The death of the singer and actor from cancer was reported today. There have been many tributes to his impact on music. While of course his fame was such that I had heard of him, I did not know much about him or his music but this article lists the ten key songs that track the trajectory of his varied career.
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I came across this online questionnaire that asks you for your opinion on various issues and then lets you know how well you align with the various candidates running for president in the different policy areas and overall. It is more sophisticated than most such things since it not only asks you for multiple choice responses to various questions, it also asks you how strongly you feel about the issue. What I particularly liked was that it provides more nuanced options if you don’t find the first pair of binary options satisfactory, which I often didn’t.
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There is an awkward, long-standing, and frequently occurring problem of how to refer in the third person to someone whose gender is unknown. The use of ‘he or she’ or ‘him or her’ is the traditional option but as anyone will attest, this is cumbersome and inelegant for both the writer and the reader. It also does not address the question of people whose gender identification does not fit into the binary category.
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Charles and David Koch are billionaire industrialists who have used their vast wealth to launch major campaigns at the local, state, and federal levels to influence (read ‘buy’) legislators so that they can get legislation passed that advances their own interests. They do this by contributing to contributing to candidates directly or through Super PACs, creating and supporting so—called think tanks that advance their interests, funding lobbying groups that work ceaselessly on their behalf, and in any other way that they can think of.
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The last segment of The Nightly Show features the evening’s guest joining Larry Wilmore and a selected panel of (usually) comedians to discuss a current issue. The weakness of the segment has been that the topic often had no connection to the background or expertise of the guest. But last week Wilmore had Bernie Sanders again on his show and they had an extended discussion on the issues that Sanders is addressing and it was an informative discussion, funny and yet serious.
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Today marks the fourth anniversary of my blog as part of the Freethought network, though I had been blogging on my earlier university site since January 2005. I truly never thought that I would keep it up for so long and still enjoy it. It has been the lively and enthusiastic response of the readers that has contributed to the enjoyment, in addition to being a learning experience for me.
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There are mixed reports coming out of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon where a group of armed people have taken over the property in the name of the ‘people’, to ‘restore the constitution’, ‘fight government tyranny’ and all the other things that get right-wing paramilitary groups get all fired up. Tim Dickinson has been following events closely and gives us some background on some of the members of this group.
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People make a lot of jokes at the expense of women about how some of them seek to own many pairs of shoes. The person who carried that to the extreme was the infamous Imelda Marcos, wife of the former autocratic leader of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos who, when he was ousted in 1986, fled with her husband to Hawaii, leaving behind around 1,000 pairs of shoes and 800 purses.
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I often succumb to the temptation to mock, or relay the mocking by others, of the efforts of the extreme right wing fanatics who speak with such a loud voice in US politics. Matt Taibbi, while also laughing at the antics of the armed people who have taken over a remote wildlife refuge in Oregon as a stand against government tyranny, addresses the question as to whether this is a good thing.
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