Horse racing is even worse than I thought

A month ago, I wrote about my astonishment that as many as seven horses that had had to be euthanized in the few days in the run up to the Kentucky Derby.

It turns out that the situation was even worse than that and that 12 horses had died there since April 27. As a result, yesterday it was announced that the location has suspended all events for about a month pending an investigation.

After a series of concurrent investigations by Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission and the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, “no single factor has been identified as a potential cause and no discernable pattern has been detected to link the fatalities,” according to a statement from the track. The racetrack’s surface has also been deemed “consistent with prior measurements” from previous years and thus “has not raised concerns.”
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A day before Churchill Downs announced it would suspend racing operations, the famed track and HISA introduced a series of new safety measures. Those changes include the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit collecting blood and hair samples for all fatalities involving covered horses and Churchill Downs restricting horses to four starts over a rolling eight-week period. Churchill Downs also added “ineligibility standards for poor performance,” so horses that lose a race by more than 12 lengths in five consecutive starts will be barred from competing again until approved by the equine medical director.

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The other defamation case by E. Jean Carroll

A jury found that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) guilty of sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll decades ago and said that he should pay her $2 million in damages for the assault and another $3 million in damages for defaming her. The very next day, SSAT appeared at a live event that was broadcast by CNN in front of a specially chosen friendly crowd where he proceeded once again to say the same things about Carroll that the jury had said constituted defamation.

Carroll and her attorney Roberta Kaplan then filed an amended suit against SSAT asking this time for punitive damages. When juries award damages in a civil suit, then assign a monetary value for the actual damage suffered by the claimant and can also add punitive damages which are meant to punish the defendant and discourage such behavior in the future. In the Carroll case, they did not award punitive damages and SSAT’s actions immediately after suggested that he was not at all remorseful by being rebuked.
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Debt ceiling raised just in time

The deal to raise the debt ceiling has passed both houses of congress with bipartisan support and will be signed into law by president Biden on Saturday, two days before the projected X-date (June 5th) when treasury secretary Janet Yellen said the government will run out of money to pay its bills. As of Thursday evening, the closing balance in the government’s account was just $22.892 billion, the lowest it has been since the recent crisis started.

The current debt ceiling limit is $31.4 trillion which has already been reached. The deal did not raise the ceiling by a fixed amount. Instead it agreed to suspend the debt ceiling until January 2025, just after the next election. As I understand it, ‘suspension’ means that there is no debt ceiling at the moment so it is possible that the US treasury could, in theory at least, run up the debt by a huge amount by selling off US treasury bills.

But I don’t think they will do that.

The dangers of social media for young people

The US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has warned that excessive use of social media by young people carries serious health risks.

“Teens who use social media for more than three hours a day face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms, which is particularly concerning given that the average amount of time that kids use social media is 3 1/2 hours a day,” the Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep.

According to the advisory, 95% of teenagers ages 13-17 say they use a social media app, and more than a third say they use it “almost constantly.” The Social Media and Youth Mental Health advisory says social media can perpetuate “body dissatisfaction, disordered eating behaviors, social comparison, and low self-esteem, especially among adolescent girls.”

Nearly 1 in 3 adolescents report using screens until midnight or later, the advisory says. And most are using social media during that time.

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Frederick Douglass memoir of being a slave

I recently read the memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (c. 1817-1895), who in 1838 escaped from slavery in Maryland to freedom in New York. This document’s account ends shortly after he got his freedom. While yet a slave, he had surreptitiously taught himself to read and write, an offense for which he could be severely whipped if discovered. His memoir is extremely well written, so much so that many people at that time did not believe that he could ever have been a slave.

After moving to New Bedford, Connecticut, he attended an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket in 1841 where he got up and spoke for the first time in a group consisting of both white and Black people. He was discovered to be a powerful orator with a compelling life story and became one of the most prominent voices for abolition. His memoir can be downloaded at Project Gutenberg and other locations.

His story of his days in slavery are harrowing. The unremitting cruelty of that institution is a reminder of how low human beings can sink once they decide that some group of people are so inferior to them that they do not deserve even the most basic of humane treatment.

He also seeks to correct some misconceptions, such as the role of singing among slaves. We know that that there is a rich tradition of Black music that came out of slavery. Apologists for slavery used the singing of slaves as an indicator that they were happy with their lot but Douglass says in Chapter II that the opposite is true, that the singing indicates deep sorrow.

I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

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Uganda’s harsh new attack on LGBTQ+ rights

The president of that nation has signed into law tough new measures aimed against the LGBTQ community.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni signed one of the world’s toughest anti-LGBTQ laws, including the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”, drawing Western condemnation and risking sanctions from aid donors.

Same-sex relations were already illegal in Uganda, as in more than 30 African countries, but the new law goes further.

It stipulates capital punishment for “serial offenders” against the law and transmission of a terminal illness like HIV/AIDS through gay sex. It also decrees a 20-year sentence for “promoting” homosexuality.
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A presidency photo of Museveni showed him signing the law with a golden pen at his desk. The 78-year-old has called homosexuality a “deviation from normal” and urged lawmakers to resist “imperialist” pressure.

