prior probability

Today (July 1) is Canada Day.

Who killed Ashli Babbitt (pictured below) on January 6? The Capitol Police or the Secret Service? (FYI: See this recent report in The Spectator, suggesting that it was someone associated with Vice President Mike Pence’s security detail, and not a member of the Capitol Police, who killed Ms Babbitt on that fateful day.) Either way, the fact that our government has not brought any charges against Ms Babbitt’s killer–in fact, the government has still not even released his name–should be of great concern to us all. Whatever happened to “equal justice under law”? And why does the “lamestream media” refuse to report on this cover-up?

New York City’s attempt to use “Ranked Choice Voting” for the June 2021 mayoral primaries has been a total disaster. (See here, for example.) I warned about this problem last year when I discussed “Quadratic Voting” in this blog post. Admittedly, Quadratic Voting is more exotic and complex than Ranked Choice Voting, but either way, the main lesson here is that voting systems need to be simple, not perfect.

When will the free countries of the world take action against the Chinese government on behalf of the people of Hong Kong and the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province? In the meantime, check out these pieces of protest art via Vidar (Street Art Utopia).

Now that I have completed my summer session teaching duties, I will be free to focus on my research and writing for the rest of the summer. Among other things, I am writing up a new paper tentatively titled “The Leibniz Conspiracy” (about which I will be blogging about in the next day or two), and I am reading the following works:

1. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy, available here. Since my wife and I visited the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in May (a museum devoted to the events of Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas), I have immersed myself in the Zapruder film and JFK conspiracy theories. Along with the movies “Parkland” and “JFK”, this is the third book I have read on the subject since the month of May!
2. Richard Jeffries, Subjective Probability (The Real Thing), available here. Given my “conversion” to Bayesian methods and subjective probability about a decade ago, I am now turning my attention to Jeffries’ work in this area.
3. Cynthia Saltzman, Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast, available here. The author and book cover are pictured below. I ordered this book on the strength of Tyler Cowen’s recommendation (see here); my copy of this book arrived yesterday, and I am already on Chapter 2.
4. Gregory Stock, The Book of Questions, available here.
5. Nic Van Til, The Commercialization of Outer Space, available here.

In addition to “No me queda mas“, another one of my favorite Selena songs is her 1995 single “Fotos y recuerdos.” Alas, I was disappointed that this beautiful song was not featured for some reason on the recent Selena series on Netflix.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Epsilon.

This beautiful painting is by Ethiopian artist Makeda Bizuneh (circa 2013).

The Chinese government is committing cultural genocide against the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province (East Turkestan), detaining approximately one million people over the past five years, subjecting them to abuse and “re-education” and forcing them to denounce their religion. See here, here, here, and below: