Local governments never seem to learn that flag burning is protected speech

It has long been established by the US Supreme Court that burning of the American flag is constitutionally protected speech. And yet, that act seems to arouse such anger that the people who do so are often arrested and charged. Then when they sue the city, the city is forced to pay them damages. In Cleveland, this pattern was repeated when police arrested Joey Johnson for burning the flag during protests at the 2016 Republican convention. He sued and today the city has agreed to settle the suit and pay him $225,000.

As is often the case, the authorities cook up some reason other than flag burning to justify their arrest.

A rush of people descended on a circle formed by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party after Johnson, a member, set the flag on fire.

An officer doused the blaze with a small fire extinguisher.

Police Chief Calvin Williams said at the time that officers intervened because Johnson lit himself on fire. Johnson and his attorneys, however, said that statement was false, and posted video footage they said contradict the city’s statement.

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Jury refuses to convict man who gave food and water to migrants

I wrote recently about how the US Customs and Border Protection agency had been destroying water stations left by humanitarian groups in the desert to prevent migrants dying from dehydration. After one of those groups No More Deaths had publicized these horrendous actions by the CBP, the US government arrested one of its volunteers Scott Warren because he had provided migrants with water, food, clean clothes, and beds in a barn. He faced up to 20 years in prison.
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What’s happening in Sudan

There has been a lot of violence in that country. After public protests resulted in the dictator Omar al Bashir being deposed on April 11 after 30 years in power, the military took over under what they call the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and have started brutally suppressing the pro-democracy groups who had organized a civil disobedience campaign to demand civilian rule.

In his latest episode of Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj provides the background to what is going on there. He says that the military junta in Sudan is getting support from the despotic leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE and that what is happening is similar to what happened in Egypt where the overthrow of a dictator ushered in a brief period of democracy before the military took over again.

The other scandal of the Central Park Five

The case of the Central Park Five has become famous as a miscarriage of justice. After a 28-year old white female jogger was brutally raped in Central Park in 1989, so badly that she was traumatized and could not even remember what happened, five black youths, four of them under 16 and one was just 16, were arrested, tried, and convicted for the crime, largely based on confessions they made during interrogations without their parents or lawyers being present.
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The impact of Plessy v. Ferguson

Brown vs Board of Education is a landmark 1954 case in the US civil rights movement because it deemed the practice of ‘separate but equal’ to be unconstitutional. That policy had held that it was acceptable to have separate schools for black and white students as long as the schools were ‘equal’. Of course, in practice they were not. But it interesting to go back to the earlier 1896 case Plessy vs Ferguson that had challenged the constitutionality of segregation laws. The US Supreme Court held that the laws were constitutional, thus putting a seal of approval on practices that had already existed for 60 sixty years in all parts of the country and led to their further expansion.
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Fight the global tyranny of the metric system!

Who knew that the metric system was planned by the French revolutionary Robespierre and adopting it would lead inevitably to the introduction of the guillotine? We should be thankful that there are those who are aware of this danger and want to make sure that the US sticks with the British system, even if it is out of step with the rest of the world, because is not a made up system that seeks to break our links with what the nation’s founders bequeathed to us.

We’re #1, baby, and so whatever measurement system we have must be the best and others should conform to what we have.

It is ultimately the stupidity that is going to lead to disaster.

Rain disrupts cricket World Cup

Because cricket matches take such a long time, are played in open-air stadiums, and cannot be played when the ground is wet, they are highly prone to being interrupted by rain. According to the rules of the one-day game, each team must face a minimum of 120 deliveries of the allocated 300 for the game to be counted. Anything less than that and the match is considered a no-decision and the two points that goes to the winner is shared between the two teams.
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Get ready for an anti-progressive propaganda blitz

The US is a one-party state and that party can be accurately called the Pro-War, Pro-Business Party (PWPBP) controlled by the oligarchy. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans. Ideological debate within this party is restricted to a narrow spectrum that only encompasses neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and right-wing extremism. This party has unanimous support from the establishment media and much of the intelligentsia, two groups that can be accurately labeled by the Chinese pejorative of ‘running dogs’, because of the tendency of dogs to do what their masters says in return for a few scraps. (It is an accurate label but one I hesitate to use because of my fondness for dogs who have many sterling qualities that these running dogs lack.)
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Trams always win in collisions with cars

In cities where trams share the road with cars, they can be involved in collisions when cars swerve into their lanes. The only option a driver of a tram has to prevent a collision is to brake. But since the tram is so much heavier than a car, the occupants of the tram feel only a slight impact. Both those factors may explain the calm manner in which tram drivers respond to car drivers trying to cut them off.

The puzzling stability of cricket bails

In cricket, there are three upright sticks (called stumps) about knee height behind the batter. If the ball delivered by the bowler hits any of the three stumps, the batter is out. This is the case if the batter completely misses the ball or hits it and the ball still goes on to hit the stumps. In order to provide an unambiguous signal that the ball has hit the stumps, on top of the stumps are two small cylindrical objects known as ‘bails’ that straddle the two gaps between the three stumps. These bails rest on grooves carved into the top of the stumps and for the batter to be out, at least one of the bails has to be dislodged and fall to the ground. The grooves are supposed to be deep enough that the wind won’t dislodge them but shallow enough that even very slight contact by the ball with any of the three stumps will cause them to fall. On very windy days, umpires have the option of using heavier bails.
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