This person pulls her Tesla into a gas station and is baffled as to how to pump gas into it, much to the amusement of the people in the car behind her.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Many will have seen Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant satire Dr. Strangelove. Here is the clip of two famous scenes where the US general (played by Sterling Hayden) who has unleashed an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union explains to a British officer (Peter Sellers) how the introduction of fluorine into the drinking water (promoted as a way of reducing tooth decay) was actually a cunning Communist plot to weaken Americans by destroying their precious bodily fluids.
In the Donald Trump era NBC and MSNBC have tried to position themselves as the alternative to Fox News and have taken to giving negative coverage on him like the way that Fox News provides positive coverage. That may be a good ratings strategy to attract all those viewers who intensely dislike Trump but that should not delude us into thinking that it is a progressive news outlet. Far from it. Glenn Greenwald publicizes an astonishingly frank email written to various news outlets by veteran military and national security reporter and analyst William Arkin as he quits NBC News and MSNBC in disgust at what he sees as having become slavish pro-war propaganda outlets.
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I love this photograph of six new women members of Congress. They look like a team of crime fighters or superheroes ready to go into action to fight wrongs and bring justice.
They ain’t ready. pic.twitter.com/4ChWrBOkRH
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 3, 2019
To add to that image that some of these new members are ready to buck the old order, another new member Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib (who is not in the photograph) was sworn in on Thomas Jefferson’s Koran, as did Keith Ellison before her when he was sworn in back in 2007. That caused a controversy back then, fueled by those who sought to give the impression that the US was founded on explicitly Christian foundations. Since these bigots tend tp have very short memories, you can predict that they will boil over in outrage again and argue she is committing an unprecedented act of disrespect.
But clearly Tlaib was unfazed by that prospect and she even wore a traditional Palestinian dress called a thobe for the occasion.
In a historic first in space research, China has safely landed a probe Chang’e 4 on the far side of the lunar surface. Spacecraft had flown past it before but none had actually landed on it.
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I have been praising Hasan Minhaj’s new weekly show on Netflix for its hard-hitting exposes of important news items wrapped up in comedy. But he seems to have been a little too tough on Saudi Arabia’s leadership and crown prince Mohammed bin Salman following its murder of reporter Jamal Khashogi for that government’s taste. Minhaj’s sponsor Netflix seems to be too weak-kneed and cowardly because it has removed that particular episode from its Saudi Arabian service..
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On my local neighborhood website, someone asked for recommendations for someone to clean their house on a ‘biweekly’ schedule.
That is a word that I avoid using because it has never been clear to me whether the user means once every two weeks or twice a week. I looked up Merriam-Webster’s dictionary and it gives both definitions. The Cambridge dictionary says that it means every two weeks in American English and “every two weeks or twice a week” for just English, which is not much help.
Clearly people who use it think it means only one or the other and have never encountered it being used with the alternative meaning. The less common word ‘fortnightly’ clearly means every two weeks and so perhaps that should be used when we want to say that and reserve ‘biweekly’ for twice a week.
But perhaps the best option is to simply say ‘twice a week’ or ‘once every two weeks’ and avoid any confusion.
The southern Indian state of Kerala has been roiled with turmoil for three months ever since the Indian Supreme Court ruled that a major Hindu temple’s ban on women of menstruating age entering it was unconstitutional. Because of that rule, women between the ages of 10-50 had been barred. The temple leaders and their male supporters have resisted the decision and stopped women from entering and as a result there have been clashes between them and the police trying to enforce the ruling, the latest occurring when two women entered the temple under police protection.
This film and the book it was based on has received quite a bit of buzz about being one of the few films that feature an all Asian cast. In this case ‘Asian’ is used in a highly restricted sense of being just Singaporeans of Chinese ethnicity. No other groups made an appearance other than in bit parts.
The first half of the film can be categorized as ‘wealth porn’ where we are regaled with the lifestyles of exceedingly rich Singapore Chinese families who show that they can be as obnoxiously ostentatious about flaunting their wealth as any gauche Westerner. At that point I was going to give up on the film but the sunk-cost effect kicked in and I thought I might as well watch a bit more.
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I am not a fan of practical jokes in general because they tend to have an underlying mean streak that finds humor in unsettling, upsetting, or even frightening the targeted person. Perhaps among close friends practical jokes are marginally acceptable though if I had a friend who was a regular practical joker, they would not be my friend for long. I like to take people at face value and having to always second-guess the actions of someone else would get old very soon.
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