The “surreal goddamn nightmare” lives of QAnon followers’ loved ones

One sure-fire way to see if something is a cult is what happens within their families and friends. If they are so devoted to a group that they cut themselves off from everyone who does not share their beliefs, then they very likely belong to a cult. The responses to a survey of people who used to have relationships with those they knew who became QAnon devotees shows all the signs that it is a cult. One of them said that the best way to sum up the situation is as a “surreal goddamn nightmare.”
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The importance of down-ballot races

Samantha Bee explains why just getting rid of Trump in the November election is not enough, that the Republicans have to lose the Senate too. I would go further and say that all the way down the ballot to state and local races, Republicans need to lose and lose badly so that they realize that they are paying the price for installing and supporting a sociopath as president.

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Frontline on Newark police reforms

The PBS news program Frontline has been examining policing in the US and the efforts at reform. In a new episode released just this week The New Yorker magazine reporter Jelani Cobb goes back to the town of Newark, NJ where he grew up. He had gone there a few years earlier after the Obama administration had placed the city police under a consent decree following widespread abuses and ordered various reforms and appointed a monitor to oversee them.

He visited the city recently to see what had changed since then. He spoke with people like the city’s major Ras Baraka (the son of Amiri Baraka) with whom he had been friends with back in his school days, the city’s public safety commissioner, and the police chief. What he saw gave him some hope that meaningful reform is possible

However, the worst person in the program was the police union chief. Jelani Cobb showed him a video of police giving a horrific beating to a man, even hitting his head on the sidewalk after he had been subdued, and asked him if it was justified. The union chief said that it was.

It is becoming increasingly clear that police unions have become one of the biggest obstacles to police reform. They are some of the most reactionary organizations in the US, going beyond perfectly legitimate activities such as fighting for salaries and benefits for their members to covering up, justifying, and excusing the worst acts of police brutality, and opposing any meaningful attempts at improving things.

US shows decline in the Social Progress Index

Evidence continues to grow about the decline of the US. The latest comes from the annual report of the Social Progress Index. As Kevin Drum describes it:

The index includes things like health care, access to education, personal safety, sanitation, human rights, and so forth, and combines them all into a single number. This number doesn’t change a lot from year to year, and from 2011 to 2016 it went up by 0.34 in the United States. Since then, however, it’s fallen by an astonishing 1.06 in just four years. We now rank 28th in the world, just behind Greece.

Note that this isn’t an economic index. The US is still one of the richest countries in the world. We just aren’t using those riches to make much social progress.

This is really not a surprise. Social progress does not register in the consciousness of Trump and the Republicans. What drives them is power and greed.

There is always one major problem when you take multiple measures and then weight them to arrive at a single number. That single number enables you to compare different countries but that number also depends on how you weight the individual items to get the composite result and that introduces a lot of subjectivity because if you change the weighting, you can get a different rank order of countries. So the more meaningful use of such data is to take a longitudinal approach and see how, keeping the weighting system unchanged, the number changes over time, rather than take a snapshot approach and compare different countries at one time.

However did they figure that out?

We know that big companies collect vast amounts of data on us based on our online presence and know our likes and dislikes in the minutest detail. So it is not surprising when we get emails recommending products for us to buy. But I was struck by an email I got from Amazon recently that said “Hello, Mano Singham, We have found something you might like.”

And the recommendation was … my own book.

Election voting has begun!

Although the official election day is November 3, in practice the election began on Friday when in-person early voting began in four states, Minnesota, Virginia, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Lines of voters stretched from polling places in Virginia and Minnesota as early voting started in four states, the first of the 2020 presidential election.

The longest lines were found in Virginia, where voters previously needed a reason to cast an early ballot. In the state’s Fairfax County, where reports showed lines stretching for hours, election workers scrambled to open an additional voting room at the county government centre.

The pitfalls of vox pop reporting

As the election nears, there are more and more media attempts to gauge the mood of the electorate. Polls of course are one indicator but given how people got burned by polls in 2016, people are a little skeptical of putting too much faith in them. Another popular reporting staple is to go out to various communities and talk to the people and then report on what they are saying, often quoting specific individuals. These vox pop pieces (short of vox populi or ‘voice of the people’) are interesting but how seriously can you take these people in the street interviews?
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020)

She was resolute in her determination to uphold liberal and humane values on the US Supreme Court and her death today will be felt keenly. There is really nothing that I can say in praise of this magnificent jurist that will not be said much better by people who knew her well and have studied her career closely.

The only thing I can say is how saddened I am by the news.

Trump will solve all problems by November 2nd

Trump has said that a vaccine for covid-19 will be available in October, a wildly unrealistic scenario. It is clearly an election vote-grabbing strategy As the clock ticks down to the election on November 3, we can expect Trump to make more and more extravagant promises in an effort to convince his supporters that his presidency has not been a colossal failure in pretty much every area other than making the wealthy much wealthier.

Between now and election day, we can expect him to promise that by election day he will end the wars Afghanistan and Iraq, produce a comprehensive new health care plan, solve the immigration issue, find a cure for cancer, and send astronauts to Mars and have them come back. Unrealistic, you say? Don’t you realize that you have to believe for good things to come true?

Samantha Bee takes on his promise that a vaccine will be found within the next few weeks.

Jerry Falwell’s fall becomes literal

Jerry Falwell, Jr., who had to resign as president of Liberty University after revelations about the swinging sexual lifestyle of him and his wife Becki, turns out to have even more hypocrisies. Falwell’s father, the founder of the university, had instituted extremely harsh restrictions on the student body when it came to dress, behavior, and alcohol, with a strict no-use policy for the last item. His son vigorously implemented these policies when he took over as president. But it now appears that Falwell is an alcoholic.
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