Surprise win in New York Democratic primary

This news just broke.

The fourth-ranking Democrat in the House has lost his bid for another term: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old activist who ran on abolishing ICE and making Medicare a universal program, defeated Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) in an upset.
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Ocasio-Cortez argued that the increasingly non-white district, which stretches from the Bronx to Queens, had been represented too long by a figure from the local political machine.

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Ocasio-Cortez told voters that they could do better — she refused corporate PAC money, emphasizing that most of the $300,709 she’d raised for the campaign came from small donors, most of them from in and around the district.

She not only won, she won by a whopping 57.6-42.4% margin.

I wrote about Ocasio-Cortez’s insurgent campaign against the Wall Street friendly Crowley before. For a young progressive Latina to beat an entrenched incumbent who was fourth highest in the party leadership is a huge upset. I hope the party leaders learn a lesson from this.

Exciting finish to Windies-Sri Lanka Test series

The third Test ended today with Sri Lanka winning, thus equalizing the three-Test series at 1-1, with one game drawn. The Windies won the first test easily, outplaying Sri Lanka in all areas of the game. The second Test was an exciting see-saw affair with the Windies dominating early, then Sri Lanka unexpectedly gaining the upper hand on the fourth day, and the game poised evenly on the fifth and final day. Unfortunately rain halted play before a decision could be reached. It was the kind of match that Test cricket aficionados love.
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Reality Winner’s guilty plea

Trevor Timm writes that the whistleblower has agreed to plead guilty to one count under the Espionage Act and serve a sentence of 63 months in prison plus another three years of supervised release. Her lawyers felt that given the enormous resources that the government has, all the roadblocks that they threw up against her lawyers to provide a reasonable defense, and their sheer bloody-minded vindictiveness, this was the best outcome she could hope for.
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What drives the ‘Flat Earth’ belief?

When I was a young boy in Sri Lanka, there was a Jesuit priest-in-training named Basil, a friend of the parents of a friend of mine, who liked to argue with us that the Earth was flat. We of course believed that it was round but as anyone who has argued with a flat-Earther knows, they have quite an array of arguments that they can drop on you to counter your objections and it is a good example of how almost any proposition can be defended if one is allowed to make ad hoc assumptions. We suspected that Basil did not really believe what he was saying but was using the formidable argumentative skills that Jesuits learn to mess with our young minds and show how hard it is to defend even what seem to be obvious truths.
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“Be a Hitler”

I have written many times about how there is a militant and bigoted group of Buddhists that includes Buddhist monks who feel that Sri Lanka should be a purely Sinhala Buddhist country and that every other ethnic-religious group does not belong. They have incited mobs to attack non-Sinhala Buddhists, most recently against the Muslim minority. Now a leading monk has gone to the next level, explicitly urging a presidential candidate to adopt Hitler as a model.
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“Kirstjen Nielsen, child snatcher!”

Back in the days when Margaret Thatcher was an ambitious up-and-coming politician eager to make her mark as a Conservative cabinet member by cutting benefits and services, she instituted polices that resulted (as I recall) in children having less access to milk. This led to chants of ‘Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher’. The Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen also seems anxious to make her mark in conservative politics by showing how mean she can be with her enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump’s cruel politics and rhetoric towards immigrants. Those policies have led to 3,700 children already being separated from their parents with no idea of how to reunite them that have led to the slogan “Kirstjen Nielsen, child snatcher!” which does not rhyme but is apt nonetheless.
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The resurgence of West Indian cricket

Sri Lanka is currently touring the West Indies and playing a series of three five-day Test matches. Both teams have been struggling of late and the first Test saw the Windies winning very easily. The second test was poised for an exciting finish on the final day before rain caused play to be abandoned and the game ending in a draw (as no decisions are called in cricket). That game was also marred by the Sri Lankan captain being found guilty of ball tampering and banned from playing in the third Test that is currently underway in Barbados and rain has already interrupted play a couple of times.
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