The Florida Fantasy
• Michael Grunwald, writing in the Atlantic, opines on the fantasy that promotes building and living in coastal Florida.
Red States and their Immigration issue
• Heather Cox Richardson, writing in her September 27 newsletter, puts the issue in perspective:
“More to the point, it is a myth that Republican-dominated border states are bearing the brunt of migrants seeking asylum. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post asked the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (TRAC) to figure out where the asylum seekers in the U.S. are.
From court records, TRAC calculated that 750,000 people are awaiting asylum hearings. More than 125,000 of them are in California. More than 110,000 are in New York. About 98,000 are scheduled for hearings in Florida, while about 75,000 are waiting in Texas. Most of the rest are scheduled for court hearings in Democratic-dominated states, such as New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland.”
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.'”
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.
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.”
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…
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:
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 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 I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am
Sent from my iPad |
Sad…
From the Washington Post, Drew Harwell reporting; “Truth Social faces financial peril as worry about Trump’s future grows“
Sad 😉
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.”