With all the attention focused on the Republican debate, a major event that been largely obscured is that today marked the end of the 60-day deadline to block the nuclear deal the P5+1 nations made with Iran. A final attempt in the US Senate to add amendments to the deal that would have effectively killed it failed today to get enough votes to overcome a filibuster and so the deal goes through.
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I watched bits and pieces of the yesterday’s Republican debate marathon online yesterday via CNN’s special livestream feed. Rather than give you my reactions, I thought I’d leave it to the pros and I thought Jeb Lund’s recapitulation, titled 5.5 Hours of Surreal Insanity, summed it up pretty well.
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Charles Darwin came from a family of skeptics and freethinkers and although at one point he studied for the clergy, it was clear that he was never that religious and his research into the origins of species frayed even that weak link and he moved away from the biblical theories of special creation that were dominant at the time and became an unbeliever as a young adult.
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Veteran journalist Tariq Ali goes down the list of all Labour Party leaders and makes the case that in Jeremy Corbyn, the party has elected the most left-wing leader in its history. But he says that Corbyn will have his work cut out for him. The Blairites of so-called New Labour had put the selection of candidates for parliament so much under their control that the current crop of Labour MPs in parliament (the Parliamentary Labour Party or PLP) will obstruct him.
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Now that the establishment war on Donald Trump is fully out in the open, Matt Taibbi expects the debate tonight to be a setup with the three moderators, but especially Hugh Hewitt, chosen so as to guarantee that they will arouse Trump’s ire. He says that the goal will be to get Trump to do something that will dent Trump’s popularity with his supporters but that the effort will backfire.
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A side issue in the Kim Davis saga is that she is described as being an Apostolic Christian, one of the many splinter groups in Christianity that differ over matters of obscure doctrine and practice. I had not heard of this group before but this article explains who they are and what they stand for.
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A 14-year old high school freshman in Irving, Texas who likes to invent things made a clock and took it to his high school to show it to his new teachers, hoping that they would be impressed by his abilities. Oh, they were impressed all right. The Dallas Morning News describes what happened.
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I will not be watching the second Republican debate tonight. It is on cable TV like the last one and to watch it would require me to go to a friend’s place and I simply can’t be bothered. I made the effort for the first one just to see what this mass audition would look like and now the novelty is gone.
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Janis Joplin’s psychedelic Porsche is being sold for $400,000. Maybe she got it from one of her friends.
The famous psychedelic Porsche convertible driven by late singing legend Janis Joplin is going up for sale.
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On his show Last Week Tonight, he runs through a list of school subjects and distills what he feels is their essence, all that you will need to know or will remember.
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