In the last show before he goes on break until 2019, he tackled the topic of the dangerous spread of false information on the internet and how companies like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are conveniently switching between portraying themselves as publishers and platform providers to escape responsibility for not doing much to stop it.
An Australian journalist was asked to leave the premises of the parliament because because her outfit was too revealing in that “you can allegedly see too much skin”. I naturally had to click on the article to see what scandalous clothing had prompted this decision. See-through blouse? Plunging neckline? Very short skirt? Here is a photograph of Patricia Karvelas in her offending outfit.
Remember when I wrote about the 13-stop North American tour that Bill and Hillary Clinton were going to make where people were charged pricey amounts to watch them talk on stage, though if you were willing to fork out even more hundreds dollars, you could also get a brief meet-and-greet with them? I wondered at that time whether we hadn’t had our fill of the Clintons and whether enough people would be willing to pay such amounts.
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Some time ago, I wrote about the The Negro Motorist Green Book , which was a travel guide written by Victor Hugo Green. It was first published in 1936 and regularly updated to inform black Americans during the Jim Crow days what places they could shop, eat, and stay the night during road trips across the US, and what towns were “Sundown Towns” where black people were banned from being outside after dark.
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Whale evolution has always fascinated me, ever since I learned that their evolutionary path took them from sea to land and then back to the sea. Here’s an animation showing how the land-to-sea-again transition may have occurred.
The death of the 41st president George H. W. Bush has resulted in the usual gushing and fawning obituaries that are used to paint a rosy picture of US politics by ignoring all the awful things he did. Today’s front section of the Plain Dealer was pretty much devoted to praising him, extending over 12 pages. Even this obituary that did not go overboard in praising him ignored his failings.
Fortunately there are people like Mehdi Hasan who do not forget and are disdainful enough of the false privilege we give to public figures to remind us of the more unsavory aspects of his career, such as his war crimes, racism, and obstruction of justice, not to mention that he was also a serial groper of women.
There has been an outcry about the decision by a Chinese scientist He Jiankui to use the new CRISPR gene-editing technology to modify the genes of two human embryos before they were placed in the mother’s womb. He had disabled a gene known as CCR5, thus blocking a pathway for the HIV virus and thus gave them some immunity from that disease.
As you may have noticed, the entire FreethoughtBlogs network was down for most of yesterday, but now seems to be up and running normally.
It was due to a technical issue and we are confident that neither Goerge Soros nor the Illuminatti were behind it.