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*sigh* OK. On Friday, 6/26, I underwent an upper GI endoscopic exam for my Hemo/oncology specialist, to check for varices, bleeders, portal hypertension, etc. After I came out of the fog, they unhooked all with wires, tubes, etc., and allowed me to dress. The endo doc came by and said, with the exception of some 'changes' due to GERD (which has been treated for years), nothing was amiss. In the midst of shaking the fuzz out of my ears, they mentioned that I'd have a follow-up for it. Here's where it gets good: They called me this afternoon to confirm...

In 1940, George Orwell reviewed Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf." In explaining Hitler's rise to power, however, Orwell, explained much of what we see around us now. David Wood discusses the review and the lesson for today. #GeorgeOrwell #Hitler #MeinKampf

The Washington Redskins have decided to remove all references of original owner George Preston Marshall, who founded the team in 1933 and owned it until his death in 1969. According to the Washington Post, the Redskins plan to erase Marshall's name from franchise history by removing his name from all official team material. This means Marshall will no longer be mentioned anywhere in their Ring of Fame, on their History Wall, or on the team's official website.

Two national parks in California are removing all mention of Robert E. Lee from informational material even though several majestic sequoias are named for the Confederate general. Sequoia and Kings Canyon parks are removing references to Lee from exhibits, printed and online material as protests against racism and police brutality have led, in some places, to the removal or pulling down of monuments to historical figures linked to slavery or colonialism. Protest have been spurred nationwide over the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white officer pressed a knee to his neck in Minnesota. A...

Days of Our Lives actress Melissa Reeves is catching heat from her co-stars and the long-running soap’s fans for coming out against the Black Lives Matter movement. Earlier this week it was revealed that Reeves — who has played Jennifer Horton on the NBC sudser on and off for the past three decades — “liked” several anti-BLM posts from right-wing activist Candace Owens on Instagram. Reeves’ Days cousin, Linsey Godfrey, wasted little time responding. After one Twitter user defended Reeves’ right to express her opinion, Godfrey countered, “Nah there is no difference of opinion on racism, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia.”...

So here’s the deal: stopped in North Platte NE last night. Although most restaurants are open we were exhausted and picked up a pizza for dine in. I can report that most normal people in flyover aren’t wearing masks, at least not at rest stops. When we got settled in our room I discovered I’d left my charger for my computer in Park City (so by my count I now have three there). So dispatches from the road will be short and sweet. Like cannoli Always good advice So while I am listening to audio books, avoiding the news and...

Paramount is set to go to the future with 2084, a sci-fi film from The Batman writer Mattson Tomlin. The project is being described as a “spiritual sister” to George Orwell’s classic 1984, which really just sounds like they’re adapting 1984 but changing the year so it’s no longer dated. The script is also described as having a tone similar to both The Matrix and Inception. THR has the scoop on 2084, which was just snapped up by Paramount. Lorenzo di Bonaventura will produce. And just what is this movie about? Don’t ask, because no one is saying. Instead, the...

A new Democratic-aligned political action committee advised by retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, is planning to deploy technology originally developed to counter Islamic State propaganda in service of a domestic political goal - to combat online efforts to promote President Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The group, Defeat Disinfo, will use artificial intelligence and network analysis to map discussion of the president's claims on social media. It will seek to intervene by identifying the most popular counter-narratives and boosting them through a network of more than 3.4 million influencers across...

The Boston Globe newspaper's obituary section spanned a devastating 15 pages in its Sunday edition, as Massachusetts reels from the coronavirus crisis with more than 36,000 cases. Massachusetts has the third greatest coronavirus breakout in the country with more than 1,560 deaths reported so far. While not all the deaths that filled Sunday’s Boston Globe issue were virus-related, there has been a stunning spikes in deaths in the state as a result of the pandemic. 'Never in my life have I seen the obituary listings take up almost a whole page. I can’t imagine what NY and NJ papers look...

