What really happened in Las Vegas?

It has been awhile since the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1 that resulted in 59 deaths and over 500 injured. What is astonishing is that some major questions, such as the motives that Stephen Paddock might have had for his action, still remain obscure. But what is also disturbing is that more questions have opened up, suggesting that the police initially may have put out an incorrect timeline of the events, as Liz Posner writes.
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There is no such thing as a ‘friendly’ conversation with law enforcement

At a recent Science Café of which I am part of the organizing committee, we had two FBI agents to talk about how they track white-collar crime such as those involving Medicare and Medicaid fraud, with physicians inflating the charges for treatment. The two agents were very friendly and pleasant and before and after the session I had an interesting chat with them about their work. But that same friendliness can be a trap if you happen to be in their sights for any investigation.
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Two court challenges in elections

After the November elections, the Virginia House of Delegates is delicately balanced with 50 Republicans and 49 Democrats, a big shift from the 66-34 majority Republicans had before. One last seat is even more delicately balanced because, after a recount, it had 11,608 votes for Democratic candidate Shelley Simonds, 11,607 votes for the Republican David Yancey, and one disputed ballot. After examining the ballot, a three-judge panel ruled that the voter’s intent was for Yancey, thus causing a tie. Here’s the disputed ballot.


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Film review: The Thin Blue Line (1988) and the conviction of innocent people

This highly acclaimed documentary by Errol Morris has been on my to-see list for the longest time but I never got around to it. I watched it last night and it deserves all the accolades it received. It is also a grim reminder of how in America, at least in some jurisdictions, so many innocent people are executed or incarcerated for decades because the police and prosecutors care less about the truth than ‘notching up a win’ and closing a case as quickly as they can.

The case so well illustrates that when police and prosecutors severely distort the judicial process in order to get a conviction, it is not just that an innocent person is deprived of life and liberty, as bad as that is, but that a whole lot of random innocent people suffer because of it. In their zeal to convict an innocent man of murder, the Dallas police and prosecutors let the real killer walk free and subsequently commit a string of violent crimes for a decade that ended with another murder. It was only after he was arrested for that second murder that the crime spree ended. The authorities are thus indirectly responsible for all those crimes.
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Keeping track of the creeps

The flood of rape, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment accusations against prominent people in public life has made it hard for anyone to keep track of who is accused of what and by whom. Via Rusty Blazenhoff I learned about something called The Creep Sheet that has compiled a list of all the accusations, sorted into categories like Entertainment, Politics and Government, Media, and so on.
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Another difference between Republicans and Democrats

When Republicans win elections, they go hard right in the policies they push, even more than they campaigned on. Even when they win with the slimmest of majorities or even after they lose the popular vote (in the cases of George W. Bush and Donald Trump), they immediately claim to have a mandate and push the most extreme policies. In the case of Trump, someone who is by any definition an East coast elitist, he now governs like a conservative evangelical fundamentalist, pursuing policies on contraception, abortion, and LGBT social issues that you can be sure that he and the people in the social circles he moved in before he became president were opposed or indifferent to.
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The politics of the latest Star Wars film

I stopped watching the Star Wars films after seeing episode 1 titled The Phantom Menace which, as all aficionados know, was the fourth film is the weird sequencing of that franchise. (Q: Why did episodes 4,5,6 get made before episodes 1,2,3? A: In charge of production, Yoda was.) So I had not planned to see the latest episode (I don’t know what number it is) titled The Last Jedi. But this review by Kate Aronoff surprised me because she says that this film takes a side in the class war.
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The new Haven app to protect your computer privacy

How do you know if your computer has been tampered with while it was temporarily out of your sight, say when you left it in a hotel room? The Freedom of the Press Foundation has issued a press release about a new open-source privacy and security app called Haven that a team led by Edward Snowden have developed that will alert you if anyone tries to do so. Haven is currently in its beta phase and they looking for testers to improve it.
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Samantha Bee goes to church

It turns out that not all the evangelical leaders who have aligned themselves with Donald Trump and agreed to serve on his evangelical advisory board sold their souls in exchange for access to Trump. One of them, A.R. Bernard, the pastor of the Christian Cultural Center megachurch in Brooklyn, New York, decided after two meetings with Trump that the whole thing was a sham and quit, with Trump’s awful response to the Charlottesville events being the last straw.
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