More fitting obituaries for Donald Rumsfeld

The smug and arrogant Rumsfeld, an utterly odious man, died yesterday at the age of 88. In a just world, he would have been tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for war crimes. But given that he was an American leader and we all know that by definition Americans never commit war crimes, that would never would have happened.

To get a more accurate recounting of his career, we can read Jon Schwarz who calls him a “dreary war criminal” who “managed to do terrible things throughout his life while remaining tremendously banal”.

[L]ess than six hours after the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, Rumsfeld was anxious to “hit SH [Saddam Hussein] @ same time.” And he wasn’t especially concerned whether Iraq or any target was responsible for the attacks. He wanted to conduct “massive” attacks on targets “related & not” (emphasis in original). That is, he saw the deaths of thousands of Americans as a wonderful opportunity to do whatever the George W. Bush administration wanted.

At that moment, Rumsfeld was doing what he did best throughout his life: spinning the unspeakable suffering of others into the desired ends of himself and his political allies.
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Hilbert’s Hotel shows why some infinities are bigger than others

Here is an entertaining video that has a nice explanation of a seeming paradox about infinities.

In 1924, the German mathematician David Hilbert raised a peculiar and seemingly paradoxical question: are some infinities bigger than others? The answer he arrived at – yes, actually – might have been impenetrable to non-mathematicians if not for the thought experiment he devised involving a hotel with an infinite number rooms. This video from the Australian filmmaker and educator Derek Muller builds Hilbert’s ‘infinite hotel’ and populates it with some strange, fuzzy creatures to demonstrate how the mathematician arrived at his groundbreaking conclusion, and touches on the real-world implications of his discovery.

New Pew analysis of 2020 election

There are many interesting features about the 2020 election, especially the way that various demographic groups voted that do not quite fit into a simple picture. Analyses of voting patterns in the election keep coming in. One of the most comprehensive is a new one by the Pew organization.

Every piece of evidence since the November election suggests Donald Trump made significant inroads among blocs of voters thought to be out of reach to the controversial now-former president.

And he still lost the popular vote by roughly twice the margin he did in 2016 — enough for Joe Biden to flip five states Trump won and capture the Electoral College.

A new analysis from the Pew Research Center shows why: Even as Trump was narrowing Democrats’ margins with white women and Hispanic voters, Biden was surging with other groups, like suburbanites, white men and voters who identified as independents, that propelled him to victory.
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According to the Pew analysis, Trump won white voters by 12 percentage points, 55 percent to 43 percent, down from 15 points in 2016. Biden narrowed Trump’s margin among white men — from 30 points in 2016, to 17 points in 2020 — but Trump won white women by a larger spread (7 points) than he won them in 2016 (2 points).

Meanwhile, Biden held steady among Black voters, carrying them by an 84-point spread (92 percent to 8 percent), virtually identical to Hillary Clinton’s 85-point lead four years ago.

But Biden only won Hispanic voters by 21 points, 59 percent to 38 percent, down significantly from Clinton’s 38-point advantage, 66 percent to 28 percent. There was a slight gender gap — Biden won Hispanic men by 17 and Hispanic women by 24 — but Trump surged broadly among Hispanics, especially among Hispanic voters without a college degree.

You can read the Pew report here.

The mysterious motivations of some people

California’s highway 101 runs north-south and in 2019 there was a mysterious spate of projectiles that were hitting cars traveling through a particular stretch of that road just north of Monterey where I live. Over 70 incidents were reported. There were no crashes or fatalities but six people suffered cuts and bruises when the glass shattered. It was unsettling and police found it hard to track down the culprit. I always assumed that it would turn out to be young kids who had nothing better to do and thought this was an amusing way of passing the time.

But in January 2020, police arrested a suspect and it turned out to be a 54-year old man Charles Kenneth Lafferty who was firing marbles with a slingshot.
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Life after pandemic restrictions are lifted

In my part of the country, restrictions are being lifted and people who are vaccinated are now gathering together even indoors without masks. This has been a great relief to many people who found the enforced isolation during the past year very difficult to deal with. I am one of the people for whom being solitary was not a problem. I am not a misanthrope, exactly, in that I do not actively shun the company of others. But the things that I enjoy doing the most (reading, writing, thinking) are those that are best done in solitude. Hence I like to maintain large expanses of time alone between my socializing with others.

But sometimes I wonder whether my sympathies with Rat should be a cause for concern …

(Pearls Before Swine)

Would I stay or would I go?

The horrific collapse of a 12-story beachfront condominium building in Florida consisting of 136 units has resulted in 16 people being killed and another 149 still missing. While it will take some time to determine the cause of the collapse, suspicions are focused on problems with the foundations or that the salty air caused the steel used in the framework to corrode. A letter written by the president of the condominium association three months before the collapse said that the building needed $15 million in major maintenance and repairs.

