redstate | Tel Aviv University Professor Isaac Ben-Israel is a prominent Israeli
mathematician, analyst, and former general and is considered to be
highly credible, but he is not a medical expert.
Tel Aviv
University Professor Isaac Ben-Israel is the chair of the school’s
Securities Studies program, the chairman of the National Council for
Research and Development and also serves on the research and development
advisory board for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries. He appeared on an
Israeli television program (Hebrew) earlier this week to discuss his latest project. The Times of Israelreported on this story.
According to The Times, Ben-Israel plotted the rates of new
infections in nearly a dozen countries including: U.S., U.K., Sweden,
Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain, Singapore, and
Taiwan. He concluded the following:
Simple
statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks
after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no
matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose
to try to thwart it.
Analyzing the growth and decline of new cases
in countries around the world, showed repeatedly that “there’s a set
pattern” and “the numbers speak for themselves.”
So,
Ben-Israel claims that a country that has taken extraordinary measures
to contain the virus vs. a nation like Sweden, which has been relatively
lax, will follow a fixed pattern. The virus will peak and recede “in the exact same way.
In the exact, same, way. His graphs show that all countries
experienced
seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of
infected peaking in the sixth week and rapidly subsiding by the eighth
week.”
The following comes from a translation of an interview Ben-Israel gave to Israeli media outlet Mako which was obtained by Townhall’s Marina Medvin:
It
is a fixed pattern that is not dependent on freedom or quarantine.
There is a decline in the number of infections even [in countries]
without closures, and it is similar to the countries with closures.
Expansion
begins exponentially but fades quickly after about eight weeks. I have
no explanation. There are is [sic] kinds of speculation: maybe it’s
climate-related, maybe the virus has its own life cycle.
When asked about the high morbidity rate in Italy, Ben-Israel replied,
“The health system in Italy has its own problems. It has nothing to do
with coronavirus. In 2017 it also collapsed because of the flu.”
fox4kc | The stay-at-home orders set to expire next week have now been extended in both Kansas and Missouri until May 3.
And Kansas City, Jackson County and now Clay County have taken it a step further until May 15.
But there’s a large group of people who say they won’t do it anymore.
They want to get back to normal immediately, and they’re planning
protests to let local leaders know.
“I think it’s time to try to start working past the fear and get
things reopened,” Jane Shull said. “If not, what are we going to do?
Stay closed forever?”
Shull owns a cleaning company, and her business is down 40-50% due to the coronavirus pandemic.
She said she’s sick and tired of staying home and reading about businesses failing.
“If people are afraid to go out or go to businesses, that’s their
decision,” Shull said. “But let the people open up their businesses and
have people social distance, whatever it takes, but you just cannot keep
everything locked down.”
Groups on social media have been popping up, advocating for reopening the economy.
A group called Reopen Missouri called the stay-at-home order an
“inhumane and ineffective policy.” Another group called Reopen Kansas
called the order a “severe overreaction to the COVID issue.”
They’ve planned protests throughout both states next week. Locally,
there’s a call to flood the now empty streets of downtown Kansas City on
Monday and another protest planned at J.C. Nichols Fountain.
ctvnews | The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a
plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product
contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses.
And an official of the World Health Organization's European
operation said the body is closely monitoring the investigation into the
events that took place at Baxter International's research facility in
Orth-Donau, Austria.
"At this juncture we are confident in saying that public health
and occupational risk is minimal at present," medical officer Roberta
Andraghetti said from Copenhagen, Denmark.
"But what remains unanswered are the circumstances surrounding the incident in the Baxter facility in Orth-Donau."
The contaminated product, a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses and
unlabelled H5N1 viruses, was supplied to an Austrian research company.
The Austrian firm, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then sent portions of
it to sub-contractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany.
The contamination incident, which is being investigated by the
four European countries, came to light when the subcontractor in the
Czech Republic inoculated ferrets with the product and they died.
Ferrets shouldn't die from exposure to human H3N2 flu viruses.
