Another crushing parliamentary defeat on Brexit for Theresa May

The British parliament today resoundingly defeated by a margin of 391 to 242 prime minister Theresa May’s revised plan for Brexit. The feeling seemed to be that the new deal did not significantly differ from the previous one that she lost by an even heavier margin. Apparently she had expected a loss but hoped to contain the margin of defeat to less than 50 so this has got to hurt. Again the main sticking point was the so-called ‘backstop’ on Northern Ireland.
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Great moments in political grandstanding

I wrote before about the problem of single-use plastic pollution where plastic items are thrown away after being used just once. One of those items is straws and a movement began to have restaurants only provide them on request. That seemed to have caught on quickly because I have noticed that the places I go to no longer hand out straws as the default option.
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The role of identity in selecting candidates

In response to my earlier post about how Bernie Sanders, despite a contrary narrative promoted by the Democratic party establishment that dislikes his progressive stances, has considerable support in the black community, hyphenman wrote the following comment: “I don’t have a candidate, but I do have a hierarchy with African American Women at the top of my list and European American Males on the bottom.”
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Fish falling from the sky

I got a message from an acquaintance in Sri Lanka forwarding a video that said that the BBC had reported yesterday that there had been fish raining from the sky in Mumbai, India. This is one of those things that are circulated widely and was accompanied by a message that claimed that this was proof of a miracle and of a god in action. The acquaintance who forwarded it to me (who is a Roman Catholic believer) asked me if this could be a miracle. My acquaintance likely asked me because he knows I am a scientist and since I have not had any contact with him for decades, he probably thinks I am still religious and thus likely to support his beliefs.
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The lies paving the road to an attack on Venezuela

I expect that most people have seen this photo that shows shipping containers blocking a bridge.

Western media reports have said that these containers were placed by Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro across the Santander bridge connecting Venezuela to Colombia to prevent food and medicines and other humanitarian aid from reaching the people there. The photo has been widely used to depict Maduro as a callous leader willing to see Venezuelans suffer rather than acknowledge that the country is facing serious shortages. The US government promoted this and the media obligingly repeated it unquestioningly

That is a lie.

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How police lie

In the county I live in, one police officer is called the top person for catching OVI (Operating Vehicle while Intoxicated) offenses. But a cell phone video taken by one of the people he stopped showed that not only did he lie in his official reports about the results of a field test he administered that he claimed showed the driver was impaired, but that he was even willing to lie even in court.


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Trying unsuccessfully to convince flat Earthers

National Geographic had a segment about the Flat Earth movement. The ten-minutes piece begins at about the 11:30 mark.
What surprised me is that it said that 2% of the American population believes in it. That works out to about 6 million people and is said to be growing. The other thing that disturbed me is that there seemed to be a lot of young people in the group. The video shows a small model of a flat Earth.
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