Just give me the facts: Part 2

I posted before about my irritation with journalists who do not provide basic facts about elections, such as the date of the election they are discussing or the vote tallies after the event, instead giving us their commentary and conclusions. This failure was clearly apparent in the special election that was held on August 16 to complete the term for the single congressional seat in the state of Alaska vacated by the death of the incumbent. On August 31, Democrat Mary Peltola was declared to have won the election, defeating two Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich.

The election was notable in that Peltola becomes the first Native Alaskan to go to Congress and the reports dutifully reminded us of that fact. But there was another very interesting feature in the election. It was the first time that Alaska was using a combination of an open primary, in which all the candidates were pooled together on one ballot (with over 45 competing) with the top four going on to the general election, and then using ranked choice voting to decided the winner among those four, provided none of the four got more than 50% of the vote in the first round.
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Police shows as propaganda

I have never watched any episodes of the extremely popular Law and Order and its multiple spin-offs and after watching John Oliver’s critique of it as essentially police propaganda, I am not likely to. He says that these shows get the assistance of police departments to produce them (thus greatly reducing their production costs) and in return portray the police and the US justice system in a very favorable light, as consisting of people who always have justice as their goal and almost always close their cases, which is simply not true. The shows, while claiming to get their material from real life, ignore the systemic problems that exist in the system and the many real life cases of police atrocities.

Watering while Black

The list of ordinary things that you can get arrested for simply by being Black keeps growing. Add watering flowers to the list , at least in the eyes of some Alabama police.

“What you doing here, man?” the white police officer asked an African American man quietly watering flowers in a front garden in Childersburg, Alabama.

“Watering flowers,” was the man’s reply.

Two minutes later, the man, the Rev Michael Jennings, 56, a pastor at the local Vision of Abundant Life church, was put into handcuffs. Three minutes after that he was placed in a police vehicle, under arrest for “obstructing governmental operations”.

The arrest, first reported by NPR, was captured on the police officer’s body camera. The man identified himself without being asked as “Pastor Jennings” and said he lived across the road.

He was told an anonymous neighbour had made a 911 call reporting “suspicious” activity outside the house of someone who had gone out of town.
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Why did Trump take the documents?

The mystery of why Trump took classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago and then resisted returning them deepens. It seems so senseless. I have been reading various theories as to how this situation came about and have not been completely persuaded by any of them. The mystery deepened further with the discovery of empty folders because it raises new questions. Did the folders contain documents when they were taken to Mar-a-Lago? If so, where are the documents now? If not, why take empty folders? As I understand it, these kinds of secret documents are not passed around willy-nilly like magazines but are tracked as to their whereabouts. How and why did that system break down?
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Atheists are not a strong political force

Ten years ago, the Reason Rally was held in Washington DC. It was meant to serve as a big coming out party for atheists and nonbelievers and I was among those who attended. The day was rainy, which put a damper on things, but the mood was festive and celebratory. But as this article says, some of the high expectations of that day did not quite pan out.

Ten years ago, thousands of atheists, humanists, and skeptics descended by the busload upon the National Mall in Washington to attend the Reason Rally, the largest-ever gathering of nonbelievers. “We’re here, we’re godless, get used to it,” chanted the crowd, estimated to have between 10,000 and 30,000 people. For America’s growing non-religious movement, it was a jubilant coming-out-of-the-closet party.
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The assurance of an extreme right winger

I am heading back in Monterey today after spending a wonderful two weeks with my grandchildren and their parents. Much of my time was spent just hanging out, going to playgrounds, playing games, and reading books with the children but I did take the opportunity to visit some friends and relatives in the area.

One day, I visited my cousin and his wife for lunch and it turned out that his brother and his wife were also visiting from Canada and it was great to see all of them after a space of about seven years. While we were chatting, a neighbor of my cousin’s dropped by the house, a man named John. He was about my age, and my ever-hospitable cousin invited him and he came in. He immediately started talking. What astonished me was that he began making the most extreme right-wing pronouncements. These included things like the US is no longer a country because under Biden, it has an open-door policy that lets anyone in (and he clearly meant the refugees at the southern border) and gives them handouts. He said that we should have walls like Israel does. He said that people in the US do not want to work anymore because they too get handouts from the government. He said that the current economic inflation was entirely due to Biden’s policies. He said that young people today are lazy and do not want to study or work hard because they expected the government to take care of them. And on and on.

What was astonishing was not that he had these views. These are quite common in the US. It was that he felt free to utter them as incontrovertible truths in the presence of strangers whom he had met for the first time. One is familiar with the dictum that one should avoid discussing politics and religion in social settings because those topics can generate great passion and animosity. But he sailed right past that taboo.
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Trump’s methods for avoiding accountability for his actions

Trump is not a clever person. But he does have a strong sense of cunning whenever anything involves his self-interest. This is evident in the way that he avoids leaving a paper trail that will enable authorities to pin crimes on him. One of the ways he does this is by avoiding putting things in writing. It is reported that does not use email and avoids as much as possible giving written instructions to his underlings, instead issuing verbal orders. This allows him to deny that he ever did so, leaving others to take the rap. He will likely eventually blame some poor sap for the recent revelations of top secret documents being sent to Mar-a-Lago.

In addition to all the investigations into presidential wrongdoings ,we should not forget the investigations into possible tax fraud involving his private businesses. One of the charges is that he inflates the values of his properties when using them as collateral to obtain loans but hugely reduces their value when filing his taxes. Forced to give a deposition recently during this investigation, Trump invoked the fifth amendment over 400 times in his efforts to avoid answering the questions posed to him by New York’s attorney general Letitia James.
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Trump needlessly alienates the allies he needs

Donald Trump is facing difficulties on many fronts, with many former allies and people who worked for him distancing themselves from him, though his hard core base seems to be intact, if possibly getting smaller. In such a situation, you would think that he would try to retain as many allies as possible.

But he is so thin-skinned that even the slightest perception of a criticism of him causes him to lash out. The latest target is Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the US Senate. It is McConnell who blocked many of the actions taken by Congress against Trump, such as the two impeachments. Trump should be grateful to him
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Parkland killer and the M’Naghten rule

In the penalty phase trial of the person who has pleaded guilty to carrying out the massacre of 17 people in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018, the defense has argued that he should not be executed but instead serve life in prison without parole because “his brain was irretrievably broken, through no fault of his own,” by his childhood and even while in his mother’s womb because she was a drug and alcohol addict, and thus he should not be held responsible for his actions.

The prosecution meanwhile has argued that he deserves to die for the “goal-directed, planned, systematic murder – mass murder – of 14 students, an athletic director, a teacher and a coach”. Note the word ‘deserves’. This raises once again the strong retributive strain that runs through the US legal system, the backward looking view hat people should be punished harshly because of who they are and what they have done, not for any benefit the punishment might provide for society. The defense is arguing that the killer was not acting because of decisions made freely by a normally functioning brain but was following the compulsions of a brain that was ‘broken’. In other words, both prosecution and defense are using ideas of free will but the defense is arguing that in this special case, he did not have it.
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Who knew that Finns were like Americans?

Some of you may be familiar with the recent fuss in Finland about the behavior of their prime minister Sanna Marin. She became prime minister in 2019 at age 34, becoming the youngest ever chief executive of a country.. Recently a video was released on social media of her dancing at a private party and clearly having a good time.

Then questions were raised in parliament about the appropriateness of her behavior and some even suggested that she may have taken drugs other than alcohol.
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