Good riddance to 2025

The end of the year seems like when many take the time to take stock of the status of life in general. I try not to do that because it seems a bit pointless (like new year resolutions – why not start good habits at other times?) but since one cannot avoid that because the media is full of such articles, one might as well give in. One thing that I find helpful at this time of years are lists of good films released during the year in which I occasionally find something I missed and can mark for future viewing.

The biggest contributor to this horrible year is of course the ongoing carnage in Gaza, a tragedy of immense proportions carried out by Israel with the overt support of the US and the acquiescence of Canada and many countries in Western Europe, all of whom could do something to stop it if they chose. Then we have the ongoing war in Ukraine plus lesser known conflicts in Somalia and Yemen which are taking a terrible toll on civilian lives, as all military conflicts do. The massacre in Bondi Beach and the continued mass shootings in the US all add to the sense of a general lack of a sense of a common humanity. It has been such a bad year that there may well be other major awful things that I have forgotten to list.

Adding to all this and making things worse is of course the pestilence known as Donald Trump. As Susan Glasser writes, “In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them.” He seems to be stoking the flames for more conflict by attacking Venezuela, clearly laying the groundwork for a full-fledged military assault or fomenting a coup. He also seems to have this weird desire to promote himself as the protector of Christianity and white people worldwide, as seen by his bombing of Nigeria, his preferential treatment of white Afrikaners in South Africa, and his tirades and attacks on immigrants of color in the US. And then we have his use of the department of justice and the FBI as his personal organizations for seeking revenge, and the conversion of ICE and CBP agents into heavily armed paramilitary secret forces equipped with masks and unmarked vehicle to terrorize people like the death squads did in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the heyday of military juntas in those countries.
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The pleasures of being alone and staying home

I knew most of this stuff but it was presented entertainingly.

I am never bored when I am at home alone because there are so many things enjoyable things that I can choose to do. While I greatly enjoy being in the company of a few people such as close friends or others whose company I find enjoyable, the times when I have been most bored is when I have been in large gatherings, such as parties, where one has a series of superficial conversations with many different people. If I am lucky, I may find a kindred soul with whom to sit in a corner and have more meaningful exchanges. It is even worse when the ambient noise is so loud that you cannot even hear anyone else and conversation just stops and you just sit there unable to read or even think. This can happen in bars and wedding receptions.
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Film review: Cover-Up (2025)

This gripping documentary directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, about the work of legendary reporter Seymour M. Hersh has just been released on Netflix. It is must-see viewing for anyone who wishes to know more about the murder, war crimes, rape, torture, and other abuses committed by the US government and its military, many of which were revealed because of the dogged work of Hersh. I have written about Hersh and his work multiple times before but if you have time to read just one of them, I would recommend my review of his memoir Reporter published in 2018. He is also scathing about the complicity of the mainstream media in enabling so many cover-ups, while patting themselves on the back for being courageous truth-seekers.

What made him distinctive was that he did not suck up to the top people, as so many ‘star’ reporters do in the effort to get what they consider ‘scoops’ but which in actuality made them conduits for government and military propaganda. The New York Times and Washington Post are particularly guilty of this. What Hersh did was to seek out lower level people who had principles and consciences and also had access to important information but were not careerists desperately seeking to climb the ladder by acquiescing to their superiors. He would go to great lengths to protect their identities, often speaking to many people whom he knew knew nothing about the story he was reporting, just so that his source could not be singled out. As a result, word got around that he could be trusted and more people would come to him with information and copies of secret documents.
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Encyclopedia wars

There is an enduring appeal to encyclopedias.The ability to look up information that has been prepared by credible sources on a huge range of topics, is invaluable, especially for someone like me whose curiosity takes me in many different directions, triggered by random events in my life. As a result, I bought a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica back around the early 1980s. I was not wealthy and it cost a lot but it was the one luxury that I felt justified in indulging in. Sadly I then had to part with it when I came to the US, because the massive multi-volume set was too expensive to ship and I expected that I would be moving around a lot in my first few years here as I struggled to gain a foothold in my career. So I gifted it to a friend. Then later in the US when my children were little and we were settled, I bought another multivolume encyclopedia set, ostensibly to help them look up stuff for their homework and for general interest though I think that secretly it was for my own benefit and I ended up being the main user.

What is nice about a physical encyclopedia is the serendipity that it enables, that you often start out looking up something specific but as you turn the pages to get to that entry, you stumble across unrelated items that are interesting and read about them too. It is like walking along library stacks looking for a particular book and finding other books that look interesting and checking them out as well. The difference is that with library stacks, books are arranged according to subject categories so you will likely be in the same general area while in an encyclopedia the entries are sorted alphabetically, so with the latter one can end up very far from the starting point.

But this was before the internet and Wikipedia, which has become the go-to source for people looking for information on anything. Now one is less likely to end up on a random topic, just as doing online searches for library books means that one can miss out on serendipitous discoveries. The same is true for journals and magazines. When you have hard copies, you tend to look at the table of contents and that can result in finding new articles of interest. But with online sources, you often get sent directly to the article you are looking for and do not scan the content titles. This saves time but also results in loss.
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Are dictionaries obsolete?

Being a lexicographer compiling dictionaries in the internet age can be viewed as both exciting, because of all the new words that can quickly gain currency, or a nightmare, because one has to decide whether to include some new word or not and what the word might even mean, knowing that whatever you decide will be hotly contested by some.

In a review of the book Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionaryby Stefan Fatsis, Louis Menand looks at the history of the modern dictionary.

