Sometimes a sandwich is just a sandwich

Recall the case of the man who was prosecuted by the federal government for throwing a sandwich at a CBP agent. Yesterday, he was acquitted by a jury.

There was no doubt as to the facts of the case. Sean Charles Dunn flatly said, “I did it. I threw the sandwich.” It was clear that the government tried to make the case into a warning to anyone to not show disrespect to any of its ICE or CBP thugs, after a viral video of the incident made them a laughing stock.

A grand jury in DC declined to indict Dunn in August on a felony assault charge, but he was eventually charged with a misdemeanor. The case moved ahead in federal court, with US district judge Carl Nichols acknowledging the strange case and saying the trial would be short “because it’s the simplest case in the world”.

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Pelosi leaves, time for Schumer and Jeffries to also go

Former speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that she is not going to run for re-election to her San Francisco congressional seat in 2026. As speaker, while she was a shrewd tactician and had the skills to keep a boisterous caucus together on some major issues such as Obamacare and protecting some safety net issues, she was typical of the party’s old guard of neoliberals, very solicitous to Wall Street interests, unwilling to take on the oligarchy, or to make even the mildest criticisms of any atrocity that Israel committed. This made her out of step with the current generation and it was definitely time for her to go.
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Republicans flailing in the aftermath of Tuesday’s losses

As usually happens, the hot takes by the losers following a bad election loss like what Trump and the Republicans suffered on Tuesday tend to be somewhat extreme. Although they lost everywhere, it is Mamdani’s win that seems to have struck a real nerve and it is not hard to see why. The defeats in the governors races in Virginia and New Jersey, though by much larger margins than anyone expected, were to largely centrist candidates who did, however, lean into the fact that running against Trump was a good idea, something that Mamdani demonstrated throughout his surprising race that took him from 1% in the polls a year ago to winning over 50% of the vote on Tuesday. For example, 71% of people who voted for Mikie Sherrill for governor of New York Jersey said that it was a vote against Trump.

What must bother them is that Mamdani did not at all shy away from all the attempts to ‘other’ him, to make him look like ‘not one of us’. Instead he embraced it. As he said defiantly in his victory speech, “I am young … I am Muslim. I am a Democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.” Republicans are making a big mistake if they think that Mamdani won because of those qualities. New Yorkers may be more progressive than the nation as a whole but they are not that progressive. I think he won despite those things being a handicap and if Republicans focus on those things and don’t look closely at what made Mamdani’s message such a winning one that it neutralized all those deficits, they will be making a big mistake. Mamdani’s achievement was in seizing upon the issues that New Yorkers cared about and refusing to be sidetracked by attacks on his biography. Others could have done what he did but he was the one who saw the opening and seized it. The fact that he is charismatic and energetic and presents a vision of youthful energy and change undoubtedly helped.
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Voters give the finger to Trump and Republicans

Tuesday saw Democrats sweep the board in every election, winning easily even in races that were expected to be close or even where Republicans were expected to win.

The headline win was by Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City defeating Andrew Cuomo by 50% to 41%. The turnout was the highest since 1969 and Mamdani got over one million votes, the first person to do so. The total votes cast was two million, almost double the 1.1 million who voted in the last mayoral election four years ago, which shows extraordinary enthusiasm. Opponents had thrown everything at Mamdani, including the fact that he was a Muslim and saying he was a Communist. His outspoken condemnation of Israeli genocide earned him the enmity of the Israel lobby and AIPAC, who tried their hardest to defeat him. Also against him were the elites, those who live in the city as well as those who have business interests in the city but live in the wealthy enclaves on Long Island. They raised huge sums of money to try and stop him, and failed.

In his speech, Mamdani did not shy away from the socialist label, even quoting socialist Eugene Debs who said ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity’. He had a message for Trump and defied his threats, saying “Hear me, President Trump, when I say this, To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” He added, “The conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate… I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older, I am Muslim. I am a Democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”
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TV review: Maigret (2025)

Georges Simenon was a prolific author who wrote a large number of novels featuring the French detective Jules Maigret. There have been many dramatic incarnations of this iconic character as this article discusses. About a year ago, I reviewed the 2016 British TV series Maigret starring Rowan Atkinson in the title role.. That series stayed close to the original in terms of period and the way that Maigret, his wife, and his supporting team were portrayed.

