‘Build the Wall’ grifter to be sentenced

Remember the We Build The Wall campaign started by Trump associate Steve Bannon and others claiming that they would build Trump’s idiotic border wall using private funds raised through a GoFundMe campaign? It looked like a scam right from the get-go. Sure enough, that is what it was.

In August 2020, federal prosecutors charged Kolfage, Bannon, Badolato, and Shea with conspiring to defraud We Build the Wall’s donors. We Build the Wall allegedly promised that every penny raised would go to construction, but prosecutors said Bannon pocketed $1 million. Kolfage took $350,000 plus went on a spending spree to buy a Jupiter Marine yacht called the Warfighter, a Range Rover SUV, a golf cart, jewelry, and cosmetic surgery, according to the indictment.

Living the high life while scamming the dupes. It is all so very Trumpian.
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Francis Collins, religious scientist

The geneticist has had a distinguished career and for the last dozen years has served as director of the National Institutes of Health, a massive federal agency that does basic research as well as fund the research of scientists in the US. The fact that he has served during three different administrations both Republican and Democrat shows that he has managed to avoid much of the partisan attacks that now routinely target prominent scientists, such as tthose on Anthony Fauci, who is head of one of the agencies that are under the NIH umbrella. Collins has been steadfast in his support of Fauci.

Collins is also an evangelical Christian, a fact that caused many people in the non-religious community to oppose his nomination by George W. Bush to be head of the NIH. But he has won over the skeptics by the way he has handled his tenure, with no evidence that he was driven by his religious beliefs in making scientific decisions.

He also wrote a best-selling book The Language of God where he attempted to reconcile belief in a god with science. I dissected that book in a 11-part (!) series of blogs back in 2009 where I pointed out the many flaws in his argument. But I have always respected Collins as a scientist and I especially admired his steadfast commitment to make freely available to everyone the data that were generated during the sequencing of the human genome, where he was named leader of the federal effort.
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Is it ‘gif’ or ‘jif’?

It is impossible to mandate language usage and saying that there is a ‘correct’ way to say or pronounce something is to invite endless challenges. This is true even if the word is a neologism of recent origin and the creator of the word tells you what they intended.

This is the case with the word written as ‘gif’, the acronym for Graphic Interchange Format. One hears both ‘jif’ and ‘gif’ (with a hard g) and the Oxford English Dictionary accepts both. Stephen Wilhite disagreed. He should know. He was the creator in the 1980s of this software that enabled the sharing of quality graphics even in the age of dial-up modems, that he shortened to the familiar acronym.

He died last month at the age of 74 and this article points to his acceptance speech when in 2013 he was honored with a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award where he announced his view in dramatic fashion.

Anti-Asian hate crimes on the rise

There has been a spike in hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans, especially Asian women.

The Manhattan DA’s office has 27 open hate crime cases related to anti-Asian hate crimes.

Across the US, anti-AAPI hate crime was up 339% last year.

Last August, Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks and responds to racially motivated hate crimes, said more than 9,000 anti-Asian incidents had been reported since March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic spread to the US from China.

New York City has seen an alarming rise in violence against Asian Americans. Four have died.

They were: GuiYing Ma, 62, who was attacked by a man with a rock in Queens; Yao Pan Ma, 61, who was attacked while collecting cans in East Harlem; Michelle Go, 40, who was pushed on to subway tracks at Times Square; and Christina Yuna Lee, 35, who was stabbed 40 times in her Chinatown apartment.

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John Oliver on truck driving

On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver describes what is going on in the truck driving industry. Trucks provide a vital service in the transportation of goods but the working conditions of drivers have been steadily declining over the years, as trucking company owners put the squeeze on them, and has resulted in a shortage of drivers as more and more people leave their jobs. He says that the turnover rate is an astounding 300%, which means that every year, an average of three people are rotating through one job. He says that the actual take home pay is much less than the the nominally high salaries that are quoted.

A long overdue event

Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed by the US senate on a 53-47 vote to fill the vacancy on the US Supreme Court that will be created when retiring justice Stephen Breyer steps down in July. It is quite incredible that it has taken so long to have a woman of color on the bench. I have not blogged about it because it was almost certain that she would be confirmed and there was nothing about her nomination that was controversial, as she was very much in the legal mainstream and had no skeletons in her closet.

But the Republican party of Trump decided to make up outlandish stuff about her . Why? Because that is what they do. And their task of persuading their rabid base that Jackson was unqualified and even evil was made easier by the fact she was a woman and a person of color because we know that white men have the best legal minds and that everyone else must be an imposter, right?
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Amazon takes a leaf from George Orwell’s 1984

In his book 1984, George Orwell imagines a dystopian society where the rulers control people by restricting their language. It appears that Amazon has decided that that policy need not just be used by governments but can also be used by big companies.

AMAZON WILL BLOCK and flag employee posts on a planned internal messaging app that contain keywords pertaining to labor unions, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Intercept. An automatic word monitor would also block a variety of terms that could represent potential critiques of Amazon’s working conditions, like “slave labor,” “prison,” and “plantation,” as well as “restrooms” — presumably related to reports of Amazon employees relieving themselves in bottles to meet punishing quotas.
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Philosophy Is Essential to the Intelligent Design Debate by Mano Singham

Continuing my policy of putting my published non-technical articles on this site, this article titled Philosophy Is Essential to the Intelligent Design Debate was published by Physics Today in June 2002 (p. 48-51).

The background to this article is that back in 2002, the advocates of Intelligent Design creationism seemed to be everywhere, seeking to have their ideas included in K-12 school science curricula at least as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. These battles were fought at the state and local levels and involved state and local school boards. Ohio and Kansas were particular hot spots because they were revising their respective science standards and ID advocates saw an opportunity to influence the new standards, especially since school boards consist of elected people who may not have deep understandings of science and could be swayed by dubious arguments about what science was.
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Sri Lanka in deep crisis

Overshadowed by other world news such as the war in Ukraine, Sri Lanka has been in a state of deep crisis. The proximate cause is the depletion of foreign currency reserves to below $1 billion which has resulted in the country being unable to pay for the imports of some of the most basic commodities like fuel for both vehicles and cooking, fertilizer, and essential foodstuffs such as milk and sugar. Surgeries have been suspended due to a shortage of medical supplies. As a result of the shortage of fuel, there have been daily power blackouts lasting up to 13 hours (except in the capital city Colombo because of course the wealthy who live in those areas must never be inconvenienced) and long lines of people waiting for hours and sometimes even overnight trying to purchase fuel and food and even then coming up empty.
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