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in London in 1755, carved out a role for the dictionary: to establish what would become known as Standard English. Johnson himself was aware that language is a living thing, always in flux. But his dictionary, with its conclusiveness, was a huge publishing success. It was considered authoritative well into the nineteenth century. In England, it would be replaced by the Oxford English Dictionary. But, in the United States, its role was usurped by Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, which made its début in 1828.

Webster deliberately set out to supersede Johnson. His ambition was to create not a dialect of British English but an identifiably American language. Johnson’s dictionary had about forty-two thousand words; Webster’s had seventy thousand. Webster added New World words including “skunk,” “boost,” and “roundabout”; words with Native American origins, such as “canoe” and “moose”; words derived from Mexican Spanish, like “coyote.” Most dramatically, he Americanized spelling, a project started in an earlier work of his, a schoolbook speller called “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” published in 1783. It is because of Webster that we write “defense” and “center” rather than “defence” and “centre,” “public” and not “publick.” He changed the language.

Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, announced as “unabridged,” appeared in 1934. Web. II was a doorstop—six hundred thousand entries, thirty-five thousand geographical names, and, in the appendix, thirteen thousand biographical names. 

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US uses visa bans to aid tech companies

It has long been the case, probably since the end World War II which saw the emergence of the US as the dominant world power largely unscathed by the destruction that had been wrought in Europe, that the US saw itself as the one true power and that other nations, including those ostensibly its allies in Europe, as vassal states. This was not overtly stated. Instead we had supposedly multi-nation collaborative arrangements such as NATO and various economic groupings, as the US sought to limit the impact of the USSR and the Warsaw pact countries, and later with Russia when that pact collapsed. But there was always the steel hand beneath that velvet glove, the implied threat that the US would always want to have its own way in international affairs.

But in the Trump era, that veneer of cooperation has been rapidly wearing away and the steel hand is now manifesting itself in many ways, big and small. One way is of course the unilateral imposition of tariffs and other trade measures. The other is the demand that other countries not impose their laws on those US companies and industries that the US favors, such as the tech sector, which has been accused of actively encouraging harmful behaviors on the internet.

This took a dramatic turn yesterday when the US imposed visa bans on five EU high-ranking officials who had been involved in the drafting and execution of laws regulating tech companies.
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The slow release of the Epstein files

I was not in the least surprised that the release of the Epstein files was limited and consisted of heavily redacted pages. It was never in the cards that attorney general Pam Bondi, loyal and obsequious sycophant of Trump that she is, would ever allow the release of anything that might even remotely embarrass him. or anyone close to him However, the limited release and the sweeping nature of the redactions has caused an uproar, and has resulted in further dribs and drabs coming out.

One new release today was a sickening letter that Epstein purportedly sent to Larry Nasser the doctor now in prison for sexually abusing large numbers of young women, including members of the US gymnastics team. The letter was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein died by suicide.

“As you will know by now, I have taken the ‘short route’ home,” the letter, which appears to have been signed from Epstein to Nasser, reads. “Good luck! We shared one thing … our love & caring for young ladies and the hope they reach their full potential.”

The letter continues: “Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch’, whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system.”

The letter is signed: “Life is unfair. Yours, J. Epstein.”
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The letter is postmarked 13 August 2019, notably three days after Epstein died in custody in what was ruled a suicide. It was found by investigators in the jail mail room weeks later after it was returned from a prison in Arizona and marked “no longer at this address”.
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The document comes as questions continue to swirl around Epstein’s death in custody, with his brother, Mark Epstein, continuing to maintain that the sex offender was murdered in his cell.

It has also been suggested that Epstein blamed his former friend Donald Trump for his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges, which came more than a decade after he was granted immunity from prosecution under a 2007 Florida state plea deal where he pleaded guilty to solicitation of a minor.

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The menace of influencers and the ‘Free Birth’ movement

I am becoming increasingly concerned whenever I see the word ‘influencer’ associated with someone on the internet. It is a vaguely defined terms and a brief search yields examples such as “one who exerts influence : a person who inspires or guides the actions of others” or “a person who is able to generate interest in something (such as a consumer product) by posting about it on social media” or “a person who has become well known through regular social media posts and is able to promote a product or service by recommending or using it online.”

I would like to add a further definition as “someone who has no real expertise or credentials about whatever they are talking about but are using their own experience or those of a few others to make sweeping claims that others should follow their advice even when that can be dangerous”.

I don’t really care about influencers who advise people about restaurants or hotels or vacation spots or what cleaning and cooking utensils to buy. Sure, the advice may be useless and they are likely being paid to shill for those things. But those are usually harmless and only result in a loss of money for the gullible. I am more concerned about those who give medical advice about treating ailments or who promote diets that can be harmful if continued for a long time.

One of the more dangerous influencers that I read about recently was in an investigative series by reporters from the Guardian newspaper promoting something called ‘free births’. To be clear, these are not so-called natural or unassisted births where women choose to give birth at home under the guidance of midwives and doulas who are able to quickly summon medical help if something goes seriously wrong with the delivery. (A midwife is a trained medical professional who knows how to deliver babies while a doula is someone who has no medical training but provides non-medical emotional and moral support.)
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When Archie Bunker meets Meathead

Much has been written in tribute about Rob Reiner after the brutal murder of him and his wife Michele. Rob was the son of actor and writer Carl Reiner and became well known playing the liberal Michael Stivic as a counterpoint to the bigoted Archie Bunker in the groundbreaking TV series All in the Family, a show that broached many social issues and taboos.

Much to Archie’s displeasure, Stivic is the boyfriend (and later husband) of Bunker’s daughter Gloria. In this clip we see the first meeting of Stivic and Archie and Edith (his wife) and hear the first time that he is called ‘Meathead’, the name that stuck forever after.