A local organisation, Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum, and 10 other individuals later filed a complaint against the law at the constitutional court, one of the petitioners, Busingye Kabumba, told Reuters.

Museveni had sent the original bill passed in March back, asking parliament to tone down some provisions. But his ultimate approval was not seen as in doubt in a conservative country where anti-LGBTQ attitudes have hardened in recent years, in part due to campaigning by Western evangelical church groups.

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DeSantis may have misjudged the tide

Ron DeSantis finally made his big announcement about running for the Republican nomination for president and the reviews about his launch were decidedly negative. As Susan Glasser writes, apart from the technical glitches which plagued the process that he chose to do on Twitter along with Elon Musk, DeSantis did not even give a clear indication of what he was hooping to achieve as president.

The start of the Twitter Spaces event featuring DeSantis and Twitter’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, was delayed by more than twenty-five minutes while Musk audibly struggled to get his new platform to work. But just as wretched was what DeSantis had to say once he started talking, both on Twitter and in a subsequent interview on Fox News, which boiled down to a lot of complaints about the “legacy media” and little rationale for his candidacy.
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The really vital question posed by DeSantis’s official entry into the 2024 race was not, after all, whether Twitter could handle a large crowd in its Spaces feature without crashing. (Answer: no.) It was whether DeSantis could revive his Presidential prospects and actually emerge as the Republican to take out Trump.

After DeSantis’s nineteen-point reëlection victory, last November, he looked to be the Republican Trump-beater at last, a younger, sharper, smarter version of the forty-fifth President—without the nasty Twitter habit and all the legal troubles. Subsequent exposure suggests he’s also Trump without the charm. In recent months, DeSantis has been sinking rather than surging in the polls, as his many missteps, from thuggishly retaliating against Disney to signing an unpopular six-week abortion ban into law, have given Trump and his allies much to feast upon. DeSantis doesn’t look like so much of a Trump-beater anymore. The ex-President, whose lead in the G.O.P. primary is back up into double digits over DeSantis, remains an overwhelming front-runner. DeSantis, meanwhile, will go into the history books for one of the worst and least competent campaign launches ever. Ouch.

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Texas attorney general impeached and suspended from office

Ken Paxton has been one of the most right wing and belligerent of Trump’s supporters, advancing all manner of propositions of the MAGA agenda including legal challenges to the results of the 2020 election which was, of course, thrown out. He also seems to be very arrogant and corrupt, with 10 years of investigations and charges pending, so much so that we had that rare event, where Republicans filed 20 articles of impeachment against a fellow Republican and then the body voted in favor, requiring him to be suspended from office, pending a trial by the Texas senate.

Many articles such as this one were irritatingly short of details. They said that the vote in favor of impeachment 121-23 and that the senate needs a two thirds majority to convict him and that his wife is a member of that body but gave no further breakdowns, requiring me to search for them.
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The complex story of Jessica Watkins

On Friday, US district judge Amit Mehta handed down two more sentences to Oath Keepers for their role in the January 6th, 2021 events, following the 18 year sentence given earlier to its leader Stewart Rhodes. One of those sentenced was army veteran Jessica Watkins, a transgender woman, who was given eight years and six months in prison.

The name Jessica Watkins was familiar to me because I had long been aware of Watkins’s role in the events. Micah Loewinger, a reporter for On The Media, and Hampton Stall, the founder of MilitiaWatch, had been tracking the activities of the Oath Keepers and monitoring the walkie-talkie app Zello that was used for militia recruiting and organizing. They listened in as the riot was unfolding. As far back as in January 13, 2021, just a week after the riot, Loewinger and Stall reported how she figured prominently in the conversations of the mob that day, issuing instructions to others on what to do.

The Zello user who described breaking into the Capitol building appears to be Jessica Watkins, a 38-year-old bartender from Ohio, who admitted to participating in the insurrection. Watkins told the Ohio Capital Journal she was the leader of a local militia called the Ohio State Regular and a member of the national Oath Keepers militia.
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“We have a good group: 30 to 40 of us. We’re sticking together and sticking to the plan,” the female voice is heard saying on Zello as they were walking toward the Capitol. “The police are doing nothing. They’re not even trying to stop us.”

The Ohio Capital Journal also identified Watkins as one of a line of Oath Keepers pushing their way through the crowd on the steps of the Capitol toward the east entrance of the building. She can be seen toward the back of the line in livestream footage taken at the deadly event wearing battle rattle. Moments later a stream of pro-Trump insurrectionists poured inside.

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Tentative debt ceiling deal reached

House speaker Kevin McCarthy and his Republican negotiators have reached a deal with Joe Biden and Democratic negotiators over a deal that would raise the debt ceiling to carry it over until 2025, i.e. after the next election. There still remains the task of having the deal passed by both houses of congress before the X-date of Monday June 5. It is scheduled for the first vote in the house on Wednesday, May 31.

I am no federal budget expert but on the surface it seems like a deal that could just as easily have been arrived at without all this brinkmanship. This article outlines what is in it.
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