The incredible cruelty of petty officials

There are a lot of tragedies in life. But sometimes there are incidents that, in the grand scheme of things may seem relatively minor because they do not involve wars or things like that, but still provoke revulsion because they are examples of people treating other cruelly for no obvious reason when simpler, more humane options are available. And in this class are the actions of petty officials who abuse people because they think they can do so with impunity because the weight of authority is behind them. There are many examples of this, as we have seen in the behavior of the TSA personnel at airports, the Customs and Border Protection agents at borders, and of course the security personnel working for United Airlines who dragged a passenger off the plane.
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Changing the rhythms of life

The ‘natural’ daily rhythm of our bodies is said to be close to 25 hours. But since our lives require a daily routine that corresponds to the clock and not our bodies, we are thus slightly out of sync with the rotation of the Earth, with each passing day increasing the disparity, resulting in things like sleeping extra on our days off from work or school in an effort to make up for it.
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The bold and strange dialogue of Mary Worth

I have written about my love affair with newspaper comics before. From my childhood I have read the comics pages in the newspapers and continue to do so in my local newspaper the Plain Dealer. I used to read every single comic in it but after some time I stopped reading some of them because they were not simply not funny (Marmaduke for example) or because I was not interested in the dramatic ones that had long storylines like Spiderman or Judge Parker.
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Reflections on the March for Science

UPDATE: Here are some signs from the marches around the world. This sign describes me and a lot of the people for whom this may be one of the few or only rally they ever attended.

I just returned from the Cleveland March for Science. I spent my time at the pre-march events in Public Square and waited for the talks but came home when the march proper started. I have little experience with marches and rallies so have no means of comparison and estimating numbers. All I can say is that it exceeded my own expectations. It took quite a long time once the rally ended for the crowd to leave the square on the march, which is a sign of how big the crowd was.
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Behind the scenes of the Clinton campaign

Matt Taibbi reviews a new book Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, based on anonymous (of course) sources within the upper echelons of the Hillary Clinton campaign and say that despite her running for president for about a decade, they could not figure out exactly why she was running, at one time even toying with the slogan “Because it’s her turn”. It makes for depressing but revealing reading about the mindset of the Washington political establishment class.
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Good riddance, Bill

Trevor Noah provides a fitting farewell to the odious Bill O’Reilly who has been given a golden parachute to leave Fox News in the wake of the latest revelations about his awful behavior that resulted in practically the entire stable of advertisers yanking support from his show. It has been clear for a long time that O’Reilly was an awful, abusive man who treated many of his co-workers at Fox abominably and yet Fox was quite happy to tolerate and make excuses for him when he was making money for them but once that money source started drying up, they turned on him.
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Bump-and-run car thefts

If one is involved in a minor fender-bender accident, the natural instinct is to get out of the car and survey the damage. But it turns out that car thieves are exploiting this tendency to deliberately rear-end people’s vehicles and then taking the car keys and stealing the car from them when they exit the vehicle. Cleveland has seen such incidents and as result, the local police in my suburb have put out guidelines as to what to do if you are rear-ended.
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It’s 9:00 o’clock, do you know where your aircraft carrier fleet is?

The absurd theatrics of the Trump administration continue apace. Friday, April 15 was the day that the world was expecting a nuclear test by North Korea because that is the anniversary of the birthday of the founder of that country Kim Il Sung, who also happens to be the grandfather of the current leader, a glorious example of despotic nepotism that we are seeing on a smaller scale in the US with dynastic tendencies of the Bush and Clinton families and even more crudely now with the Trump family. The current leader Kim Jong-Un likes to demonstrate some military power on these days.
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