Why the shock?

The killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk has created an outpouring in the media and among the political classes about how terrible and shocking it is.

Terrible? Yes. It is wrong to kill someone except under extreme circumstances like self-defense.

But shocking? No. This is America where multiple people are murdered every day because of the ease with which lethal weapons like guns can be obtained. Statistically, prominent people like Kirk are a small fraction of the public and usually surrounded by security personnel that make them hard to get to. But as small as that probability may be, there will be occasions when, despite the odds, someone well known is going to be killed.

In fact, when I get up in the morning and read the news headlines, I almost expect to see some ghastly story about people being killed. I just don’t know who the specific victims will be.

So I was not shocked by the killing of Kirk. Deadly violence is the norm in the US. Acting shocked tends to result in such events being seen as anomalies not requiring any serious response, rather than as signs of an endemic problem that calls for systemic action.

Meeting the deportation quotas drags in ordinary people

That Trump is struggling to have his ICE goons meet the quota for detaining and deporting people (reportedly the target is about 3,000 people per day) is clear from the fact that they are now doing so for the most minor of offenses.

An Irish grandmother who has lived in the US for most of her life and holds a green card is facing deportation because she wrote a bad cheque for $25 in 2015.

Donna Hughes-Brown, 58, was detained in July after landing in Chicago on a flight from Dublin and is being held in isolation in a detention centre in Kentucky. She has lived in the US since 1977, has five children and grandchildren, and ran a horse farm in Troy, Missouri.

Her husband, Jim Brown, a US citizen and military veteran, told reporters his wife was not a criminal and that he “100%” regretted voting for Donald Trump as president.

He said she had been detained on a misdemeanour relating to a $25 cheque she signed a decade ago and for which she made restitution and received probation.

She was detained under legislation amended on 4 July as part of Trump’s sweeping “one big beautiful bill” act. The couple visited Ireland that month for a funeral. When they landed at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on 29 July a police officer was waiting for her on the ramp.

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The dumb blonde stereotype

While idly surfing the internet, I came across an item that began “This reminds me of the joke of two blondes sunbathing in Missouri.” I immediately knew that the ‘joke’ would be based on the stereotype of blonde women being stupid and/or ignorant. And sure enough, here is the full item.

This reminds me of the joke of two blondes sunbathing in Missouri. One of them looks up and sees the faint outline of the Moon in the blue sky.

One asks the other, ”Which is closer, the Moon or Florida?”

“Obviously the Moon. Can you see Florida from here?”

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Complicity in Israeli genocide is Starmer’s shame

British prime minister Keir Starmer and the governing Labour party have shown themselves to be utterly complicit in the Israeli genocide taking place in Gaza, doing nothing except make largely meaningless statements. But their latest actions are jaw-dropping. After members of a group called Palestine Action were accused of vandalizing tanks, the government took the extraordinary step of not only banning the group but going to the extreme of also making it a crime to publicly support the organization. This blatant attack on the right to political speech has infuriated people and brought them out in defiance, challenging the government to arrest them. Here is one report from August 9th.

Backers of the group, who have held a series of protests around the United Kingdom over the past month, argue that the law illegally restricts freedom of expression.

More than 500 protesters filled the square outside the Houses of Parliament on Saturday, many daring police to arrest them by displaying signs reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” That was enough for police to step in.

But as the demonstration began to wind down, police and protest organizers sparred over the number of arrests as the organizers sought to show that the law was unworkable.

“The police have only been able to arrest a fraction of those supposedly committing ‘terrorism’ offenses, and most of those have been given street bail and allowed to go home,” Defend Our Juries, which organized the protest, said in a statement. “This is a major embarrassment to (the government), further undermining the credibility of this widely ridiculed law, brought in to punish those exposing the government’s own crimes.”
…

On Friday, police said the demonstration was unusual in that the protesters wanted to be arrested in large numbers so as to place a strain on police and the broader criminal justice system.

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The ‘cold plunge’ fallacy

From the time we are children, we are often told that we need to do something that we do not want to because it is good for us. The most obvious things are taking medicines and eating vegetables. That advice is undoubtedly correct. But that may subtly breed the erroneous idea that the fact that something is distasteful to eat or do may in iitself be an indicator that it is good for us. Often these things involve actions that people we know tell us about or that we read about famous and successful people doing.

