Amazing art perspective

I am terrible at art and have always been so, partly due to serious lack of talent and partly due to having had no training at all. The art classes we had in elementary school back in Sri Lanka were viewed largely as fun time where we drew whatever we liked and got almost no feedback on how to make it better. This ignorance of art has not prevented me from having an immense respect for the abilities of artists and their fertile imaginations.
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The arrival of oligarchy in the political lexicon

Conservative David Frum, who was George W. Bush’s speechwriter, fingers anger against the oligarchic control of US politics as a major driver in the US election.

The tight grip of oligarchy upon the American political system slipped a little last night in New Hampshire.

On the Democratic side, voters cast their ballots for one of the most implausible candidates in modern presidential history—less because his rhetoric was so mesmerizing or his program so inspiring than as a protest against an expected winner perceived as a lavishly compensated servitor of organized wealth.
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Why the media and political elites never saw this coming

I have been writing repeatedly about the devastating impact of the 2007-2008 recession triggered by the frauds committed by the financial sector. But I did not personally experience any hardship. This was because I had a job that was not affected by the crisis and was living in a home that was paid for a long time ago and was not trying to sell it. So while the city of Cleveland was hit hard by foreclosures that devastated entire neighborhoods, where I lived there was just a slight uptick in the number of houses for sale and that seems to have now returned to more normal levels.
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Is Donald Trump playing a deep game?

Much energy and effort has been spent, not least by me, in trying to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon, what he stands for and why so many people are attracted to him. You would think that all possible theories would have been exhausted by now but I came across this article by Bobby Azarian, a cognitive neuroscientist at George Mason University, that sheds a possible new light on his motivations and methods.
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The Bible can probably solve your plumbing problems too

In Idaho, a panel of Republicans in the state senate has approved a bill to allow public school teachers to use the Bible as a reference book in the teaching of astronomy, biology, and geology. Not to be outdone, two Mississippi Democratic legislators think that they have found the solution to the world’s many problems. They have proposed that the Bible be the official state book.
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The influence of the Koch-led oligarchy

Jane Mayer, a superb investigative reporter for the New Yorker and author of the book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine about the influence of big money in the election process and how in different ways, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are channeling voters anger at this corruption.
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New poll finds that Sanders is more electable than Clinton

One of the arguments used by supporters of Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders is that she has a better chance of beating the Republican candidate in November. But there has been little empirical support for such a belief. Now a new Quinnipiac polls says that Sanders would beat every Republican candidate while Clinton only ties or trails them.
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