There is no such thing as a ‘friendly’ conversation with law enforcement

At a recent Science Café of which I am part of the organizing committee, we had two FBI agents to talk about how they track white-collar crime such as those involving Medicare and Medicaid fraud, with physicians inflating the charges for treatment. The two agents were very friendly and pleasant and before and after the session I had an interesting chat with them about their work. But that same friendliness can be a trap if you happen to be in their sights for any investigation.
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Two court challenges in elections

After the November elections, the Virginia House of Delegates is delicately balanced with 50 Republicans and 49 Democrats, a big shift from the 66-34 majority Republicans had before. One last seat is even more delicately balanced because, after a recount, it had 11,608 votes for Democratic candidate Shelley Simonds, 11,607 votes for the Republican David Yancey, and one disputed ballot. After examining the ballot, a three-judge panel ruled that the voter’s intent was for Yancey, thus causing a tie. Here’s the disputed ballot.


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Film review: The Thin Blue Line (1988) and the conviction of innocent people

This highly acclaimed documentary by Errol Morris has been on my to-see list for the longest time but I never got around to it. I watched it last night and it deserves all the accolades it received. It is also a grim reminder of how in America, at least in some jurisdictions, so many innocent people are executed or incarcerated for decades because the police and prosecutors care less about the truth than ‘notching up a win’ and closing a case as quickly as they can.

The case so well illustrates that when police and prosecutors severely distort the judicial process in order to get a conviction, it is not just that an innocent person is deprived of life and liberty, as bad as that is, but that a whole lot of random innocent people suffer because of it. In their zeal to convict an innocent man of murder, the Dallas police and prosecutors let the real killer walk free and subsequently commit a string of violent crimes for a decade that ended with another murder. It was only after he was arrested for that second murder that the crime spree ended. The authorities are thus indirectly responsible for all those crimes.
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The meaning of cousins ‘removed’

Recently we had as dinner guests a colleague and his wife and during the evening he happened to mention that someone was “his first cousin once removed’. I seized on this because I had never been sure what that meant and so asked him. He said that when he talked about someone being his first cousin once removed, he meant someone who was a child of his first cousin. But when I asked him how that other person would refer to him (since he was not the child of that person’s first cousin) he said he was not sure. I have also heard some people refer to the child of a first cousin as a second cousin.
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Keeping track of the creeps

The flood of rape, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment accusations against prominent people in public life has made it hard for anyone to keep track of who is accused of what and by whom. Via Rusty Blazenhoff I learned about something called The Creep Sheet that has compiled a list of all the accusations, sorted into categories like Entertainment, Politics and Government, Media, and so on.
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Another difference between Republicans and Democrats

When Republicans win elections, they go hard right in the policies they push, even more than they campaigned on. Even when they win with the slimmest of majorities or even after they lose the popular vote (in the cases of George W. Bush and Donald Trump), they immediately claim to have a mandate and push the most extreme policies. In the case of Trump, someone who is by any definition an East coast elitist, he now governs like a conservative evangelical fundamentalist, pursuing policies on contraception, abortion, and LGBT social issues that you can be sure that he and the people in the social circles he moved in before he became president were opposed or indifferent to.
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The politics of the latest Star Wars film

I stopped watching the Star Wars films after seeing episode 1 titled The Phantom Menace which, as all aficionados know, was the fourth film is the weird sequencing of that franchise. (Q: Why did episodes 4,5,6 get made before episodes 1,2,3? A: In charge of production, Yoda was.) So I had not planned to see the latest episode (I don’t know what number it is) titled The Last Jedi. But this review by Kate Aronoff surprised me because she says that this film takes a side in the class war.
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