Following Joe Biden’s money

The role that money plays in US elections is obscene. As a result, the strength of a campaign is not only measured in terms of poll numbers but also in terms of how much money is raised and spent by each candidate, which in turn influences the polls.

The Biden campaign is currently in a little bit of financial trouble in that the amount of money it has in hand is far less than that of his main rivals Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, even though the contributors to the Biden campaign are big money contributors. As a consequence, despite his vow not to take money from lobbyists and Super PACs, his wealthy supporters and lobbyists are forming a Super PAC to fund his campaign, as Lee Fang reports, funded by wealthy people who are concerned about people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren winning the nomination and (Oh, the horror!) even the presidency.
[Read more…]

Is coffee good or bad for you?

Hasan Minhaj looks at why there seems to be so much contradictory reporting on this question and says that one problem is the pressure to publish papers that result in some researchers finding ways to hype results that are not firmly grounded in the evidence.

I myself drink just one cup of coffee and one cup of tea a day, or two cups of coffee if no good tea is available.

(Thanks to Jeff Hess.)

Vandal grannies

This story describes a couple of grandmothers in Russia who took the law into their own hands and vandalized a children’s playground.

Two women in Russia’s Leningrad region have been filmed destroying a children’s seesaw after complaining about the noise.

Brandishing a saw, the two women took turns cutting the playground equipment into pieces.
…

On social media, critics condemned the behaviour of the two women.

These “vandal grannies will now need to either set up a new seesaw at their own expense or fix this one,” one social media user declared.

“They should have brought some oil to stop the seesaw from screeching,” another commented. “But they took a saw and now they are all over the news like some vandals.”

It reminded me of this Monty Python sketch

National Weather Service being undermined again

John Oliver looks at how the Trump administration is trying to limit the services provided by this very important agency because the private sector cannot compete with it. It is doing so by trying to appoint the head of a private weather company AccuWeather to head the NWS. So much for the claims that the private sector can do things much better than the government can. This comes after the earlier failure in 2005 of another attempt to prohibit the NWS from giving its information away for free.