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.
[Read more…]

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.
[Read more…]

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.
[Read more…]

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.
[Read more…]

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.
[Read more…]

Film review: Hell or High Water (2016)

On the surface, this is another clichéd cops and robbers film. Two brothers, the older one having spent ten years in prison for a series of crimes, set out on a spree of robbing banks in rural West Texas, stealing fairly small amounts of cash from each, and pursued by a grizzled old Texas Ranger on the verge of retirement and his partner who is of mixed Mexican/Indian ethnicity.
[Read more…]

The astonishing story of how women got to run in the Boston Marathon

70-year old Kathrine Switzer ran and completed the Boston Marathon yesterday. Nowadays it is not unusual for women and older people to achieve such things but this is significant because 50 years ago, Switzer became the first woman to run in this race and what happened when she did so makes for an astonishing story that I wrote about two years ago and you can listen to her tell her story now in this video clip.
[Read more…]

Cleveland’s dubious claims to fame

The city of Cleveland has many desirable features. But these tend to be overshadowed by the many macabre criminal stories that have become associated with it that have garnered national and international attention. There were the so-called headless torso serial killings involving at least twelve victims back in the 1930s. Elliot Ness, who later became famous as an FBI investigator was police chief at the time. Then there was the Sam Sheppard case in 1954 that was reportedly the basis of the hit TV series and film The Fugitive.
[Read more…]