It was not long ago that many nations in the west made a impressive display of solidarity in favor of free speech following the massacre of the writers and cartoonists at the magazine Charlie Hebdo. There were marches and speeches celebrating the right to free speech and the need to be vigilant against attempts at censorship.
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Jeb Bush has finally faced up to the fact that he is not going to be president of the US and has ended his campaign for the Republican nomination. It must be a particularly bitter pill for him to swallow given that he was the son, not his brother George W, who was always thought to be the one who would be president and was groomed for it by his parents,
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I came across this interesting little math problem by Oliver Roeder that I thought I would pass on. I actually worked it out while I was waiting to board my plane on my return from California yesterday.
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One of the features in the news stories surrounding militia groups like the ones led by Cliven Bundy’s brood is that the members all seem to carry in their pockets copies of the US constitution and quote from it, presumably to give more credence to their claims that they are the true followers of that founding document and that everyone who challenges them is acting illegally. In articles, you will frequently read passages like the following by Christopher Ketcham of his account of meeting with Cliven Bundy last year.(Harper’s Magazine, February 2015)
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I am terrible at art and have always been so, partly due to serious lack of talent and partly due to having had no training at all. The art classes we had in elementary school back in Sri Lanka were viewed largely as fun time where we drew whatever we liked and got almost no feedback on how to make it better. This ignorance of art has not prevented me from having an immense respect for the abilities of artists and their fertile imaginations.
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Conservative David Frum, who was George W. Bush’s speechwriter, fingers anger against the oligarchic control of US politics as a major driver in the US election.
The tight grip of oligarchy upon the American political system slipped a little last night in New Hampshire.
On the Democratic side, voters cast their ballots for one of the most implausible candidates in modern presidential history—less because his rhetoric was so mesmerizing or his program so inspiring than as a protest against an expected winner perceived as a lavishly compensated servitor of organized wealth.
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I have been writing repeatedly about the devastating impact of the 2007-2008 recession triggered by the frauds committed by the financial sector. But I did not personally experience any hardship. This was because I had a job that was not affected by the crisis and was living in a home that was paid for a long time ago and was not trying to sell it. So while the city of Cleveland was hit hard by foreclosures that devastated entire neighborhoods, where I lived there was just a slight uptick in the number of houses for sale and that seems to have now returned to more normal levels.
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Stephen Colbert, with a stuffed ferret named Caligula in his arms, pays tribute and bids farewell to the victims of the latest culling of the Republican herd, with the dropping out of Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, and Jim Gilmore.
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Much energy and effort has been spent, not least by me, in trying to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon, what he stands for and why so many people are attracted to him. You would think that all possible theories would have been exhausted by now but I came across this article by Bobby Azarian, a cognitive neuroscientist at George Mason University, that sheds a possible new light on his motivations and methods.
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