Tim Dowling captures something that had been vaguely bugging me for some time but that I could not quite put my finger on, and that is the way that some people in the US, when someone in their organization is exposed as doing something outrageous or criminal, are quick to say “This is not who we are”.
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New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman operates in two modes. He is either completely wrong or given to superficial platitudes written in an appallingly bad style. But like all the other warmongers who occupy the top niches of the US political-media establishment, there is no problem for which more bloodshed is not the preferred solution.
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The premises outside St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco has four tall side doors with sheltered alcoves that were apparently being used by homeless people as a place to sleep. The church apparently did not like this and came up with a novel way to discourage them, as one reporter observed.
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Glenn Greenwald comes out with another shocking story in The Intercept about the kinds of threats that the US uses against its allies if they gave asylum to Edward Snowden.
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So here I am in Auckland awaiting the start of the first semi-final game between New Zealand and South Africa due to start in four hours time. I will be watching it on TV instead of going to the nearby Eden Park grounds. If Sri Lanka had beaten South Africa and made it to this game I would have tried to get tickets even though it would have been very hard. The four semi-finalists (New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, and India) are not surprises and all the games should be close ones.
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This song, written by Neil Diamond and performed by The Monkees was their best one, I thought. It is the ideal song, at least the title phrase, for those occasions when one is cheering for one’s preferred team, especially when it is the underdog and fighting back. I don’t go to any sporting events so don’t know if it is actually used for that purpose.
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The same day that Sri Lanka received a thumping at the hands of South Africa in the World Cup cricket tournament, they also suffered a shock defeat to Bhutan in a qualifying game for the 2018 football World Cup. Bhutan is ranked as the worst of 209 teams in FIFA and needless to say they are thrilled at winning the two games 1-0 and 2-1.
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Kevin Drum has done some excellent writing about the case for a causal relationship between the amount of lead in our environment and violent crime, bringing to greater public awareness research done by Rick Nevin and others. I wrote about his article for Mother Jones on this topic last year and he now has a follow-up article looking at more research by Nevin, a leading proponent of the lead-violent crime linkage, that extends that argument to rural areas, saying that rural crime skyrocketed in the late 1800s because lead paint wasn’t readily available before 1880.
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Recently my daughter told me that her friend from high school, whom I also know and happens to be the daughter of a colleague, had got married and was pregnant. She is in a same-sex marriage. Another colleague of mine, also in a same-sex marriage, just had a baby too. What struck me was how ordinary this news seemed to me. Just a decade ago, same-sex couples getting married and giving birth to children would have been big news. Now I find myself responding pretty much the way I would to news of an opposite-sex marriage and pregnancy of people I know, happy for the couple, wishing them well, and then moving on to other things.
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