime time TV audiences in a format that seems to revel in their agony. To win this contest requires knowing the spelling of 150,000 to 200,000 words. This is astonishing when one considers that Shakespeare used only about 33,000 words in his plays and this is considered to be close to the upper limit of most people’s vocabularies, even those who have high levels of formal education. So these competitors are learning to spell a lot of words they will never, ever use.
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