I am not persuaded that the ability to have huge rallies is a good measure of the level of a candidate’s support. It also depends on how good the campaign staff and the advance teams are at drawing in a crowd. Furthermore, if a candidate has a core base of fervent supporters, they may be able to pack rally after rally by following him from place to place, like Grateful Dead fans, even while broader support may be declining.
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George Ellis is professor of complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and he has written an essay in defense of the idea of free will. It is a long essay but his argument is really against classical determinism of the Laplacian kind, as can be seen by this statement.
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose I’m wrong. Let’s ignore all these issues and take the deterministic view seriously. It implies that the words of every book ever written – the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Das Kapital, the Harry Potter series – were encoded into the initial state of the Universe, whatever that was. No logical thinking by a human played a causal role in the specific words of these books: they were determined by physics alone.
I have recently been watching the British TV series The Indian Doctor. It is a fish-out-of-water story similar to the other British show Doc Martin. The latter featured a brilliant but irascible surgeon with zero social skills and no tolerance for stupidity or even small talk who becomes a general practitioner in a small fishing village in the southwest of England where he has to deal with nosy and gossipy villagers. The Indian Doctor deals with another skilled doctor Prem Sharma who arrives in a small Welsh coal mining town in 1963 as its sole doctor after being recruited from India by the British government to staff its expanding National Health Service.
Whereas Martin is rude and impatient with everyone, Sharma is genial and polite. Sharma’s wife Kamini, however, comes from a very wealthy upper-class family in India and had hoped that her husband would be a Harley Street specialist so that they could live in London and enjoy its cultural life. She is dismayed at being stuck in a backwater, living in a grungy apartment over the equally grungy doctor’s office and where she has to do all the chores that servants did for her back home. She also has to deal with the suspicions and prejudices that small tightly knit communities have about any outsider. The town’s people even think of the English as foreigners, so people from as exotic a place as India are viewed as almost an alien species.
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The city of Washington, DC, the capital of the US that has a population of about 700,000 and covers about 68 square miles, is by design not part of any state. The running of the city is under the exclusive direction of the US Congress. While Congress has devolved certain powers to a mayor and city council, it retains the right to overturn any actions that the local government may take.
In the wake of all the protests against police brutality, the House of Representatives voted on July 22 to remove all confederate statues from the Capitol building, with many Republicans joining the Democratic colleagues.
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On his way to a fundraiser in Florida yesterday, Trump spoke to an absolutely YUGE overflow crowd on the airport tarmac in Tampa.
not exactly an overflow crowd at Trump's speech in Florida pic.twitter.com/uS2o0fptNE
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2020
Needless to say, the wags on Twitter had a field day, with one commenting that this was “Like an aging rock star who can’t draw a crowd at the county fair.”
I watched this film, based on a novel by Robert A. Heinlein, a few months ago but did not bother to write a review about it because I thought it was a gore-filled silly film with lousy acting that I could not recommend or thought was even worth writing about. But then I came across this article that describes it as some kind of powerful satire of militarism.
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What has been obvious from the start is that the US has had no national plan for dealing with the pandemic, leaving the whole thing up to a patchwork system of actions by local authorities. The basic elements of safety protocols, widespread testing, and contact tracing were not widely promoted and implemented. Katherine Eban, writing in Vanity Fair, explains what happened and says that part of the blame lies with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was assigned the task of creating and implementing a policy.
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