The ratio of mindless speculation to actual news goes through the roof

There is no question that the shooting at the Trump rally is big news. But it is also a good rule of thumb that in the immediate aftermath of unexpected events like a shooting, the amount of actual factual information available is very small and yet the media feel the need to spend vast amounts of time on it. The inevitable result is that you get huge amounts of mindless blathering as news media try to fill the time without having anything to say.

So you will get reactions from politicians who were nowhere near the scene, from people who were at the scene but did not really see anything, and also the inevitable discussion about what this means for the election, again accompanied by speculations from politicians, political pundits, and ordinary people, none of whom really know anything.

Much of the chatter will be about the possible motives of the shooter, whom the FBI identified as a 20-year old man Thomas Matthew Crooks. They have released his name so people have immediately scoured the internet to find out information using that name, in order to seek a motive that will bolster their preferred narrative. But this is dangerous because few names are unique, though in this case having three names narrows things down, assuming that it is correct. I have often been surprised when searching for someone on the internet to find out how many people have the same name. In addition, inferring motive from biographical data is a practice that has dubious value.

I find it helpful at these times to just tune out the news and occasionally check the headlines to see if anything new has been discovered. It is best to wait until firm information is unearthed before forming any conclusions. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

The modern corporate university

The horrendous behavior by the Israeli government and military in Gaza, where the Palestinian people have been subjected to bombing on a massive scale as well as being attacked by ground troops, and are the targets of an embargo on aid that has resulted widespread famine and starvation, has led to a spate of protests on university campuses. In some of those campuses, university authorities have responded harshly, with presidents calling in riot police, breaking up encampments, and attacking and arresting protestors, even though in almost all cases the protests were peaceful. As a result, there have been a flurry of no-confidence votes brought by faculty against university presidents.

Ostensibly, university presidents are supposed to represent the interests of members of the university community, namely. faculty, students, and staff. If significant segments of those populations are opposed to them and their actions, whom do they represent?
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Macron’s gamble pays off, sort of

Going into the second round of the elections for the French National Assembly, the right wing National Rally (RN) party led by Marine Le Pen was anticipating coming in first and even gaining an absolute majority of at least 289 seats in the 577-seat body. This was based on their showing in the first round last week when they obtained the most votes and won 38 seats of the 78 that were won outright.

The second round was for the remaining 499 seats in which no candidate obtained the required 50%. But there was a hastily cobbled together agreement between the left wing coalition of the New Popular Front (NFP), consisting of the France Unbowed (LFI) party, the Greens and the Socialists, and the center-right Ensemble coalition led by president Emmanuel Macron, where one of their candidates agree to drop out in three- or more-way races in order to not split the anti-NR vote. That strategy seems to have worked. The final results have the NR and its allies pushed into third place with just 143 seats while the NFP came out on top with 182 and Ensemble came second with 163. Other parties got 89.

There will have to be some kind of coalition to get to 289 seats but Macron is in a bind. While there was a pre-election alliance between the NFP and Ensemble, forming a coalition between two coalitions is going to be hard because despite uniting against the NR, the two coalitions have little in common and outgoing prime minister Gabriel Attal, who is a member of Macron’s coalition, has already said that he will not serve under the premiership of Jean-Luc Melenchon, the head of LFI, the largest party in the NPF.
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A double portion of Pie

He gives a farewell to the outgoing Conservatives.

It was left ambiguous as to whether comedian Tom Walker was retiring his character as well.

And in this segment aimed at Americans, he summarizes the years of Tory rule and tells us what to expect in the coming years from the incoming Labour government and its leader Keir Starmer.

UK elections confirm predictions

As predicted in the polling, the Labour Party won a sweeping victory in the general elections. They got 412 seats, a gain of 211 from its previous 201 in the 650-member parliament. Conservatives got just 121, dropping by a whopping 251 seats from its previous 372, even worse than exit polls had predicted. The Liberal Democrats, who after they joined the Conservatives in David Cameron’s government in 2010 as a junior partner, got hammered in 2015 (going from 56 seats to just 8) also had a good day, winning 71 seats, a gain of 63. The Scottish National Party lost badly, getting just 9 seats, down by 39. I am not sure what that implies for the Scottish independence movement. Sinn Fein won seven seats in Northern Ireland, making them the largest party there. The implications for leaving the UK and uniting with Ireland are not clear.

In this clip, made just before the election, Jonathan Pie provides a brutal analysis of how bad the 14 years of Conservative rule have been.

Many of the front-bench Conservatives and cabinet members, including the ministers of defense, veterans, justice, education, culture, transport, and chief whip have lost. Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt, seen as a potential replacement to Sunak as party leader, has also lost her seat. Sadly, the awful Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, and Kemi Badenoch were not swept away by the tide and have retained their seats. Mordaunt’s departure have improved their chances of becoming party leader. The infamous Liz Truss did lose her seat, one that had been considered quite safe since she last won it by a huge majority and it had been held by conservatives since 1964, ruling out any fantasy that she might have had about making a comeback as party leader.

