Telling it like it is

Teachers are finally taking action to protest the lack of investment in public education that has led to their low and stagnant salaries, lack of adequate supplies for students, and poorly maintained facilities. To add insult to injury, teachers are constantly vilified by right-wingers as lazy moochers who complain despite having cushy jobs and their summers off. Teachers have long been fed up with this state of affairs but now they are getting angry.
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The drearily predictable resurgence of the race and IQ debate

So here we are again, debating the tired and discredited thesis propounded by Charles Murray and his late co-author Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve about the role of intelligence in socioeconomic success and as its pertains to race. These issues have resurfaced in a new book by David Reich and Murray has once again returned to the spotlight. Andrew Sullivan who, as then editor of The New Republic gave a huge amount of space to publicize that earlier book, has emerged to defend Murray’s ideas. Sam Harris has once again aligned himself with odious ideas and defends them as courageous truth-telling in the fight against political correctness.
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John Oliver on the Sinclair Broadcasting propaganda machine

While much attention has focused on Fox News as a purveyor of propaganda and falsehoods in the service of Donald Trump and the people he represents, less attention has been paid to a news company that has a much broader reach in the country and that is Sinclair Broadcasting, the owner of many local radio and TV stations.

In this clip, John Oliver shows how local newscasters at Sinclair stations are tightly controlled by the owners in a way that would make the leader of any totalitarian nation envious.

Jesus Christ Superstar

Last night the NBC TV network broadcast a live performance of this rock musical to coincide with Easter Sunday. I started watching the high-energy 2½ hour show but gave up after 40 minutes. This was not because I thought it was bad. I liked what I saw but the frequent breaks for commercials finally got the better of me. It seemed like for every 8 minutes of the show, we had a break for about 4 minutes of commercials. I understand the business model of ads paying for free programming, but the time spent on ads was just too much and they were so frequent that it destroyed the sense of engagement. If a DVD comes out, I may well watch it but today clips were made available and I embed some below.
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On Jordan Peterson being a Rorschach test

My post on Pankaj Mishra’s critique of Jordan Peterson aroused some interesting and thoughtful responses. As I said, I did not know anything about Peterson or his works and some tried to clue me in and provide perspective. As recommended by some, I went online to see some videos by and of Peterson and it turns out that there are a lot! I picked some based on whether their titles promised topics of interest to me, not a very effective strategy with YouTube, I know, but the only option I had if I did not want to devote the rest of my life to watching a ton of his videos. I have watched a few and plan to watch a few more and will post my comments on them after I have had time to digest them.
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Prosecutors need to be held accountable for their abuses

Yesterday, I wrote about the case where the Pulse nightclub shooter’s wife Noor Salman was acquitted of all charges, despite the determined efforts of prosecutors to make life as difficult as possible for her and coerce a confession. Fortunately for her, the jury overcame the ‘scary Muslim terrorist’ fear-mongering and cleared her. But as Shaun King reminds us, many people do not escape the heavy hand of prosecutors seeking conviction at all costs and gives the case of Natalie Pollard, where she took a plea deal just to avoid being badgered by the legal system.
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Laura Ingraham loses advertisers, goes on ‘vacation’

Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s shtick is to bully and smear and she tried to do this to David Hogg, one of the high school survivors of the Parkland shooting, but found that young people are not pushovers for her tactics. Hogg responded by calling advertisers to boycott her show. When about a dozen of them did so, Ingraham tried to mend the damage by issuing an apology to Hogg “in the spirit of Holy Week”, a weird invoking of religion that not only did not stem the fleeing of advertisers but also prompted widespread mockery.
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Pulse nightclub shooter’s wife acquitted of all charges

The mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in June 2016 was a horrific event even by the standards of the US where mass killings are so common, in which 49 people were killed and 58 wounded by a single person Omar Mateen, showing how much firepower he had at his disposal. Mateen himself was killed after a three-hour standoff with police. Mateen had sworn allegiance to ISIS and said that his motive was revenge for US actions against ISIS.
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Surprising twist in the dark matter search

In science, we often give provisional existence status to entities that serve as explanatory concepts to explain phenomena, even though they have not been directly detected as yet. Of course, that state of provisional existence does not last forever and strenuous efforts are undertaken to obtain direct measurements of existence and sometimes these can take a long time. That seems to be the case with dark matter which is thought to be about five times as abundant as normal matter and to exist in large spheres in which all galaxies are immersed but whose direct detection has proven elusive.
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