Some interesting elections to watch for today

Today is yet another Byzantine day in American politics, with various kinds of elections taking place. Much media attention is focused on a special election in Ohio for a seat in the US House of Representatives. This is a solidly conservative district that has been represented by Republicans for decades and Donald Trump won by a margin of 7 points. So why the fuss? Because according to polls, Democrat Danny O’Connor is giving Republican Troy Balderson a close run. I am not hopeful, though. Ohio is quite a reactionary state.
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What kind of person would own such a house?

What kind of person would want to own a house that is an architectural nightmare and has three bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, three kitchens, eight dishwashers, 13 porches, and an elevator? The same kind of person who would own 10 yachts, because the goal of such people is ostentatious wealth. Yes, we are talking about the Betsy DeVos, the education secretary who has been working to undermine public schools. This is merely her summer home, somewhere that has easy access to her summer yachts.

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Oscar Wilde on the cruelty of prison authorities to children

The incredible cruelty and sheer viciousness in the way that the Trump administration, through its justice department and homeland security agencies like ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), has treated the children of undocumented immigrants, ripping them away from their parents and sending them off to distant places where it is hard to reach them, is enough to make you sick. Back in 1897 Oscar Wilde, just prior to his own release from prison, observed similar senseless, unfeeling cruelty towards children in prison, especially one incident in which a prison guard was dismissed for a small act of kindness towards an inmate child.

After his release, Wilde wrote a letter to the editor of The Daily Chronicle newspaper describing what he saw. Written with the eloquence that only someone like Wilde can summon, what he describes is an example of the banality of evil, and is applicable to the actions of ICE in the US now. I give below an extract but it is worth reading in full. (Note: What Wilde calls ‘sweet biscuits’ are what are referred to as cookies in the US and a ‘warder’ is a prison guard.)
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An important elected office that few pay attention to

In November, people will vote for all 435 members of the House of Representative, 35 senate seats, and 39 state and territorial governorships. Most media attention will be focused on these races. Hardly any attention will be paid to one of the most important elected offices and that is the prosecutors. There are a total of 2,437 elected prosecutors in the US, going under various titles from county district attorneys to state attorney generals. In all but three states, prosecutors are elected. In many ways, prosecutors are the most important people in the legal system since they have the power to decide whether to pursue a case, whom to charge and with what crime, make plea deals, strongly influence who gets bail and how much, and they and have great power over the flow of information pertaining to the case. And yet, 85% are elected unopposed and I suspect that few can name the person who occupies that position in their area.
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Yet another rabbit hole to avoid

There are so many weird news items these days that I simply ignore most of them as not worth following up, since their existence is so fleeting and they are soon replaced by the next absurdity. But if they occur frequently enough, then the names and words associated with them stick in my mind and once in a while I find an article that explains what is going on. That is the case with QAnon.
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The overlooked danger of overhydration

I grew up in Sri Lanka, a tropical country where it was pretty hot during the day and we perspired a lot. But we did not pay too much attention to staying hydrated by drinking water all the time. Furthermore, in middle class homes like mine, there was the belief that tap water was not pure enough to drink and could contain dangerous bacteria and so in our home water was first boiled and then cooled in the refrigerator. We did not drink water outside the home unless we were in another middle-class home that followed the same practice. We drank water with meals and two or three cups of tea and/or coffee during the day. As younger schoolboys we would take a little canteen of water with us to school but as we got older, we stopped doing that and simply did not drink water until we got home. If we got thirsty drank hot tea or coffee or bought a bottled drink, bottled water not being a thing then. When we played sports as children during the blazing hot days, we would of course get thirsty and would drink water when we felt the need.
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The British have a genius for making things complicated

Starting with their weird units for length (inches, feet, yards, furlongs), mass (ounces, pounds, stones, etc.), volume (fluid ounces, gallons), and their now mercifully extinct old currency (pounds, shillings, pence, three-pence, half-pence, farthing), where the conversions never seem to involve a simple factor of ten, the British seem to have, whenever given the chance, opted for a more complicated system when simple ones based on the factor ten stared them in the face. Note that the single word ‘pound’ could refer to a force, a mass, or money. Unfortunately they imposed these systems on their colonies and we had to suffer through them as students. Most countries have taken the sensible step of switching to the metric system, with the US being a notable holdout.
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