The 16-year old Palestinian girl Ahed Tamimi has become a cause celebre across the world after she slapped an Israeli soldier who had entered her family compound. This was after “an Israeli soldier shot Ahed’s 15-year-old cousin in the head with a rubber-coated metal bullet during a demonstration against the ongoing military occupation”. In retaliation, the Israeli authorities arrested her and she remains in custody.
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If we are in a room that contains no sources of light at all and the room is also sealed off so no light can enter from outside, then we will experience total blackness, irrespective of the color of the walls or the objects in the room. But we can, in theory, also experience total blackness even if the room has a bright source of light, provided that the source of light is behind us and everything in the room is black such that it absorbs 100% of the light that falls on it, and no light gets reflected back into our eyes. This is because the color of objects that do not themselves generate light is determined by what light they reflect. Objects that appear to be red reflect light that is largely in the red range of the visible spectrum of electromagnetic waves, and similarly for other colors. Black objects are those that do not reflect any light at all in the visible spectrum.
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Some video clips never fail to crack me up and though I have shown them before, I feel the need to show them again for those who only recently started reading this blog and may have missed it. This one is from back in the early days of the US invasion of Iraq and is from the Australian sketch comedy show skitHOUSE.
Two stories in The Intercept illustrate well how skewed the justice system is in the US.
In the first case, Shaun King writes about a man, clearly inflamed and influenced by Donald Trump’s attacks on the media and in particular at CNN, who phoned in multiple deaths threats to that network.
EARLY TUESDAY MORNING, we learned that Brandon Griesemer, a 19-year-old grocery store clerk from Novi, Michigan, made at least 22 calls to CNN’s Atlanta headquarters where he not only threatened to shoot and kill employees, but used racial and ethnic slurs for both African-Americans and Jews. The calls were made two weeks ago, and Griesemer was charged last Friday.
This was not Griesemer’s first rodeo. On September 19, he was reported to have made similarly ugly calls to an Islamic center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Brandon Griesemer is a bigot.
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Ryan Grim and Lee Fang write that while the actions and words of Donald Trump and his Republican enablers have angered and energized progressives across the country to run for office, they are being blocked by Democratic party dead-enders in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and their allies like Emily’s List who are backing the same losing candidates and polices of the past, based on their ability to raise money rather than gain votes. The DSCC keeps pursuing the tired strategy of trying to win over Republican voters, which means backing more conservative candidates and policies, rather than attract those voters who have opted out of politics because they feel that the Democrats are just Republican-lite.
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The South African jazz composer and trumpeter died today at the age of 78. He was not only an accomplished jazz musician, he was also an anti-apartheid activist who lived in exile because to return to his native country during the apartheid era would be to court immediate arrest. His talent immediately made him recognized and befriended by other great politically conscious musicians such as Harry Belafonte and Yehudi Menuhin. He returned to South Africa in the early 1990s, after the end of apartheid. I had not known that he had been briefly married to Miriam Makeba for two years.
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After Donald Trump’s insulted Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa, Conan O’Brien thought that he should visit Haiti.
“I have no idea what the president has against the people of Haiti, but if the president doesn’t like them, they must be lovely people,” the TBS host added on his show last Monday. On Thursday, he landed in Port-au-Prince, where he spent the weekend taping his special, which aims to show the president and those like him how much Haitian immigrants have to offer the United States.
Now we have our first look at the hour-long show, which will air this coming Saturday night. “President Trump insulted Haiti, so I thought it was only fair to Haitians the chance to return the favor,” O’Brien says in the new clip.
Suppose that you, law-abiding driver that you are, are going along the highway at the posted speed limit of 70 mph. You see in your rear-view mirror a car traveling at high speed in the lane next to yours. Suppose that car is traveling at 100 mph. At the instant that the other car is right next to you, you both see an obstruction ahead, say a tree lying across the road. You both slam on your brakes to the maximum and you come to rest just before you hit the barrier. What would be the speed with which the other car hits the tree?
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While I have been following cricket matches, I have not paid much attention to the politics of the game. I stumbled upon the documentary Death of a Gentleman quite by accident and it was quite an eye-opener. The film looks at the way that international cricket is run. The documentary started out as a project by two sports journalists Jarrod Kimber and Sam Collins who are ardent fans of cricket at the highest level, which consist of the five-day Test matches played between national teams. They were concerned that this form of the game (that purists like me like the most) was in danger of extinction because of the rise of the abomination called T20 which reduces the game to about three hours but in the process eliminates many of the features that had made this game into the second most popular sport in the world after soccer. The long form of Test matches has many subtleties that the short form T20 lacks. I personally find the short-form boring, requiring as it does a very limited range of batting and bowling skills.
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Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow nails it.