There is another identical building just one block away that was built by the same company at the same time forty years ago and now those residents have to make the decision as to whether to stay or leave. This is not an easy decision and would depend on many factors. These units are expensive but their value would have dropped now and some people may not be able to sell and find another place. It would also depend on whether they lived alone (in which case they would only be risking their own demise) or whether they lived with loved ones which might tilt the decision towards moving. It would also depend upon age. Older people find it harder to move and may also feel that they have less to lose by staying.
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How long can Trump sing the same old songs?

Donald Trump held a rally in Ohio on Saturday, his first since leaving office. It was ostensibly in support of a Republican candidate mounting a primary challenge to an incumbent Republican congressperson who had committed the sin of voting in favor of Trump’s impeachment. But of course, the rally was about him. Everything is always about him.

So what did Trump say to the thousands who turned out to hear their Dear Leader? Did he have anything new? Apparently not.

Appearing to relish being back in front of thousands of supporters, Trump repeated his false claim that his defeat in the November 2020 election was marred by fraud.
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Trump survived a second impeachment on a charge linked to the violence and has kept broad influence over the Republican Party, in part by leaving open the question of whether he will run for office again in 2024.

He dangled that possibility on Saturday to the crowd.

“We won the election twice and it’s possible we’ll have to win it a third time. It’s possible,” he said.
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The former president highlighted parts of his regular grievance list at the rally, with particular focus on the rising number of immigrants crossing over the U.S. southern border, an issue Republicans have zeroed in on to rally their voters.
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Trump repeatedly attacked what he called “woke generals,” following an exchange this week in which the top U.S. military officer hit back against a growing conservative movement opposed to teaching certain theories about racism.

“Our generals and our admirals are now focused more on this nonsense than they are on our enemies,” Trump said.

He criticized the media, a regular foil, and tried to co-opt the phrase “Big Lie,” which critics have used to describe his efforts to discredit the 2020 results.

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John Oliver on Christian health scam

Health care is something that everyone needs and sometimes urgently. Because the health industry in the US is mostly private, this leaves it wide open for unscrupulous people to take advantage of this need for their own profit. Add to that the wide leeway that the US gives to religious organizations and it should not come as a surprise that groups acting under the umbrella of religion are making money claiming to support for people’s health care needs without actually doing so.

John Oliver looks at one such program that goes by the name of Health Care Sharing Ministries and shows how easy it is to claim that an entity is a religious organization and take advantage of all the loopholes.

An encouraging result for LGBT rights

The US Supreme Court, by a 7-2 margin, has declined to hear a case where a school board appealed a lower court verdict against their policy of demanding that students only use bathrooms according to the gender assigned to them at birth, thus providing a victory for transgender rights.

The case involved a former high school student, Gavin Grimm, who filed a federal lawsuit after he was told he could not use the boys’ bathroom at his public high school.

The policy of the school board for Gloucester county, Virginia required Grimm to use restrooms that corresponded with his biological sex – female – or private bathrooms.

Last August, the US court of appeals for the fourth circuit ruled that the board had practiced sex-based discrimination and violated Grimm’s 14th amendment rights by prohibiting him from using the boys’ restroom.

Judge Henry Floyd wrote: “The proudest moments of the federal judiciary have been when we affirm the burgeoning values of our bright youth, rather than preserve the prejudices of the past.”

Nonetheless, on the supreme court Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, two of the most hardline justices on a panel slanted 6-3 in favor of conservatives, voted to hear the board’s appeal.

Upholding the decision of the appeals court sets a strong legal precedent. But because the supreme court has chosen not to hear the case itself, there is still no nationwide ruling on the issue.

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The Covid Delta variant is hitting the unvaccinated

The Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is now rapidly becoming the dominant strain. This variant is more easily transmissible and more dangerous, and Dhruv Kullar warns that from the evidence gained so far from the UK, it poses a greater risk to the unvaccinated.

Earlier this year, scientists estimated that lineage B.1.1.7-the Alpha variant, first isolated in England-could be some sixty per cent more transmissible than the original version of sars-CoV-2. Now experts believe that the Delta variant is sixty per cent more transmissible than Alpha-making it far more contagious than the virus that tore through the world in 2020. It hasn’t yet been conclusively shown that Delta is more lethal, but early evidence from the U.K. suggests that, compared to Alpha, it doubles the risk of a person’s being hospitalized. Even if the variant turns out to be no deadlier within any one person, its greater transmissibility means that it can inflict far more damage across a population, depending on how many people remain unvaccinated when it strikes.

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