I am a huge fan of Charles Dickens’s works and have read most of them. I am also a huge fan of the cinematic output of writer and director Armando Iannucci whose sharp and witty screenplays and fast-paced direction of biting satires are a treat to watch. Among his credits are the films In the Loop and The Death of Stalin and TV series Veep and The Thick of It. (The links are to my reviews.)
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Investigative reporter Tom Burgis has written a book Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World. He was interviewed on the public radio program IA and also in the Daily Beast about his book. I have not as yet read Burgis’s book but I earlier reviewed another book on the same topic Moneyland: The inside story of the crooks and kleptocrats who rule the world by another investigative journalist Oliver Bullough.
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North Carolina is a state that Trump won in 2016 that this year is seen as a possible Democratic pickup so it was not surprising that Trump held a rally there last week.
As Seth Meyers, says, what was troubling though was that there was no sign of any precautions being taken to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
After he was exposed as publicly playing down the seriousness of the virus even though he knew it was highly contagious and dangerous, Trump said that he only did so so as not to create panic. That explanation has been blasted as dangerous by creating a false sense of complacency at a time when accurate information was essential so that steps could be taken to minimize the spread.
But it appears that even now his administration is trying to minimize the danger by pressuring the scientists who work for the Centers for Disease Control to change their reports to comport with his optimistic statements.
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The pandemic has cut deeply into the airline business and they are seeking to lure people back. Surely one of the most bizarre attempts is offering people the opportunity to buy tickets to fly to nowhere, i.e. where the plane takes off, flies around for a few hours, and then returns to the airport.
Singapore Airlines (SIA) is looking to launch no-destination flights that will depart from and land in Changi Airport next month, in a bid to give its ailing business a lift.
Sources told The Straits Times that the national carrier is working towards launching this option for domestic passengers – dubbed “flights to nowhere” – by end-October.
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We all get pesky robocalls and each one presents a problem. If we do not recognize the number, should we answer? Ignore? Block the number?
Apparently, the answer is that none of these actions make much of a difference.
To better understand how these unwanted callers operate, we monitored every phone call received to over 66,000 phone lines in our telephone security lab, the Robocall Observatory at North Carolina State University. We received 1.48 million unsolicited phone calls over the course of the study. Some of these calls we answered, while others we let ring. Contrary to popular wisdom, we found that answering calls makes no difference in the number of robocalls received by a phone number. The weekly volume of robocalls remained constant throughout the study.
The bottom of the oceans is a mostly unexplored frontier that does not get as much attention as the frontier of space. But it does attract adventurers who seek to go where no one has gone before. On January 23, 1960 Auguste Piccard and Don Walsh went to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the world that, at a depth of 11,034m, is deeper than Mount Everest is high. But no went there again there for over a half-century until in 2012, when filmmaker James Cameron went there in a submersible. Unfortunately, the submersible had many systems failing during the trip so that, although he was not in danger, it was never used again. I blogged about this back then. No one went again for another seven years. But in the last year that picture has changed dramatically.
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Having white people put on blackface makeup to perform is now viewed as highly offensive and many people who have done so have apologized for it. In a post on the problem of cultural appropriation, I discussed the other factors in the problem of white actors darkening their skin to play roles that could have been played by actors of color.
But the problem can get meta, as in the case of the 2008 action comedy Tropic Thunder. That film is about a a group of actors making a Vietnam war film on location in a jungle in Asia. Robert Downey, Jr. plays a white actor who is so committed to the ‘method’ school of acting, where one completely immerses oneself in the character 24/7 before and during the entire shooting of the film, that he puts on blackface and never removes it until after the film is completed. Since the role was that of a white actor playing a black man, did that make it appropriate to cast Downey in blackface? Or, since he is always seen on screen as black, should that role have been played by a black actor, which would have resulted in a black actor playing a white actor who is playing a black character? Some of the jokes in the film involve other actors who are black reacting to Downey knowing he is a white actor playing a black man. Would the jokes have landed as well, if we (the audience) did not know that Downey was white?
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When Trump ran for president in 2016, he touted the fact that he was a businessman and that this background would enable him to run the government more efficiently. The idea that being a businessman is good training for running a government is a dubious proposition at best because there are major differences between the two. With a business, you have to appease just the stockholders if it is a public company or nobody at all if you own a private company. But with government you have to deal with a huge number of different constituencies that have independent sources of power and are not beholden to you and finding ways to get things done takes a different skill set.
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