Truss in trouble

The spectacular implosion of the Liz Truss premiership continues in the UK. Given that she came into the premiership on September 5th with just a little over two years before she had to face a general election, she seemed to have decided to make her mark quickly and start out with a bang, introducing major changes in the country’s finances almost immediately. The mini-budget she introduced along with her treasury secretary Kwasi Kwarteng on September 23, less than three weeks after taking office (about ten days of which were consumed with the death and funeral of the Queen), was a supply-sider’s wish list with cuts in corporate taxes and the top rate for individuals that would benefit the wealthy, along with cuts in benefits and services that would adversely affect those in the lower income brackets.
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And now … The Trump Show?

The Congressional committee investigating the events of January 6th, 2021 yesterday held what seems likely to be its last public hearing, though it will continue to meet in order to wrap things up and issue its final report by the end of the year. The hearing was intended to wrap up the case that Trump knew that he had lost the election and yet lied that he had won and tried to steal it in many ways, by trying to coerce state officials to manipulate votes and, when that failed, to try to use the courts to overturn results, and when that too failed, to use a mob to prevent the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

The hearing ended with the committee holding a vote on whether to subpoena Trump to testify before it under oath and the vote was unanimous in favor of doing so. The subpoena will be issued shortly. The immediate media reaction was that there was no way that Trump would agree to appear since he has resisted all efforts in other cases to make depositions or otherwise testify.

But I was not so sure. Trump loves to be the center of attention and TV ratings are what turns him on. And you can be sure that the ratings for such testimony will go through the roof. While he still speaks before adoring fans at his rallies, Trump is a person who loves to be on TV, that is the world he values. This would be a big event and the allure to be the center of it would be tremendous.
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Who knew house numbering was a controversial topic?

For most of us, our address consists of a street number that makes it easy to find. But books that are set in England long ago or in rural areas will frequently refer to a house by the name given to it by a past resident, like ‘The Larches’. There did not seem to be any street numbering system and I used to wonder how people unfamiliar with an area found a house other than walking up and down the street looking at the house names or asking any local whom they met.

The lack of the traditional street numbering system is also seen in Japan but there is an alternative system that, while seeming strange to outsiders, has a definite structure that enables one to zero in on the location. Unlike the system in the US where the address starts with the smallest unit such as the name of the person, then proceeds to the house number and then to the street, then the city, then the state, and then the country, in Japan it goes in the reverse order, with the largest unit such as the city coming first and the name coming last. It seems to work well. I hear that Japan has a different way of entering a destination in its GPS system in order to find places, as this video describes.
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Elaborate coffee vocabulary and rudeness

Cartoonist Stephan Pastis often makes fun of the more elaborate coffee culture that has sprung up with its detailed recipes and this cartoon is an example.

(Pearls Before Swine)

What struck me is that the person asking for coffee says “Gimme”, which strikes me as rude. But I am wondering of this is one of those things that used to be considered rude but are transitioning to being acceptable by the younger generation, leaving oldies like me to catch up.
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Alex Jones ordered to pay $965 million

That pitiful excuse for a human being who benefits from the suffering imposed on the bereaved families of slain children has been ordered by a jury to pay $965 million to some of those families. Twenty six children and six adults were massacred in the 2012 shooting at the Sandy Hook elementary school.

The verdict is the second big judgment against the Infowars host over his relentless promotion of the lie that the 2012 massacre never happened, and that the grieving families seen in news coverage were actors hired as part of a plot to take away people’s guns.
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The Connecticut trial featured tearful testimony from parents and siblings of the victims, who told how they were threatened and harassed for years by people who believed the lies told on Jones’s show.

Strangers showed up at their homes to record them. People hurled abusive comments on social media. Erica Lafferty, the daughter of the slain Sandy Hook principal, Dawn Hochsprung, testified that people mailed rape threats to her house. Mark Barden told how conspiracy theorists had urinated on the grave of his seven-year-old son, Daniel, and threatened to dig up the coffin.
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The lawsuit accused Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, of using the mass killing to build his audience and make millions of dollars. Experts testified that Jones’s audience swelled when he made Sandy Hook a topic on the show, as did his revenue from product sales.

Jones’s motivation to do this thing can be put down to the desire to make money. But what makes Jones’s followers do these despicable things to the families? Even if you think the whole thing is a hoax, what motivates you to go to such elaborate lengths to make your point? Don’t these people have lives?

The arcane language of UK politics

UK prime minister Liz Truss is said to have “withdrawn the whip” of a cabinet minister named Conor Burns.

A senior Conservative minister, Conor Burns, has been sacked from the government after an allegation of “serious misconduct” relating to his behaviour at this week’s party conference.

Truss asked him to step down from his role as a minister of state in the trade department and he had the Conservative whip withdrawn pending an investigation.

Burns is the sixth Conservative MP to have had the whip withdrawn or quit politics in the past 18 months over allegations of misconduct.

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The problems with crime reporting in the US

I have written many times before about the serious problems with the (in)justice system in the US in the way that police department and prosecutors tend to value getting convictions more than justice, with the result that many members of poor and minority communities tend to get disproportionately arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned.

But there is another problem and that is the way that crime is covered in the media which, in addition to giving the distorted impression that the level of crime in the country (people who watch the news tend to think that crime is rising each year when it is in fact dropping) adds to the biases in the system.

In another excellent episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looks at the problems with the media coverage and what can be done.

The long and tortured process by which scientific facts are created

It was reported yesterday that Bruno Latour, the philosopher of science and anthropologist, had died at the age of 75.

Latour was considered one of France’s most influential and iconoclastic living philosophers, whose work on how humanity perceives the climate emergency won praise and attention around the world.

A pioneer of science and technology studies, Latour argued that facts generally came about through interactions between experts, and were therefore socially and technically constructed. While philosophers have historically recognised the separation of facts and values – the difference between knowledge and judgment, for example – Latour believed that this separation was wrong.
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His groundbreaking books, Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987) and We Have Never Been Modern (1991) offered groundbreaking insights into, as he put it “both the history of humans’ involvement in the making of scientific facts and the sciences’ involvement in the making of human history”.

To put that into context, one of his most controversial assertions was the claim that Louis Pasteur did not just discover microbes, but collaborated with them.

In the mid-1990s there were heated debates between “realists”, who believed that facts were completely objective, and “social constructionists”, like Latour, who argued that facts were the creations of scientists.

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The problem of junk science used as evidence in courts

Because science and its associated technology have been so successful, there is a danger that anything that can be dressed up in the language of science can carry more weight that it merits.

One example is with the use of forensic science in court cases. The ability of modern scientific techniques that can analyze microscopic traces of items at crime scenes and link them to victims and perpetrators (DNA being a good example) has led to the ability to both convict the guilty and exonerate those falsely accused. TV police procedurals also lead to the impression that forensic science is very accurate and even judges can tend to give it greater credibility than it sometimes deserves.

This can result in new techniques being accepted as evidence even when the ‘science’ behind it has not been properly evaluated and is possibly useless, sometimes referred to as ‘junk science’. One example is the so-called science of bite marks.
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