Vermont senator Bernie Sanders will announce today he will enter the race for the Democratic nomination for president. This is very welcome news. He would be a far better president than Hillary Clinton. He is someone who is not afraid to refer to himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ (although his socialism is of a very mild sort) and the things he stands for will now be part of the political discussions.
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I listened to the full 140-minute audio of the oral arguments in Tuesday’s hearings on same-sex marriage before the US Supreme Court. While listening, my reaction was somewhat different from the commentators I had linked to earlier so I thought I would put forward my own impressions of the exchanges and the tactics employed by the lawyers for the various sides. I will give my predictions for the outcome in a later post, maybe later today but more likely tomorrow.
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Once again, a comedy show comes up with a pretty good analysis of the events in Baltimore. Jon Stewart points out that these kinds of eruptions have occurred time and time again because the conditions that trigger them are never addressed and that the way that such disturbances are viewed depends on the kinds of people doing the rioting.
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Most of this blog’s readers would have heard about the Golden Ratio, supposedly first derived by Euclid. If one takes a straight line segment and divides into two such that the ratio of the longer part to the shorter is the same as the ratio of the whole line to the longer part, some simple algebra shows that this ratio works out to be about 1.618 to one.
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When I was still in my early teens I became a huge fan of comic writers such as P. G. Wodehouse, S. J. Perelman, and Stephen Leacock. I loved the way they played with words to get laughs and dreamed of writing just like them. So I tried writing a comic story, a parody of the hard-boiled detective genre which Perelman in particular was a genius at, such as his famous short story Somewhere a Roscoe.
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I have long used the word oligarchy to describe America because I think it accurately captures the reality of the current state of politics where a small coterie of wealthy individuals and families control the country and make all the major decisions on economic and military issues. The so-called people’s elected representatives are merely the people in front of the curtain, there to entertain us and distract us from the fact that we really have no say except on a limited set of social issues that the oligarchy does not really care that much about as long as the stability they need to maintain their own lifestyles is maintained.
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The audio of this morning’s oral arguments in the same-sex marriage case Obergefell v. Hodgeson before the US Supreme Court is now available. The first part dealing with the issue of whether states can ban same-sex marriages (what is known as the “marriage question”) lasts for 90 minutes and can be heard here while the second part dealing with whether states can refuse to recognize the marriages of same-sex couples who were legally married in another state (the “recognition question”) lasts 60 minutes and can be heard here. (Warning: autoplay).
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If one wanted to see evidence of the shallowness of the US news media and its incestuous relationship with politicians and the way reporters (I use the term loosely) get gooey-eyed when they meet film and TV stars, you need look no further than the annual White House Correspondents Dinner that took place last Saturday. I am amazed that the event didn’t shrivel up and die after the brutal roasting it got in 2006 from Stephen Colbert when the organizers made the mistake of inviting him to give the keynote speech and instead of the usual pandering they expected to get, he took the opportunity to tell them to their faces that they were nothing better than star-struck stenographers who suck up to the powerful and famous. Incidentally, there is a new documentary titled Nerd Prom that gives an inside look at this event, if you have the stomach for it.
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A money-grubbing preacher of a megachurch (is that redundant?) called the World Changers Church International with the highly appropriate name of Creflo Dollar beseeched his congregation to donate generously so that he could purchase a new luxury private jet that costs $65 million to replace the one he already has. The new plane is a Gulfstream G650, a model that has billionaires waiting in line to purchase, and no self-respecting man of god would be seen dead without one.
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The city of Baltimore is experiencing violent clashes between members of the public and the symbols of authority such as police and firefighters, accompanied by looting and fires. This has resulted in a state of emergency being declared and a week-long curfew from 10:00pm to 5:00 am imposed. The clashes broke out following the funeral of Freddie Grey, the 25-year old man who died in police custody.
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