John Bercow’s greatest hits

While the British parliamentary machinations over Brexit have been depressing to watch, one of the few bright spots (for me at least) is watching the speaker John Bercow in action. He has been speaker through a tumultuous period, none more so than the past few months with the Brexot chaos. His attempts to control a sometimes rowdy chamber has been a treat to watch.

But all good things must come to and there are rumors that Bercow may be stepping down from this role sometime in the summer, though he himself has not confirmed it.
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Uh-oh, does this mean a rise in ‘incels’?

Christopher Ingraham tweets a link to an article that he wrote for the Washington Post has gone through the data compiled in the General Social Survey and says that the number of young men who have not had sex during the previous year has nearly tripled in the last decade and has now reached 28%.


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Russiagate and the new Red Scare

Katie Halper interviews Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Aaron Maté of The Nation about how much of the mainstream media glommed onto the Trump-Russia collusion story, predictably called ‘Russiagate’, for so long to the exclusion of many other important stories, and left themselves wide open to the kind of blowback that they are now experiencing because of the Mueller report seemingly saying (at least as far as the released short summary goes) that there was no such collusion. The entire interview is well worth reading but here are a few excerpts. (MT refers to Taibbi, AM to Maté, and KH to Halper.)
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The scandal of professional wrestling

I have never seen the appeal of professional wrestling because violence, even if simulated, makes me cringe so I never watch it. Also, even with scripted fights, there is real wear and tear on the body and actual injuries. The scandal of professional wrestling is not that the whole thing is faked because everyone knows that. It is that the wrestlers are treated like dirt by the monopolistic WWE and its owner Vince McMahon that results in many of them dying young and poor, as John Oliver points out in this expose.

Taking a lighter look at Brexit

Four indicative proposals for Brexit were selected by the speaker for debate and voting and just now it was announced that all four failed to get a majority, joining in the dumpster the eight from last week. The closest that lost by just 3 votes (273 to 276) was one proposed by a pro-European Conservative Ken Clarke though most of his party voted against it. This was seen as a minimally disruptive Brexit that would consist of a UK-wide customs union with the EU.

A disappointed Clarke reportedly said that “his customs union did not get a majority because some people’s vote supporters would not back it because they only wanted to back a second referendum. And some MPs would not back it because they wanted common market 2.0, even though they would have been happy with the customs union plan too, he says. He says he sometimes thinks this house is not very good at doing politics.” That seems like an understatement.
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A fourth vote on May’s plan?

On Monday, the British parliament will votes on a new set of indicative votes, hoping to find one that contains the elusive formula that can gain a majority that will pass as a legislative option, after the previous such exercise sent all the options to defeat. It now appears that Theresa May is also planning to put forward her thrice (or twice depending on how you view the third vote) defeated Brexit plan to parliament for a fourth vote later in the coming week. This time she has upped the stakes and threatened to call for a general election if it fails, no doubt hoping that the fear of Jeremy Corbyn winning the election and becoming prime minister will scare the hell out of all the Conservatives and neoliberals within the Labour to vote to pass her plan.
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Why US-North Korea talks collapsed

You may recall that the summit meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un held with much fanfare in Vietnam at the end of February ended abruptly, with a scheduled luncheon of the two leaders canceled and both parties leaving Vietnam immediately after with no joint communiqué. This was a sign that things ended badly but there was no explanation for what happened.

We now have some insight. Reuters says that it has seen a document that Trump gave Kim on that final morning that contained demands that had long been rejected by North Korea and they decided that the US was not serious and that it was not worth talking anymore.
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The Saudi spying operation in the US exposed

Remember the story of photographs of Jeff Bezos that the National Enquirer and its parent organization AMI was trying to use to blackmail Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos to stop his investigation into how they got the photos and issue a statement saying that he absolved them of all wrongdoing? Instead Bezos went public and gave his investigator Gavin De Becker all the resources he needed to continue his investigation.

Now De Becker says that he has completed his investigation and issued a statement that is quite extraordinary.
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A case study of radicalization

Trevor Aaronson has a fascinating case study that looks closely at the life of Michael Hari, part of a trio that bombed a mosque in Minnesota, to show how some white Christian men have become radicalized in Trump’s America. He says that what Trump has done is ‘flip the switch’ in the minds of these men, turning them from simply feeling disgruntled at their failures in life to seeing themselves as a victimized group that has a mission to save the country from domination by women, minorities, and non-Christians. It gives their lives meaning.
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May goes down for the third time

[UPDATE: The EU has issued what seems like a pretty hardline statement in response to the vote, saying that the ball is entirely in the UK’s hands now to come up with something definite by the April 12 deadline but that a no-deal outcome seems most likely. The statement says that they are prepared for a no-deal exit and will not accept any half-baked proposals. They have scheduled a meeting of EU leaders on April 10 to evaluate whatever May comes up with, though given how things are going, parliament may still be voting up until the 12th.]

The British parliament voted just now to defeat Theresa May’s stripped down Brexit plan by a margin of 344 to 286, a smaller margin than the previous two votes but still a significant defeat. The deadline now shifts to April 12 by which time parliament will have to give the EU a definite plan that can consists of: revoking Article 50; requesting a very long delay of the order of years; or leaving with no deal. The first two options would involve the UK taking part in the EU elections later this year, something that the Brexiteers strenuously oppose.
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