John P2022-09-21T15:20:51-05:00September 21st, 2022|

Tom Friedman, writing in the NYT, does a decent job of trying to define what the end result of the war may be.  None of his predictions, alas, seem particularly optimistic. But they are probably realistic.

John P2022-09-14T16:25:32-05:00September 14th, 2022|

Much, much credit is due for the incredibly philanthropic contribution to our planet’s future made by Patagonia’s Chouinard family.  Read about it in the NYT.  If only more wealthy individuals were so unselfish…

• Zeynep Tufekci writes in the NYT about the benefits of the updated bivalent Covid booster vaccines. An excerpt:

“Many European countries and Canada, for example, did a better job of making sure more of their population got boosters. Their cumulative death and illness tolls from the Omicron wave are sharply lower than those of the United States, where only about a third of eligible adults had gotten boosters, compared with two-thirds of adults in many European countries. The United States has had a death rate 80 percent greater than Canada’s from the Omicron wave — a similar pattern holds globally. Countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have about 80 percent or more of their adult population boosted, and their death tolls are even lower.”

• Might as well try to inject some optimism; see Matt Yglesias’ posting re. Janet Yellen’s take on the economy. I was especially taken with this graph of the recent recent growth of real GDP:

• Jamelle Bouie has it right with his Newsletter’s take on the Republican response to student debt cancellation:

“The fact of the matter is the Republican Party does not have anything to offer the millions of working- and middle-class Americans who labor under the burden of student debt. For all the talk of “populism,” the party is still hostile to the social safety net, opposed to raising the minimum wage, hostile to unions and worker power and virtually every economic policy intervention that isn’t tax cuts and upward redistribution from the many to the most fortunate few.

To debate the reality of student debt relief is to make that more than clear to the public at large. Republicans, then, are trying to make this a debate over culture, to try to reduce issues of class to a question of aesthetics, with traditional blue-collar workers on one side and the image of an ungrateful and unproductive young person on the other. And they’re hoping, as always, that you won’t notice.”

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