How this year’s Sanders campaign is changing politics

Bernie Sanders ran a good campaign during the 2016 primaries that resulted in him posing a serious challenge to the party establishment’s preferred candidate Hillary Clinton. But there were problems, particularly with Sanders’s lack of explicit attention to the specific issues facing minorities and women and the poor. It is not that he does not care about those issues. Those have dominated his thinking from his days as a high school student activist. But he is an old-style socialist who sees discrimination in any form as an outgrowth of mercenary capitalism that seeks to pit marginalized and exploited groups against one another in order to keep them divided and unable to join forces on the things they agree on, because if they do, that would challenge big business and the oligarchy.
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Seeking messages from gods

Many religious people seek some sort of sign from their god that s/he exists and is also willing to violate the laws of science to demonstrate that fact, either by doing a general miracle or something specific to benefit them personally. Some are so desperate for this that they are willing to assign coincidences or random events or even obvious hoaxes (like the fish falling from the sky) the status of miracles.

While most of the time this is harmless, unscrupulous people can use this to trick people and swindle them of their money.
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Gerrymandering changes blocked by US Supreme Court

Just recently, the ACLU of Ohio won a big victory when a federal Appeals Court ruled that Ohio’s congressional districts were blatantly gerrymandered and should be redrawn by June this year for the 2020 elections. Courts in Michigan had ordered similar redrawing. Both rulings were appealed by Republicans and on Friday, there was a setback when the US Supreme Court blocked both those orders without any reasoning.

The decisions in Michigan and Ohio that were put on hold by the justices were the latest rulings by federal courts determining that electoral maps designed by a state’s majority party unconstitutionally undermined the rights of voters who tend to support the other party.

But the action by the justices was not unexpected as they weigh two other gerrymandering cases – one from North Carolina and the other from Maryland – that could decide definitively whether federal judges have the power to intervene to curb partisan gerrymandering. The rulings in those cases, due by the end of June, are likely to dictate whether the legal challenges against the Ohio and Michigan electoral maps can move forward.

So the fate of these two cases now rests on the outcome of the other two cases, unless the decision is made to consolidate all four cases.

Understanding the European Union election results

The European Union elections have been released and it looks like the fears of an overwhelming victory by the Euroskeptics did not materialize. They did do better than they did in the 2014 election but did not gain enough seats to seriously challenge the existence of the union. As far as I can tell about how elections to the EU parliament work, the elections for seats are held in each country and contested by parties in those countries, but then those elected members form umbrella parties with like-minded members from other countries. The Guardian provides a graphic of the provisional results for each of the 10 umbrella parties in the 750-seat assembly.

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All you ever wanted to know about 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a polarizing film. On the one hand, there are those like me who absolutely love it. The other pole does not consist of people who hate it, because there is nothing really objectionable in the film. Instead it consists of those who were utterly bored and baffled by it. Even those who loved it were baffled by it but did not let that reduce our enjoyment as we were swept along by the cosmic grandeur of this revolutionary science fiction film, the story it told, and the awesome special effects that blew us away even though (and perhaps because) they were done using models and film trickery in that pre-CGI age. They still hold up well in this CGI age.
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The cruel and inhumane US (in)justice system

The absurdly disparate sentences that are issued in the US legal system is vividly on display in the case of Michael Thompson, aged 68, who has served 25 years of a 40- to 60-year sentence in a Michigan prison. Tana Ganeva describes his case.

In 1994, Thompson sold 3 pounds of pot to a police informant. Michigan legalized pot in 2018, laying the groundwork for a profitable legal industry, making it that much harder for him to understand why he’s still behind bars. “You know after 25 years, you don’t feel nothing no more. You just feel numb,” he said.
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Meet the new kilogram and other new standards

On May 20th, the 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures instituted a new standard for the kilogram mass. A metal block kept in a hermetically sealed vault in Paris had been the mass standard for 130 years. New standards were also introduced for the unit of current (Ampere), temperature (Kelvin), and the mole.

It used to be the case that standards for the basic units used in science had been defined in terms of macroscopic objects like this and thus could be easily understood. But the need for increasingly precise and unvarying standards meant that these were no longer suitable and standards have increasingly shifted to using the fundamental constants of nature and getting from those to the familiar quantities involves quite a long chain of reasoning. The kilogram is the last remaining physical object to be so displaced.
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Reactionary Alabama

The state of Alabama has been in the news as one of the wave of states passing highly restrictive laws on abortion, including a recent one that bans all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, so early that many women might not even know that they are pregnant. The only exception being the woman’s life being in serious danger, and not even for rape or incest. Doctors who perform abortions can be imprisoned for up to 99 years. Alabama already has only three clinics in the state where women can get abortions.
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