Turnout is one of the lowest in post-war history, suggesting that there was not that much excitement about the race. Labour really did not offer an inspiring platform and indeed implied that they would not make any major changes.. Their main message was that the Conservatives should be thrown out and although voters seemed willing to oblige, it was hardly an inspiring message. Even in his victory speech, Keir Starmer promised ‘stability and moderation’, hardly the stuff that fires up supporters.
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The high price in the US of weight-loss drugs

The drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, although developed to treat diabetes, have become wildly popular outside its original target population because it seems to be highly effective in reducing weight as well. This has resulted in it becoming harder for diabetics to gain access to the drugs as well as their price rising.

US senator Bernie Sanders has long been a critic of the pharmaceutical industry and how it charges highly inflated prices in the US that are available for much less elsewhere in the world. He has been successful in pushing for the cost of insulin and asthma inhalers to be drastically reduced and now he is targeting Ozempic and Wegovy.

The blockbuster weight-loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic are arguably as omnipresent in the American zeitgeist as Taylor Swift or the iPhone. The drugs and others in its class are associated with the sparkle of Hollywood, on the lips of Oprah and considered transformative by doctors.

But the giant market for drugs like Wegovy, including not just the roughly 11% of adults who have diabetes but also the 42% of adults who have obesity, has conjured one of the demons of American healthcare – price.

Americans paid 10 times more for Ozempic than patients in the United Kingdom in 2023 – $936 a month compared with $93. Wegovy costs Americans $1,349 a month, compared with $296 in the Netherlands (the drug is not yet available in the UK).

That wild discrepancy has captured the attention of one of the drug industry’s loudest critics, the US senator Bernie Sanders.
…

“What we’re focusing on right now is what may end up being one of the best-selling pharmaceutical products in the history of humanity, and that is Ozempic and Wegovy,” said Sanders. “These are very important gamechangers helping people with diabetes and obesity.”

Sanders is preparing to square up against the chief executive of the Danish pharmaceutical giant that makes both drugs, Novo Nordisk. Under threat of subpoena, its CEO, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, agreed to testify before the same committee in September. But even for Sanders, the challenge is formidable.

“You’re taking on a company which will make billions of dollars every single year, many billions of dollars from the US, on just this product,” said Sanders. “So, do I think this is going to be a difficult challenge? I do.”

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Political maneuvering in France

The first round of elections for all 577 seats in the French National Assembly have been held and, as expected, the National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen captured the most votes nationally with 33% of the vote. In second place with 28% was the New Popular Front, an alliance of center-left Socialists, greens and far-left parties. President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance placed third with 21%.

In the French system, a candidate who gets more than 50% of the vote in the first round gets elected to the seat. Failing that, anyone who gets the support of 12.5% of registered voters in the first round qualifies for the second. Hence the second round can have two, three, or possibly even four candidates competing in an electorate compete.

In the first round, 78 seats were won outright, including 38 by the National Rally, leaving 499 to be decided in the second round.

So now there is serious negotiating among the second, third, and fourth place finishers to drop out so as to give the remaining candidate a better chance of defeating the NR candidate. The deadline for dropping out was 6:00pm (Paris time) today.
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Betting and honors in the UK

The general election in the UK to be held on July 4th has been sidetracked by the election betting brouhaha that has revealed how widespread betting is in that country, as more and more members of parliament are found to have bet on the date of the election. At a time when he should be putting out the final message to voters as to why the Conservatives deserve to continue to govern, the prime minister Rishi Sunak has had to bat down allegations that people close to him have taken advantage of that proximity to place wagers on inside information about the date of the election.

Apart from the question of whether any of them had such information, news reports have also discussed how honors (colloquially referred to as ‘gongs’) seem to be handed out. The UK has an intricate set of honors that are awarded to individuals, ranging from knighthoods to lesser ones like the OBE, MBE, and CBE, and who knows what else (where the labels show their imperial history), as well as peerages of various kinds.

A knighthood is an honour awarded by the British monarch for exceptional national service.
The female equivalent, a damehood, holds the same official title: Grand Cross of the British Empire (GBE).

Among the levels of Honours, there are also CBE, or Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, OBE, or Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, and MBE, or Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

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Getting religion back in schools

Religious conservatives in the US are determined to get Christianity back into the school curriculum. For the longest time, they were on the retreat as the US Supreme Court pushed back against attempts to use public schools as vehicles to teach religious ideas, arguing that the First Amendment to the constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” implied that no agency of the state could show preference to one religion over another or to religion over no religion. Thus not only was teaching the Bible excluded but even religious ideas such as intelligent design creationism could not be taught in science classes as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
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