North Randall mall that is located close to where I live was at one time the largest mall in the country and its opening was a celebrity-studded event. But like many malls that do not cater to high-end customers, it has fallen on hard times and became a ghost mall with all the stores moving away. So the impoverished city of North Randall was delighted when Amazon announced its intention to lease the property, raze the largely abandoned mall, and put up one of its giant ‘fulfillment centers’ that would reportedly bring in 2,000 jobs.
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There is a new film The Post starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep and directed by Stephen Spielberg that resurrects once again the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers and the legal case that was won by the Washington Post and other newspapers that prevented the suppression of them. Nick Gillespie writes that in an interview with the BBC Arabic service’s Sam Asi, Spielberg, Hanks, and to a lesser extent Streep, praise Ellsberg as a hero for his actions but avoiding doing so with Edward Snowden.
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This highly acclaimed documentary by Errol Morris has been on my to-see list for the longest time but I never got around to it. I watched it last night and it deserves all the accolades it received. It is also a grim reminder of how in America, at least in some jurisdictions, so many innocent people are executed or incarcerated for decades because the police and prosecutors care less about the truth than ‘notching up a win’ and closing a case as quickly as they can.

The case so well illustrates that when police and prosecutors severely distort the judicial process in order to get a conviction, it is not just that an innocent person is deprived of life and liberty, as bad as that is, but that a whole lot of random innocent people suffer because of it. In their zeal to convict an innocent man of murder, the Dallas police and prosecutors let the real killer walk free and subsequently commit a string of violent crimes for a decade that ended with another murder. It was only after he was arrested for that second murder that the crime spree ended. The authorities are thus indirectly responsible for all those crimes.
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I stopped watching the Star Wars films after seeing episode 1 titled The Phantom Menace which, as all aficionados know, was the fourth film is the weird sequencing of that franchise. (Q: Why did episodes 4,5,6 get made before episodes 1,2,3? A: In charge of production, Yoda was.) So I had not planned to see the latest episode (I don’t know what number it is) titled The Last Jedi. But this review by Kate Aronoff surprised me because she says that this film takes a side in the class war.
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‘Prepper’ is the name given to those people who take extensive precautions to survive in the case of a major calamity such as nuclear war breaking out or the US being invaded and taken over by (say) Costa Rica or electing a socialist lesbian of color as president. These precautions take the form of heavily arming themselves, creating well-stocked bunkers, and learning skills that will enable them to survive in the wild and live off the land.
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Zimbabwe has been going through a rather strange political transition. Robert Mugabe has ruled that country since 1980 when his guerrilla force ZANU overthrew the white minority government of what was then called Rhodesia. Since then, his rule has become increasingly autocratic, corrupt, undemocratic, and brutal and it seemed like he, now 93 years old, was grooming his wife Grace to take over from him, and sacking his deputy head of state seemed to be a step in that direction
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