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.

Sri Lanka wins Asian netball championship

While Sri Lanka goes through major political and economic crises, their sports teams are achieving considerable success. I wrote about the men’s win in the Asia Cup cricket tournament on Sunday. This news overshadowed that on the same day, their women’s team won the Asia Netball Championships, defeating Singapore 63-53 in the final.

Netball is a game played in over 80 countries, primarily by women. It is similar to basketball in that the they have a similar court and ball and hoops at each end where you score goals. It is different from basketball in that you cannot dribble or bounce the ball. The player in possession has to remain stationary, hence ball progression is achieved entirely by passing to team mates, which makes team work and accurate passing very important. It is not a game where one virtuoso player can carry the team. There are seven players on a side and physical contact between opposing players is minimal.
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Walking away from endless arguments

As regular readers are aware, some of the comment threads to my posts go on and on, with later comments having little or no connection to the original post. This is a common feature of internet discussion boards. Some recent examples are the one in which I referred to speculations that dinosaurs may have used fire. That generated 386 comments, most of them dealing with creationism and evolution and nothing to do with dinosaurs. A post on free will generated 105 comments. Even more surprising was the response to a posting of a New Yorker cartoon that has 102 comments. A mere cartoon!
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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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Sri Lanka are surprise winners of Asia Cup cricket

In the final game that just ended, Sri Lanka beat Pakistan to win the Asia Cup trophy. Why was this a surprise? Because Sri Lanka was fielding a relatively young and inexperienced team, especially when it came to bowling, and they got off to a bad start when in the preliminary round they were trounced in the first game by Afghanistan. Afghanistan has come a long away in the short time it has been playing international cricket but it still had to be considered the weaker team. If Sri Lanka lost its second game against Bangladesh, it would have been eliminated from the tournament but they managed to win and then proceeded to win every single subsequent game, beating the more highly favored Indian and Pakistan teams along the way (the latter twice) as well as a repeat match against Afghanistan. This was definitely a team where the whole was more than the sum of its parts, punching above its weight, with different players stepping up at crucial moments.
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Buzz Aldrin once punched a moon landing denier in the face

Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were the first people to walk on the moon. That was a major scientific and technological achievement that involved great personal risks to the two astronauts so one can imagine how annoying it must be to Aldrin to have some idiot get in his face saying that the whole thing was fake and calling him a coward and a liar and a thief, after luring him to a venue under false pretenses that it was an interview for a documentary, hence the camera and sound people around. So Aldrin, at the age of 72, punched the guy in the face.

I had not been aware of this incident that took place 20 years ago.

Of course, the nutters will point to the fact that Aldrin did not take up the offer to swear on the Bible as ‘proof’ that he did not walk on the moon. These people are willing to believe in a magic man in the sky without any evidence whatsoever but will not accept something for which there is tons of evidence, showing that you cannot argue with people who are not reality-based.
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Blood type and covid susceptibility

It appears that there may be a link between one’s blood type and susceptibility to getting covid.

Blood type doesn’t affect much in our daily lives. In fact, most people don’t even know whether they’re Type A, B, AB, or O. But the seemingly-banal detail might be a factor in who is most susceptible to Covid 19. That link was established pretty early on in the pandemic and scientists didn’t let it go. Additional research has buttressed the possibility of a link.
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Where are we now, in 2022, on blood type and Covid? Additional research and review papers have confirmed that we’re in more or less the same place: It looks like there really is an association between Type A blood and susceptibility to Covid and Type O blood and less susceptibility. Yet no research so far has been able to pin down the molecular goings on that explain the mechanism behind why this might be so.

“It’s pretty clear that Type O is protective to some degree. I don’t think that having Type A or Type B is the problem—it’s just that they don’t have Type O,” says Mark Udden, MD, professor of hematology and oncology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

My own blood type turns out to be O+, which puts my mind at ease a bit. But despite that, I still wear an N95 mask whenever I am in an indoor public space and am not sure when I will feel comfortable going without. On my recent trip to Boston, I wore it almost all the time in the planes and in the airport, removing it only to eat or drink. But I noticed very few people wearing masks, probably about 5%, even in a high vaccination state like Massachusetts.

More and more people I know have got covid, though fortunately they were vaccinated and the cases have been mild. Many got it after flying. So I was a little concerned about my two trips to see my grandchildren and their trip to CA, all during the summer. But all those took place without any incident.

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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