Calling all grammar pedants!

Are you, like me, somewhat of a grammar pedant and struggling to find gifts to give certain friends and relatives of yours who consistently say things that annoy you? Mark Frauenfelder has found just the thing. If the recipients spot the typo on the mug, they get a pardon. That error, he tells me, is an example of something called Skitt’s Law that says that “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself.”
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The highly uncertain future facing us with the Trump administration

The incoming Donald Trump administration is taking shape and the invaluable site ProPublica has compiled a continuously updated list with brief backgrounds of what we know about the people being proposed so far for cabinet and cabinet-rank posts. It seems to be a mix of bankers, corporate executives, political hacks, and military people, plus one nutty person (Ben Carson) to liven things up at cabinet meetings when he is not spaced out. None of them has a background that suggests that they are likely to work for the benefit of many of the less-well-off Trump voters. So the betrayal of the working and middle classes, many of whom voted for Trump because of his grandiose promises to solve all their problems, is well under way.
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THE PARADOX OF SCIENCE: The surprising success of science

The book with the above tentative title that I have been working hard on for the past year is finally done! Well, not really. As has been said, “A book is never finished, it is merely abandoned by its author.” No book (or article or painting or any other form of free composition) is ever really completed because one can always keep refining it, seeking to make it better. On each review, I find things I want to change and it is only when I find that I am changing the same things back and forth that I realize that it is time to end the process.
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The ‘Russian hacking’ story gets curiouser and curiouser

The perpetual ‘Red Scare’ mentality that has sustained the high levels of US military spending for a century has taken a curious turn. The basic charge is that the Russian government materially involved itself in the US presidential election by hacking into the websites of the Democratic party, and especially the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, and released those emails through WikiLeaks in order to hurt her campaign and aid in the election of Donald Trump, and that the Russian government was actively in communication with the Trump campaign. An additional charge against the Russians is that they doctored some of the documents leaked through WikiLeaks to make them look worse than the originals and that they also helped in the dissemination of fake news.
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Film review: Julius Caesar (1953)

This is an excellent film. It is so good that after watching it over the weekend, I wondered, “How could it be that I did not see this gem a long time ago?” The film is based on William Shakespeare’s play and featured an outstanding cast. Eyebrows were initially raised over the surprise casting of Marlon Brando in the role of Mark Antony, as people wondered how the notorious mumbler would handle one of the best known speeches from Shakespeare, the funeral oration for Caesar. At 29, he was also considered somewhat young to play the role of a senior Roman senator who would have been around 40.
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Goldman Sachs wins, again

For a long time now, it has been clear to any thinking person that the transnational global financial elite runs the world for its own benefit and that seems to be still true, despite all the railing against them during the last election, For all his populist talk of taking on the Wall Street bankers and criticisms of Hillary Clinton for being so cozy with them, Donald Trump has now appointed people from Goldman Sachs, the firm at the heart of American financial excess and greed, that Matt Taibbi memorably described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”, to top posts in his administration.
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The burden of proof when making charges

There was an interesting discussion in the comments about my dismissal as an ‘absurd’ claim the story that Hillary Clinton and key members of her Democratic party campaign were running some sort of child prostitution and sex trafficking ring out of a pizza shop, triggered by one commenter suggesting that I was dismissing the charge because I “liked” her, a claim that will cause some raised eyebrows among regular readers, some of whom have vigorously defended her from my attacks on her history and her qualities to be a president.
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Trying to find a silver lining in today’s political climate

While the immediate results of the presidential election have ominous implications in the near term in the US, especially for the poor, minorities, women, and the LGBT community, and can make people feel depressed, it sometimes helps to take the long view and see that the pendulum swings back and forth and that in general, we are much better off now than we were in the past and that we can help swing that pendulum again away from the likes of Trump and what he represents.
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President Obama’s belated attempt at limiting executive abuse

President Obama, after running one of the least transparent administrations despite promising during his first presidential campaign to run the most transparent, seems to have realized that it may not be wise to place all the executive power he has taken up and used, especially those of ubiquitous surveillance, the use of drones for the murder of people, relentlessly undermining the rights of courts to review its actions, and of people to seek judicial relief, in the hands of Donald Trump. He has now issued a 61-page document with the title REPORT ON THE LEGAL AND POLICY FRAMEWORKS GUIDING THE UNITED STATES’ USE OF MILITARY FORCE AND RELATED NATIONAL SECURITY OPERATIONS that insists that the executive powers he used are limited, presumably to prevent Trump from going wild with them.
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