Quarter-life crisis: Is this a thing now?

We are all familiar with the term ‘mid-life crisis’ that signifies a kind of panic that supposedly seizes people some time around their forties when they worry about whether they have made correct decisions concerning the major choices so far, if their lives have any meaning, and whether they should change directions before they get old and die. It is often the source of jokes, invoked when when middle-aged people do something that is out of character, such as buying an expensive sports car.
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After the exposure, what comes next?

The pattern has become familiar. Day after day we get new names of well-known people accused of the behavior ranging from the gross to the illegal, almost always by men of power and influence and aimed at young women and men whose careers they could influence positively or negatively. Their targets felt intimidated from speaking out against them directly or complain to their superiors. What has become clear is that these men behaved with impunity because they felt that their position gave them immunity. Clearly, if things are to change, people must realize that whoever they are, if they abuse their power over people they will be exposed and suffer the consequences.
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I just don’t understand some people

Ohio political news has been abuzz with salacious reports following the resignation of a state legislator named Wes Goodman, after he was reportedly found having sex with another man in his office. Goodman had been described as an up and coming star in Republican politics, which means of course that he campaigned on the ‘family values’, evangelical Christian platform which means espousing the anti-poor, anti-women anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-contraception agenda, because that is what ‘family values’ has come to mean.
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Did Robert Mugabe watch A Very British Coup?

Zimbabwe has been going through a rather strange political transition. Robert Mugabe has ruled that country since 1980 when his guerrilla force ZANU overthrew the white minority government of what was then called Rhodesia. Since then, his rule has become increasingly autocratic, corrupt, undemocratic, and brutal and it seemed like he, now 93 years old, was grooming his wife Grace to take over from him, and sacking his deputy head of state seemed to be a step in that direction
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Does Melvin the god want us to know if he exists or not?

There is a nagging little problem that I have with all the proofs of god that theologians keep insisting should be convincing. The fact that we are not all believers in the various gods means that these arguments are not that persuasive and, if gods exist, immediately raises the question: Do these gods want us to know they exist or not?
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Heartwarming story

There is much misery and suffering in the world, some of it due to natural disasters, others due to human actions. In the former category was the recent 7.3 earthquake that hit Iran and Iraq and killed over 500 people and caused greater damage and death in Iran. So it was nice to watch this clip of a little boy bringing his friend to an emergency food station run by the Red Crescent and telling the workers that she had not had any food and asking that she be given some. He did not ask for anything for himself but an aid worker stopped him as he walked away and gave him some food too.

Using duct tape to solve traffic problems

Carla Sinclair highlights how some people in the Dutch town of Nijmegen, who happened to be behavioral change experts, noticed a problem at an intersection where bicyclists who were turning right were being crowded off to the side due to congestion. So they took matters into their own hands and used duct tape to create separate lanes to nudge the cyclists into different lanes leading to much smoother flow.

Though crude, it worked and the city is now going to make the lanes official. What struck me was that there seem to a lot of cyclists and that they are pretty law abiding folk.

Could you distinguish a dead person from a mannequin?

Caitlin Doughty writes about two recent cases where people came across the bodies of dead people but then dumped them, thinking that they were mannequins put out as pranks. She is the owner of a funeral home and she says that part of the problem is that too few people spend any time at all with their deceased loved ones, thinking that they must quickly shunt them off to funeral homes, and thus have little idea of what a dead person looks like.
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