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a name frequently floated as a potential running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, has extended her stay-at-home order in response to the coronavirus pandemic to include a ban on individuals traveling between two residences. Starting Saturday, Michigan residents will no longer be permitted to visit friends or relatives or their second homes or vacation rentals inside the state, with few exceptions such as caring for a relative, an elderly friend or pet, visiting a nursing home, attending a funeral with no more than 10 people, or complying with a court order related to...

See how your community is moving around differently due to COVID-19 As global communities respond to COVID-19, we've heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as Google Maps could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19. These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.

It has been said that money is power. Some have suggested that knowledge is power. For Nietzsche, language was a central aspect of power. Frederich Nietzsche noted that the “lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power.” Philosophers have long recognized language as a crucial faculty that distinguishes man from other creatures. Aristotle wrote that human beings, unlike other animals, possess “rational speech,” which is, among other things, for distinguishing between the just and the unjust. That is to say, language is employed...

Athens. It is believed that the tomb of Alexander the Great and the Ark of the Covenant have been found on the Greek Island of Thasos, announced Russian Grekomania.ru, which is information partner of the Greek Minister of Culture and Tourism.

In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Google put their heads together to determine that there are roughly 1,022,000 words in the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary lists around 600,000. Either way, that’s a lot of words. But there isn’t a word in the English language for what Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing. They are no longer merely lying. Lying is covering up the truth. Lying is, No, Mom, honest, I didn’t break Aunt Donna’s Hummel. Or: No, Your Honor, I did not bilk my investors out of $4 million and abscond to Grand Cayman. What these people...

They will be ordered to wear high tech devices that can immediately detect when they’ve had a drink, and police will them haul them back in front of a judge. The new bid to curb problem-drinking will be unveiled tomorrow by Justice Secretary Robert Buckland in his speech to the Tories’ annual conference. They will be targeted on boozed-up people arrested or convicted for an array of offences from repeat drink-driving to assault, domestic violence and child abuse. Mr Buckland will tell the party faithful: “Prison is a hugely important tool to tackle crime but it is not the only...

The Orwellian dystopia found in 1984 is our future if the trendline continues. And a startling pathway to that future is beginning to congeal before us. George Orwell presciently wrote “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” This was accomplished in the novel through a device called the Memory Hole. Protagonist Winston Smith’s job, along with innumerable other workers, was to search the news archives for any stories, phrases or even people who did not line up with the current official worldview and history as dictated by Big Brother. If he found an instance,...

Abortion advocates are upset that women searching for abortion and pregnancy-related words online might potentially still be “lured” toward pro-life pregnancy centers — and they’re seeking to further silence them. In May, Google changed its advertising policies to require that pregnancy-related advertisers be “certified” before displaying their ads, below which Google would also display whether or not the facility provides abortions. The so-called “loophole” that abortion activists are now targeting involves specific search keywords. Since that time, Google’s policy has applied to searches with the keyword “abortion,” but not for other terms such as “free pregnancy test” or “pregnancy...

In George Orwell’s “1984,” the classics of literature are rewritten into Newspeak, a revision and reduction of the language meant to make bad thoughts literally unthinkable. “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” one true believer exults. Now some of the writer’s own words are getting reworked in Amazon’s vast virtual bookstore, a place where copyright laws hold remarkably little sway. Orwell’s reputation may be secure, but his sentences are not. Over the last few weeks I got a close-up view of this process when I bought a dozen fake and illegitimate Orwell books from Amazon. Some of them...

This summer, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four turns 70 years old, and that anniversary has prompted a surfeit of articles analyzing the book and its continuing relevance to our age. There is no doubt that the book is one of the most consequential political novels ever written and ought to be on the reading list of every conservative -- not because Orwell was himself a conservative (he remained a man of the Left until his death), nor because the dystopian world that Orwell described turned out to be prophetic. “The image of a boot stamping across the human face," in...

George Orwell was a brilliant individual. A man of incredible insight – and foresight. In his unfathomably predictive novel 1984, Orwell warns of Big Brother: “(O)stensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party Ingsoc wields total power ‘for its own sake’ over the inhabitants. “In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens.…The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan ‘Big Brother is watching you’: a maxim that is ubiquitously on display. “In modern culture, the term ‘Big Brother’ has entered the lexicon as a...