Last night I watched the above documentary written and directed by Alex Gibney and largely based on the book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013) by Lawrence Wright that I favorably reviewed here. That review provides a lot of the information that is in the film so I will not repeat it here.
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As the US lurches from one mass shooting to another, Bernie Sanders has been criticized for not taking a more hardline stance against guns and this has made him speak out more and try and make his position clearer. He used a speech yesterday in Boulder, Colorado and recent TV appearances to do so.
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More details are emerging about the attack by a US gunship on the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in the early hours of Saturday, October 3, 2015 that resulted in 22 deaths (so far), at least 37 injured, 33 missing, and resulted in the closing of the only major hospital that served a wide area. After talking with the people who worked at the hospital and live in the area, the Los Angeles Times provides a detailed chronology of the events of that night. The Washington Post has another account that complements it, using as its main sources the US and Afghan military.
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He had a hilarious bit about the maneuvering to not become the next Speaker of the House of Representatives. I have not been watching his new show but it looks like the set-piece monologue segments like this are exactly like the ones he used to do on his old show and that is a good thing. The one difference is that he no longer has to act like a right wing nutter.
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It looks like the Carson camp has got fed up with being asked for verification of his Popeye story and is now taking the tack of refusing to answer any more questions on the topic and expressing indignation that anyone would even ask for corroborating evidence and thus questioning the truth of the story
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Every time I think that the state of US politics in general, and the Republican party in particular, has reached new depths of dysfunctionality and cannot sink any lower, I get proved wrong. The bizarre struggle to find a new Speaker for the House of Representatives truly marks a major new low. The Speaker’s post was until just recently something that ambitious young congresspeople aspired to as the pinnacle of their careers. It enabled the holder to wield considerable political power, someone who, along with the senate majority leader and the president, pretty much determined the agenda of the country. The Speaker was the second in line for the presidency, after the vice-president, which gives some idea of the importance attached to the position by the drafters of the US Constitution. (UPDATE: This is wrong. As Chiroptera points out in the comments, the complete line of succession is not in the Constitution but is specified by law. Ahcuah points out that some legal scholars say that the Speaker does not qualify to be in the list at all. Thanks to both!)
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With all the drama taking place within the Republican party from their presidential primary to the chaos surrounding the search for a new speaker, we should not ignore that things are moving along within the Democratic party.
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Food writer Michael Pollan says that when you look at time-lapse photography of plants as they grow so that you can see them move as they grow, it looks eerily like they are acting with a sense of volition, although of course they do not have a central nervous system.
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Yesterday I wrote about how Ben Carson, when questioned about his boast that he would not have let the Oregon gunman shoot people so easily, came up with anecdote from his own history, presumably to dispel criticisms that he has no idea how he would actually act in such a situation.
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When a couple were denied a marriage license because the justice of the peace said that their proposed marriage would be harmful to children and also violated his personal beliefs, the state’s governor was outraged and thundered, “This is a clear violation of Constitutional rights and federal and state law. Mr. Bardwell’s actions should be fully reviewed by the Judiciary Commission and disciplinary action should be taken immediately, including the revoking of his license” and when Bardwell finally resigned his position, the governor said that it was “long overdue”.
Give up?
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