fraud, Helen, time

1) So Trump gave his speech on election fraud. His real motivating factor here is his belief that he's so wonderful that nobody would vote against him (except his enemies, who hate him for unfathomable Reasons), so if he loses an election it must be rigged. Note his concentration on the presidential election he lost and not at all on the ones he won, though if there were fraud it would be widespread.

The substantive argument, which I've seen put forth in good faith by sincerely deluded people, is this: there are jurisdictions where the earliest-counted ballots trend Republican, but by the end of the counting they turn out to be heavily Democratic. It seems to them self-evident that Democratic election officials have dumped in loads of fake ballots to change the outcome.

What hasn't occurred to these people is that the earliest-counted ballots may not be representative of the whole. The first ballots counted are the absentees, and absentee voters tend to run Republican. But they'll be outweighed by the in-person votes that come in later.

Besides, if there were loads of fake ballots it would be easy to detect this, starting with implausible turnout figures.

I can testify, as a former Hugo administrator, that the first tranch of votes coming in will in no way predict the eventual winners, and there's no particular reason in the Hugos for the earliest ballots to lean one way or another.

Our election security is fine, and proposals to require ID at the polls, which wouldn't prevent the kind of fraud that's being alleged, are merely smokescreens to make it harder for Blacks, poor people, and other Democrat-leaning constituencies to vote.

2) Classics professor Denise McCoskey on the casting of Helen of Troy:

If you want to talk about historical accuracy, the Ancient Greeks would be far more upset that these things are not being done in Greek than about anything involving the appearance of these characters. To have Helen speak English is a far bigger transgression than to have her appear as a skin color that you don’t like. I think that’s something that is getting distorted for obvious reasons. And I don’t have a problem with that, if you want English-speaking audiences to engage with Helen—I teach English translations—but then you have to say that there’s a lot of ways we can translate Helen that has to do with our audience and what we want to think about today.

3) The bill enacting permanent Daylight Saving Time, which has passed the House, still needs to get through the Senate and the president's desk before it becomes law. Let's hope it fails one of these hurdles. People have forgotten that we enacted permanent DST once before, in 1974. But the outcry against morning darkness in the winter was so intense that it was repealed within a year. What this story proves is that DST can't really adjust the length of the day: what its supporters actually have a beef with is the axial tilt of the earth, and no legislation will help with that.

There's apparently a competing congressional bill that would return us to permanent Standard Time, what we had before DST was invented, and that I would support.