Time to close Guantanamo Bay prison and end all occupation of Cuba

The prison camp at Guantanamo bay in Cuba that houses so-called ‘enemy combatants’ has been an atrocity, with those taken into custody in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ being housed there and subject to torture and the denial of basic human rights such as being held indefinitely under appalling conditions and without prospect of a trial, or force-feeding hunger strikers. Calling them ‘enemy combatants’ instead of ‘prisoners of war’ is the fig-leaf used by the US government to violate the Geneva Conventions .The US likes the fact that the ambiguous status of the prison territory enables it to skirt US law in the way it treats detainees. enabling substantial abuses.
[Read more…]

The Sackler family epitomizes greed and sleaziness

I have written many times before about the Sackler family that made billions of dollars by pushing their company Purdue Pharmaceuticals to get doctors to overprescribe the opioid painkiller OxyContin and making the dosage stronger, resulting in the massive drug addiction problem we have now that have caused so many deaths.

Investigative reporter Patrick Radden Keefe has written a new book Empire of Pain about the Sackler family and he was interviewed on the radio program Fresh Air about how the family went to great efforts to push the drug while at the same time keeping their name separate from the company so that they could build up their reputations as philanthropists and have their name attached to many public and university buildings. He explained how they are trying to shield their personal fortunes from the many lawsuits against them by shifting company money into their private accounts and then putting the company into bankruptcy.
[Read more…]

How many T. Rex dinosaurs have ever lived?

The headline that 2.5 billon T. Rex dinosaurs walked the Earth was definitely something that caught my attention. It turns out that that number was just the average with a massive variation in possible values. What I was more interested in was how one sets about even making an estimate of the number of animals in a species that has been extinct for 65 million years. The paper lays out the problem and basic method they used.

Although much can be deduced from fossils alone, estimating abundance and preservation rates of extinct species requires data from living species. Here, we use the relationship between population density and body mass among living species combined with our substantial knowledge of Tyrannosaurus rex to calculate population variables and preservation rates for postjuvenile T. rex. We estimate that its abundance at any one time was ~20,000 individuals, that it persisted for ~127,000 generations, and that the total number of T. rex that ever lived was ~2.5 billion individuals, with a fossil recovery rate of 1 per ~80 million individuals or 1 per 16,000 individuals where its fossils are most abundant. The uncertainties in these values span more than two orders of magnitude, largely because of the variance in the density–body mass relationship rather than variance in the paleobiological input variables.

[Read more…]

The ‘Trump made me do it’ defense is not working

As the trials start to unfold for those who took part in the January 6th insurrection, we see the various defenses being brought forward. One that is being tried is “I was following Trump’s leadership”. One of those trying it in order to get out on bail is a 51-year old geophysicist from Colorado named Jeffrey Sabot who, after returning home, tried to destroy evidence by zapping his phone in the microwave (would that even work?) and making other moves. His problem is that he is seen on videos attacking a police officer at the Capitol. He then decided to flee to Switzerland (which with the US does not have an extradition treaty) and say that he was going to ski.

But after arriving in Boston and going to the airport to leave the country, he panicked when he saw police officers whom he thought were coming for him so he left the airport and drove south in a rented car, throwing his phone over a bridge along the way. But he was caught and arrested anyway.
[Read more…]

Follow-up on the Mrs Sri Lanka fiasco

I know readers of this blog have been anxious to know the fallout from the dustup that occurred in the Mrs Sri Lanka competition when the previous year’s winner Caroline Jurie abruptly declared that Pushpika De Silva, the person whom she had just crowned the winner, was ineligible because she was divorced, yanked the crown off her head, and placed it on the head of the first runner up, all before a national TV audience. It has caused a sensation, with even the international media covering it.

Here again is the video of what happened.


[Read more…]

Review: American Insurrection (2021)

The PBS investigative program Frontline has been investigating hate groups in American for the last few years and I linked to two earlier documentaries that they produced in 2018. One was Documenting Hate: Charlottesville and the other was Documenting Hate: New American Nazis. Hence they were well positioned to explore the roots of the insurrection that occurred on January 6th because its chief correspondent A. C. Thompson already knew many of the key players in those groups.
[Read more…]

And now we have Walgreens Karen

A woman in Florida (of course!) was asked by a Walgreens store employee to wear a mask but simply walked past. When another female customer, who happens to be a Muslim, told her that an employee was talking to her, she let loose an incredibly ugly and racist tirade. She then made the classic maneuver that identifies her as a Karen by calling the police and saying that she is the victim under threat. You should watch the video to the end when the tables are turned on her when the police do not take her side and her swagger disappears to be replaced by whimpering.