The actor died yesterday in London. He was 91.
There are some actors who leave an indelible impression because of one particular role and this was undoubtedly true in the case of Moody’s appearance in the musical Oliver! that was based on the book Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens that was first a stage play in London and Broadway before being made into a film in 1968.
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Pope Francis is due to issue an encyclical (a kind of letter from the pope to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics) this coming Thursday where he is expected to call on Catholics all over the world to act to stop global warming and address climate change and inequality.
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In early 2013, following their convincing defeat in the presidential elections in 2012, the Republican party commissioned a study to do some serious soul-searching as to what the problem was and what they needed to do to make their party more appealing, especially to the young, women, and Latinos. The result was a 97-page report (quickly dubbed an ‘autopsy’) that criticized the the party’s attitude towards those major demographic groups and recommended wholesale changes.
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He realized that his interview 2011 with Donald Rumsfeld when he was plugging his memoirs was absolutely awful, allowing Rumsfeld to evade all responsibility for his lies and crimes. I panned Stewart for that interview at the time and said that it was symptomatic of a general failing of his, that he seemed to let politically powerful people off the hook when he was talking directly with them, unlike when he was taking about them in their absence.
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Shannon Grove, a California Assemblywoman, has put the lie to the idea that religious nutcases never change their minds. She used to think that the terrible drought in her state was caused by environmentalists who prioritized the needs of fish over people but now she says she knows better and that it is actually caused by the state’s abortion policies that she thinks are too liberal.
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I have mentioned that although opponents of same-sex marriage are threatening to defy any decision by the US Supreme Court that says that bans on same-sex marriage violate the constitution, they have been vague about what specific actions they might take. From North Carolina comes one possible tactic. Their Republican-controlled legislature passed a law that said that magistrates and clerks can choose to not perform same-sex marriages. The governor of the state, also a Republican who opposes same-sex marriage, had vetoed the bill on the grounds that employees of the state who have taken an oath to carry out faithfully the duties of their office should not be allowed to pick and choose whom they serve. But the legislature overrode the veto and this policy is now law.
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I was reading about the large number of baseball pitchers who suffer serious elbow injuries that require something popularly known as Tommy John surgery so named after a famous pitcher. Something known as the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow gets frayed, stretched, or torn during the pitching motion and has to be replaced. These injuries, along with rotator cuff injuries, can occur in even young children playing in Little League games.
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We are all familiar with R. Buckminster Fuller’s revolutionary ideas for buildings such as the geodesic dome. Less well known is that in 1933 he came up with a design for a futuristic car called the Dymaxion car that was front-wheel drive with rear steering and had just three wheels. The rear wheel could turn by 90o, allowing for a very tight turning circle.
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The entry of Bernie Sanders into the Democratic party primary race has had some on the left speculating that his role is not to try and win the nomination nor to even try and shift the debate towards more progressive policies but to essentially keep progressives within the Democratic party fold and prevent them from not voting or going to a third party.
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We have heard dire warnings from people in the US, even Republican presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, that they will defy any attempt to put same-sex marriage on a par with opposite-sex marriage. These warnings have come in anticipation that the US Supreme Court might rule this month that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional.
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