Musings

Corporations vs Democracy

• An important opinion piece from Alex Kingsbury in the NY Times — “Who Is Financing Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Caucus? Corporations You Know.“; an excerpt:

“All told, as of this week, corporations and industry groups gave almost $32 million to the House and Senate members who voted to overturn the election and to the G.O.P. committees focused on the party’s congressional campaigns. The top 10 companies that gave money to those members, according to CREW’s analysis of campaign finance disclosures, are Koch Industries, Boeing, Home Depot, Valero Energy, Lockheed Martin, UPS, Raytheon, Marathon Petroleum, General Motors and FedEx. All of those companies, with the exception of Koch Industries and FedEx, once said they’d refrain from donating to politicians who voted to reject the election results.

Of the 249 companies that promised not to fund the 147 senators and representatives who voted against any of the results, fewer than half have stuck to their promise, according to CREW.

Kudos aplenty to the 85 corporations that stuck to their guns and still refuse to fund the seditious, including Nike, PepsiCo, Lyft, Cisco, Prudential, Marriott, Target and Zillow. That’s what responsible corporate citizenship looks like. It’s also patriotic.”

John Patrick2022-06-16T19:06:17-05:00June 16th, 2022|HomeRecommended|

Recent Covid Vaccination Rates and Mortality

Some positive information, this from David Leonhardt’s NYT Morning Newsletter of June 9. An excerpt:

“…Covid’s racial gaps have narrowed and, more recently, even flipped. Over the past year, the Covid death rate for white Americans has been 14 percent higher than the rate for Black Americans and 72 percent higher than the Latino rate, according to the latest C.D.C. data.”

and

“The successful part of the story is the rapid increase in vaccination among Black and Latino Americans since last year. Today, the vaccination rate for both groups is slightly higher than it is for white Americans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s surveys.”

Gosh, it seems that getting vaccinated against Covid may save lives…

John Patrick2022-06-09T14:55:18-05:00June 9th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Ministry for the Future – Redux

As I had noted in a previous post, Kim Stanley Robinson does a superb job of rendering climate change’s near future earth in his novel The Ministry for the Future. The harrowing first chapter I mentioned back then foreshadowed this year’s heat wave in India. And now Bill Gates has joined Ezra Klein, Barack Obama, and Bill McKibben in recommending the novel. I urge you to give it a read.

John Patrick2022-06-06T15:22:51-05:00June 6th, 2022|Home, Musings|

On guns in the US

• What they said:

Nicholas Kristof’s How to Reduce Shootings in the NYT

and

Steve Kerr at his pre game news conference

John Patrick2022-05-25T10:20:34-05:00May 25th, 2022|HomeRecommended|

Donald McNeil Jr. on Monkeypox

Donald McNeil writes a nice piece in Medium discussing the recent Monkeypox outbreak, including his views on an appropriate level of concern (his is a bit more than mine). But definitely worth reading..

John Patrick2022-05-24T16:52:54-05:00May 24th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Crypto revealed

• This is a nice interview of UC-Berkeley computer researcher Nicholas Weaver in Current Affairs. He does a pointedly humorous takedown of what he labels “a giant self-assembled Ponzi scheme. You hear about people making money in Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. They only make money because some other sucker lost more.”

and:

“So the stock market and the bond market are a positive-sum game. There are more winners than losers. Cryptocurrency starts with zero-sum. So it starts with a world where there can be no more winning than losing. We have systems like this. It’s called the horse track. It’s called the casino. Cryptocurrency investing is really provably gambling in an economic sense. And then there’s designs where those power bills have to get paid somewhere. So instead of zero-sum, it becomes deeply negative-sum.

Effectively, then, the economic analogies are gambling and a Ponzi scheme. Because the profits that are given to the early investors are literally taken from the later investors. This is why I call the space overall, a “self-assembled” Ponzi scheme. There’s been no intent to make a Ponzi scheme. But due to its nature, that is the only thing it can be.“

John Patrick2022-05-17T17:06:55-05:00May 17th, 2022|HomeRecommended|

Linda Greenhouse weighs in on the infamous leak

• Yet another masterful analysis by the wonderful (and incomparable) Linda Greenhouse, writing in the NYT; Justice Alito’s Invisible Women. A pertinent excerpt:

“In the wake of the mortifying breach that the leak represents, there has been much talk of the Supreme Court’s “legitimacy.” The court has a problem, no doubt, one that barriers of unscalable height around its building won’t solve. But if a half-century of progress toward a more equal society, painstakingly achieved across many fronts by many actors, can be so easily jettisoned with the wave of a few judicial hands, the problem to worry about isn’t the court’s. It’s democracy’s. It’s ours.”

John Patrick2022-05-06T11:56:59-05:00May 6th, 2022|HomeRecommended|

As the world burns…

This time-lapse video captured by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite shows the white plumes of wildfires burning in northern New Mexico fueled by extreme drought and high winds, along with the brownish cloud of a haboob (dust storm caused by high winds) blowing south from Colorado.

John Patrick2022-05-04T18:39:01-05:00May 4th, 2022|HomeRecommended|

Yes, I agree with Tom Friedman again

Tom Friedman, writing in the NY Times, I think has it right when he argues that the US ought to be more circumspect when speaking publicly about the war in Ukraine. An excerpt:

“Our goal began simple and should stay simple: Help Ukrainians fight as long as they have the will and help them negotiate when they feel the time is right — so they can restore their sovereignty and we can reaffirm the principle that no country can just devour the country next door. Freelance beyond that and we invite trouble.”

John Patrick2022-05-04T14:29:32-05:00May 4th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Unsettling SCOTUS leak

Absent the draft in a wartime footing, I can’t imagine the Supreme Court would ever consider forcing men to choose an option with 10-15 times the mortality risk to them of another option (as is the case in term pregnancy versus legal elective abortion). Yikes. And to these eyes, Alito’s logic seems extremely flawed, e.g.:

“And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”

Um, what does he think having half the states outlawing abortion and half allowing it is likely to do to deepening national division, with a resultant crazy quilt of varying laws and some states already wanting to criminalize anyone merely assisting someone seeking an abortion?

It is odd to me that his arguments totally ignore the fact that in survey after survey, an overwhelming majority of Americans favor allowing at least some form of legal pregnancy termination.

Even Bret Stevens acknowledges “You may reason, justices, that by joining Justice Alito’s opinion, you will merely be changing the terms on which abortion issues get decided in the United States. In reality, you will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control — in a country already ablaze over racial issues, school curriculums, criminal justice, election laws, sundry conspiracy theories and so on….A court that betrays the trust of Americans on an issue that affects so many, so personally, will lose their trust on every other issue as well.”

Gotta love the fact that Mitch McConnell said the person responsible for the leak should face criminal charges, but would not vote to impeach DJT, who willfully and clearly attempted to subvert the results of a legitimately held presidential election and supported an insurrection.

John Patrick2022-05-03T16:51:40-05:00May 3rd, 2022|Home, Musings|