Herschel Walker’s lie-strewn candidacy for the US senate

For those who thought that in Donald trump, the Republican party had hit rock bottom with its support for a liar who speaks utter nonsense, let me introduce you to Herschel Walker, former professional football player and the current Republican candidate for the Georgia senate seat. Walker has also made bizarre lies about the 2020 election, saying that Joe Biden did not get even 50 million votes, when he actually got over 80 million. Trump has endorsed Walker for the Georgia senate race, no doubt seeing in him a kindred soul.

The senate race has been rocked by revelations about Walker. The most recent is a report in the Daily Beast alleging that, despite being an advocate of banning abortion with no exceptions at all, even for rape, incest or if the life of the mother was in danger, and wanting federal laws to be passed to ban it nationwide, he had paid for an abortion for a woman in 2009. His son Christian Walker, who is an ‘influencer’ on social media has put out a Tik-Tok blasting him for his lies and his pretensions to being a moral Christian who condemns absentee fathers, when in reality Walker has confirmed that he had three children out of wedlock and that he had pointed a gun at his wife’s head and threatened to kill her. Incidentally Christian Walker is a conservative Trump supporter who rails against ‘woke’ liberals on his social media accounts where he has a huge following.

It is also reported that Walker’s advisors were aware of this abortion story well in advance but hoped that it would not surface before the election
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How museums connive in the looting of the world

In yet another outstanding episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looks at the ugly history of how western countries looted the heritage of people around the world by robbing them of their historical artifacts in order to stock their museums and enrich themselves. He takes apart the excuses that are given by these museums to retain their stolen goods.

What I found particularly depressing was that only a tiny fraction of the looted items get displayed even in the museums of the western countries. Almost all of them are buried in their vaults so that no one gets to see them.

When people talk about historical wrongs, they often complain that it is hard to know how to rectify it. In most of these cases of looted items, it is not that hard. We know what the looted items are, we know where they came from, and who the rightful owners are. They must be returned.

2022 Nobel prize in physics goes to work on quantum entanglement

It was announced yesterday that Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have been jointly awarded the Nobel prize in physics for their experiments to test the effects of quantum entanglement. These experiments are both extremely important and extraordinarily difficult.

The story can be said to begin with the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper of 1935 where they seemed to suggest that the theory of quantum mechanics, by then already hailed as a massive success, had to be incomplete because there were elements of reality that were not represented in the theory. In their paper, they argued that in the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics that was embraced by most physicists, one could have situations where a measurement made on one particle could instantaneously influence the outcomes of a measurement on another particle however far away it was. Einstein felt that was ‘spooky’.
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Crackdown on ‘pig-butchering’ cyberscam

I wrote recently about being the target of the ugly cyberscam with the ugly name of ‘pig butchering’ that involves human trafficking, that operates largely out of Cambodia and neighboring countries. ProPublica had written a detailed expose of the scam and this may have possibly led Cambodian authorities to crack down on the practice.

A new type of online fraud emanating from scam sweatshops in Southeast Asia is facing its first major crackdown. Cambodian authorities have stepped up raids on compounds alleged to house workers engaging in online fraud, seizing computers, phones and electric shock batons and freeing thousands of involuntary workers. And Apple has removed from its app store two popular trading apps that cybercriminal groups in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have used to defraud people.

As ProPublica reported in a Sept. 13 investigation, pig butchering scams have been fueled by human trafficking. Workers from around Asia are tricked into going to Cambodia, Laos or Myanmar for seemingly well-paid jobs that instead trap them inside scam sweatshops run by Chinese criminal syndicates. Those who resist directives to engage in online fraud face beatings, food deprivation or worse.
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Dramatic reversal of UK’s tax cut for the wealthy

In an embarrassing turn of events for the Liz Truss government, while insisting late into Sunday night that they were going to stick with the plan to massively cut the tax rate for the wealthy that they had announced with pride but had sent the country reeling in all manner of ways, the government announced very early Monday morning, on the first day of the Conservative party conference, that they were scrapping it. They were clearly rattled by the rumblings of a rebellion by the party faithful at the conference that suggested that the measure might be defeated in parliament.

This article describes what happened on Sunday evening.
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Brazil elections bring disappointment and hope

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wins 48% of the votes in Brazil’s presidential election held yesterday, ahead of the 43% for incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Since Lula did not get 50%, that means there will be a run-off election between just the two of them on October 30th.

The results are a a disappointment for Lula’s supporters who had hoped that he might be able to avoid the run-off vote, although the polls showed that it was always unlikely. Bolsonaro got more votes than expected. So now we head to the run-off on October 30th.
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The short unhappy honeymoon of Liz Truss

Whenever a new person becomes leader of a democracy, especially one who replaces a highly unpopular one, they are usually given a grace period of 100 days or six months or so before they start getting seriously criticized, a period often referred to as a honeymoon. This is so that they can assemble their team and formulate policies that will implement whatever they promised to do.

In the case of Liz Truss, who was elected by Conservative party members in September to replace the unpopular Boris Johnson as prime minister after weeks of turbulence, she has managed within the space of less than one month after taking office to create serious turmoil within the country, so much so that even members of her own party are calling for her to either quit or fire her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng or reverse the policies that he had revealed to parliament in a so-called ‘mini-budget’ that gave large tax cuts to the rich, reportedly the biggest tax cuts in 50 years, without any serious thought being given to how the resulting revenue shortfall would be made up. This article describes in detail how it all went down.
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Unnecessary reporting

Surely everyone should know by know that hurricanes involve very strong winds, heavy rainfall, flooding, and flying debris. And yet, each new hurricane has news channels sending some hapless weather reporter out into the storm to show them getting buffeted by the forces of nature. This is serious malpractice since the reporter could very easily get hurt or killed by getting hit with some flying object, as can be seen in this footage.

Fortunately this reporter was not hurt but I suggest that they preserve this clip and show it every time there is a hurricane to remind people how bad it can be, without risking anew the life of a reporter.

Film review: The Big Sleep (1946, 1978)

I recently watched this 1946 film directed by Howard Hawks. It had long been on my list of must-see films because it is considered a classic of the film noir genre and I finally found a DVD of it at my library. Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler, it features Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the former as a private detective Philip Marlowe hired by an elderly millionaire with two willful and beautiful daughters, the elder of whom is played by Bacall, who has a wild, drug using, promiscuous younger sister who is being blackmailed with photographs taken of her in compromising positions.

As Marlowe’s investigation proceeds, people start getting killed left and right. But unlike most detective stories, where everything is neatly tied up at the end and there is a single killer (or maybe two killers), this one defies any such clean denouement. I counted seven killings, with six each committed by a different person and the seventh unaccounted for. The Bacall character also keeps popping up everywhere, even in places where should not be, without any explanation as to why she is there and what she is doing.
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The story of atmospheric CO2

In this animation, they show how the arrival of coal and petroleum-based industrialization around the beginning of the 19th century led to a very rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 levels from a level of about 280 ppm (parts per million), which had been stable for millions of years, to about 412 ppm.

We have to go back about 2.5 million years to find a time when the level was as high as the current value and at that time there were no ice caps and glaciers, and consequently ocean levels were 55 ft higher than they are now. That should give us some idea of how dangerous it would be if we do not do something soon to combat global warming.