Vicente Fox in 2020!

The former Mexican president turns out to have quite the comedy chops. He has produced some memorable digs using salty language at Donald Trump and his plans to build the wall, but now he goes further and says that he is going to run for US president in 2020. He makes the announcement in this campaign video where he discusses his platform and his strategy for winning.
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It’s never the right time to talk about inconvenient truths

Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s choice to head the EPA, is a climate change skeptic of course. After all, his boss has called it a ‘hoax’. When asked whether the back-to-back huge hurricanes Harvey and Irma with Jose in the wings should result in having serious discussions about the impact of climate change and how to mitigate it, he replied:
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Why the Apollo images were so ghostly

The TV images we saw of the Apollo astronauts on the moon had a ghostly, grainy look. That poor quality lent support to the beliefs of some people that the moon landings were faked though the reasoning escapes me. If the video was filmed on a secret Hollywood soundstage by Stanley Kubrick, as some allege, then surely NASA could have shelled out a few extra bucks to make a better quality product? (I never quite understood why people would believe something so bizarre. Why would NASA and the top people in the US government cook up such a story?)
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The problem with too much information

Governments like to have as much surveillance as possible of the people because it gives them greater control. It is often argued by them that this information is necessary in order for them to provide better security, and the debate becomes one where the desire for security has to be balanced by the desire of ordinary people to live their lives free from government snooping. The one case where the debate has swung overwhelmingly in favor of the government is when it says it is investigating terrorists. People have become so spooked by the idea of terrorists in their midst that they seem to be willing to grant carte blanche to the government to do whatever it likes to combat any threat. But this license can result in heavy costs to the individuals who happen, for whatever reason, to fall into the government’s crosshairs.
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Seth Meyers on Hillary’s ‘Blame everyone else’ book tour

Hillary Clinton is on a book tour to promote her new memoir. As is her custom, she is charging high prices for the privilege of listening to her and rich people get to get close to her by paying a higher price. Given the fact that her practice of selling access haunted her during the campaign, and that surely she must not need money anymore given her wealth, why she keeps feeding the image of being greedy is incomprehensible.
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Why do I do this?

Yesterday I was working on several documents on my computer and so there were several windows open as I shifted my attention from one to another. The overlapping open windows were scattered across the screen so that I could make any one of them ‘live’ by just clicking on it. I noticed at one point that if the document I was going to work on was at the right end of the screen, I would first move it to the left end before working on it.
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A pacifist minister on how the antifa saved him from a beating

I ruminated recently on how the issue of violence has got more problematic recently with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and religious extremists using the language of violence to incite their followers. The group that has come to be known as ‘antifa’ consist of anonymous people, sometimes dressed in black, who have arrived ready to combat these groups with violence if necessary and have become part of counter-protests that have sometimes turned violent. The people on the left have been ambivalent about how to deal with the antifa, some seeing them as allies in the cause though not agreeing with the tactics they adopt.
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The US media love to hype US government war threats

One thing the US media loves to do is hype the threat of wars, even highly dangerous ones with the potential use of nuclear weapons such as in the long-standing dispute between North Korea and the US. I am not accusing them of actually wanting to see the outbreak of nuclear war because that would be truly insane but they tend to talk of the situation as one of being on the brink of such a war with no solution in sight, even though there has been one for a long time.
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