Lauren Witzke is yet another QAnon supporter who has won a Republican primary and is going to be the party’s candidate for a federal office, this time for the senate seat in Delaware. But it appears that QAnon is not the only thing she believes in. She also has dabbled with flat-Earth and 9/11 conspiracy theories. She will challenge incumbent Democratic senator Chris Coons.
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When people have a terminal illness and are confronted with the real possibility of imminent death, one cannot fault them for taking desperate measures in the hope of a miracle cure. This was what we saw in the early days of the AIDS epidemic when people were dying in large numbers and there was no effective treatment. Sufferers felt that the conventional protocols for finding treatments that depended on the usual three phases of trials to ensure safety and efficacy were far too slow and that seriously ill patients should be allowed to try experimental treatments that had not met the standards for approval.
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This took place on September 13th.
A Spanish athlete is being applauded on social media after he sacrificed a top tier win in the 2020 Santander Triathlon to give it to a competitor who took a wrong turn on the course.
British athlete James Teagle was on course to win third place in the competition in Spain last weekend when he made a mistake metres from the finish.
Diego Méntrida overtook him but noticed the error and stopped to allow Teagle to cross first.”He deserved it,” Méntrida said later.
El triatleta madrileño Diego Méntrida dejó pasar a su rival cuando éste se equivocó de camino antes de la meta. Peleaban por el tercer puesto en el Triatlón de Santander, que ganó Gómez Noya https://t.co/ZCgxlZQIeL pic.twitter.com/b83zwDTAVX
— EL MUNDO Deportes (@ElMundoDeportes) September 17, 2020
This is what sports, indeed all areas of life, should be like.
I am not that well-informed of the dinosaur world, being able to name only the better-known ones, such as Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, and of course Tyrannosaurus Rex. So I was disappointed that the first name had, for some reason probably related to the way things get named in biology, been replaced by the name Apatosaurus. My three-going-on-four year old grandson is at the age when dinosaurs are of great interest and recently when he showed me a model of what he referred to as a Brontosaurus, I said, dispensing what I thought was superior grandfatherly knowledge, that it should be properly called an Apatosaurus. (My grandson calls me ‘Parta’, a Tamil word for grandfather and was what I used to call my own grandfather. My grandson thinks it is hilarious when I pronounce the name of that dinosaur ‘a parta-saurus’, as if it is named after me. That joke never gets old for him. He is not that far off in thinking of me as a dinosaur, though.)
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One sure-fire way to see if something is a cult is what happens within their families and friends. If they are so devoted to a group that they cut themselves off from everyone who does not share their beliefs, then they very likely belong to a cult. The responses to a survey of people who used to have relationships with those they knew who became QAnon devotees shows all the signs that it is a cult. One of them said that the best way to sum up the situation is as a “surreal goddamn nightmare.”
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Samantha Bee explains why just getting rid of Trump in the November election is not enough, that the Republicans have to lose the Senate too. I would go further and say that all the way down the ballot to state and local races, Republicans need to lose and lose badly so that they realize that they are paying the price for installing and supporting a sociopath as president.
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The PBS news program Frontline has been examining policing in the US and the efforts at reform. In a new episode released just this week The New Yorker magazine reporter Jelani Cobb goes back to the town of Newark, NJ where he grew up. He had gone there a few years earlier after the Obama administration had placed the city police under a consent decree following widespread abuses and ordered various reforms and appointed a monitor to oversee them.
He visited the city recently to see what had changed since then. He spoke with people like the city’s major Ras Baraka (the son of Amiri Baraka) with whom he had been friends with back in his school days, the city’s public safety commissioner, and the police chief. What he saw gave him some hope that meaningful reform is possible
However, the worst person in the program was the police union chief. Jelani Cobb showed him a video of police giving a horrific beating to a man, even hitting his head on the sidewalk after he had been subdued, and asked him if it was justified. The union chief said that it was.
It is becoming increasingly clear that police unions have become one of the biggest obstacles to police reform. They are some of the most reactionary organizations in the US, going beyond perfectly legitimate activities such as fighting for salaries and benefits for their members to covering up, justifying, and excusing the worst acts of police brutality, and opposing any meaningful attempts at improving things.
Evidence continues to grow about the decline of the US. The latest comes from the annual report of the Social Progress Index. As Kevin Drum describes it:
The index includes things like health care, access to education, personal safety, sanitation, human rights, and so forth, and combines them all into a single number. This number doesn’t change a lot from year to year, and from 2011 to 2016 it went up by 0.34 in the United States. Since then, however, it’s fallen by an astonishing 1.06 in just four years. We now rank 28th in the world, just behind Greece.
Note that this isn’t an economic index. The US is still one of the richest countries in the world. We just aren’t using those riches to make much social progress.
This is really not a surprise. Social progress does not register in the consciousness of Trump and the Republicans. What drives them is power and greed.
There is always one major problem when you take multiple measures and then weight them to arrive at a single number. That single number enables you to compare different countries but that number also depends on how you weight the individual items to get the composite result and that introduces a lot of subjectivity because if you change the weighting, you can get a different rank order of countries. So the more meaningful use of such data is to take a longitudinal approach and see how, keeping the weighting system unchanged, the number changes over time, rather than take a snapshot approach and compare different countries at one time.
We know that big companies collect vast amounts of data on us based on our online presence and know our likes and dislikes in the minutest detail. So it is not surprising when we get emails recommending products for us to buy. But I was struck by an email I got from Amazon recently that said “Hello, Mano Singham, We have found something you might like.”
And the recommendation was … my own book.
Although the official election day is November 3, in practice the election began on Friday when in-person early voting began in four states, Minnesota, Virginia, South Dakota and Wyoming.
Lines of voters stretched from polling places in Virginia and Minnesota as early voting started in four states, the first of the 2020 presidential election.
The longest lines were found in Virginia, where voters previously needed a reason to cast an early ballot. In the state’s Fairfax County, where reports showed lines stretching for hours, election workers scrambled to open an additional voting room at the county government centre.