When sports is more than about sports

Despite its massive population that is second only to China, India has achieved very modest success in international athletics. This documentary from Al Jazeera looks at a program that seeks to identify promising young athletes in remote tribal areas and then groom them for success at the national and international levels. The documentary focuses on two of them Ravikaran and Nayana. Usain Bolt has been the inspiration for them.

But it is more than about athletics. The success of young people brings about larger changes in their communities. Ravikaran is from a small community known as Siddis who are believed to be descended from slaves from Africa brought to India by the Portuguese, something I had not known about before. They suffer from the same racial and color prejudice that the US is familiar with.

Nayana is from a different community that is also underprivileged. Her success (she was selected to attend an elite coaching program in the US) has opened the eyes of her traditional-minded community and made them realize that girls should have equal access to education and athletics.

The gripping congressional hearings on the events of January 6th

I generally follow US political news fairly closely so you would think that the public hearings on the riot on January 6th would not contain much that is new to me. But I have been impressed at how well put together the hearings have been, with the committee combining live testimony with previous closed-door testimony to lay out a clear and coherent picture of what happened and why. What it laid out was a damning indictment of what a lying, lawless, person Donald Trump is.

What the hearings reveal is that what happened on January 6th was the culmination of a plan hatched by Trump and a few of his close political advisors, based on a hare-brained theory concocted by a lawyer named John Eastman, that Mike Pence had the power to unilaterally overturn the results, a theory that all the legal and other sane people working in the White House and justice department thought was utterly crazy and possibly criminal. They told Eastman and Trump so but they went ahead anyway, which shows criminal intent.
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Satire at the NRA convention

The NRA had its convention right after the school massacre n Uvalde, Texas. At the event, a prankster named Jason Selvig took the opportunity to make a short speech that was ostensibly praising NRA head Wayne LaPierre but was actually a slap at their absurd responses to the massive gun violence in this country. The satire was subtle enough that he was allowed to speak uninterrupted for two minutes and was even applauded by some in the audience but the internet knows satire when it sees it and it has gained wide circulation, with 10 million views on Twitter alone.


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Unexpected recent trend in Covid deaths

David Leonhardt writes about an unexpected recent trend. When it comes to almost any issue in America, the data for people of color, especially Blacks and Hispanics, are worse than for whites. And in the early days of Covid, that dreary pattern emerged once again.

During Covid’s early months in the U.S., the per capita death rate for Black Americans was almost twice as high as the white rate and more than twice as high as the Asian rate. The Latino death rate was in between, substantially lower than the Black rate but still above average.

Minority and marginalized communities tend to have less access to health care and thus the initial trend was regrettable but not unexpected. But recently, there has been a surprising reversal.
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The problem of tech monopolies

On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discussed how four companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon) are each monopolies in one area and how that works against innovations and makes us unable to escape their clutches, and they use their power to suppress any new company that might hope to compete with them.

He argues that we need to invoke anti-trust legislation to break them up. Those companies warn us, as they always do, that they provide good products and services and forcibly breaking them up would harm consumers. Oliver reminds us that AT&T made that same argument when they were a telephone monopoly but that breaking it up resulted in a flood of innovations that we cannot imagine being without now. He makes the point that consumers may have been happy with AT&T because they had no idea what was out there in terms of possible innovations until the monopoly was broken up.

Congressional hearings demolish Trump’s Big Lie

I have been following the congressional hearings on the the events of January 6th, 2021 when hordes of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol building, breaking in and defacing it and stealing property, in their futile effort at stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. They were responding to Trump’s call to action, duped into believing his pathetic and obvious lie that the election had been stolen from him and that he had been re-elected.

One feature that is emerging is that the people who were employed by the White House in any kind of professional capacity, such as his attorney General Bill Barr, lawyers or employees of various governmental agencies and even his campaign manager, kept telling Trump that there was no evidence of massive fraud.
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Film review: Meet the Patels (2014)

This comedy by Geeta Patel and her brother Ravi shows her filming him as he tries, as an Indian-American, to navigate the dating and marriage scene that is complicated by the conflicting pressures of the two cultures. Both of them were born in the US to Indian-born parents who want them to marry and have children, preferably with other Indians or Indian-Americans who come from the same Indian state. The problem is that neither child is having much success finding marriage partners on their own and the parents step in to try to guide them through the arranged marriage process. Much of the humor comes from the westernized children of immigrants trying to accommodate the traditional expectations of their parents.
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The ghouls who feast on mass murder

As if having to deal with the senseless slaughter of their children by someone who has easy access to high-powered military style weapons is not enough, the bereaved parents frequently have to then deal with people on the internet who will say that the whole thing did not happen and was staged by gun control groups. The gun lobby and their supporters clearly fear that so many mass shootings, especially of schoolchildren, will result in at least some action being taken and so they will unleash these conspiracy theorists who will accuse the parents of being ‘crisis actors’ and will proceed to put their names and addresses and other contact information on the internet to encourage others to target and harass these parents individually, making their lives an even greater hell than it has become. Those parents who speak out publicly against the lack of gun control, in an effort to try and prevent other parents from having to endure what they are experiencing, will be particularly targeted for this treatment.
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Should we show graphic photos of gun victims?

The recent mass shootings using military-style weapons like AR-15s have reopened the debate about whether we should show images of the victims. Generally, media show just photos of the children when they were alive, grieving families, memorials erected in their memory, and so on. While these are heart-wrenching, some argue that they do not convey the full horror of what happened, leaving most people with simply no idea of the massive amount of damage that these weapons can inflict even on adults, mutilating them beyond recognition so that they can be identified only by their clothing or DNA. The effect on small children is even more devastating.
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Webb telescope hit by tiny meteoroid but should still function well

A tiny meteoroid has hit one of the 18 mirrors of the Webb telescope. But engineers had taken this possibility into account since there are so many tiny particles flying around in space.

The damage inflicted by the dust-sized micrometeoroid is producing a noticeable effect in the observatory’s data but is not expected to limit the mission’s overall performance.

James Webb was launched in December to succeed the revolutionary – but now ageing – Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers are due to release its first views of the cosmos on 12 July.

The US space agency Nasa said these images would be no less stunning because of what’s just happened.
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The speed at which things move through space means even the smallest particles can impart a lot of energy when colliding with another object. Webb has now been hit five times with this latest event being the most significant.
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The possibility of micrometeoroid hits was anticipated and contingencies like this were incorporated into the choice of materials, the construction of components and the different modes of operating the telescope.
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Engineers will adjust the positioning of the affected mirror segment to cancel out a portion of the introduced distortion, but they can’t remove it all.

July 12 will be a big day in astronomy.