Public health authorities concerned about what has been described
as a "serious error" on Baxter's part have assumed the death of the
ferrets meant the H5N1 virus in the product was live. But the company,
Baxter International Inc., has been parsimonious about the amount of
information it has released about the event.
On Friday, the company's director of global bioscience communications confirmed what scientists have suspected.
"It was live," Christopher Bona said in an email.
The contaminated product, which Baxter calls "experimental virus
material," was made at the Orth-Donau research facility. Baxter makes
its flu vaccine -- including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is
expected shortly -- at a facility in the Czech Republic.
People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence
that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses somehow co-mingled in the
Orth-Donau facility. That is a dangerous practice that should not be
allowed to happen, a number of experts insisted.
Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses could have resulted in dire consequences.
So, what are these “fundamental” features of GPTs that would allow us to compare one to another? And more generally, what criteria can one use to distinguish a GPT from other technologies?
Bresnahan and Trajtenberg (1996)argue that a GPT should havethe following three characteristics: 1.Pervasiveness– The GPT should spread to most sectors.
2.Improvement– The GPT should get better over time and, hence, should keep low-ering the costs of its users.
3.Innovation spawning– The GPT should make it easier to invent and produce new products or processes.
Most technologies possess each of these characteristics to some degree, and thus a GPT cannot differ qualitatively from these other technologies. Note, too, that the third property is, in a sense, a version of the first property if we phrase the latter to say that the GPT should also spread to the innovation sector. Moreover, this list can be expanded to include more subtle features of GPTs, a subject that we consider in Section3.Yet we find these three basic characteristics to be a useful starting point for evaluating and com-paring the impact of various technologies through history. Investigating how Electricity and IT measure up on these three dimensions is the focus of Section2.
NYTimes | For about
$80,000, an individual can purchase a six-month plan with Private Health
Management, which helps people with serious medical issues navigate the
health care system.
Such a plan
proved to be a literal lifesaver as the coronavirus pandemic descended.
The firm has helped clients arrange tests in Los Angeles for the
coronavirus and obtained oxygen concentrators for high-risk patients.
“We
know the top lab people and the doctors and nurses and can make the
process efficient,” said Leslie Michelson, the firm’s executive
chairman.
In some respects, the pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes
and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from
the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the
virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in
access to health care, child care, education, living space, even
internet bandwidth.
In New York, well-off city dwellers have
abandoned cramped apartments for spacious second homes. In Texas, the
rich are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to build safe
rooms and bunkers.
And across the
country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national
unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.
“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based
entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are
bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local
government.”
opendemocracy | The US Federal Reserve has chosen to pump $1.5tn
into Wall Street to reinflate the stock market, while millions of
Americans go without insurance or continue to go to work despite
sickness, because they can’t afford a day off. That’s a political
choice.
The governments of Ireland, Finland and France have chosen
to pay out millions to their citizens and to cancel mortgage and rent
payments. Those, too, are political choices.
The poor are much more likely to die
from COVID-19 than the rich, because they have other illnesses thanks
to their poverty. The staggering increase in homelessness rates in the
UK means thousands have nowhere safe to go. The failure to tackle
domestic violence across the world means that millions of women will be
living in fear as they self-isolate. All of these problems are products
of the failures of our politics.
Wealth and power will define who
is bankrupted and who isn’t, who becomes sick and who doesn’t, who gets
the care they need and who suffers, how many of us will live and how
many will die. But we will be told that we’re not allowed to talk about
these things, because they’re political.
For a decade,
progressives across the Western world have been pointing out that our
healthcare systems are being torched on the altar of the market. But now
we’re all paying the price of that sacrifice, we won’t be allowed to
mention it. Because that’s political.
For a generation, the left
has developed policy ideas to ensure the protection of everyone in an
increasingly precarious economy. But we will be told off for calling for
them. Because that’s political.
More broadly, politics is how we negotiate how we live together. And
so there is absolutely nothing on earth that is more political than a
pandemic, when disagreements over resources and priorities and behaviour
define who will live and who will die, not through the slow playing-out
of the long symphony of history, but in the coming weeks and months.
