The war in Afghanistan is a tragic version of the film Groundhog Day, where the same cycle of events gets played out over and over again with no discernible progress. We now have president Trump faced with the prospect of deciding whether to send in more troops and a new commander to break the stalemate, which is the same situation president Barack Obama faced in 2009 when he was newly elected.
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James Bond he is not.
Leo Varadkar has been elected leader of the Fine Gael party in the Republic of Ireland which means that he will become the country’s next taoiseach, the equivalent of prime minister. On the positive side is the fact that the 38-year old Varadkar is the son of an Indian immigrant father and Irish mother. He is also gay. Neither of these is insignificant given the overwhelming Roman Catholic culture of the country and the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment that saw the passage in 2004 of legislation that removed citizenship rights from the Irish-born children of non-national parents.
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As visitors to any of the FreethoughtsBlogs site will have noticed, there have been server problems that have periodically made the sites unavailable during the past few days. But PZ Myers says that we are shifting to a new webhosting service this week that one hopes will be more reliable. The move should be invisible to visitors to FtB and also (I hope!) to those of us who write the blogs.
In the US, any terror attack sends the media into a frenzy of fear mongering and as a result people here tend to be in a state of permanent fear. But as I have said many times before, Americans don’t seem to realize that people in other countries seem to be made of sterner stuff than those who live in the ‘home of the brave’ and take these awful acts in stride. It is not that they minimize the tragedies but that they don’t let themselves be paralyzed by them.
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He does not get any takers. Well, except one who makes a non-monetary contribution.
London suffers yet another terrorist attack with seven dead so far and dozens more injured, many critically, in two separate but connected events. We are told that three assailants were shot dead by police. Although no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, given that this occurred less than a week before British elections on June 8 and that there was a similar attack in Manchester last week Paris a few days before the French presidential election, one has to ask if there is a deliberate pattern to launch such attacks just before elections.
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A reporting team from The Guardian has been on the road with Jeremy Corbyn and provides an inside look at him when he is not in the public eye. One gets the impression of a man who is comfortable in his own skin and knows who he is and what he wants, who becomes uncomfortable only when he feels pressured to answer hypothetical questions for which there really are no good answers. Meanwhile Conservative leader Teresa May has come across as phony and somewhat bumbling.
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Tennis great Martina Navratilova has not been shy about speaking her mind and trying to advance the cause of women and the LGBT community. She has now called on Australian authorities to rename the Margaret Court Arena, one of the main courts where the Australian Open is played, because Court is a racist and a homophobe and is thus not worthy of the honor, though there is no denying her tennis accomplishments.
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