Education measures did well in elections

There has been a sustained conservative assault on public education by those who do not want their children to be exposed to any ideas that their parents object to and to learn to think. Their fight to get books that they do not like removed from school and public libraries is part of this broader anti-education campaign.

However, the 2022 mid-term elections saw some positive results on the education front. The article says that while Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida exploited the bogus critical race theory issue and still won, Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan also won, running on platforms that were strongly pro public education.

Voters also were in favor of taxing the rich to pay for public education services.
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Who have been truly awful Democratic candidates?

There is no doubt that Herschel Walker is absolutely the worst candidate for state and national office that I can think of, at least in my lifetime, someone who is utterly unsuited for any responsible position. And that is against stiff competition from Sarah Palin, Doug Mastriano, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mark Finchem, Lauren Boebert, Louis Gohmert, Paul Gosar, and the list goes on. In an earlier post, I expressed my amazement that he had got over 1.7 million votes and came within 100,000 votes of defeating Raphael Warnock, and wondered how so many people could for for such a cartoon candidate. Is it just that they were going to vote for the party however bad the candidate was? Was there no bottom to what they were willing to ignore as long as the candidate had an R after their name?
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Neil Diamond briefly performs again

His songs formed much of the soundtrack of my youth. He retired from performing five years ago after receiving a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. But he made a brief reappearance and sang the song that has become a staple at every single wedding reception that I have attended, with the guests enthusiastically joining in with “So good! So good! So good!”, just like the audience here. He started out a little shaky but seemed to gain energy from the warm reception he received and ended strong.

My favorite song by him is not quite as well known. It is Brooklyn Roads from 1968. It is autobiographical, as he says, “I had just signed with MCA Records and wanted to stretch my creative wings. This is the most literal and personal story I had written up to that point. ‘Brooklyn Roads’ told of my youth and my aspirations. I loved the freedom of being able to write something without the charts in mind.”

It is a beautiful song, that will strike a chord with anyone who recalls memories of their childhood.

Doing the math on the Twitter deal

The comic strip Pearls Before Swine took aim at the financial situation that Elon Musk faces after purchasing Twitter.

(Pearls Before Swine)

(Pearls Before Swine)

As I understand it, Musk paid $44 billion for the purchase. $27 billion was put up by him and $4 billion by other investors, while $13 billion was borrowed. This is what is known as a ‘leveraged buyout’ in that it is the company that is being bought that borrows the money, not the buyer. So if the loans go into default, it is Twitter that is on the hook, not Musk personally. This strikes me as a bit weird but what do I know about high finance? It appears that the banks seem to think that Musk will not drive the value of Twitter below the $13 billion valuation so that they can recoup their loan even if things go south.
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McConnell and McCarthy snubbed by Capitol police and their families

Congress voted to give its highest award to the Capitol and Washington DC police for their efforts to stop the rioters on January 6th from entering the Capitol building and attacking members of Congress. The ceremony was held yesterday and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were in line to shake the hands of the recipients.

But the officers as well as the family of a police officer who died, clearly still angry at how Republican leaders made excuses for Donald Trump’s incitement of the violence, ignored their outstretched hands and walked right past them.

McConnell, the Senate minority leader, was caught on video with his hand outstretched, waiting in line for handshakes that never came as senior officers and Sicknick’s parents warmly greeted the Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer.

The relatives and officers in uniform then walked straight past the Republican duo, barely looking at them.

“They’re just two-faced. I’m just tired of them standing there and saying how wonderful the Capitol police is, and they turn around and … go down to Mar-a-Lago and kiss [Trump’s] ring,” Sicknick’s mother, Gladys Sicknick, said, according to a tweet by CNN congressional reporter Daniella Diaz.

“It just hurts.”

Sicknick’s brother, Ken, was also forthright. “They have no idea what integrity is. They can’t stand up for what’s right and wrong,” he said.

They people made it clear that they had decided together in advance that they were not going to shake their hands.

Donald Trump’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Tuesday was a bad day for Donald Trump.

