On re-reading Australian test cricketer Usman Khawaja’s article about the racism he encountered in Australia as a young boy of Pakistani descent that I wrote about recently, I noticed that he tossed out a statement almost in passing, that “Kids can be mean and that is normal.”
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This Saturday Night Live clip about Anderson Cooper and Kelly Anne Conway show how these talk show are just ritualized show busness, like professional wrestling, where each player knows what role they are to play. Conway knows that she has to say wild and crazy things in defense of Trump while Cooper’s role is to feed her opportunities to do so. In this way, CNN’s ratings go up and Trump’s fans are pleased.
As he began his second term as Chinese president at the opening of Communist Party’s 19th Congress, Xi Jingpin gave an over three-hour speech outlining the party’s vision for the future. One thing was clear: that he is a strategic thinker who sees China playing an increasingly dominant role on the global stage. Given that it is expected that within the next five years the size of China’s economy will exceed that of the US, this is not an idle dream.
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I am finally home again after a week on the road. Most of the time was spent playing with my grandson, who has just learned to crawl and so is always on the move, proudly showing off his new skill. He is also exploring all the different sounds that can be made by banging two objects together. Since the objects he has at his disposal are toys that have been carefully designed for safety and are mostly made of plastic, the range of sounds he can produce is limited but do have subtle variations that he is studying.
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The motives of Stephen Paddock, the person who killed 58 people and injured hundreds in a shooting spree in Las Vegas, remain a mystery. Investigative journalist Greg Palast writes that he went to school with Paddock and recounts his impressions of him from that time. He says that he and Paddock lived and went to school in a poor part of the greater Los Angeles area, where their proximity to the elites of Beverly Hills constantly rubbed their noses in the fact of the sheer unfairness of class privilege that some were born into and which opened many doors for them, and others were not.
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One of the first things people learn about microwaves ovens is to never put any metal objects in it. So I was surprised to see a microwave oven with a metal rack in the center, like those you find in regular ovens. Naturally I tried to find out how the manufacturers had achieved this and under what conditions metal could be used.
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The Republicans made the issue of US deaths in the Libyan town of Benghazi the centerpiece of multiple investigations of Hillary Clinton as part of their sustained effort to discredit her and thus undermine her candidacy. But this news item has received surprisingly little coverage from US media.
When four US special forces soldiers died in an ambush earlier this month in scrubby desert in western Niger, attention was suddenly focused on one of the most remote and chaotic war zones on the planet.
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Donald Trump has decided to cut the federal subsidies that helped make the insurance premiums on the health exchanges more affordable. But the people who will be most adversely affected by this move tend to live in states that voted for Trump last year.
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