Shed no tears for Kirstjen Nielsen

The departing head of the Department of Homeland Security, who oversaw and implemented the cruel policy that separated children from their parents and placed them in cages, is following the familiar dual-track path of all fired Trump administration employees: publicly sucking up to Trump so as not to anger his base while leaking to the media that she was actually a restraining force that opposed his vicious policies. She is undoubtedly hoping that the latter will result in her reputation being recovered from the gutter where it currently is.
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Iran plays tit-for-tat with the US

The US government feels that it has the right to intervene in the affairs of other countries to the extent of destabilizing them, supporting insurgent groups, creating coups, and even invading them. But it denounces anyone that fights back. For example, Afghans who attack US troops in that country are accused of being terrorists and charged as such. But if a foreign country were to ever invade the US, would Americans who take up arms against the invaders be called terrorists? And what of countries that provide support to Americans fighting the foreign invaders? Would those countries be labeled as state supporters of terrorism? To ask the question is to reveal the hypocrisy.
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The hidden, ugly face of US empire

The radio program On The Media this week had an absolutely gripping interview with Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. It begins at the 3:30 mark and lasts for about 50 minutes, laying out in great detail the hypocrisy of claiming to be a republic while actually being an empire that denied rights to the large populations under its control.
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Coronation Street finally gets black residents

I wrote recently that I prefer TV series that have very limited runs and avoid those that go on and on. So I was startled to read that the British soap opera Coronation Street had, for the first time, added a black family to the residents of the street. What shocked me was not that it took so long to add this element of diversity but that the show was still on. I recall as a young boy in England seeing an episode or two. It was not to my liking and the only thing I remember is that there was a tough-looking, sharp-tongued, woman named Ena Sharples who always had a hairnet on her head. Apparently the show has been showing three times a week on prime time for nearly sixty years which is an incredibly long run even by soap-opera standards.

This shows great loyalty on the part of the British public. I recall an interview that either P. G. Wodehouse or George Bernard Shaw (I forget whom) gave in which he was asked the secret of his success and longevity as a public favorite. He replied that with the British public you just have to hang in there and keep producing new material. After a while you become seen as an ‘institution’ and the public sticks with you forever after that even if the quality of your work declines. He was being modest because his output was usually of high quality but there is a germ of truth there. The British public can be very loyal to their veteran artists and performers and their vintage shows like Coronation Street and Dr. Who, and are loathe to see them end.

John Bercow is not leaving the building anytime soon

It appears that I am not the only one taken by John Bercow, the speaker of the British House of Commons. As a result of the intense attention paid to the parliamentary maneuverings over Brexit, he has apparently become a cult figure in Europe and Der Spiegel interviewed him, where I was relieved to hear him saying that the rumor of him stepping down this summer was unfounded.
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How technology can improve without increased understanding

Archeologists sometimes find ancient artifacts that show considerable sophistication. These might cause us to infer that the people of that time had a better understanding of the underlying science than we had previously given them credit for. This is because advances in technology often go hand in hand with advances in science. Technological advances upon up new frontiers for scientific investigation while new scientific theories lead to new technologies. But that link may not always exist.
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Jet lag asymmetry

I do not suffer from jet lag that much but I have friends who suffer terribly. I ascribe my greater tolerance to my belief that a prime cause is tiredness during the long flight and so make it a point to sleep as much as possible on the plane, which I am fortunately able to do. Some people find it very hard to sleep and watch a lot of inflight films which may make the even more tired. I have also experienced that traveling west is easier than traveling east and I put that down to the fact that going west results in the day-night cycle becoming stretched out and so one has longer nights and can more sleep.
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Calls to end use of statistical significance

There has long been a common method used in science and social sciences when deciding whether results are worth publishing. One starts out with what is called the ‘null hypothesis’, a kind of baseline that might represent (say) the current conventional wisdom, and then one sees if the results of the experiment are consistent with it. If it is not consistent, then the results are considered to be more interesting than if they were. This requires the use of statistics and then one has the problem of deciding whether the result is a real effect or a statistical anomaly. For a long time, something called the ‘p-value’ was used to make this decision and a p-value of 0.05 was used as the benchmark for statistical significance.
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Australian politics on TV

I recently watched two television series produced and set in Australia. One was Secret City and the other was Rake. The former is a political espionage drama while the latter is a comedy-farce. How they both portray the Australian political-legal-police-internal security systems in less than flattering, to put it mildly, showing them as utterly corrupt and venal. Both shows portray the Australia-China relationship as a highly fraught one, and in Secret City, the US is shown manipulating Australia to serve its own foreign policy ends.
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