They are finally coming in and they do not disappoint. The telescope seems to be functioning well, providing crisp, sharp images of the most disant parts of the universe and hence of its earliest times, over 13 billion years ago, i.e. about 700,000 years after the Big Bang.
You can see more of the images here.
As a grandfather, I am well aware that the conventional wisdom is that I have outlived my usefulness as far as evolutionary theory goes. Once you have had offspring and raised them to an age where there are independent and capable to having offspring of their own, you have pretty much exhausted your biological usefulness. This leads to one speculation as to why our bodies, after a certain age, tend to fall apart. It is because there is no selection pressure to develop mechanisms keep it going.
But the fact remains that people do live longer than is strictly necessary for evolution to function and this article argues that older people can still serve an evolutionary purpose.
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Despite the massive shortages of most essential items and the political unrest that have resulted in the overthrow of the current political leadership and the president and prime minister driven from office and in hiding, Sri Lanka continues to have cricket matches, with the current tour of the country by the visiting Australian team continuing before large and enthusiastic crowds.
After the Australians won the 20-over series 2-1, Sri Lanka won the 50-over series 3-2. They then played two five-day Test matches, the oldest and most prestigious form of the game. In the first one Australia beat Sri Lanka by an innings while in the second that ended yesterday, the tables were turned and Sri Lanka beat the Australians by an innings. So the two teams ended the tour even, which is good for Sri Lanka since Australia is always a tough team to beat.
For those who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of cricket (that I have heard described as ‘like Calvinball but with more rules’), find it unfathomable, and have no desire to learn more, all you have to know is that when a team wins a five-day Test match ‘by an innings’, it means that it well and truly trounced its opponents. For those more curious about the game, I provided a basic tutorial some years ago.
The people in the subcontinent of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are particularly cricket mad and as evidence one needs to look no further than how the current tour by Australia went off smoothly as if nothing was going on in the country.
I linked to videos of the protestors in Sri Lanka occupying the official residence of the president and, like many people in Sri Lanka, was stunned at the opulence of the place. The residence is in the heart of the business district in Colombo and I must have passed by it hundreds of times but had never given much thought to what it was like inside. It is a large building and was protected by a high fence with a security guard at the gate. Since only one side of it is visible from the street, I had no idea how extensive the property was.
What the videos reveal is that it is very luxurious with large, well appointed rooms, nice gardens and a swimming pool. Even though the climate is tropical, private swimming pools are a luxury and rare in Sri Lanka and I do not know of anyone who has one. The daughter of a friend of mine was one of the people who entered with the protestors and she had told her mother how they too were stunned by what they saw.
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Alex Holder is a British documentary producer who managed to get a lot of time to interview Donald Trump and his three oldest children from September 2020 past January 2021. Holder was interviewed by the congressional committee that is investigating the events of January 6th.
When the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack deposed British film-maker Alex Holder, it heard from a first-hand fact witness who inadvertently observed some of the darkest and most politically fraught days of Donald Trump’s time in office.
…Holder was there for it all: three sit-down interviews with Trump, including one at the White House, numerous other interviews with Trump’s adult children, private conversations among top aides and advisers before the election, and around the Capitol itself as it got stormed.
…Holder testified for about four hours behind closed doors last week about his roughly 100 hours of footage, used for an upcoming documentary titled Unprecedented, and turned over to House investigators the parts demanded in a subpoena compelling his cooperation.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the beleaguered president of Sri Lanka, who had insisted that he would stay on as president for his full term despite widespread protests and calls for him to quit, has finally decided to resign on July 13th.
This news came following a massive protest organized for today (Saturday) in which people were urged to come to Colombo and show their displeasure with the government. The government tried to block the protest by declaring a curfew and stopping transport to the city but that seems to have failed as crowds gathered at Galle Face Green, a beachfront esplanade in the heart of the city, right next to the office of the president and just a block away from his official residence.
The protestors stormed the president’s office, with the overwhelmed security forces looking on helplessly.
Rural America has many roadside attractions, some amusing, some religious, most of them kitschy. My attention was caught by a news item a couple of days ago about a faux Stonehenge granite monument in rural Georgia called the Georgia Guidestones that had a mysterious origin and aroused quite a bit of controversy and, this being America, conspiracy theorizing. It had to be demolished after unknown persons exploded a device that had damaged part of it and rendered it unstable.
In a recent post, I discussed the influential 1963 essay by Richard Hofstadter about the paranoid style in politics. The paranoid style in politics is not a clinical diagnosis of individuals but a style characterizing a certain kind of political thinking that may be held by ordinary people. In the case of a paranoid individual, they fear that sinister forces are targeting them personally. In the case of the paranoid style in politics, people do not think that they themselves are under attack as individuals but believe that their way of life, their values, even their nation, is under attack by evil forces. This gives them the sense that their desire to fight back vigorously against these shadowy and malign agents, however misdirected, even delusional, their fears might be, is a noble cause that must be fought to the finish.
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