I recently watched the 2016 British TV documentary Exposure. It deals with the horrendous murders of atheists and other secularists in Bangladesh and elsewhere by religious fanatics in the Muslim world and how that hate has spilled over to the threats faced by Muslim apostates in the UK. You can see the full 47-minute video online.
I am constantly impressed by the imagination of people who dream up new sporting contests. For example, here is one event from the 2017 Marblelympics, where teams of marbles compete with each other. In this exciting event, the marbles travel on tracks that go underwater.
The US business and political class are fond of bemoaning what they say are the high rates of corporate taxes in the US and how it makes the US uncompetitive compared to their European counterparts. Of course, this is just a game played by transnational elites to try and get governments to compete with each other in lowering tax rates. If the US rates do dip below the European ones, then the business elites in Europe will complain how they are now disadvantaged and need to have their taxes lowered, and so on.
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I wrote a few days ago about the Indian ‘holy man’ Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh whose followers went on a rampage killing over 30 people after he was convicted of raping two women. He has just been sentenced to 20 years in prison and authorities are bracing themselves for a further round of rioting.
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Back in 1983, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case Marsh v. Chambers that the practice of ceremonial opening prayers of the Nebraska state legislature was constitutional. In his strong and cogently argued dissent, justice William Brennan warned that allowing any ceremonial prayer at all, whatever the constraints imposed, would result in the Supreme Court getting involved in endless disputations about what kind of prayer and settings should be allowable and what should be disallowed.
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In his highly successful old show The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert adopted the persona of a right wing TV blowhard modeled on Bill O’Reilly. His departure to host a more traditional late night TV talk show has created a vacuum in that niche and now another Daily Show alum Jordan Klepper has moved to fill it, modeling himself on an even more extreme character like Alex Jones. He is going to face the challenge of being constantly compared to Colbert but Klepper has good comedy chops and should be able to withstand that scrutiny.
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August 22 was to be the first day in a new school for Palestinian children who had previously had to walk a long distance to their old school, itself an overcrowded one in a converted car garage. But the night before opening day, as part of its ongoing US-supported efforts to make life hell for the Palestinians it rules over in its apartheid state, Israeli forces destroyed the children’s school so that when the children turned up, there was nothing there.
Israeli military jeeps came barreling down towards Jubbet al-Dhib’s first and only primary school late Tuesday night, terrifying locals who had been finishing preparations for the school’s grand opening set for the next morning. Soldiers shot tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets as they cleared the way for bulldozers and flatbed trucks brought in to take the school.
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ExxonMobil is under threat of litigation by the attorneys general of several states that they “violated, variously, racketeering, consumer protection, or investor protection statutes through their communications regarding anthropogenic global warming (AGW)”, as stated by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes in their paper Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014) that appeared in the August 23, 2017 issue of Environmental Research Letters (vol. 12 (2017) 084019). Supran and Oreskes show that the internal ExxonMobil documents and research supported and done by ExxonMobil largely supported the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change while their public stance was largely at odds with it.
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Ryan Zinke serves in Donald Trump’s cabinet as Secretary of the Interior. His daughter Jennifer Detlefsen is a navy veteran and in an Instagram post that purportedly comes from her, she had some choice words for Trump’s decision to bar transgender people from enlisting in the military.
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