There have recently been several films about how Christians are suffering persecution in the US for their beliefs and are bravely fighting back against injustice and persecution by those powerful entities advancing the LGBT agenda. Saturday Night Live presents a trailer of yet another such film.
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Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa stopped off in Colombo in 1922 on their way to Japan but the visit did not receive the kind of widespread publicity in the local papers that one would have expected, given how famous he was. True, he had not as yet received the Nobel Prize. A few weeks after his visit, the announcement was made while he was in Japan that he had received his retrospectively for 1921, but he was still an eminent celebrity. I myself was not aware of this visit until a friend of mine recently sent me a link to this article that summarized what Einstein had written in his private notes about the visit and his encounter with a rickshaw, a mode of transport that has disappeared, though I remember seeing them as a child.
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I wrote recently about how Southwest Airlines had been involved in a series of incidents where Muslim passengers had been kicked off flights, the latest where a Berkeley student was kicked off after another passenger reported him for suspicious behavior.
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Recently actors and married couple Johnny Depp and Amber Heard created a controversy by trying to smuggle their two dogs into Australia on a visit while trying to evade that country’s strict quarantine laws. He got caught but was allowed to leave without suffering the serious punishment (that could go up to ten years in prison) that a non-celebrity might have received. He later provided a video of a grudging apology.
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I simply do not understand the attraction of the Scripps Spelling Bee competition. It now results in young people spending an extraordinary amount of time memorizing the spelling of words so esoteric that one is never likely to use or hear them except in highly technical contexts. In its early years the winning words were blackguard, conflagration, concede, litigation, breach, saxophone, license, and primarily. In recent years they were appoggiatura, Ursprache, serrefine, guerdon, Laodicean, stromuhr, cymotrichous, guetapens, knaidel, stichomythia, and feuilleton. (See here and here for my earlier posts and in particular read the comments to those posts by readers who added interesting information and insights.)
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There has been a great outpouring of grief over the death of Prince who, by all accounts, was a highly gifted and innovative musician. I have not written about his life and death because, although of course I had heard of him, I was not at all familiar with his music, a telling sign of how ignorant I am of so much of popular culture. The Prince phenomenon occurred during a time when I was not paying much attention to the world of popular music.
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What puzzles (and bothers) me is why I have such an intense visceral dislike for Ted Cruz, even to just seeing his face. Judging people by their looks is a terrible thing, and although it is true that we do judge people almost instantaneously upon meeting them, it is not usually based on whether they are good looking or not, but by more subtle cues as to their likability, trustworthiness, and so on, that are hard to pin down.
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Brazil is a major player in the global economy. There is a great deal of political turmoil going on there right now with the president under impeachment proceedings. The US media is reporting on it as a corruption story, that the current president and her party are corrupt and that this move is a cleansing operation. But Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, says that while corruption is undoubtedly there, behind the scenes it is being used to remove a government that is supportive of the poor with one that the oligarchy wants in power.
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On February 9, Bernie Sanders broke through a significant barrier in US political history.
“Bernie Sanders made history on Tuesday night as he became the first Jewish-American to win a presidential primary.
The milestone falls just eight days after Ted Cruz became the first Hispanic-American to win a presidential nominating contest with his win in the Iowa Caucuses.
Sanders is not the first Jewish-American to run for president. Both former Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman mounted unsuccessful campaigns for the White House in 1996 and 2004, respectively. Further, the Republican nominee for president in 1964, Barry Goldwater, was of Jewish descent but was a practicing Episcopalian.
But Sanders is the first Jewish-American candidate, not to mention the first non-Christian candidate of any denomination, to win a state in a presidential primary.”