Perfect adherence to principles is not always possible

For reasons that are not clear to me, there are omnivores who get defensive when they encounter vegetarians or vegans. There seems to be a sense that members of the two groups are smug and superior and preachy about their dietary practices when in my own experience, and I know many people who are one or the other, they are not. It seems like some omnivores feel the need to defend their meat eating in some way. An indication of this defensiveness is the impulse to question the purity of the commitment of the vegetarian or vegan pointing out that they might be wearing leather shoes or something like that.
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Moving Away from the Authoritarian Classroom by Mano Singham

I feel that whatever subject we are assigned to teach, an underlying goal should be to also prepare students to be active participants in a democratic society. And yet, it is undoubtedly the case that during the most formative period in their lives, K-16 education, young people are immersed in an authoritarian system that gives them little control or decision making powers. In short, we seem to be training them to think of authoritarian systems as the norm. I was very much guilty of being part of that system until I started reading about the nature of education and after that I proceeded to change my teaching practices to make them as democratic as I could.

I tried to understand how and why our classrooms have become so authoritarian and felt that it was symptomatic of the breakdown of trust in the student-teacher relationship. I wrote about that and the changes I made and my experiences in an article that I published in Change Magazine, vol. 37, no.3, May/June 2005, p. 50-57.

Moving Away from the Authoritarian Classroom

Winter Olympic disasters

I do not follow the Olympics but have seen many headlines concerning the current games in China saying that some highly regarded competitors have had ‘wipeouts’, meaning spectacular falls. I looked it up to see what was going on and from what I saw in the clips below, it seems like the winter Olympics events are a hell of a lot more dangerous than the ones in the summer Olympics, apart from the curling events of course.

Skiers can reach speeds of around 150 mph while people in the luge event are going down a narrow tubular track feet first at speeds of around 80 mph. Even in slow motion it looks scary. The slightest misjudgment and you could have a very nasty, even life-threatening, accident. That requires a considerable level of mental toughness to overcome one’s natural fears.
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New York Times has still not mentioned the AI report on Israel

By any stretch of the word, one would think that the blistering critique of Israel’s apartheid practices by Amnesty International would constitute ‘news’. And yet, as James North writes, a week has passed and the New York Times has still not written a single word on the report. This is from the newspaper that prides itself as being the ‘newspaper of record’ and has on its masthead the slogan “All the news that’s fit to print”, implying that within its pages you will get all the news that you need to know.

This will not come as a surprise to veteran media watchers who have long known that this newspaper serves as a conduit for the message of the Israel lobby in the US, providing cover for Israeli apartheid practices under the guise of being even-handed by occasionally allowing minor criticisms to be written.
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Brian Flores exposes the NFL’s sleazy culture

The National Football League consists of 32 team owned by extremely wealthy people who are mostly white and male and so one would not expect them to be the most ethical of people in terms of the way they do business or the most enlightened when it comes to issues of race. This has already been demonstrated in the way they responded to Colin Kaepernick and the issue of racist team names and mascots. During the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, they felt pressured to at least say the right things about racism but it seemed to be the minimal amount that that they could get away with.

American football is a game in which the head coach plays an outsize role in the team’s performance, calling the plays, deciding who is does what, and so on. It is telling that although 70% of the players are black, there is currently only one black head coach. There has been an overwhelming majority of black players for a long time, long enough for large numbers of them to have worked their way through the ranks of player, assistant coach, offensive and defensive coordinator, to finally head coach, so the lack of more black coaches speaks to a real problem. While black coaches have been hired, they are usually hired by struggling teams and their tenure tends to be short-lived. Furthermore, while white coaches who fail with a team and are fired are given multiple opportunities with several other teams as either head coaches or coordinators, black coaches often have just one shot.

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Samantha Bee talks to three religious women about abortion

She brings together three women who are followers of Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism to ask them how well what their religious books actually say about abortion aligns with what we are told about by the anti-choice movement. Very little, it turns out. In fact, they suggest that the current proposed restrictions on abortion actually violate the tenets of their religion.

Spirit photography

There is a very strong desire among some segments of the population to make contact with dead people. This desire has been exploited by charlatans, people who claim that (for a fee, of course) they can channel your loved ones. The methods used have varied over time. In the US, the rise in interest in communicating with the dead coincided with the Civil War that saw massive numbers of dead people that left their families devastated and seeking some form of comfort.

In the mid-19th century, in the early days of photography, the husband and wife team of William and Hannah Mumler created a sensation by taking photographs of people that showed the ghosts of their dead loved ones hovering around them, such as this one of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln standing behind his wife Mary Todd Lincoln.
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Lata Mangeshkar (1929-2022)

Many people in the west may not have heard the above name but this force of nature has died at the age of 92 after testing positive for covid-19. She was a giant in the Indian film and music world, as can be seen in the response to the news of her death.

Lata Mangeshkar, one of India’s most beloved singers, has been cremated in Mumbai with full state honours.

Mangeshkar, whose voice was the soundtrack to hundreds of Bollywood films, died aged 92 on Sunday.

PM Narendra Modi and stars of the entertainment industry attended the funeral, where large crowds gathered to pay their respects.

Her extraordinary career spanned more than half a century and she recorded thousands of songs in 36 languages.

Two days of national mourning will follow the funeral and the national flag will be flown at half-mast throughout the country.

She was what we used to call a ‘playback singer‘ in that it was her voice that was heard in the songs in films while the actor lip-synced the words. India is a nation of many languages but whatever the language of the film and whoever were the actors, it was a pretty safe bet that the singing of the female lead in the film was being done by Mangeshkar. Given that so many Indian films feature multiple songs, she was everywhere, recording thousands of songs. Even I, who watched hardly any Indian films, knew about her and could recognize her distinctive voice.

Here is an example of her singing.