Jonny Thomson spoke with neuroscientist Rachel Barr about this ‘cold plunge fallacy’ that has led to many fads that may be merely making life unpleasant for us without any benefits, or where the benefits may be outweighed by the negatives of the experience, or that may even be harmful.
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Labour government in disarray in the UK

Over in the UK, it looks like prime minister Keir Starmer is blowing it big time. It was just a little over a year ago that the party swept the Conservatives out of power, winning 412 seats in the 650 member body, a gain of 211 seats from before, giving them a massive majority. The Conservatives had held power for 14 years and the public had clearly had enough of them. But as soon as three months after the election, the popularity of the Labour party had cratered and it has not recovered since, as it lurches from one self-inflicted would to another, accompanied by a feckless leader who seems to have no vision, other than to be a slightly less right-wing version of the Conservatives. The government, rather than improving the condition of those in need, has refused to do so, keeping in place some of the former harsh anti-poor policies and even adding to them. Adding to that have been image-damaging shabby scandals about Starmer and other party leaders accepting gifts such as clothes from wealthy people, cementing the idea that they are on the take and in the pockets of the plutocrats. Just yesterday, deputy prime minister Angela Rayner was forced to step down over allegations that she had evaded paying the appropriate amount of taxes on her properties.

Before the UK election, I linked to a very interesting interview given by Rory Stewart who was at one time an ambitious and upward bound insider Conservative politician before becoming disillusioned with Boris Johnson’s Brexit policies and quitting parliament. He described Starmer as conducting a ‘Ming vase’ election strategy.
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Time to fire more people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics

The BLS has released the August job numbers and they continue the dismal trend that started in May where the numbers were well below the required number needed to keep up with population growth. The revised numbers for June even showed a decline in jobs for that month.

You can read the BLS press release here that has a more complete breakdown of the data.

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The precursor to Sherlock Holmes

As long-time readers know, I am big fan of murder mysteries, in books and in TV/film forms. Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie constituted much of my reading as a boy. Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes has often been seen as the archetype of the private detective, able to see clues and solve crimes where the official police force could not, and his biographer John Watson served the role of the narrator, observant enough to be a surrogate for the reader and was able to tell us broadly what was seen by Holmes, without being able to distinguish between what was relevant and what was superfluous, and thus unable to make the crucial inferences that Holmes did.

But recently I came across the story The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe that was published in 1840 and is credited as being the first modern detective story and it is clear that Doyle was inspired by Poe’s story.

In the earlier story, we again have a friendship between two men, the unnamed narrator in Poe’s case who meets and befriends an eccentric acute observer in August Dupin and the two share lodgings in Paris. Poe’s narrator records his observations of Dupin, and we immediately see the similarities to Holmes, in that Dupin also has acute powers of observation and superlative analytical and deductive skills.
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How much lower can the US sink in rogue nation status?

The answer seems to be there is no bottom. For the longest time, the US has been behaving like a rogue state, invading other countries, bombing places any time that it wants to, and killing innocent civilians, Americans and foreigners, with little or no justification other than that they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It has done whatever the hell it wants in the world, either covertly or overtly, and this has been true for a long time through both Democratic and Republican administrations.

With Trump, the crimes have become ever more egregious with not even the semblance of an effort to cloak them in some facsimile of legality by concocting some justification .It seems futile to chronicle its crimes, like painting a black wall with more black paint.

The latest Trump outrage is that on Tuesday he proudly said that he had ordered a military strike on a small speedboat in international waters that he claimed killed 11 members of what he called a drug smuggling ring. There is, however, one big problem with this.
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Great moments in sports fandom

Once again we have a story about an adult at a sporting event snatching a souvenir out of the hands of a child who had been given it by an athlete. In this case, the villain becomes even more villainous when it turns out that he is a millionaire.

Moments after the tennis player Kamil Majchrzak celebrated the biggest win of his career at the US Open last week, he handed his cap to a beaming young boy. What happened next sparked tears, outrage, a detective hunt across social media and, finally, a grovelling apology.

It came from Piotr Szczerek, a millionaire businessman from Poland, who had snatched the cap out of the boy’s hand and stuffed it into his bag. Videos of the incident showed the youngster looking deeply upset and asking: “What are you doing?” while Majchrzak – who was oblivious to the situation after his five-set victory against the ninth seed, Karen Khachanov – walked away.

You can see the incident here.


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