Blondie defends manual labor

I sometimes hear white-collar workers speak disparagingly about manual workers whom they see relaxing. They seem to think that such people should be working non-stop even though they are doing extremely difficult and tiring jobs, often in terrible conditions, while their critics push paper around in air-conditioned workplaces where a lot of time is spent in idleness. I, for example, have never really done a hard day’s work in my life and am aware that I am very fortunate and am grateful for being so lucky.

I was glad to see that the creators of the Blondie comic strip were taking a stand for manual labor against this unfair criticism.

Hasan Minhaj on drug pricing extortion

I only got around to watching last Sunday’s show Patriot Act yesterday and it was another excellent one. This time he took on the high drug prices that people in the US pay, much higher than in other countries, that often results in people not being able to afford drugs to live. Rather than give a generalized critique, he used as a case study the price of insulin (a drug that so many people need to just stay alive) to show how three big drug companies Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi, that market drugs under a multiplicity of names, have formed essentially a drug cartel that keep raising prices together and also exploit patent laws (they own the majority of them) to prevent cheaper drugs entering the market.
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Seth Meyers on the Green New Deal and Trump’s lies about it

That Donald Trump lies constantly is not news. But his lies and those of his supporters have long since jumped the shark and descended into self-parody. This is most evident in how they are portraying the Green New Deal, saying that it will take away people’s cars, air travel, oil, gas, the military, and even their cows.

Do Trump’s supporters really buy that rubbish? In the clip below, the audience sort-of cheers when Trump says these things at a rally but I got the sense that it was a dutiful response rather than an enthusiastic one.

How Brexit happened and what lies next

Over the weekend I watched the film Brexit: An Uncivil War starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings, the brains behind the original Leave campaign. I must admit that I had not heard of Cummings before I saw this film. He seems to be someone who keeps a low profile and after running the campaign has largely disappeared again, leaving others to pick up the debris. The film highlights the use of data-mining people’s online activities to find out what drives them and targeting ads to exploit their fears, especially those who had dropped out of the system and no longer voted.
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The right wing dilemma about the rise in socialist ideas

It was interesting that Donald Trump in his State of the Union speech gave a warning about the rise in socialism in the US. It is clear that the Republicans are testing the water to see if fear of socialism bogey can be made into a successful election slogan. But they are treading warily because the actual ideas being painted as socialist, especially when it comes to health care, turn out to be quite popular.

Seth Meyers describes the right wing freak out, and his segment about nutter Phil Robertson’s statements about who provides his health care is hilarious.