The Raygun controversy at the Olympics

I do not pay much attention to the Olympic games and never watch any event in real time. I tend to like only those events where the performances are measured using instruments and have little interest in those where people make judgments as to the difficulty, aesthetics, and so on. The events that interest me are the track and field ones and I sometimes watch clips of those events if I read that something interesting happened. The fact that I already know the result does not bother me. It is seeing top athletes pushing themselves to the limit that I find interesting, but not enough to devote more that a few minutes to it.

However, during the Paris Olympics this past summer, various news headlines registered in my consciousness in passing and I became vaguely aware that there had been some controversy involving the new event of breakdancing that was introduced for the first time, part of a trend by the people behind the Olympics of trying to attract younger viewers who do not find the traditional events interesting enough.
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Blog comments policy

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. An email sent to me privately by a long-time lurker brought home to me how people might be hesitant to join in the conversation here, even if they have something to say, out of fear that something that they write, however well-intentioned, will be seized upon and responded to in a hostile manner by some of the most egregious offenders.

So here is a rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.

It is well known that the comments sections on the internet can be a cesspool. I had hoped that the people who come to this site would be different, leading to more mature exchanges. But I was clearly too sanguine. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

The other issue is the hostility that is often expressed, often triggered by the most trivial of things. People should remember that this is a blog, not a journal or magazine. There are no copy editors, proof readers, and fact checkers. In such a casual atmosphere, people (and that includes me) will often inadvertently be less than precise or accurate in what they say. If the error is trivial but the meaning is clear, the error should be ignored. If the meaning is not clear, clarification can be politely asked for. If it is a genuine error, a correction can be politely made. If I think people are being rude or condescending or insulting (and I do not mean just abusive language but also the tone), I will ban the person.

For me, and I suspect for the other bloggers on this network, the rewards of blogging lie in creating space for a community of people to exchange ideas and views on a variety of topics. But that is pleasurable only if people post comments that are polite and respectful towards others, even while disagreeing. Some time ago, I wrote a post that a good philosophy of life is “Don’t be a jerk”. That would be a good rule to keep in mind when posting comments as well. There is absolutely no call for anyone to be rude or sneering or condescending towards others.

Almost all the commenters on this blog contribute positively and it is a pleasure to read their contributions and interact with them. It is a very few who think that a sneering, condescending, or abrasively argumentative tone is appropriate. My patience has been worn thin by some of their comments in the past. If I think, for any reason whatsoever, that someone is behaving like a jerk, I will ban them. I am in no mood to argue about this. I will not make any public announcement about who is banned. They will simply find that they can no longer post comments.

So I would suggest that in future commenters think carefully before they post anything, taking into account what they say and how often they say something. They should try to put themselves in the shoes of the person they are arguing with and think about how they might feel if their comment had been directed at them. They should also think about how their comments might look to others. It surprises me that people do not realize how badly this kind of behavior reflects on themselves.

Readers may have noticed that there are no ads on any of the blogs on this network. Nobody is making any money at all. In fact, it is a money sink and PZ Myers pays for the costs of the servers out of his Patreon account that you can contribute to if you would like to support the network. The bloggers here blog because they want to create spaces for conversations on issues that they care about. ‘Clicks’ have no monetary value. That means that I do not care how many people come to the site.

I realize that these guidelines are somewhat vague. So a good rule of thumb would be: If in doubt as to whether to post something because it might violate these boundaries, that is a good sign to not post it. I will be the sole judge of whether the boundary has been crossed.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I have zero tolerance for people who try to find ways to skirt the guidelines such as, for example, skirting the three comment limit by continuing it on another thread. I also reserve the right to make exceptions to the rules at any time, if I feel it is warranted. These decisions will be solely mine and will be final. There will be no discussion, debate, or appeal. If anyone objects because they think that I am being arbitrary, they are of course free to leave and never return.

Pete Hegseth makes Matt Gaetz look good by comparison

Trump’s nominee for defense secretary Pete Hegseth brings no discernible qualifications to. the position. Like some of the other nominees, his main qualification seems to be that he looks good on TV. But today a new report by investigative reporter Jane Mayer of the New Yorker has a whistleblower making serious allegations about his behavior when he was the head of a non-profit. He looks so bad that Matt Gaetz, who was forced to withdraw his nomination as attorney general, looks good by comparison.

Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

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Exodus of ob-gyns from Texas

The state of Texas has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, resulting in the needless deaths of women whom doctors were fearful of treating for pregnancy-related problems because the state could prosecute them under the law. ProPublica has been exposing these cases and reports on yet another one.

Wrapping his wife in a blanket as she mourned the loss of her pregnancy at 11 weeks, Hope Ngumezi wondered why no obstetrician was coming to see her.

