The interesting history of the Miss America pageant

I have of course heard of the Miss America and Miss USA pageants and recall having seen bits of either or both (it was hard for me to tell the difference) on TV many years ago. To me they seemed to be two sides of the same coin, an opportunity to parade attractive young women in swim suits before a large TV audience. But in the August 31, 2020 issue of The New Yorker magazine, Lauren Collins says there are differences between the two, in that the Miss America organization insists that its contest is about more than looks.
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The Trump town hall debacle

You know that Trump must feel desperate when he goes outside his bubble of sycophantic right wing interviewers that fawn over him. He agreed to a town hall hosted by ABC News two days ago that featured ordinary people asking him questions and he was clearly rattled by their directness. One questioner even shut him down when he interrupted her while she was asking it. The problem for Trump is that it is easy for him to insult reporters and political opponents when they challenge him. His fans love it. But he cannot do that with ordinary people though he must have been sorely tempted to do so. The event went so badly that one of his biggest sycophants Laura Ingraham of Fox News called it an ‘ambush’ by ABC.
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There is no end to Trump’s assaults on women and decency

Another woman has come forward and charged that back in 1997 when she was a model, Trump sexually assaulted her.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Amy Dorris alleged that Trump accosted her outside the bathroom in his VIP box at the tournament in New York on 5 September 1997.

Dorris, who was 24 at the time, accuses Trump of forcing his tongue down her throat, assaulting her all over her body and holding her in a grip she was unable to escape from.

“He just shoved his tongue down my throat and I was pushing him off. And then that’s when his grip became tighter and his hands were very gropey and all over my butt, my breasts, my back, everything.
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Vulnerability to fake news

We are currently awash in fake news and conspiracy theories. From reader Jason, I received this 2018 article that discussed what effect cognitive abilities have on people’s vulnerability to fake news. It highlights a particularly significant risk factor, that people they identified as having low cognitive ability have a particularly hard time rejecting misinformation.

What do they mean by ‘cognitive ability’?

First proposed by the cognitive psychologists Lynn Hasher and Rose Zacks, this theory holds that some people are more prone to “mental clutter” than other people. In other words, some people are less able to discard (or “inhibit”) information from their working memory that is no longer relevant to the task at hand—or, as in the case of Nathalie, information that has been discredited. Research on cognitive aging indicates that, in adulthood, this ability declines considerably with advancing age, suggesting that older adults may also be especially vulnerable to fake news. Another reason why cognitive ability may predict vulnerability to fake news is that it correlates highly with education. Through education, people may develop meta-cognitive skills—strategies for monitoring and regulating one’s own thinking—that can be used to combat the effects of misinformation.

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Somber milestone of covid-19 deaths

According to the coronavirus dashboard created by Avi Schiffman, yesterday the US passed the 200,000 mark in deaths from the disease. The US continues to lead the world in both deaths and the number of cases, the latter number now about 6,800,000. The numbers are growing fast in India and Brazil.

What is infuriating is that the US numbers would have been much lower if Trump and the people around him and listened to the infectious disease and public health experts at the beginning and implemented their recommendations, most of which are extremely commonsensical, such as washing or sanitizing one’s hands, avoiding close proximity to others, and wearing masks, with the government coordinating a national policy of supplying protective equipment to health care personnel and the public and aggressively promoting widespread testing.

Instead we had, and continue to have, Trump promoting magical thinking that the virus will somehow disappear on its own, even though we now know that he was aware from almost the beginning that the virus was dangerous and could be transmitted by airborne particles.

The 1% have sucked up $50 trillion from the rest of us

That the wealthy have been steadily increasing their share of the wealth has been obvious for some time. Reader Tadas sent me a link to an article that has quantified the amount siphoned off by them during the past four decades and it is a staggering $50 trillion since the year 1975.

This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year. [My emphasis-MS]
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Football protests

The National Football Season has started in the US and as expected, players and teams are engaged in various forms of protests for racial justice and against systemic police brutality.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic only one team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, admitted fans on Sunday. The Jaguars stayed in the locker room for the anthems while their opponents, the Indianapolis Colts, stood on the goalline. The Colts head coach, Frank Reich, was the only member of the team to kneel. Indianapolis Star reporter Joel Erickson estimated half the crowd stood for Lift Every Voice and Sing.
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The Green Bay Packers, Philadelphia Eagles, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins and New York Jets also opted to stay in the locker room for the anthem during Sunday’s early kick-offs.

Elsewhere, Washington players decided to kneel for the anthem, while their opponents, the Eagles, left the field.

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Donald Trump’s magical thinking

After breezily and wrongly predicting, against all the evidence, that we should not worry about the coronavirus because it would magically go away, Trump is now predicting, again against all the evidence, that we should not worry about climate change because the world will magically get cooler.

During his visit to the US West Coast, Mr Trump repeated his argument that poor forest management was to blame as he met Californian officials involved in the battle against the wildfires at a stop near Sacramento, in the centre of the state.

Dismissing one official’s plea to not “ignore the science” on climate change, Mr Trump said: “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch… I don’t think science knows actually.”
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