Ricky Gervais is an atheist, stand up comedian, and actor. He made a pretty funny film with an interesting premise called The Invention of Lying that I reviewed favorably back in 2010. More recently, though, he has joined with those comedians who are ticked off with audiences who do not find humor aimed at marginalized groups to be funny. They claim that they are being silenced for their edgy humor by those who can’t take a joke.
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Yesterday there was a town hall style forum with nine Democratic presidential candidates talking about LGBT issues, similar in format to the earlier town hall on climate change where each candidate came on serially for an allotted time. During it, Elizabeth Warren showed that she is becoming increasingly comfortable thinking on her feet and dealing with difficult questions.
Here she is responding to one such question.
The climate activist group Extinction Rebellion has organized protests that shut down central London and elsewhere to highlight the need for urgent action on climate change. Jonathan Pie takes aim at those (including newspapers like the Guardian) that snicker at the supposed hypocrisy of the people involved in the protests and moan about the disruptions caused, while ignoring the biggest issue, that those who have known about the climate change crisis for a long time and could have done something about the problem, refused to do anything. (Language advisory)
After the election of Donald Trump as president, the bar for this position has become so low that pretty much any sentient being that has shown any signs of intelligence (and I include apes, dolphins, and crows in that category) would be better. So it is irritating to see any Trump supporter asking questions of the Democratic candidates as to whether they are qualified for the job, whether they have the requisite experience, skills, etc.
I am not saying that the public should not value expertise and wisdom and experience. I am only saying that Trump supporters have forfeited the right to raise such questions. I think cartoonist Jen Sorensen agrees with me.
Michael Che wonders whether we should start to talk about Donald Trump the way we talk about Lenny in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
This Pearls Before Swine cartoon struck home for me because, like Rat, I have an iPhone 5. I am not one that needs to have the latest version of anything. If the old one works, I stick with it. In fact, I have never bought a cell phone in my life. The ones I have used have all been hand-me-downs from my spouse or children when they upgrade to new phones.
I am perfectly happy with my old iPhone 5 and would be quite content to continue to use it forever because it seems to be working fine as far as its basic functions of calls and texts and its data storage features. But I am feeling pressure to upgrade. The problem is not the phone itself but that one by one, various apps are upgrading to versions that are no longer supported by the phone. The iOS operating system I have is 10.3.4 which is the latest one that my hardware can support but the updates of various apps require newer versions of iOS and that would require me to get a newer phone just to use those apps.
I am holding out for now even though some things (like depositing checks in my bank account) can no longer be done by phone and I have to do it the old-fashioned way.
Sigh.
Trevor Noah looks at those who are trying to defend Donald Trump on the impeachment inquiry.
House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy was particular inept in his 60 Minutes interview. But as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez points out, people like him get much less scrutiny than she does when does similar interviews.
It’s wild to me how people crawled over my 60 mins interview with a fine-toothed comb to find any word or reason to claim I’m unfit for the job, yet here Kevin McCarthy (the GOP Leader!) is a bumbling, sloppy, dishonest mess & his mediocrity is accepted as a matter of course. https://t.co/zx7qlhW9dh
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 30, 2019
(1) He's male.
(2) He's white.
(3) He's GOP.It is expected at this point.
— Elanor Gardner (@Sams1stDaughter) September 30, 2019
He says that Boris Johnson is utterly out of his depth as prime minister and that any other prime minister who has had the kind of setbacks that he has had in the last few weeks would have been out on his ear. (Language advisory of course.)
Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the attacks of 9/11 have been good for the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, and the entire counter-terrorism industry in the US that have used them to get increased funding and powers. In order to keep those dollars flowing, the FBI has had to repeatedly show success in fighting terrorism and one of the means of doing that is setting up sting operations. If they cannot find real threats, they will create ones.
Trevor Aronson writes about a new satirical film The Day Shall Come based on many of the real-life sting operations conducted by the FBI that recruits hapless people with absurd ideas and then coaxes them to take part in ridiculous plots that are then grandly ‘exposed’ by the agency.
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Donald Trump has a strategy for dealing with bad news that has worked for him so far in retaining Republican support, especially in Congress. When news starts breaking about some major transgression, what he does is to first deny that there is anything there and then slowly but steadily concede the truth of elements of the story until the full story (as far as we know) is out in the open. The strategy works on several levels. One is that when he does say that something did happen, his supporters assume that it cannot be that bad if he is willing to publicly acknowledge it. Also since each little bit, by itself, is not seen as too bad, his supporters go on record publicly still supporting him for that little bit until finally they are on the hook for the whole awful mess and there is no going back. They then say that this is old news that ‘everyone’ knew about so it cannot be that bad. It is like the metaphor of the frog in slowly heated water. (I know, I know, that the basis for the metaphor is false and frogs do jump out of slowly boiling water.)
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