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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Remembering Ron Dellums, a pioneering socialist member of congress

Dellums died on Monday at the age of 82. Jon Schwarz writes an appreciation of the life of this avowed socialist congressman who had to fight opposition from even within his own Democratic party. In a memoir, Dellums described the approach he took in 1970 to unseat a Democratic incumbent who was a Cold War liberal who had supported Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war policies.
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The emerging Democratic-neoconservative alliance

The neoconservatives have had a terrible influence on US politics. They gained a firm foothold in the Bush-Cheney administration and succeeded in pushing for disastrous wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening war against Iran. Their goal was the destabilization of the Arab governments in the region, and the dynamic they created resulted in the Obama administration continuing the policies and leading to chaos in yet more nations like Libya and Syria. The resulting blowback with the rise of groups like ISIS resulted in the neoconservatives being discredited and lying low for awhile but they are making a comeback.
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Sexual abuse of men is not funny

Samantha Bee tries to correct an imbalance in the way that sexual abuse of men and women are treated in the media and in our culture generally. She is joined in this message by Terry Crews who has said that he was sexually assaulted too.

I must admit, I did not know what the phrase ‘drop the soap’ alluded to.