The end of the NRA?


It seems that the National Rifle Association may be in greater trouble than we thought. New York states attorney general had brought charges against the organization that its top executives , especially Wayne LaPierre had been using its funds as their personal piggy bank to live high on the hog. This at a time when the organization had been losing revenue because of declining membership and had had to make cutbacks to staff benefits.
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Fun with gravity

Suppose you could get a layer of liquid to stay suspended in mid-air, then you could observe counter-intuitive things such as objects like toy boats floating on both the top and bottom surfaces, being right side up on the top surface and upside down on the bottom surface.

But how could you get such a layer of liquid to defy gravity in this way? It turns out you can, as can be seen in this video.

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What happened in Massachusetts

Massachusetts is a strongly Democratic state with all its congressional and the two senate seats held by Democrats. The governor is an outlier in being a Republican but he has been careful to position himself as a centrist moderate technocrat and distanced himself from the nutjobs that currently make up the Republican party. So the primaries are where the real action is and on Tuesday we saw two proxy battles between the party establishment and progressive insurgents.

In the senate race there was a generational switch in that the incumbent Ed Markey who has been in Congress for 44 years represents the progressive wing and the much younger challenger Joseph Kennedy turns out to be the establishment candidate. Markey has aligned himself with the progressives in Congress, co-sponsoring the Green New Deal with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and they in turn strongly backed him. Kennedy was clearly seeking to use his famous name to move from the House of Representatives (where he currently holds a seat since 2013) to the Senate. No Kennedy has lost an election in Massachusetts and no doubt he hoped to ride the wave of the family name to victory. His problem is that his politics are more Republican-friendly.
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The silly fuss over Danbury

During one of his recent segments, John Oliver took some shots at the city of Danbury, Connecticut. It was entirely gratuitous and had nothing to do with anything else he was saying and I took it as the kind of thing comedians do, and that is pick on some random city to make fun of, whether it deserves it or not. In the state of Ohio for example, Akron and Canton, two perfectly decent and ordinary cities, are often are the butt of jokes, such as the one about Akron’s city slogan being “Akron: We are not Canton”.

But the Republican mayor of Danbury Mark Boughton took umbrage, declaring that in retaliation they would rename their sewage treatment plant the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant.
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What to expect in the next two months

It used to be the case that the day after the Labor day holiday in the US (which is the first Monday in September and this year falls on September 7) marked the kickoff of the presidential campaign. Of course that, like most political norms in the Trump era, has gone extinct. We are now in campaign mode all the time, so the second day of September is as good a day as any to take stock of where things stand now to set a kind of baseline and prepare for what is to come. A couple of graphs provide a good gauge of what is to come in the next 62 days before the election.
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