Creepy Epstein tributes

The entire book of tributes to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been released (putting paid to claims by Trump and his defenders that the story was a hoax and the book never existed) and it is really creepy. You can see the full book with tributes here

First of all, what kind of adult gets such a birthday present? Ghislaine Maxwell went to a great deal of trouble to put it together and it was obviously an effort to please a vain, immature man. A lot of prominent people took the trouble to send in contributions and some are now rightly embarrassed at this display of their obsequiousness. One of them was the UK’s ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson who has now been fired for it.

It is not clear how Epstein initially got his wealth but what is clear is that once he acquired some, he had a formula for how to draw people into his web and make even more money. [Read more…]

Preparing for the unexpected

As regular readers know, I play the card game bridge and recently I happened to look at some aspects of the history of the game. It is not pretty because the main body that governs the game in the US, the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), was infused with the racism that the country was steeped in, not allowing Black people to join and play, forcing them to start their own organization the American Bridge Association (ABA).

On October 4, 1949, members of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) voted to exclude Black players from competitions.

The ACBL was founded in 1937 and became the largest organization devoted to the card game in the U.S. White bridge organizations in this era strictly enforced racial segregation, forcing Black bridge players to create their own bridge association called the American Bridge Association (ABA). Racial exclusion was reinforced by laws in several states that officially banned card games between Black and white players.

In 1949, several Black bridge players applied for membership in the ACBL, challenging the organization’s “white only” policy. In response, the ACBL board of directors held a vote among its 28,000 members. Nearly 60% voted to reject allowing Black bridge players to be admitted.
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Everything can become a competition

There seems to be an insatiable appetite among the public for competitions. This results in some enterprising people turning even the most unlikely practices into contests with prizes and the works. The annual hot dog eating contest is one such thing. But at least that contest has a quantifiable measure with which to judge the outcome.

Harder to understand is a massage competition. But it appears that there is a world championship for this.

[O]ne Saturday morning in June, in Copenhagen, I found myself in a classroom filled with twelve massage tables, around which massage therapists from across the world prepared to ply their trade on their receivers, or “body models,” in front of an audience.
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The eighth annual World Championship in Massage was under way in a modernist, glass-and-concrete building owned by University College Copenhagen. For a weekend, more than two hundred and sixty competitors from fifty-eight countries would face off in nine categories, including Swedish, Thai, chair, and Eastern- and Western-freestyle massage.
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Eddie Izzard on the Daleks

Based on my personal experience, there seems to a correlation between skeptical thinking and science fiction. I attend functions of a group of skeptics, sometimes physically at local venues, and at other times online with people around the world and I find that a large number of them are aficionados of science fiction and are knowledgeable about the minutiae of those stories.

Recently I created some mild astonishment within this group by saying that I had never actually watched any complete episodes of favorites like Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, or Dr. Who. I knew about them of course and had read about them and seen the odd clip of something from them. It is not that I avoid them. I do read the occasional science fiction but had never had any great interest in seeing science fiction on TV or the big screen. This surprised others who seemed to expect that with my science background, I would find them appealing.

One thing that had always puzzled me were the Daleks, the evildoers in the Dr. Who stories. They seemed to me to be laughably comical and totally not frightening. Eddie Izzard shares my puzzlement as to what the creators were thinking when they created them as conical objects with flat bottoms, like pepper and salt shakers, who moved on wheels and had weird appendages where arms would be.

The reactions to the death of Charlie Kirk

I must say that I have been surprised by the reactions to the killing of Charlie Kirk. I had of course heard of him but he had been on the periphery of my political consciousness. I viewed him as a young right-wing provocateur among many other such people, spewing racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic rhetoric aimed at gaining a following among the population that shares such views, and currying favor with Trump and the right wing political classes. But he is now being portrayed by the right as some kind of messianic figure and his killing, rather than being just another episode in the political violence that is endemic to the US, is being viewed as some kind of major martyrdom for the Trump cause, akin to Jesus’s martyrdom for our sins.

I have also been surprised at what has been revealed about his alleged assailant. The initial information about the shooting made me think that the perpetrator was some kind of trained professional. To kill someone from a roof top with a single shot at a range of about 200 yards, even with a telescopic sight, and then jump down to the ground and escape pursuers made me think that it must be someone with some kind of military or paramilitary training.

