The weird border wall being built privately

Donald Trump’s fixation with building his stupid wall along the Mexico border is enabling grifters to make money, and ProPublica describes one such effort.

The length of the border between the US and Mexico in Texas consists of the Rio Grande, so an imaginary line along the middle of the river marks the boundary. Of course, you cannot build in the river so the fence has to be built on land inside the US creating a weird no-man’s land between the fence and the river, land that belongs to the US but will become unusable, depriving the owners of the land of its use. Furthermore, since at times the river overflows and floods the banks creating swamps, the fence has to be built well inside US territory. In one region, the US government fence is more than a mile from the river.
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There is no limit to the Trump family grifting

ProPublica reveals that some of the money that was disbursed by Congress that was meant to help small businesses weather the economic impact of the pandemic shutdown went instead to family and friends of Trump.

Businesses tied to President Donald Trump’s family and associates stand to receive as much as $21 million in government loans designed to shore up payroll expenses for companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to federal data released Monday.
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The Sally Hemings story

One of the questions that historians of the US ponder is how Thomas Jefferson could write stirring words about the equality of all men in the Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, while himself owning hundreds of slaves himself. He is often pointed to as embodying the hypocrisy that has existed in the US at its inception and continues to this day. After all, he knew that slavery was wrong and frequently condemned it. Furthermore, he fathered six children with one of his slaves Sally Hemings, something that was disputed by the white descendants of Jefferson until his paternity was settled conclusively following DNA tests in 1998.
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Why the Tulsa massacre is not better known

Trump’s recent fiasco of a rally in Tulsa, OK had the effect of shining a light on the 1921 Tulsa massacre that I wrote about here. What is astonishing is how little known that massacre was, despite its horrific nature and the blatant racism that drove it. During it airplanes even dropped incendiary devices on the black community to start fires. The radio program On The Media says that there is a reason for this ignorance of one of the worst racist massacres in US history.
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The new tell-all Trump book

The new book by Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, exposes him to the world. The unsuccessful attempts to block publication resulted in the Streisand effect kicking in big time and greatly increasing interest in the book. As a result, the publisher shifted up the release date to Tuesday, July 14 but they also sent copies to the media and you can read excerpts from it in many places, such as this one.

Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, paints her uncle the president in a horrifying light and reveals explosive details about his character and disparaging comments made by his sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry.

“If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy,” Mary bluntly declares in the book. “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with complicity, silence, and inaction from his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”

While the excerpts quoted in the article suggest that the book will make for entertaining reading, it also induces the sobering feeling of “How the hell could such a person end up president? What does it say about a country that would vote him in?”

In another article, Mary Trump’s lawyer Ted Boutrous is quoted as saying, “The more people see what he was like before, and really understand the kind of person he is and was, the more people will be horrified that he’s the president.”

I am not so sanguine that this statement applies to Trump’s supporters because they are a cult and cult members either refuse to believe anything negative about their Dear Leader or view what others see as his faults as actual virtues.

Ghislaine Maxwell now in NYC jail

The one-time lover, confidante, business associate, and alleged procurer of teenage girls for abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and his friends has been transferred from the New Hampshire jail where she was over the weekend to the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in New York City. She is expected to appear in court on Friday at which the issue of bail will be discussed. Prosecutors will warn that she is a flight risk because of her money and her UK and French citizenship and connections, and thus should be denied bail, while her lawyers will likely argue that the fact that she had not already left the country (something that has puzzled me) means that she does not want to flee and so could be let out on bail
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Implications of Supreme Court decision on ‘faithless electors’

Yesterday, the US Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling of some significance. To understand why, you need to look at the truly weird system that the US uses to elect its presidents. So buckle up for a trip through that maze.

The first thing to appreciate is that the president is not elected by the majority (or plurality) vote of all the people in the country. While voters in an election do cast their votes for a specific presidential candidate, what they are really doing is electing members to an abstract entity called the electoral college and it is these electoral college members who vote for the president sometime after the presidential election is held, in a process that no one pays any attention to because it is assumed that they will vote according to the results of the presidential election so there should be no surprise.

Each state is entitled to a certain number of electoral college votes based on the following formula: one vote for each member of the House of Representatives from that state (which is roughly proportional to the number of voters in that state, with a minimum of one) plus two votes (for the two senators that each state gets). Since there are a total of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 senators, that adds up to 535 in total. Washington DC is not a state and thus has no congressional members but for the purposes of presidential elections it is treated as one and is allocated three electoral college votes. Thus there are 538 votes in all and to become president, you need 270 of those.
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Film review: Chasing Coral (2017)

I recently watched the above documentary that dealt with how the warming of the oceans is killing off the coral reefs all over the world. The filmmakers developed time-lapse cameras that they could place on the ocean floor to show how when temperatures rise even slightly, first the reefs get bleached white and then develop brown fibrous attachments all over them, giving them the look of ghostly apparitions. They focus a lot on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
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Normal body temperature

The pandemic has made everyone aware of the need to monitor their body temperature to see if they might be carrying the virus. I wrote earlier about how my ‘normal’ body temperature when I have no symptoms of anything is much lower than the canonical value of 98.6F, which makes it hard to determine how to use my body temperature to determine if I am sick or if I have returned to normal after being sick. This article explains that there is a huge amount of variation because a multiplicity of factors affect the temperature.
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