Sex abuse report released in Australia

The royal commission in Australia charged by the government with investigating how institutions (religious, federal and state governments) have responded to child sex abuse allegations has, after five years issued a 17-volume report containing 400 recommendations, of which 189 are new. Such commissions usually issue fairly mild recommendations but these were quite sweeping. Naturally, the report looked at the Catholic church, one of the worst perpetrators of child sexual abuse, and suggested two major changes: ending celibacy for priests and requiring priests to report to the authorities anyone who in confessions to priests said that they had abused children.
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Keeping the focus on Trump’s abuse allegations

New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand has been out in front on the sexual abuse issue and called for Donald Trump to resign because of the charges that sixteen women have leveled against his disgusting behavior. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii then came out with an even stronger statement, saying “The only way to stop this president who has a narcissistic need for attention, he’s a misogynist and admitted sexual predator and a liar. The only thing that will stop him from attacking us—because nobody is safe—is his resignation.”
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Brace yourself for renewed UFO mania

The New York Times has an interview with two former US navy pilots who reported seeing a UFO in 2004. It appears that there was a secret multimillion dollar Pentagon program to investigate such sightings and keep a record of them. The program ended in 2012 but monitoring still goes on. The interview article describes in some detail how the two navy pilots pursued the object and its strange behavior, and there is a brief video of the object.
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Hopeful and warning signs from Alabama

As I said, it is unwise to draw sweeping conclusions from the shocking win by Democrat Doug Jones over Republican Roy Moore in the senate race in the deep red state of Alabama. It may well be that that election was sui generis because of the extreme views of Moore and the sexual abuse allegations against him and the revelations of his creepy obsession with teenage girls..
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Exploring the dark net

The dark net is that part of the internet that is hidden from the usual browsers that we use. To get to it, one can use what is called the TOR browser that protects your anonymity by rerouting your information through multiple encrypted sites so that you cannot be traced. TOR stands for The Onion Router and has nothing to do with the satirical website. If you are like me, you have heard about this router and the dark web but have never tried to access either.
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Using optical illusions as traffic regulators

I love optical illusions and this one in Iceland (that I came across thanks to Richard Kaufman) seems to suggest a pedestrian crossing that is floating on air. But it is not just for fun. Such trompe l’oeil (“fools the eye”) illusions claim to have the benefit of causing drivers, puzzled by what they see ahead of them, to slow down when approaching them, increasing the safety of street crossers.

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Hey, maybe Trump will nominate me for a federal judgeship

After seeing this video of one of Donald Trump’s nominations for a lifetime position as a federal judge in the US District Court, I feel that I am just as qualified as him. He failed to satisfactorily answer a single question of law posed to him by Republican senator John Kennedy of Louisiana. Trump has been nominating extreme ideologues to the federal bench, many of whom have been deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association. The sad thing is that the Republican senators have confirmed many of them.
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