John Oliver reviews the news from last week that were hardly covered because of the serial rubbish that spews out of Donald Trump’s mouth.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
I will be visiting with my grandson for the coming week and am finding him so fascinating that it is hard to find the time to blog. It turns out that being a new grandfather is all that it is cracked up to be. So blogging will be sporadic for the next week.
But what I can report is that even though he is just one month old, he acts more rationally than the current president of the USA.
This was the first solo press conference given by Donald Trump. Normally the president makes a few remarks about some issues that he wants to highlight and then asks for questions. Trump used his opening time to deliver a long, rambling, incoherent monologue largely praising himself and blasting the media for painting his administration in a bad light, before combatively engaging with the press and his ‘answers’ to the questions consisted of more self-praise and press-blasting.
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I know, I know, and water is wet, right? But I was struck by something he said in his news conference today that was widely reported as reaching new levels of incoherence and rambling. Read the transcript and see for yourself. Here’s a bit of it.
Leaking information to the press is a long-standing Washington practice. It is the means by which trial balloons are floated, agendas are pushed, and careers are advanced and demolished. The response as to whether leaks are a good thing or a bad thing is usually a partisan one depending on who is doing the leaking and who the targets of the leaks are, rather than on broad general principles of whether the leaks are in the public interest. What is unusual is such a high level of leaks so early in an administration.
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I just watched this critically acclaimed film and have to admit that I was highly disappointed. The central plot line is something that really appealed to me, as to how the world might react if spaceships were to suddenly arrive on Earth. What would the extra-terrestrials look like? What might their intentions be towards us? How could we communicate to find out? What science and technology do they have that enables them to overcome the massive barriers to interplanetary, let alone interstellar, travel that we face? This is a topic that is a staple of science-fiction writers, in classics like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
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A couple of recent posts on tea (see here and here) generated lively discussions about the many myths surrounding how to make a good cup of tea. I have also in the past mentioned that there are a lot of similar myths surrounding wine, compounded in that case by an order of magnitude greater level of pretentious vocabulary surrounding the topic. One thing I have noticed is that people who fancy themselves as connoisseurs of tea or wine or anything else refuse to be swayed by studies that suggest that the fine distinctions they claim to detect have no objective basis. Persuading them otherwise seems to be harder than persuading religious believers that there is no god.
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Just before the Federation Cup tennis match played between the US and Germany in Hawaii, the version of the German national anthem associated with the Nazis was sung, instead of the current version.
A male soloist at the match on the Hawaiian island of Maui sang the verse beginning with the lines “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, uber alles in der Welt”, which translates as “Germany, Germany, above all, above all in the world”.
Although the words were written long before the Nazis ruled Germany, they became closely identified with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in the period before and during the second world war.
The offending verse, which traditionally began the anthem, is now considered anachronistic.
The third verse of the 19th century Deutschlandlied, the words of which were written in 1841, is the only one performed in modern-day Germany and is officially classed as the national anthem.
The Trump administration has its first casualty with his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn being forced to resign amidst charges that he lied about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. He must be feeling pretty aggrieved since his boss lies brazenly and repeatedly and he must have thought that it was ok for him to follow his lead. What is extraordinary is the flood of news leaks leading up the resignation that, to me at least, suggested that leaks have become the weapons of choice in the Trump administration’s bureaucratic warfare. Robert Mackey says that the leaks by current and former intelligence officials are also aimed at Trump himself and that he is finding it increasingly irksome.
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