In this age of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, Stephen Colbert imagines what the next blockbuster heist film is going to be about.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
In this age of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, Stephen Colbert imagines what the next blockbuster heist film is going to be about.
A great example of why monopolies are bad can be seen in the practices of the two companies Ticketmaster and Live Nation. The merger of the two has resulted in them wielding enormous power when it comes to live concerts. As a result, consumers get both price-gouged and lousy service.
Back in 2009, New Jersey congressperson Bill Pascrell, Jr., among others, warned that allowing the merger would be bad but the Obama administration waved it through. In 2018, Pascrell wrote an article saying that all their dire predictions had come true.
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Here is a clip of police in Los Angeles chasing down a suspect.
It. reminded me of those old black and white slapstick comedies of the silent film era with the bungling Keystone Cops, with them running all over the place.
As long time readers know, I grumble about that biannual ritual in the US of changing the clocks forward by one hour in the spring (when it becomes Daylight Savings Time) and then one hour back in the fall (when it reverts to Standard Time). We just made the change this past Sunday and I went around changing the eight clocks that are not connected to the internet. You would think that I would have been on top of this issue but I was taken completely by surprise to learn that the US Senate yesterday unanimously passed a resolution making DST permanent
That does not mean that the deed is done. The House of Representatives has not passed the measure and Joe Biden has not stated that he will sign the bill into law.
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Continuing my program of putting on this blog my published articles, this one was published by me in Change magazine in the March/April 2008 issue, p. 40-43.
I wrote this in order to help faculty who often did not have good writing habits and hence were less productive in their scholarly output than they might have been. I was gratified by the number of them who said that it helped them a lot.
I hate to read reports like this one yesterday where tennis player Naomi Osaka was severely heckled during her match.
Naomi Osaka was reduced to tears after being heckled during her second-round defeat to Veronika Kudermetova in Indian Wells.
The Japanese player, who missed parts of the 2021 season to look after her mental health, was jeered early in the match and it was undoubtedly a major factor as she lost 6-0, 6-4 to the world No 24.
A spectator reportedly shouted “Naomi, you suck”, with Osaka complaining to the umpire, and as she went to serve at the start of the third game, she was visibly crying. Clearly affected, she lost the first set without winning a game, before putting up a better fight in the second.
This behavior was especially cruel since Osaka has had well-known issues with mental health that have caused her to withdraw from some major tournaments. But it appears that this particular tournament has a nasty reputation for obnoxious fan behavior.
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I watched the Netflix series Inventing Anna that told the story of a young Russian-born German woman named Anna Sorokin who came to New York in her twenties with the name Anna Delvey and managed to persuade many of the wealthy socialites in that city that she was a wealthy heiress to a massive trust fund that she would have access to as soon as she reached a certain age. She used that reputation to live large, getting multiple credit cards and bank accounts with large overdraft limits, stay for extended periods in fancy hotels, eat in expensive restaurants, fly in private jets, and get major players in Wall Street such as lawyers, bankers, and hedge fund managers to work on her project of converting a choice building in the heart of the city into a highly exclusive art-based private club that would serve just the highest echelons of the elite. She even persuaded prestigious architects, artists, and designers to join her project. And then finally, it all fell apart, as it had to, because it was all a house of cards. She was not an heiress and there was no trust fund. She was running a Ponzi scheme, using money that she borrowed from one place to impress wealthy people that she too was wealthy and thus get them to fund her lavish lifestyle, since they assumed that she had the means to repay them.
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I have noticed that a large number of comic strips feature non-human animals. Some of these animals behave as one expects them to do, in that they express themselves in the way that animals do by using their bodies, wagging their tails and so on. In the case of others, the animals are anthropomorphized to various degrees. At one end, the creators put in thought bubbles to indicate what they are thinking, though they cannot talk. This clearly appeals to pet caregivers who have often wished they could know what their pets are thinking. Other comic strips have animals and pets seemingly living and working together and able to converse with each other. And then there is the other extreme in strips where only animals appear and they live just like humans do.
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By any measure, the supposedly massive convoy of trucks that was supposed to sent a stern message to the government protesting its pandemic polices was a major bust. Part of the reason may have been that there seemed to be some confusion about some basic issues, such as when and where the trucks would gather and what they would do when they arrived. For people who claimed to want to seriously challenge the government, they were remarkably inept.
Some organizers wanted to stage the event on Tuesday, March 1st in Washington DC at the National Mall, which was the day when Joe Biden was to give the annual State of the Union address. Hardly anyone showed up, with reporters outnumbering the twenty or so people who showed up. Another group seemed to have set the target date to be Saturday, March 5th and some on Sunday, March 6th. Some wanted to rally in Washington DC while others planned to meet outside the city. It was also not clear what they intended to do. Create massive gridlock by parking on major streets in the city, like what happened in Ottawa, their inspiration for this event? Create massive traffic jams by driving at a crawl on the Washington Beltway? But beltway traffic is usually at a crawl anyway, so no one might even notice.
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