Some cartoon strips require some fairly specific background knowledge to get the joke, like this one.
(Bizarro)
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Some cartoon strips require some fairly specific background knowledge to get the joke, like this one.
(Bizarro)
The popular daily puzzle game Wordle requires one to identify an unknown five-letter word selected from a pool of around 2,300 common words. One tries to guess the word in as few tries as possible, with a maximum set at six. After each guess, you get three kinds of feedback: a letter is highlighted green if it is the right letter in the right location; yellow if it is a letter that is used in the word but appears in the wrong location, and grey if the letter is not used at all. I wrote about this a few weeks ago.
Some enthusiasts were not happy about the recent news that the word of the day, rather than being randomly selected, had begun to be curated by a human. (This may have been prompted by the fuss that occurred when the word of the day during the abortion crisis was FETUS.) This had resulted in some recent words being connected to a current event, so that the word last Thursday (Thanksgiving day) was FEAST and the day before that (the busiest driving day of the year) had been DRIVE. As a result, some people who were aware of this change had managed to guess the word on the first try. But it did not make them happy. I can understand why, because it shifts the puzzle from one involving logic to one in which you try to guess what is in the mind of the editor based on some current event, which is much less interesting. I had not been aware of this change, and there is some ambiguity as to whether, due to the criticisms, the puzzle has gone back to being random. I hope it has.
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Last month, five lions in a an enclosure in the Taronga Zoo in Sydney managed to get out of their enclosure and explore the neighborhood.
In Sri Lanka, one would occasionally come across the swastika symbol in various places. This had nothing to do with Nazis. The swastika predates the rise of the Nazis by millennia and is a religious symbol for many people around the world and even in the US. It only became a hate symbol with Hitler.
The equilateral cross with its legs bent at right angles is a millennia-old sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism that represents peace and good fortune, and was also used widely by Indigenous people worldwide in a similar vein.
…The symbol itself dates back to prehistoric times. The word “swastika” has Sanskrit roots and means “the mark of well being.” It has been used in prayers of the Rig Veda, the oldest of Hindu scriptures. In Buddhism, the symbol is known as “manji” and signifies the Buddha’s footsteps. It is used to mark the location of Buddhist temples. In China it’s called Wàn, and denotes the universe or the manifestation and creativity of God. The swastika is carved into the Jains’ emblem representing the four types of birth an embodied soul might attain until it is eventually liberated from the cycle of birth and death. In the Zoroastrian faith, it represents the four elements – water, fire, air and earth.
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The Republican party is in a dance with death with its leader Donald Trump, as he keeps going further and further in his ties with the worst elements of American politics, consisting of racists, misogynists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. His dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West/Ye has forced even the more servile members of the party criticize him.
House and Senate Republicans are speaking out against former President Donald Trump’s dinner last week with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
“There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday. “And anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States.”
…The leaders’ reactions to the dinner came a day after former Vice President Mike Pence said that Trump should apologize for even sitting down with Fuentes.
“Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier a seat at the table,” Pence said in an interview with News Nation Now. “And I think he should apologize for it, and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification.”
The US Supreme Court has said that bans on same-sex marriage and inter-racial marriage are both unconstitutional. So why did the US Senate yesterday by a 61-36 vote pass the Respect for Marriage Act that protects what seemed to be already legal? It is because the overturning of the Roe v. Wade precedent that gave constitutional protection to abortions had created fears that the current US Supreme Court might overturn those other hard-won freedoms as well. Justice Clarence Thomas has openly voiced his disagreement with the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage.
All Democrats voted in favor of this bill, and it was supported by 12 Republicans. The House of Representatives will now have to pass a similar measure so that Joe Biden can sign it into law.
While the bill would not set a national requirement that all states must legalize same-sex marriage, it would require individual states to recognize another state’s legal marriage.
So, in the event the Supreme Court might overturn its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage, a state could still pass a law to ban same-sex marriage, but that state would be required to recognize a same-sex marriage from another state.
That is a good move. It is disappointing that 36 Republican senators voted against it.
Readers may recall Adam Conover as the genial host of the TV series Adam Ruins Everything where in each episode he debunks popular myths and misconceptions. In one episode on the myths about the Copernican revolution, he used my research into that topic to make his case.
In a new podcast, he channels Jonathan Pie to deliver a blistering attack on Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Bankman-Fried (the founder of the now bankrupt crypto exchange FTX). He discusses the failures of these so-called geniuses and says that they represent much that is wrong with our society, that we tend to uncritically accept the grandiose claims of people with ordinary abilities. He says that there are many people who are frauds like these three, privileged and incompetent, children of wealthy parents who attended Ivy league schools and claim to be able to change the world, when they are merely people who just got lucky at one point in their lives and then were able to fool enough people to buy their bullshit and get fawning coverage from the media and the moneyed classes.
The political commentariat in the US is agog with a report of Donald Trump hosting a dinner at Mar-a-Lago for notorious white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and notorious nutcase and anti-Semite Kanye West aka Ye. Trump was apparently highly taken with Fuentes who flattered him by apparently being familiar with Trump’s speeches. When Trump said that he disliked the teleprompters that his advisors wanted him to use at his rallies in order to sound more presidential, Fuentes said that he liked it when Trump ad-libbed. His flattery seemed to work when Trump turned to Ye and said, “I really like this guy. He gets me.”
Trump, of course, loves anybody who fawns over him, however unsavory they may be. This has become such a well-known fact about his personality that everyone seeking his favors does it once they gain access to him. Trump seems to not be aware, or perhaps care, if they are being sincere or cynically exploiting this weakness. Such a character flaw requires a person to be surrounded by gatekeepers who will block such people from getting close to him but in Trump’s case, they seem to be ineffective.
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The skeleton of one of the largest dinosaurs known to have inhabited the Earth, reconstructed from the fossil bones of six animals discovered in 2010 in Patagonia, will shortly go on display in the Natural History Museum in London.
FIFA, the controlling body of international football, has long been known to be utterly corrupt. The nation of Qatar has an appalling record on human rights including ,the criminalizing of homosexuality, brutal treatment of its migrant labor force, and violations of free speech rights among others. So when in 2010 FIFA selected Qatar as the host nation for the 2022 tournament despite its manifest unsuitability (for starters, the temperatures can rise to very high levels in the summers), there were immediate suspicions that bribery had been involved, with the Qatari rulers seeking to get good publicity by hosting this major international sporting event.
This article goes into great depth on the sordid history of FIFA and Qatar.
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