Lasers and eye damage

The US attorney general Bill Barr has defended the massive and violent federal response to the demonstration in Portland by arguing that the protestors were the ones who were being violent and that the security forces were just defending themselves and government property.

Barr said federal authorities had a duty to defend against violent attacks and rioters, and said protesters have attempted to burn down the building, shot commercial fireworks, and used pellet guns and slingshots to shoot projectiles that have injured federal officers “to the bone” as well as lasers that have damaged officers’ eyesight.

Are these claims true? Barr is a loyal follower of Donald Trump and hence one must assume that, like Trump, he is lying unless he can prove otherwise. I have not seen a detailed fact-check of those claims of injuries, such as medical reports or independent third party observations.
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Why we need to teach real US history

I have written multiple times before how US history is taught in schools in a completely sanitized form that distorts and erases what truly happened. People are given a rose-tinted view of the past, especially when it comes to the brutality that was inflicted on black people during the time of slavery and all the way to the present. This is why there is such reluctance by some to accept that the confederacy was actually a very bad thing and should not be honored in any way. The same holds true for the treatment of Native Americans.

In another excellent program, John Oliver looks at all the problems with the way US history is taught and offers suggestions for how it should be taught,

Big win for progressives in Missouri

In the Democratic primary election for the House of Representatives in St. Louis, Missouri, Cori Bush who was backed by progressive groups, defeated the 20-year incumbent William Lacy Clay, who had ‘inherited’ the seat from his father.

In Missouri, Bush’s win in the district representing St Louis marked another progressive ousting of a Democratic incumbent. Clay was elected in 2000, taking over the post from his father who had served for 32 years before.

Bush, a 44-year-old nurse and pastor, is almost guaranteed to win the seat in the November election because the district is heavily Democratic.
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Her foray into the 2018 election earned her comparisons to another progressive who took on a Democratic incumbent, New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She campaigned on issues such as a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition and Medicare for all.

She was also one of four candidates, including Ocasio-Cortez, to be the focus of the documentary Knock Down the House – which trailed their 2018 campaigns.

Bush was a surrogate for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and helped organize Black Lives Matter protests against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In a tweet, Sanders hailed Bush as a “true progressive”.
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Voters in Missouri also approved expanding the government health insurance program for low-income Americans, Medicaid. This could give 250,000 Missourians access to the program, starting next year, according to the state’s auditor.

The state’s Republican governor, Mike Parson, opposes Medicaid expansion but because the expansion won through the initiative process, it can only be changed if lawmakers go back to voters.

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The US should follow New Zealand’s lead for dealing with the pandemic

Yesterday brought some encouraging news of a survey that shows that most Americans do not believe Trump’s assertions that the US is doing a better job of dealing with the pandemic than other countries, and they are looking for the government to issue aggressive national plan to fight the epidemic and are willing to wear masks and accept other restrictions.
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Trump flounders badly yet again

In an interview conducted by Jonathan Swan of Axios and broadcast on HBO (which I do not have a subscription to), Trump tried once again to lie and bluff away his poor handling of the pandemic crisis but ended up looking foolish yet again.

Claiming that the pandemic was unique, Trump said: “This has never happened before. Nineteen seventeen, but it was totally different, it was a flu in that case. If you watch the fake news on television, they don’t even talk about it, but there are 188 other countries right now that are suffering. Some, proportionately, far greater than we are.”
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Swan pressed the president on which countries were doing worse. Trump brandished several pieces of paper with graphs and charts on them that he referred to as he attempted to suggest the US figures compared well internationally.

“Right here, United States is lowest in numerous categories. We’re lower than the world. Lower than Europe.”

“In what?” asks Swan. As it becomes apparent that Trump is talking about the number of deaths as a proportion of cases, Swan says said: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the US is really bad. Much worse than Germany, South Korea.”

Trump then says: “You can’t do that.”

It is just pathetic and even worse when you watch him.


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The new Cold War with China

In order to be able to justify its obscene levels of spending on the military, the US has to always portray itself as being under threat and in imminent danger. With the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the next threat we were told was from the drug cartels, and then we had al Qaeda and the threat of an Islamic takeover. In between we even had the silliness of Nicaragua and the small island nation of Grenada being portrayed as the beachheads for a possible invasion of the US.

Trump sensed the war weariness of the nation and when running for the presidency, promised to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, scale back involvement in NATO, and bring many of the US troops stationed around the globe back home. He has achieved very few of those goals and now that his abject failure in dealing with the pandemic is being exposed daily, he seems to have decided to resurrect the Great External Threat to take attention away from all his failures. Bypassing other candidates like Russia or North Korea, he seems to have picked China as the target, knowing that Democrats will always join in in attacking Russia and China. Both Trump and Biden have ramped up the anti-China rhetoric, though in his first three years in office and even as late as March of this year, Trump was effusively praising that country and its leader Xi Jinping. His secretary of state Mike Pompeo has been the most belligerent in his anti-China rhetoric.
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Trump’s supporters may need big rallies even more that he does

I am not persuaded that the ability to have huge rallies is a good measure of the level of a candidate’s support. It also depends on how good the campaign staff and the advance teams are at drawing in a crowd. Furthermore, if a candidate has a core base of fervent supporters, they may be able to pack rally after rally by following him from place to place, like Grateful Dead fans, even while broader support may be declining.
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Another attempt to rescue free will

George Ellis is professor of complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and he has written an essay in defense of the idea of free will. It is a long essay but his argument is really against classical determinism of the Laplacian kind, as can be seen by this statement.

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose I’m wrong. Let’s ignore all these issues and take the deterministic view seriously. It implies that the words of every book ever written – the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Das Kapital, the Harry Potter series – were encoded into the initial state of the Universe, whatever that was. No logical thinking by a human played a causal role in the specific words of these books: they were determined by physics alone.

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Another case of life imitating art

I have recently been watching the British TV series The Indian Doctor. It is a fish-out-of-water story similar to the other British show Doc Martin. The latter featured a brilliant but irascible surgeon with zero social skills and no tolerance for stupidity or even small talk who becomes a general practitioner in a small fishing village in the southwest of England where he has to deal with nosy and gossipy villagers. The Indian Doctor deals with another skilled doctor Prem Sharma who arrives in a small Welsh coal mining town in 1963 as its sole doctor after being recruited from India by the British government to staff its expanding National Health Service.

Whereas Martin is rude and impatient with everyone, Sharma is genial and polite. Sharma’s wife Kamini, however, comes from a very wealthy upper-class family in India and had hoped that her husband would be a Harley Street specialist so that they could live in London and enjoy its cultural life. She is dismayed at being stuck in a backwater, living in a grungy apartment over the equally grungy doctor’s office and where she has to do all the chores that servants did for her back home. She also has to deal with the suspicions and prejudices that small tightly knit communities have about any outsider. The town’s people even think of the English as foreigners, so people from as exotic a place as India are viewed as almost an alien species.
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