The more I learn about bats, the more I am impressed at the abilities of these mammals. I had taken the phrase ‘blind as a bat’ literally and thought that bats depended entirely on echolocation to navigate. Christie Wilcox sets me straight and says that bats use both vision and echolocation to get around, using each for specific purposes.
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The states of Alaska, Washington, and Hawaii held caucuses yesterday and Bernie Sanders won by huge margins of 82-18%, 73-27%, and 70-30% respectively.
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When Bernie sanders was speaking at a rally in Portland, Oregon, a small bird came and rested on his podium, and the crowd went wild.
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This is an excellent film that deals with the true story of the Boston Globe‘s 2002 expose of the Catholic Church’s shameful role in covering up the repeated sexual abuse committed by its priests in the Boston diocese and that the cover-up went all the way up the chain to Archbishop Cardinal Law who orchestrated secret settlements with the victims.
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AIPAC (American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee) is one of the key components of the Israel lobby in the US and plays a powerful force in elections, similar to the role that the NRA plays. It advocates for very hardline Israeli policies against the Palestinians and also against any nation that it or the Israeli government deems to be opposed to Israel. Needless to say, it vigorously opposed the nuclear deal between the P5+1 nations and Iran.
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During the period when Marco Rubio and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz were slinging crude insults at each other, observers hoped that the Republican primary race had finally hit bottom and could not descend any further into the muck. We now know that that is not true. The campaign has got sleazier by the day.
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Some states, including Ohio, like to give tax breaks and other forms of subsidies to film companies to make their films there. The case that is made is that making the film in the state brings jobs and revenue that more than compensates for the giveaways, and in addition the state gets lots of free publicity and visibility. At one time, states seemed to be in a bidding war for film companies, much to the latter’s delight.
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The comedian died today at the age of 66. He was a very funny guy, playing a neurotic personality. I used to watch his early TV show It’s Garry Shandling’s Show where he frequently broke the fourth wall. His opening theme prepared you for a zany experience.
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The Daily Show correspondent Adam Lovitt looks at the rise of anti-Semitic events at the rallies for Donald Trump. One has to wonder at the rapidly decreasing number of groups that have not been disparaged at Trump and GOP events.
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Mississippi is a poor state combined with a strong religious tradition and is usually at the bottom of the list when it comes to most measures of social well-being. But there is one area where it excels and that is in the vaccination rate where the rates are the highest in the nation. 99.7% of its kindergartners are fully vaccinated, compared with 94.5% nationwide. I discussed the reasons for this anomaly in a post last year. They achieved it by limiting exemptions from vaccination only under very strict conditions, unlike the much looser exemptions in other states.
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