In yet another episode of inside baseball in Washington, Donald Trump’s personal assistant Madeleine Westerhout was abruptly fired yesterday apparently after speaking disparagingly about Trump’s relationships with his family to reporters. You can read what happened here but what interested me was this how Politico treated one aspect of this story.
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It is well known that women have a very difficult time having their accusations of being sexually abused and even raped being taken seriously. We also know that police officers who commit abuses of any kind are very unlikely to suffer any serious consequences even for the most egregious actions. Natasha Lennard writes about the predictable outcome when both those conditions occur in a single case.
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Ryan Bell, national organizing manager for the Secular Student Alliance, writes in The Humanist magazine that while young people are becoming more and more secular, they face challenges in finding a community that shares their values and provides the kind of camaraderie that religious institutions used to provide. Various forms of alternatives are being created in colleges across the country to fill that need. One of those are the Secular Student Fellowships sponsored by the SSA. He discusses the case of several students who have experiences like that of a young woman named Sophia.
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We know that the mainstream media, even so-called ‘liberal’ ones, tend to be strongly supportive of the status quo and of the interests of the political-business establishment and thus totally against the candidacies of progressives. And one of the ways to observe this bias in action is to note how differently it scrutinizes the statements of candidates it prefers to those it dislikes, setting a low bar for truthfulness for the former and a high bar for the latter.
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One of the big successes of science has been the steady eradication of diseases that once ravaged so many people across the world. So it is frustrating when some diseases are making a comeback because of the misinformation spread by opponents of vaccinations. The latest example of this backsliding is that four European countries (Albania, the Czech Republic, Greece and the UK) that once had been declared measles-free have had that status revoked by the World Health Organization because of new outbreaks.
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A California tried to use his vanity license plate to get out of paying for parking tickets. He chose the license plate NULL in the belief that when his ticket was entered into the database, it would end up in some computer dustbin and he would not get the bill. It did not quite work out that way.
It’s the story of a security researcher known as Droogie, who presented his experience at the recent DEF CON conference in Las Vegas. Droogie decided his new vanity plate should read “NULL.”
…Droogie’s hope was that the new plate would exploit California’s DMV ticketing system in a similar manner to the classic xkcd “Bobby Tables” cartoon. With any luck, the DMV’s ticket database would see “NULL” and consign any of his tickets to the void. Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened.
First, Droogie got a parking ticket, incurred for an actual parking infraction—so much for being invisible. Then, once a particular database of outstanding tickets had associated the license plate NULL with his address, it sent him every other ticket that lacked a real plate. The total came to $12,049 worth of tickets.
…Although the initial $12,000-worth of fines were removed, the private company that administers the database didn’t fix the issue and new NULL tickets are still showing up.
Lesson: Don’t try to outsmart the DMV.
According to a large-scale longitudinal study, people who are optimistic tended to live longer than those who are not, and it even increased the chances of ‘exceptional longevity’, the term used for people who live to be 85 or more.
The team split about 70,000 women into four equally sized groups, based on their scores for optimism. They then compared lifespan for the most optimistic with the least, taking into account factors including age, sex, race, education, depression and other health conditions present at the outset.
The results show the most optimistic group of women had a lifespan almost 15% longer than the least.
Similar results were seen in men, even though optimism was measured slightly differently. When the team compared the fifth of men boasting the highest optimism scores with the least optimistic, they found the most positive men had lifespans almost 11% longer.
People seem to like going on cruises since it is apparently a rapidly growing business, despite some recent horror stories of norovirus outbreaks on the boats. From what I can tell from the advertisements, these things are a floating combination of hotels and amusement parks. But in the latest episode of his show Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj says that underneath all the gaiety and laughter, the business model of these companies is based on ruthless exploitation of labor, dumping of waste into the environment, and a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions, combined with careful avoidance of any responsibility for anything that might go wrong on board, including sexual assault.
Given my slightly introverted nature, I think I would not find cruises enjoyable. Being constantly surrounded by large numbers of people who are determined to have a good time 24/7 and get the maximum benefit from the limited time on board would wear me out pretty quickly. I would likely retreat to my cabin for long periods of time, which would defeat the purpose of going on a cruise.
In his drive to prevent the UK parliament from blocking his attempts to take the UK out of the EU even with no deal, prime minister Boris Johnson has formally asked the Queen to prorogue (i.e., suspend) parliament for five weeks from mid-September. As a constitutional monarch, she had to acquiesce to his ‘request’, disappointing those who fantasized that she might instead ask the royal footman to throw him out on his ear.
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The First Amendment to the US constitution says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The clause pertaining to religion states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” which means that there are two parts, what have come to be known as the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. It is the Establishment Clause that has come under stress recently as religious zealots in the US, convinced that this is a Christian country, seek to make that manifest by having prayers at government functions, putting up Ten Commandments monuments in public spaces, putting mottoes like ‘In God We Trust’ on currency and elsewhere, and placing nativity scenes at Christmas time.
The US Supreme Court’s responses to the cases have been muddled, to put it frankly. They seem to struggle to find ways to accommodate at least some religious invasion of the public sphere, even if it leads to convoluted reasoning, possibly out of a sense that outright prohibition might cause too much of a furor.
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