Carnage in Sri Lanka

I was woken up this morning by a phone call from my daughter alerting me to the horrific news from Sri Lanka where a coordinated set of eight attacks at multiple locations, reportedly involving suicide bombings, had claimed over 200 lives and 450 injured though those numbers will change. The government has ordered a nationwide curfew and shut down all social media platforms, a source of many incendiary rumors in the past. Sri Lanka is prone to fact-free speculations spreading like wildfire even before the age of social media and these platforms have made this problem much worse
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Dara O’Briain reviews the film 2012

I have not seen this film or even heard about it but after watching this hilarious review of it by the comedian, I don’t think I need to. Like most natural disaster films, there is an attempt to give a scientific explanation for the catastrophe but O’Briain says that this ludicrously over-the-top apocalyptic film offered one that was so utterly outlandish that he used it to insert a useful lesson about neutrinos.

Great moments in political grandstanding

Politicians love to claim that they have the pulse of the people and speak for them when in fact most of them speak on behalf of the wealthy and the lobbyists. Kentucky Republican Andy Barr invited congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to visit his home district and talk to the coal miners there about the impact her Green New Deal would have on their livelihood.

“I want to invite the gentlelady to come to eastern Kentucky where thousands of coal miners no longer have paychecks,” he said. “I invite her to go underground with me and meet the men and women who do heroic work to power the American economy.”

No doubt Barr felt that she would be afraid to meet with real Merkins because only Republicans speak for them. But to his surprise, she accepted and tweeted that she looked forward to persuading his voters that it was she who was best representing their needs and interests and not Barr.
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Robocall truce?

I noticed that today we did not get even a single robocall, though on any given day they usually number around 10. I also noticed that today is both Good Friday and Passover and I was wondering if it was more than a coincidence and that the callers declared a truce on this religious holiday. I cannot imagine that they have such sensitivities given that they are willing to annoy the hell out of people. And also, many of the places where these calls originate are overseas and thus may not have many Christian or Jewish employees who take today off.

On the other hand, today I got a sudden influx of spam comments on the blog, something that occurs very rarely.

I was curious if any readers also noted an absence of robocalls today.

John Oliver exposes the Sacklers-again

The Sackler family, the owners of the Purdue Pharma that aggressively marketed the painkiller Oxycontin resulting in an explosive growth in drug addiction, has been dragged into the spotlight and are now the target of multiple lawsuits by states. As a result these highly secretive people, who only allow their names to be public when they put it on buildings as part of their ‘philanthropy’, have been forced to give legal depositions. But their lawyers have aggressively worked to have their video depositions sealed
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Good News! Health care stocks fall

I have long held that the only economic measure that matters in the US is the stock market. While other measures such as unemployment and wage rates, income and wealth inequality, health and education measures, housing and rental prices and the like may have much greater significance for the vast majority of people, the oligarchy only cares about the value of their stock portfolio. As long as the stock market rises at a healthy clip, champagne corks will be popping even as climate change threatens to destroy the world.
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The media and Democratic establishment attacks on Bernie are taking a familiar form

To the consternation of the Democratic party establishment and the mainstream media, Bernie Sanders is once again proving that he has strong support, both in terms of getting large numbers of volunteers signed up and in small donations. The party establishment hates him because he is not part of the neoliberal wing that encompasses the Clintons, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, plus many of the other contenders for the party’s presidential nomination. Sanders and Warren are the two people who are taking direct aim at the control by the oligarchy of pretty much all the major institutions of American political and economic life.
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Game of Thrones mania

Unless you are living under a rock, you are likely to have been bombarded with stories about the final season of this series that seems to have grabbed the passionate devotion of so many people. Hearing that it has large amounts of gruesome and gratuitous violence, I steered clear of this show and have not seen a single episode and feel like cartoonist Stephen Pastis.