It turns out that he seems to be just an ordinary college student from a Mormon family in rural Utah.
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Living in an alternate reality

Joseph Ladapo is the surgeon general for the state of Florida and is a vaccine skeptic who recently announced plans to abolish all mandates that requires parents to vaccinate their children against preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, and hepatitis, comparing such mandates to slavery. He also opposes gender-affirming care and counseling for transgender and nonbinary minors. He is a good example of how an education obtained at elite institutions (he obtained his undergraduate degree from Wake Forest and his MD and PhD from Harvard) does not mean that one cannot hold unscientific views. He has been publicly rebuked by the CDC and FDA for spreading scientific misinformation.

But extreme as his views are, they are nowhere close to those of his wife Brianna who is described as an “intuitive spiritual healer, movement therapist, and teacher”.
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The dilemma for the Federal Reserve

The US Federal Reserve has two missions: keep inflation under control and have full employment.

What should be the desired rate of inflation? If it gets too low, that might be due to the economy stagnating and heading towards recession. Too high and people and businesses start hurting and indulging in more short-term spending as a hedge against future price rises. The magic number that the Fed and the economic pundits have settled on seems to be around 2%.

In its Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy (PDF), the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) judges that inflation of 2 percent over the longer run, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, is most consistent with the Federal Reserve’s mandate for maximum employment and price stability. When households and businesses can reasonably expect inflation to remain low and stable, they are able to make sound decisions regarding saving, borrowing, and investment, which contribute to a well-functioning economy and the well-being of all Americans.

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Bolsonaro gets 27 years in prison

The former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup following his loss in 2022 to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Justices Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha and Cristiano Zanin ruled on Thursday that Bolsonaro – a former paratrooper who was elected president in 2018 – was guilty of seeking to forcibly cling to power after losing the 2022 election, meaning four of the five judges involved in the trial had found Brazil’s former leader guilty.
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On Tuesday two other judges, Moraes and Flávio Dino, also declared the 70-year-old politician guilty of leading what the former called “a criminal organisation” that had sought to plunge the South American country back into dictatorship.
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Why the shock?

The killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk has created an outpouring in the media and among the political classes about how terrible and shocking it is.

Terrible? Yes. It is wrong to kill someone except under extreme circumstances like self-defense.

But shocking? No. This is America where multiple people are murdered every day because of the ease with which lethal weapons like guns can be obtained. Statistically, prominent people like Kirk are a small fraction of the public and usually surrounded by security personnel that make them hard to get to. But as small as that probability may be, there will be occasions when, despite the odds, someone well known is going to be killed.

In fact, when I get up in the morning and read the news headlines, I almost expect to see some ghastly story about people being killed. I just don’t know who the specific victims will be.

So I was not shocked by the killing of Kirk. Deadly violence is the norm in the US. Acting shocked tends to result in such events being seen as anomalies not requiring any serious response, rather than as signs of an endemic problem that calls for systemic action.

Meeting the deportation quotas drags in ordinary people

That Trump is struggling to have his ICE goons meet the quota for detaining and deporting people (reportedly the target is about 3,000 people per day) is clear from the fact that they are now doing so for the most minor of offenses.

An Irish grandmother who has lived in the US for most of her life and holds a green card is facing deportation because she wrote a bad cheque for $25 in 2015.

Donna Hughes-Brown, 58, was detained in July after landing in Chicago on a flight from Dublin and is being held in isolation in a detention centre in Kentucky. She has lived in the US since 1977, has five children and grandchildren, and ran a horse farm in Troy, Missouri.

Her husband, Jim Brown, a US citizen and military veteran, told reporters his wife was not a criminal and that he “100%” regretted voting for Donald Trump as president.

He said she had been detained on a misdemeanour relating to a $25 cheque she signed a decade ago and for which she made restitution and received probation.

She was detained under legislation amended on 4 July as part of Trump’s sweeping “one big beautiful bill” act. The couple visited Ireland that month for a funeral. When they landed at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on 29 July a police officer was waiting for her on the ramp.

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