First off, Democrat Raphael Warnock defeated Republican Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff, giving the Democrats a welcome 51-49 margin in the US senate. Walker was the candidate promoted by Trump despite the fact that he was utterly unsuited for the position and party insiders knew that he had many skeletons in his closet that came out during the campaign. What is depressing is that there were over 1.7 million people willing to vote for a cartoon candidate like Walker, which is astounding to me. Warnock won by a margin of 51.4% to 48.6%, or by about 95,000 votes, a margin close to what pre-election polls indicated. When added to losses by Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Blake Master in Arizona, this one just adds to Trump’s image as a loser who also backs losers and will provide ammunition to those in the party who want to avoid having him as the party’s presidential nominee in 2024.
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Trump Organization found guilty of tax fraud

A jury has found the Trump Organization to be guilty on all the counts of tax fraud they were charged with. The verdict came very quickly, within a day of the case being sent to the jury, a sign that they thought it was an easy decision.

A jury in New York has convicted the Trump Organization of criminal tax fraud in a major blow for the former president.

Although Donald Trump was not personally on trial, prosecutors insisted he was fully aware of the 15-year scheme in which they said executives were enriched by off-the-books perks to make up for lower salaries, reducing the company’s tax liabilities.

The 12-person jury in New York’s state court was sent out to deliberate on Monday morning after a six-week trial in which Trump Organization lawyers pinned blame for the fraud solely on the greed of longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg.

The former close ally of Trump accepted a plea deal earlier this year admitting fraud in exchange for a five-month prison sentence. Prosecutors laid out a case heavily reliant on Weisselberg’s testimony.

The verdict represents a serious blow to Trump and his family who rose to fame as property moguls in New York but whose business practices have long shadowed in secrecy with rumors of ill-doing.

What this means for the company is unclear, though it will clearly not be good.

Meanwhile, New York attorney general Letitia James has a pending criminal case against Trump and his family.

Get ready for the inevitable aftermath: a long whiny rant from Trump about how this is all part of a witch hunt against him even though he is the most innocent man.

Hey! Don’t forget The Pips!

The backup vocalists of singers are often overlooked. The excellent 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom that I reviewed here some years ago focused on some of the people who provided the rich texture to many of the greatest pop songs but were largely anonymous.

I recently watched this documentary about the anonymous vocalists who sing backup for the featured musical stars, providing harmonies and visual excitement by dancing and swaying along with the music. In the 1950s and earlier, most of the backup singers were white women who sang more sedately and tended to follow the written music score.

But black women grew up singing in the gospel churches where improvising, harmonizing while dancing, and the ‘call and response’ form of preaching and singing provided a natural training for a more vibrant form of backup vocals. The people who utilized this most in the early days were the British rockers like the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker who had discovered American blues music and found that these singers added an authenticity and energy to the music that they themselves did not have. They encouraged these women to let loose and give it all they got and they did, changing music forever. We then had backup singers being partially featured with groups like Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Tony Orlando and Dawn, Martha Reeves and the Vandelas, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and so on.

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A community in American Samoa leapfrogs into solar energy

I have been reading several books on anthropology recently and decided to revisit a classic, the 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead. This was Mead’s first book, published in 1928 when she was just 27 and was based on nine months field work in 1924 on the island of Tu’a in American Samoa and it made her famous. She was investigating whether the conflicts that seemed to arise in the US between adolescent girls and their parents after they reached puberty was biologically based or was because of the cultural context in which they grew up.

Mead was part of the anthropology program at Columbia University and Barnard College directed by Franz Boas that claimed that evidence showed that race, sexuality, and gender were not fixed, biologically determined categories but were fluid and a product of culture. Boaz expanded on these themes when he wrote in the Foreword to Mead’s book, “Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.”
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The Copernican Myths by Mano Singham

Given the discussions generated by yesterday’s post about how the location of heaven changed with advances in science, I decided that an article that I published back in 2007 in Physics Today on December 2007, p. 48-52 might be relevant because it discusses why it was that the idea of a heliocentric universe led to the inference that the universe might be infinite and thus left no room for a heaven. (Doing so continues my program of putting on this blog my published articles for easier access.)

The Copernican Myths.