Current Events

Network television used to love “ conflict ,” and the more acrimonious and hate-filled the better. As pack animals, humans are fascinated by intense disagreements, especially between their leaders, and by fights in general [ Why Do We Enjoy Watching Other People Fight? , By Christian Jarrett, Science Focus, 2020]. So intense political conflict means more viewers and more add revenue. But clearly this doesn’t apply to the disputed Trump-Biden election.  All the Main Stream Media has adopted the “ narrative ” that “Biden is the President-Elect,” e ssentially ignoring the “conflict” happening behind the scenes, rendering their broadcasts bland and hardly worth watching. Why? After all, you would think that the networks would be elated. Able to present the U.S. as a country in crisis, on the brink of self-destruction, there could be constant, dramatic, rolling news bulletins—all of them more than paying for the commercials by which they’d be regularly interrupted. Biden-suppor...

  Is American singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, now 75 years old, deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature? Numerous issues need to be disentangled here, probably too many for one article. In the first place, there is the matter of the Nobel Prize itself. No one is obliged to accept the awarding process as either entirely objective or disinterested. The prize has been handed out by the Swedish Academy, whose 18 members have tenure for life, since 1901. The winners have for the most part tended to be European, with Swedish writers especially well represented in the first few decades of the prize’s existence. Nobel Prize ceremony 2015 The list of 113 Nobel Laureates includes many writers––however one may feel about the overall thrust of their work––who undoubtedly are serious figures, including Harold Pinter, Günter Grass, Doris Lessing, Gabriel García Márquez, Alice Munro, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Heinrich Böll, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre (who refused the awa...

  CCCP Moskobel Russian Electric Trains History In 1951 the government in the Soviet Union began producing 'O' gauge electric train sets for 3-rail operation. These train sets were not intended to be sold, at least not initially. The first Stalin-era sets were used as gifts to Communist party members, high ranking military officers and foreign dignitaries. They were also used as rewards to adolescent boys who were members of the Young Pioneers youth group that was the communist equivalent of the Boy Scouts. The set was called the Moscow Pioneerskaya Railway (Pioneer Railway).   These sets contained a die-cast diesel-type locomotive, two tin-plate passenger cars, two freight cars (a box car and a flat car), three operating street lights, three operating signals, a large lighted passenger station, a bridge, three operating accessories including an operating gateman, an operating flagman and an operating gate crossing, plus various other ...