The head of the evangelical Liberty University has agreed to take the “indefinite leave of absence” asked for by the university’s Board of trustees after a suggestive photo appeared on the internet of him with his arms around the waist of a Peg Bundy lookalike on a yacht, with both of them showing their midriffs ,and he with his pants unzipped and holding a glass with dark liquid in it.
In his monologue he has a good idea about how to really shut down the NRA.
It is pretty much indisputable that New Zealand has done much, much better at containing the coronavirus than the US. The leadership shown by the NZ government stands in stark contrast to the utter shambles that we have seen in the US. That country has had just 1,569 cases and 22 deaths so far, compared to over five million cases and 163,000 deaths in the US. Life in that country seems to have pretty much gone back to normal, though the government stands ready to take quick action if there is any sign of the virus coming back.
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The current pandemic has rekindled a lot of interest in the 1918 pandemic where the misleadingly labeled Spanish flu killed anywhere between 50 and 100 million people.
As the pandemic reached epic proportions in the fall of 1918, it became commonly known as the “Spanish Flu” or the “Spanish Lady” in the United States and Europe. Many assumed this was because the sickness had originated on the Iberian Peninsula, but the nickname was actually the result of a widespread misunderstanding.
Spain was one of only a few major European countries to remain neutral during World War I. Unlike in the Allied and Central Powers nations, where wartime censors suppressed news of the flu to avoid affecting morale, the Spanish media was free to report on it in gory detail. News of the sickness first made headlines in Madrid in late-May 1918, and coverage only increased after the Spanish King Alfonso XIII came down with a nasty case a week later. Since nations undergoing a media blackout could only read in depth accounts from Spanish news sources, they naturally assumed that the country was the pandemic’s ground zero. The Spanish, meanwhile, believed the virus had spread to them from France, so they took to calling it the “French Flu.”
While it’s unlikely that the “Spanish Flu” originated in Spain, scientists are still unsure of its source. France, China and Britain have all been suggested as the potential birthplace of the virus, as has the United States, where the first known case was reported at a military base in Kansas on March 11, 1918. Researchers have also conducted extensive studies on the remains of victims of the pandemic, but they have yet to discover why the strain that ravaged the world in 1918 was so lethal.
The plight of the Uighur minority in China is something that I was peripherally aware of and kept meaning to look into more closely to find out exactly what was happening but never got around to it. Fortunately John Oliver had a program that dealt precisely with this issue.
It appears that Fox News personality and Trump whisperer Sean Hannity, no doubt in an attempt to appear erudite and impress his audience, bungled the Latin motto he put on the cover of his new book.
At first, the cover featured the Latin tagline “vivamus vel libero perit Americae” – a phrase that Hannity told viewers on Fox means “live free or America dies”. But as Indiana University Bloomington classics student Spencer Alexander McDaniel laid out on his blog in May, the Latin phrase makes little sense.
“It is clear that whoever came up with this motto does not even know the basic noun cases in Latin or how they work,” wrote McDaniel. “The words in Hannity’s motto are real Latin words, but, the way they are strung together, they don’t make even a lick of sense.”
McDaniel, who was not the only classicist to question Hannity’s “perplexing” Latin, translated Hannity’s Latin text as “Let’s live or he … passes away from America for the detriment of a free man”. He then inferred that the incorrect Latin had been arrived at by putting “live free or America dies” into Google Translate.
Here’s the relevant scene from Life of Brian.
The publisher should also make Hannity write out the correct Latin phrase 100 times so that he does not make the same mistake again.
The US attorney general Bill Barr has defended the massive and violent federal response to the demonstration in Portland by arguing that the protestors were the ones who were being violent and that the security forces were just defending themselves and government property.
Barr said federal authorities had a duty to defend against violent attacks and rioters, and said protesters have attempted to burn down the building, shot commercial fireworks, and used pellet guns and slingshots to shoot projectiles that have injured federal officers “to the bone” as well as lasers that have damaged officers’ eyesight.
Are these claims true? Barr is a loyal follower of Donald Trump and hence one must assume that, like Trump, he is lying unless he can prove otherwise. I have not seen a detailed fact-check of those claims of injuries, such as medical reports or independent third party observations.
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I have written multiple times before how US history is taught in schools in a completely sanitized form that distorts and erases what truly happened. People are given a rose-tinted view of the past, especially when it comes to the brutality that was inflicted on black people during the time of slavery and all the way to the present. This is why there is such reluctance by some to accept that the confederacy was actually a very bad thing and should not be honored in any way. The same holds true for the treatment of Native Americans.
In another excellent program, John Oliver looks at all the problems with the way US history is taught and offers suggestions for how it should be taught,
In the Democratic primary election for the House of Representatives in St. Louis, Missouri, Cori Bush who was backed by progressive groups, defeated the 20-year incumbent William Lacy Clay, who had ‘inherited’ the seat from his father.
In Missouri, Bush’s win in the district representing St Louis marked another progressive ousting of a Democratic incumbent. Clay was elected in 2000, taking over the post from his father who had served for 32 years before.
Bush, a 44-year-old nurse and pastor, is almost guaranteed to win the seat in the November election because the district is heavily Democratic.
…Her foray into the 2018 election earned her comparisons to another progressive who took on a Democratic incumbent, New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She campaigned on issues such as a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition and Medicare for all.
She was also one of four candidates, including Ocasio-Cortez, to be the focus of the documentary Knock Down the House – which trailed their 2018 campaigns.
Bush was a surrogate for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and helped organize Black Lives Matter protests against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In a tweet, Sanders hailed Bush as a “true progressive”.
…Voters in Missouri also approved expanding the government health insurance program for low-income Americans, Medicaid. This could give 250,000 Missourians access to the program, starting next year, according to the state’s auditor.
The state’s Republican governor, Mike Parson, opposes Medicaid expansion but because the expansion won through the initiative process, it can only be changed if lawmakers go back to voters.
Yesterday brought some encouraging news of a survey that shows that most Americans do not believe Trump’s assertions that the US is doing a better job of dealing with the pandemic than other countries, and they are looking for the government to issue aggressive national plan to fight the epidemic and are willing to wear masks and accept other restrictions.
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