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.
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“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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It’s good to know when to abandon a plan

I learned that in order to write, I could not depend upon the muse to inspire me but instead had to have a regular writing schedule that would compel me to write every day. That experience resulted in me even writing an article titled Seven Suggestions for Becoming a More Productive Writer in which the first suggestion was to set aside time every day to write, whether one wanted to or not. I like to quote Peter de Vries who said, “I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”

It is similar to exercise. For most people, physical exertion is not pleasant but seen as a necessity. We are told that having a regular exercise routine, or ‘plan’, is a good thing. Having a steady daily routine is a good way of maintaining discipline. Ad hoc exercise, where you do it only when the mood strikes you, tends to not work well because other things that are more interesting or seem more important can easily distract you, whereas if you prioritize a set time for exercise, you are more likely to stick to the plan.
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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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Supreme Court rejects Sackler deal

The US Supreme Court rejected the bankruptcy deal that had been negotiated by the Sackler family, the people behind Purdue Pharmaceuticals that was responsible for aggressively and falsely marketing opioids to large numbers of doctors and their patients, resulting in the massive opioid epidemic that we currently have in the US that has devastated families and communities. The drug was heavily marketed to doctors as having low risk of addiction, which was not true.

The Sacklers had brought the settlement in front of a friendly bankruptcy judge that effectively shielded much of the vast personal fortunes they had accumulated and instead passed the cost on to the company, which has filed for bankruptcy, on friendly terms, while not having to admit guilt and getting total immunity from future lawsuits that will leave their personal fortunes intact. For more details on why the bankruptcy deal was so bad, see here.
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Trump lies and dodges throughout the debate

The debate played out pretty much as I expected.

Joe Biden tried to give wonky answers to policy questions while serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) lied and lied repeatedly and avoided answering questions, pivoting almost immediately to complaining about the borders, and how everything was great when he was president and has gone to hell under Biden. It was basically the stuff that he says at his rallies.

His shtick was to largely claim that the US is weak and despised around the world because Biden has allowed open borders that allow millions of criminals and insane people into the country who are murdering people. He kept saying that over and over again. The moderators did not do any fact checking at all. The only thing they did was to repeat the question when SSACFT did not answer but then SSACFT would largely ignore it again.

While Biden tried to combat this with data, his presentation was not forceful enough.

On the optics, Biden seemed hesitant and soft-spoken and stumbled occasionally, while SSACFT portrayed confidence even as he flat-out lied. And in the US, since optics tends to win over substance, Biden would not have inspired his supporters with confidence.

Visualizing spacetime

One of the insights of the general theory of relativity has been to change our understanding of the relationship between gravity and spacetime. We now say that mass has the effect of distorting spacetime and it is that distortion that causes other objects with mass to move in ways that formerly we used to describe as being acted upon by a gravitational force that could act at a distance.

But visualizing that distortion of spacetime and its effects is not easy because the distortions are not visible in the three spatial dimensions that we can ‘see’ and must be described mathematically.

However, this video makes a valiant effort.