Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe from back in 2015 explains the template used.
(Via Rob Beschizza)
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe from back in 2015 explains the template used.
(Via Rob Beschizza)
A black Michigan state lawmaker was escorted by six heavily armed people, five black and one Hispanic, as she attended the state legislative building.
Sarah Anthony’s escort. The lawmaker said her experience during the rightwing protest was ‘one of the most unnerving feelings I’ve ever felt in my life’. Photograph: Courtesy of Michael Lynn Jr./Merica20tolife
Lost in the other news is this story of a group of Americans who apparently tried to launch an attack on Venezuela’s government but the plot was foiled even before it got off the ground and the plotters, that included two former members of the US Special Forces, were captured by Venezuelan fishing villagers and handed over to the authorities. The similarities of this botched attempt at overthrowing the Venezuelan government to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba during the Kennedy administration in 1962 has led to the label ‘Bay of Piglets’ for this one.
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I have been keeping tabs on this excellent site that tells you the growth over time of confirmed covid-19 cases in each country. You can pick which countries you want to display using the menu at the bottom right. It is plotted so that the x-axis gives the total cumulative number of cases while the y-axis gives the number of new cases over the previous seven days. (You can also choose to plot deaths.) The graph is log-log so that a straight upward line means the growth of cases is exponential, with the steepness of the slope intercept indicating the doubling time for the number of cases. It is obviously not good to be lying on that straight line or on a line that curves upward. What you want to see is the curve turning down sharply. (You can also choose to have the data displayed on a linear scale but that is not so helpful when one is dealing with a huge variation in numbers country by country.)
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Rick Bright, a government scientist who was director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, had warned early on that trying to prevent the coronavirus from coming here was futile and that instead the country needed to quickly start taking steps to meet the inevitable challenge by ordering the necessary supplies to test for and treat the disease. The administration did not like what he was saying and he was reassigned to a different area that did not require his expertise. So he became a whistleblower and his lawyer Debra Katz describes what happened.
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The governor of the state of Georgia has said that, due to the current pandemic situation, people can get their driver’s licenses without actually taking a road test. This has naturally horrified many people because driving puts you in command of a lethal weapon. As any driver will tell you, even when you take driving lessons, spend some time getting practice, and then pass the test, the first few months of driving alone tend to be nervous periods because safe driving habits have not as yet become instinctive. To not have to take the test at all just makes it that much worse.
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One of the things that the current pandemic has done is strip away the veneer that enabled people to think that things were generally going well in this country except for a few areas that needed work. What has been revealed is that the very fabric holding the society together is highly frayed and needs major repairs. The most obvious deficiency is one that I have been repeatedly hammering on and that is the rotten health care system. Another is the lack of an adequate social safety net for people who find themselves suddenly out of work.
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Trump is desperate to improve his ratings as can be seen by him using the Lincoln Memorial as the setting for fielding softball questions from friendly Fox News personalities. But does he not realize that by reminding people of Lincoln, he just emphasizes how awful he is by comparison?
I wrote recently about an interview with food writer Michael Pollan about his latest book on how coffee works on the body and produces the addiction that so many of us have that makes need to have a cup first thing in the morning and for some of us to drink it throughout the day. In the April 27, 2020 issue of The New Yorker Adam Gopnik reviews several books that paint a somewhat darker picture of coffee as a tool of global capitalism.
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