Cryptobust?

One of the things that was a big selling point of cryptocurrency was that it was supported by blockchain technology which supposedly meant that all the transactions were transparent and publicly available. I had thought that this would mean that frauds would be difficult to pull off since there is supposed to be a digital trail of all transactions that can be checked by anyone. That shows just how much I know and why I should never go anywhere near these things because as John Cassidy writes, recently there have been a spate of scams involving cryptocurrencies.
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The danger posed by a majority that sees itself as under threat

I have mentioned before how many negative trends that I observed in Sri Lanka over the decades, I now see playing out in the US. The mass killing in Buffalo illustrates one such situation that is rife for bigotry and that is when the majority community in a nation sees itself as under threat from the minority. This is because feeling threatened engenders a sense of grievance and a need to strike back in self-preservation while at the same time, being in the majority means that they have all the power and the means to attack members of the minority.

In Sri Lanka, politicians have long been able to whip up animosity against minority groups by saying that the majority Sinhala Buddhists were in danger of being eliminated. The fact that they constituted about 70% of the population and that this was highly unlikely to happen on simple statistical grounds did not prevent such fears from seizing the imagination of some people in the majority and we saw periodic acts of violence against the minorities. The targets varied over time suchas the minority Tamils who made up just about 20% of the population. But the chauvinists pointed to the fact that the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu shared ethnic features with Sri Lankan Tamils and thus, taken together, they constituted the larger group that, in their fevered imagination, would one day take over the country and suppress the Sinhala Buddhists. More recently, fears have been raised about Muslims, who make up just about 5% of the population, arguing that their relatively high birth rates were part of a long-term devious plot to become the majority. That both of these claims have not a shred of evidence in support and were preposterous purely on demographic grounds was dismissed.
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Can someone be too MAGA for Republican voters?

On the surface, one contest for the Republican party nomination for a US Senate seat reveals a surprising level of diversity among the top three candidates who are closely tied in the polls. While one is the standard-issue rich white man (a former hedge fund CEO), the other two consist of a Muslim child of immigrants and a Black woman. The contest is taking place in Pennsylvania and the CEO is David McCormick, the Muslim child of immigrants is TV personality Mehmet Oz, and the Black woman is Kathy Barnette. Donald Trump has endorsed Oz because he is impressed by his success as a TV personality and for Trump that is a huge factor. Once you look past those differences, what you see is a very depressing image of the party because all three candidates are awful.

The Republican party is now the party of the Trump MAGA (Make America Great Again) cult that emphasizes, among other things, xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia. The question in this race is whether there is such a thing as being too MAGA for Republican voters. While all three are MAGA in some form, they can be distinguished as ‘not quite MAGA enough’ (McCormick), ‘MAGA acceptable’ (Oz), and ‘too MAGA’ (Barnette), with Donald Trump playing the role of Goldilocks and choosing Oz as having just the right level of MAGAness.
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What the hell is going though such people’s minds?

We now have yet another mass shooting.

A teenage gunman in military-style clothing opened fire with a rifle at a New York supermarket in what authorities called a “hate crime and racially motived violent extremism”, killing 10 people and wounding three others before surrendering to police on Saturday afternoon, authorities said.

Police officials said the 18-year-old gunman, who is white, was wearing body armor and military-style clothing when he pulled up and opened fire at people at a Tops Friendly Market about 2.30pm, with the shooting streamed via a camera affixed to the man’s helmet.
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Excellent summary and analysis of the situation in Sri Lanka

This 12-minute news report from the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle gives an excellent summary of the situation in Sri Lanka and how it got that way and the extent of the nepotism and corruption of the Rajapaksa family.

At the 2:20 mark, the news reader describes the Rajapaksa family dynasty that has been in politics for eight decades and shows a chart of some of the many family members who occupy senior positions in government. He says that they could not fit all of them on their chart. The Rajapaksa family has been labeled the most unashamedly nepotistic family in Sri Lankan history and that is saying something since nepotism has been rampant throughout the country’s post-independence history.

Meanwhile, a court has barred the former prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa (currently holed up in a naval base), his son, and fifteen allies of theirs from leaving the country, because of their possible involvement in the violence that took place on Monday.

