The Trump voters

The big puzzle is whether Donald Trump’s supporters will be swayed by the relentless attacks on him by the party and Washington establishment. Will Trump succeed even without the full support of right-wing power brokers like Rush Limbaugh (who prefers Ted Cruz) and the active opposition of Glenn Beck and the motley crowd of conservative extremists that attended the annual CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) that met this weekend and which Trump canceled on at the last minute?
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End of the Alabama’s stand against same-sex marriage

The state of Alabama has been one of the holdouts against same-sex marriage despite the US Supreme Court ruling in June 2015 nullifying all state bans against it. The state’s chief justice Roy Moore has been adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage and on March 3, 2015, before the US Supreme Court’s ruling, the state’s supreme court (with only one justice in dissent) had barred all the state probate court judges from issuing such licenses.
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New galaxy found 13.4 billion light-years away

The discovery by the Hubble telescope of a galaxy that is 13.4 billion light years away is an exciting development. This is not only because it is further away than anything we have seen so far but also because it suggests that stars and galaxies were being formed at the very earliest stages of the universe, which is currently calculated as being 13.81 billion years old.
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The puzzling strategy being adopted against Trump

The Republican party and the Washington establishment have clearly decided that they are deeply worried by the idea of Donald Trump being the party nominee and have finally declared all out war on him. The last debate saw Fox News tag team with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to attack him with all they had. The Washington Post has editorialized against him. Republican senate leader Mitch McConnell has said that the party will not support him. And the party’s 2012 nominee Mitt Romney gave a blistering speech against him. All kinds of SuperPACS funded by wealthy donors are now running ads against him in the upcoming primary states.
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A medical show without the gross medical scenes

I don’t watch medical dramas because they dwell too much on what takes place inside the surgical rooms and I am not fond of scenes involving blood and gore, which is why I tend to also avoid US police dramas. So I was interested in this comedy TV series called Save Me by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that apparently deals with the sequence of events that lead up to the 9-1-1 call and not so much after that.
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The torture issue exposes more hypocrisy of Trump opponents

The rise of Donald Trump has seen a whole lot of people in the Republican party and conservative movement suddenly realizing that divisive rhetoric and xenophobic attitudes and bigotry are bad things, even though they were advocating those very same things for decades except using coded language. They seem outraged that he is openly saying what they were covertly advocating.
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The irrationality of sporting allegiances

In a comment to an earlier post on cricket, Marcus Ranum asked an interesting question about sports that I thought deserved a thoughtful answer.

I am interested why an otherwise rational person such as yourself, Prof. Singham, feels concern about a professional national team’s performance. What makes you feel connected to their defeat or victory?

It never made any sense to me why anyone cares about professional sports, other than tribalism or nationalism. How do you make an emotional connection between the little guys in the pictures, who are being paid to play a game, and “my team”?

I do enjoy occasionally watching professional sports because they are so super darned good. And all the weird musculature from the performance-enhancing drugs is kind of fun to look at. It’s the emotional connection that makes no sense to me at all.

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