Over the course of six hours on June 11, 2023, Porsha Ngumezi had bled so much in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land that she’d needed two transfusions. She was anxious to get home to her young sons, but, according to a nurse’s notes, she was still “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.”
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Randomizing a deck of cards

I like the card game bridge and play in local duplicate club tournaments about twice a week. Depending on the game or the preference of the director, the hands that are played are either shuffled and dealt by the players at the beginning of the session or are hands that have been previously generated by a computer and arranged by a dedicated card sorter.

In bridge, each of the four players starts with 13 cards and if the deck of cards has been completely randomized before being dealt, the distribution of the four suits (in any order) can vary from somewhat even distributions such as 4-4-3-2 (21.6% probability) to the next most likely 5-3-3-2 (15.5%), 5-4-3-1- (12.9%). 5-4-2-2- (10.6%), 4-3-3-3 (10.5%) and then starts dropping sharply until it gets to 9-3-1-0 (0.01%). More skewed distributions are even rarer. (The Official Encyclopaedia of Bridge (1984))

A common refrain that I hear from players at the table is that they feel that the hands that are generated by the computer tend to have more skewed distributions than the ones shuffled and dealt at the table. They think that whoever is in charge of the computer that generates the hands tend to program it that way in order to provide greater challenge. I heard this so often that I became curious if this was the case and looked it up to see if there was anything to this bit of bridge folklore.
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ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu and Galant is a landmark decision

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. You can read the ruling here.

Jeremy Scahill amd Murtaza Hussain report that this is the first time that a leader favored by the US and western powers has been held to account.

In its ruling, the court explicitly rejected arguments made by Israel and the U.S. that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over Israel. “The acceptance by Israel of the Court’s jurisdiction is not required, as the Court can exercise its jurisdiction on the basis of the territorial jurisdiction of Palestine,” the court said.

“This is a watershed event in the history of international justice. The ICC has never, in over 21 years, indicted a pro-Western official. Indeed, no international court since World War II has done so,” said human rights attorney and war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody. “Up until now, the instruments of international justice have been used almost exclusively to address crimes by defeated adversaries as in the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, powerless outcasts, or opponents of the West such as Vladimir Putin or Slobodan Milošević.”
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Gaetz quits

Trump’s controversial nominee for attorney general has withdrawn his name for the position. This took me by surprise since just this morning the House ethics committee was deadlocked on whether to release their report on the various allegations of sexual misconduct, some involving minors, that have plagued him for years. I thought that move would clear the way for his nomination to go through.

In his statement, Gaetz gave the usual ‘for the good of the country’ pablum.

After meeting with senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Gaetz determined that his nomination was “becoming a distraction to the critical work” of the new Trump administration, he explained on X.

“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s [justice department] must be in place and ready on Day 1,” Gaetz said.
…

The announcement comes one day after the House ethics committee deadlocked over releasing its report on allegations that Gaetz engaged in sexual relations with a 17-year-old girl. The justice department launched its own inquiry of the allegations but declined to bring charges, and Gaetz has consistently denied the claims.

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This should be good. The Onion wants to buy Infowars

Infowars was the site where Alex Jones promoted all his conspiracy theories. Probably the most hateful one was where he claimed that the massacre of 20 first grade children and six teachers at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 never happened but that all the family members and friends and colleagues seen grieving were ‘crisis actors’, advancing the cause of gun control. Not only did this cause those families great pain, but Jones’s lunatic followers took it upon themselves to seek out and harass them, with some of them having to move repeatedly to escape them.

They sued Jones and won $1.5 billion in damages that required Jones to sell off his assets. He tried to declare bankruptcy to evade it but the courts ruled that this maneuver was not allowed.
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TV review: Maigret (2016)

The prolific author Georges Simenon, in the years between 1931 and 1972, published 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Jules Maigret, a police officer working in Paris in the mid-twentieth century.

In some ways the stories resemble Columbo in that the focus is not on providing a surprise ending. In many stories, like Columbo, Maigret strongly suspects who the criminal is early on and sets about finding ways to get evidence against him. Like Columbo, he prefers not to use his first name and is referred to as just Maigret, even by his wife. Like Columbo, he is said to be happily married with no children. But unlike with Columbo, his wife does appear in the stories in a supportive and empathetic role. Also unlike Columbo who works alone and seems to be given a free hand by his superiors, Maigret has a team of assistants to aid him but is often interfered with by his superiors for political reasons.

Maigret is a middle-aged man who smokes a pipe and is soft-spoken, contemplative, and measured in his utterances. He is extremely low key and in solving cases, he uses psychology to to get in the mind of the victim and the criminal, trying to figure out the reasons behind their actions. He is kind, empathetic, and a good listener and is known to be highly ethical and thus respected even by the criminal classes.
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