Now there is yet another version of the Maigret series, again called simply Maigret, that makes quite dramatic changes, while still keeping him as a chief inspector in Paris. For one thing it takes place in the present time so this Maigret has all the modern technology at his disposal. Maigret himself and his wife have been transformed from a sedate couple in their mid-fifties where the wife is a homemaker, to a hot young couple where his wife now works as a medical professional. Maigret’s team, all white men in the original, while retaining their old names, has also become younger and gender and ethnically diverse, with the addition of an insubordinate and insolent inspector who is jealous of Maigret and thus provides some internal tension within the team. The actor who plays Maigret, Benjamin Wainwright, has a disconcerting physical similarity to the actor who plays the annoying goofball Jonah Ryan in the comedy series Veep which I found a bit disconcerting at first, but that feeling soon passed.
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Consciousness, measurement, and quantum mechanics – Part 7

(See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6. Also I am going to suspend the limit of three comments per post for this series of posts because it is a topic that benefits from back and forth discussions.)

In order to fully appreciate the role of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle on the question of objective reality and measurement, a highly truncated history of quantum mechanics might help.

The theory traces its beginnings to 1900 when Max Planck decided to assume that the material that made up the walls of the cavity inside a body that was at a uniform temperature (called a blackbody) could be treated as oscillators that could only absorb and radiate energy in discrete amounts (‘quanta’) and not continuously as had been previously assumed. The size of these quanta depended upon the frequency of oscillation as well as a new constant he introduced that has come to be known as Planck’s constant h. The value of this constant was very small, which is why it had long seemed that the energy could be absorbed and radiated in any amount. This was a purely ad hoc move on his part that had no theoretical justification whatsoever except that it gave the correct result for the radiation spectrum of the energy emitted by the blackbody. Planck himself viewed it as a purely mathematical trick that had no basis in reality but was just a placeholder until a real theory came along. But as time went on and the idea of quanta caught on, he began to think that it could represent something real.

In 1905 Einstein proposed that light energy also came in quanta and this was used to explain the photoelectric effect, which was what he was awarded the Nobel prize for in 1921. Then Niels Bohr in 1913 used the idea of quantization to come up with a model of simple atoms that explained some of their radiation spectra. Both of their works used Planck’s constant.

Erwin Schrodinger’s eponymous equation was proposed by him in 1926 and set in motion the field of quantum mechanics because it laid the foundations of a real theory that enabled one to systematically set about making calculations of observables. Almost simultaneously, Werner Heisenberg came up with alternative formulation based on matrices. (Later on P. A. M. Dirac showed that the two formulations were equivalent.) But Schrodinger’s theory was in the form of a differential equation that enabled one to calculate the wave function of a particle that was moving under the influence of a potential. Differential equations and wave behavior were both very familiar to physicists and thus Schrodinger’s approach was more easily accessible and used more widely.
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The fall of a royal grifter

The man formerly known as Prince Andrew but in future will be just plain old Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, is undoubtedly a grifter, willing to trade on his title and the connections generated by his family connections to fund his greed and lust for a lavish lifestyle. But the public revelations of his association with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his sexual relations with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a young women whom Epstein offered to him and other men, has been too much for the current king who has set about cutting him loose from the family, at least publicly.

The entitled behavior of people like Windsor is usually something that is learned at an early age. It is said that he was the favorite child of the late queen who indulged him and protected him and partially funded his lifestyle, though his greed for even more led him into all manner of shady deals with shady people. Throughout his life, there have been questions about how he and his now ex-wife Sarah Ferguson funded their luxurious lifestyle, which includes the upkeep of the 30-room Royal Lodge described as “a Georgian mansion sitting in 40 hectares of secluded grounds in Windsor Great Park” for which he paid no rent, or in 2014 to buy for £18 million a chalet in Switzerland. On top of this was the lavish lifestyle that he enjoyed.
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Judges order that SNAP payments must continue

Two federal judges have ruled that SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) payments that assist low-income people to pay for food must continue despite the government shutdown. The program assists 42 million people, about one in eight of the population.

John McConnell, a US district judge in Providence, issued a temporary restraining order in the Rhode Island case at the behest of those plaintiffs. They had argued that the US Department of Agriculture’s suspension of Snap benefits due to kick in on Saturday was unlawful.
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In the Massachusetts case, the US district judge Indira Talwani in Boston gave the administration until Monday to say whether it would partly pay for the benefits for November with contingency money or fund them fully with additional funds.

The Trump administration maintains that the SNAP money will run out by November 1 unless Congress reconvenes and passes new appropriations.
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