Health
is always a social affair, and never more so than with infectious
diseases. As a species we live in groups. Everybody’s health relies on
everybody else’s. The survival of each depends to some extent on support
for all. There is no such thing as an isolated individual decision in a
pandemic.
There is no doubt that our world will not go back to
what it was before, As Naomi Klein pointed out more than a decade ago,
big money has long used disasters to advance its agenda of cuts,
privatisation and deregulation, securing unpopular policies when people
are too overwhelmed to resist.
Living Memory Black political history and struggle is not only co-opted but ruthlessly distorted and exploited in furtherance of everything from the the "replacement negroe program" to degenerate identity politics in America. As go black folks, so goes America!
blackagendareport | There really is no more to the clap-trap about a Black electoral
“strategy” than attempting to figure out which way the white folks are
going and then circling the Black wagons, accordingly.
“Black have been convinced by corporate media that white
folks will hold Sanders’ socialism against him and allow Trump another
mandate.”
With his victory in the Blacktropolis of Detroit, the
clueless corporate champion Joe Biden has definitively won the “Black”
Democratic presidential contest. Unlike South Carolina, Alabama and
Mississippi, where collaborationist preachers have always held sway over
huge sections of the Black electorate, Detroit was once home to the
Marxist-oriented League of Revolutionary Black Workers and sent avowed socialist John Conyers to
Congress for 52 years, from 1965 to 2017. Detroit isn’t afraid of
people that call themselves socialists – actually, very few Black people
are socialism-phobic, and young Blacks are even more socialist-friendly
than their white counterparts.But this is the election cycle when
Blacks circle their wagons around the Democratic establishment,
perceiving it as the only refuge from Donald Trump and his marauding
White Man’s Party.
The difference between 2016, when Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton
in Michigan, and this year’s primary is simple: the experience of four
years of Donald Trump. Black people want desperately to sweep the Orange
Menace and his Amerikaners from power, and have been convinced by
corporate media that white folks will hold Sanders’ socialism against
him and allow Trump another mandate.
“Very few Black people are socialism-phobic, and young Blacks are even more socialist-friendly than their white counterparts.”
Black people don’t vote their own political convictions in Democratic
primaries; they give their votes to candidates they believe are the
best bet to defeat the White Man’s Party. With such a “strategy,” Black
folks almost never win -- in terms of getting an officeholder who thinks
as they do -- but are content to avoid losing catastrophically to the
worst “crackers.”
Black voters are aware of Biden’s many transgressions against them -- but that’s what white “moderates” do, and older Blacks have convinced themselves that a white moderate is needed to flush the overtly white racist Trump from power. Black
voters support Bernie Sanders’ agenda, which very much resembles a
Black political center of gravity that decades of polling has shown is
far to the left of the white political spectrum. In fact, majorities of
the very voters that awarded sweeping victories to Joe Biden in the
March 3 Super Tuesday primaries told exit pollsters they
“support a single government health insurance plan for all?” – the very
definition of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All. Sanders’ signature
program won the primaries, hands down – but Bernie lost to the corporate
hack that opposes Medicare for All. Indeed, all of Sanders’ core issues – Green New Deal, a living minimum wage, cancellation of student debt – are supported by super-majorities of Democrats (and huge numbers of Republicans).
unz |It
seems like we woke up one day to find that, out of nowhere,
distinguishing between male and female has become illegal. In defiance
of intuition, common sense and 3rd grade biology, a number of liberal
plutocracies like Canada and the United Kingdom have legislated to
force-feed their subjects the doctrine of transgenderism, which contrary
to the idea that it is an individual choice, is always coupled with
mandates that ordinary citizens acknowledge the delusions of wealthy
narcissists and perverts.
In
the United States, using the incorrect pronoun or expressing suspicion
that transgender people are simply mentally ill incurs a massive
personal cost. Such expressions can get one put on a Southern Poverty
Law Center hit list, banned from the ability to use social media and
banking services, and opens one up to harassment and violence from
anarchist and radical liberal militias given vast leeway to operate by
the police.