Tense impasse in Sri Lanka as shoot on sight order given by president

After the chaos of Monday when, in response to pro-government mobs attacking the tent camps of anti-government protestors, there was a massive nationwide retaliation in which the homes of 41 pro-government politicians were burned down including three belonging to the family of the president and prime minister, an uneasy calm has returned to the streets. The president Gotabaya Rajapaksa has declared an emergency that has given him even more powers than before, ordered a nationwide curfew until Thursday morning, and given the military orders to shoot ‘lawbreakers’ on sight.

On Tuesday, the government ordered troops to open fire on anyone looting public property or causing “harm to life”.

It also deployed tens of thousands of army, navy and air force personnel to patrol the streets of the capital Colombo.

Despite their presence, the city’s top police officer was assaulted on Tuesday afternoon by a mob accusing him of not doing enough to protect peaceful protesters.

At Colombo’s Galle Face Green, on the sea front, crowds also continued to gather.

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Violence escalates in Sri Lanka: Prime minister resigns

The crisis in Sri Lanka keeps escalating by the hour. After more than a month of protests in which people across the country called for the removal of president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, his brother the prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, and the government over the fact that they had created a massive economic crisis that had led to daily hours-long power cuts, high inflation, and shortages of imported fuel, medicines, and certain foods, events took an even more serious turn on Monday.

Up until then, the demonstrations had been widespread but largely peaceful, with demonstrators setting up tent-city encampments in Colombo called ‘Gota Go Gama’ and ‘Mynah Go Gama’ (‘Gama’ is Sinhala for ‘town’ and a ‘Mynah’ is a small bird and is a recently coined derogatory nickname for the prime minister, so you get the sentiment being expressed by the names) and marching in many parts of the country and organizing successful general strikes that brought the country to a standstill. But on Monday, Mahinda (who has a larger base of support than his brother Gotabaya because he has been in Sri Lankan politics longer, was a former president, and opened the doors for his brothers and the rest of the Rajapaksa clan to occupy many sectors of the government) seemed to have decided to launch a counter-offensive. He had thousands of his supporters from various parts of the country bused into Colombo to his official residence Temple Trees where he and some supporters in parliament gave defiant speeches vowing to fight the protestors. After that session, his supporters went out into the streets and violently attacked the protestors, destroying the two tent cities, the banners, and all the other items that the protestors had with them.
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Why the British House of Commons is more interesting to watch than the US Congress

When you watch proceedings of the British parliament, you cannot help but notice how all the MPs are seated very close to one another, most apparently without designated seating, This level of proximity can lead to situations where an MP can notice, as happened recently, that the member next to them was watching pornography on their phone. The seats are in sets of rows facing each other with the two front rows just 13 feet apart. The Speaker sits on a raised throne between the two rows, looking straight down the center aisle. This arrangement lends a certain intimacy to the proceedings and gives the sense of a real debate going on with people from opposing sides alternating to pop up, hoping that the Speaker will call upon them to speak. In the US House of Representatives, it looks less like a debate and more like a series of speeches given from a central podium to a cavernous room.
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Tackling the problem of renewable energy storage

The cost of producing renewable energy using solar and wind has been dropping sharply over the years so that it is now comparable and often even cheaper that energy produced using fossil fuels. So why hasn’t it taken over the energy sector completely? The reason is that when it comes to renewable energy, there is an extra cost that fossil-fuel based power plants do not have and that is the cost of storing the energy and this has to be factored in as well.

It is energy in the form of electric current that drives all our devices but the problem with current is that it cannot be stored as current because as it flows in wires, it dissipates its energy as heat. (Superconductors don’t have any resistance and thus do not lose any heat but the commercial applications of that are far off in the future.) The production of current has to exactly match the use of current at every moment. The energy grid is is a true marvel of engineering technology that achieves precisely this. We have various power plants feeding electricity into the grid and this is the sent all over the area covered by the grid to wherever it is needed at that moment. So in the US during the summer months, for example, energy is sent to the hot southern parts of the country to meet the increased demands of air conditioning.
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Environmental racism

On the latest episode of Last Week Tonight John Oliver discusses how historic racial discrimination practices have resulted in poor and minority communities ending up living in highly polluted areas, where the life expectancy can be ten years below nearby communities that are not similarly polluted. He describes one community where the lead levels are hundreds of times above acceptable limit, so that signs are posted on yards telling children not to play on the grass or in the dirt! That is like asking children not to breathe the air.
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