As Donald Trump tries to get the Republican party to unify around him, there has been some shifting around among the members of the various sectors within the right-wing party, such as the elected officials, the media, and the influence shapers. One is seeing the first two sectors falling into line behind Trump as they see it in their best interests to not defy the party nominee.
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As we all know, young people are leaving religious institutions in ever-increasing numbers. This is naturally causing concern in religious quarters and some wealthy people think that the problem is that the young are not being equipped to ‘properly’ answer the kinds of deep questions that occur to almost everyone as they are growing up and becoming independent. By properly, these people mean consistent with what the Bible says.
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We have seen that no one in the US government ever faces serious punishments for the torture, death, and destruction of innocent people in the many countries with which we are at war, except for those who reveal the truth about such events, as was the case with the punishment meted out to Chelsea Manning for her release of the Collateral Murder video.
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It happened again.
I got a notice from my university saying that there was a problem with some of the university-wide software that was resulting in some services responding very slowly or not at all, and that they were working on it and apologizing for any problems that this may be causing users. So far, so good. But then they went and added “Thank you for your patience”, something that I see frequently and also hear on recordings when you call a business and there is some waiting involved to speak to a human being.
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The oligarchy in the US, aided by the politicians they buy, have been waging a relentless war against worker unions. Workers who lack the collective protection of a union are highly exposed to abusive practices by employers and managers. An excerpt from a new book Bully Nation by Charles Derber and Yale R. Magrass makes the case that the bullying of vulnerable workers who try to unionize or otherwise improve their working conditions is a consequence of the inequalities generated by unchecked capitalism.
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Many of you would have received the request from some business or organization to “Like us on Facebook!” If you have a Facebook account, you also get email alerts that promise updates on the ‘status’ of friends and if you click on them you will find that rather than being a significant change in their lives (new job, moved to new city, major relationship changes, etc.), it is often something really trivial, such as that they are ordering pizza. As a result of several such updates, I now don’t bother to click on them. And yet, they seem to garner a lot of ‘likes’ by their friends.
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Most people are familiar with the phrase ‘shell game’ which denotes the shifty moving around of something so that one finds it hard to trace its location. It comes from a trick that is popular with street magicians that have been used for ages to fleece bystanders who try to bet that they know under which cup a ball has been hidden.
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Take a look at this sentence in an article in The Guardian. The author writes, “Few attendees at Sanders rallies – least of all Sanders – seem the least bit phased”. The context clearly implies that the author meant to use the word ‘fazed’ which means “to cause (someone) to feel afraid or uncertain”, whereas ‘phased’ means something else entirely.
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I have not read Ayn Rand’s major work that supposedly lays out her philosophy of objectivism and that has attracted devoted followers like Speaker of the House of representatives Paul Ryan, former chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, and a host of other libertarian-minded people.
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