Musings

Isn’t it ironic…

From Heather Cox Richardson, writing in her September 28 Newsletter:

“This destructive storm highlights the distance between reality and the ideology that calls for getting rid of the federal government.

As a newly elected congress member in 2013, now-governor of Florida Ron DeSantis was one of the 67 House Republicans who voted against a $9.7 billion federal flood insurance assistance package for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey. Now, with Florida on the ropes, DeSantis asked President Joe Biden for an emergency declaration to free up federal money and federal help even before the storm hit, and said Tuesday, ‘We all need to work together, regardless of party lines.'”

John Patrick2022-09-29T11:48:04-05:00September 29th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Analysis of the state of the Ukraine-Russia Conflict

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 Patrick2022-09-21T15:20:51-05:00September 21st, 2022|Musings|

Zeynep Tufekci

• 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.”

John Patrick2022-09-19T15:17:04-05:00September 19th, 2022|HomeRecommended|

A giant thank you to Patagonia’s

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…

John Patrick2022-09-14T16:25:32-05:00September 14th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Matt Yglesias channels Janet Yellen on the economy

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:

John Patrick2022-09-12T14:18:23-05:00September 12th, 2022|HomeRecommended|

Steve Jobs on our interdependency

From the Steve Jobs Archive, a site set up by his friends and family, an email Steve sent to himself in 2010:

From: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com

To: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com

Date: Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:08PM

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow
I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive
of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless
to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor,
object oriented programming, or most of the technology
I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am
totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

Sent from my iPad

John Patrick2022-09-12T14:15:49-05:00September 9th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Sad…

From the Washington Post, Drew Harwell reporting; “Truth Social faces financial peril as worry about Trump’s future grows“

Sad 😉

John Patrick2022-08-27T11:38:56-05:00August 27th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Jamelle Bouie — “Republicans would like to offer you some resentment”

• 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.”

John Patrick2022-08-27T10:49:09-05:00August 27th, 2022|HomeRecommended|

Tax takes

More good stuff from Matt Yglesias, writing on the peculiar reluctance of law-and-order Republicans to support adequate funding of the IRS (defund the police? horrors! defund the IRS? they vote yes!):

“…the government collecting the tax revenue it’s owed is unambiguously good, and the Republican Party’s opposition to it is telling and disturbing.

After all, they wrote a tax reform bill in 2017, and even though their bill cut taxes on net, it did raise a bunch of revenue (most famously from curbing the SALT deduction) to partially offset the cost of the tax cut. The GOP could have increased tax enforcement as another offset, and instead of letting Democrats spend the revenue, they could have used it to make the cuts in the Trump tax bill even bigger.

But they didn’t. Because separate from the party’s overall view on the desirable level of taxation, they’ve developed a peculiar soft spot for tax cheats.”

John Patrick2022-08-24T09:58:29-05:00August 24th, 2022|Home, Musings|

They’re scary all right…

I agree. And I was the CIA Director https://t.co/LRAHDDyy4n

— Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) August 17, 2022

John Patrick2022-08-18T12:57:36-05:00August 18th, 2022|Home, Musings|