An
army of phony scientists, shameless academics, politicians and activist
legal fronts, armed with unfathomable amounts of money, have been
successful in using every dirty trick to completely circumvent and upend
legislative democracy. Christopher Caldwell’s recent book, “The Age of
Entitlement,” outlines how elites have been able to use Civil Rights
precedents – where laws are decided in courts rather than by elected
representatives and referendum – to radically transform American society
by overruling the US Constitution and the will of the people.
Civil
Rights, what was originally promoted as a second “Reconstruction” that
would only impact issues related to Jim Crow in the South, has become a
parallel vein of political power, where laws and rules that impact
society as a whole are no longer tethered to public opinion or consent,
but instead decided by a small group of rich Jews and capitalists,
sometimes in the same family and playing diverse roles on the pitch to
make their grotesque and oppressive dystopia real.
henrymakow |Jon, heir to the fortune, is gay.
In 2000 he created the Arcus Foundation, a nonprofit serving the LGBT
community, because of his own experience coming out as homosexual. Arcus
has given more than $58.4 million to
programs and organizations doing LGBT-related work between 2007 and
2010 alone, making it one of the largest LGBT funders in the world.
Stryker gave more than $30 million to Arcus himself in that three-year period, through his stock in Stryker Medical Corporation.
Stryker founded Arcus right when
the AIDS epidemic was being brought under control in the U.S. Before he
started Arcus, he was president of Depot Landmark LLC, a development
company specializing in rehabilitating historical buildings. This would
serve him well when he later renovated space for Arcus in Kalamazoo. He
was also a founding board member of Greenleaf Trust, a privately held wealth management firm also in Kalamazoo.
Jon's sister Ronda Stryker is married to William Johnston, chairman of Greenleaf Trust. She is also vice chair of Spelman College, where Arcus recently bestowed a $2 million grant in
the name of lesbian feminist Audre Lorde. The money is earmarked for a
queer studies program. Ronda and Johnston have gifted Spelman $30 million dollars overall,
the largest gift from living donors in its 137-year history. She is
also a trustee of Kalamazoo College (where Arcus bestowed a social
justice leadership grant for $23 million in 2012), as well as a member of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows.
Pat Stryker, another sister to Jon, has worked closely with gay male Tim Gill.
Gill operates one of the largest LGBT nonprofits in America and has
been close to the Stryker family since Jon created Arcus. In 1999, Tim
Gill sold his stakes to Quark, his computer software company, and went
to work running the Gill Foundation in Colorado. Working closely with Pat Stryker and two other wealthy philanthropists, who together became known as the four horsemen due to their ruthless political strategies, they set out to change Colorado, a red state, to blue. They proceeded to pour half a billion dollars into small groups advocating LGBT agendas. Gill noted in his opening introduction for Jon Stryker at the 2015 GLSEN Respect Awards that,
since knowing each other, he and Jon have "plotted, schemed, hiked and
skied together," while also "punishing the wicked and rewarding the
good."
WaPo | On Friday, the Iranian government finally began to acknowledge what the world already knows: the covid-19 virus has hit that country extremely hard and it’s likely to get much worse.
In a televised news conference, the spokesman for Iran’s coronavirus task force
announced that 4,700 cases of the virus have now been confirmed,
including more than 1,200 in the previous 24 hours. The official death
count stands at 124.
The
ways in which key leaders’ responses differ from those of ordinary
citizens tell you everything you need to know about the deepening gulf
between the Iranian people and their government and how it might
contribute to the spread of the disease.
The sudden sense of alarm contrasts starkly with how Iranian President
Hassan Rouhani and other officials initially downplayed the threat.
In the
early stages of the virus story, officials in Tehran were worried about
turnout in the Feb. 11 parliamentary elections. They feared that low
voter turnout — which, as anticipated, was aggravated by the Iranian military’s shootdown
of a Ukrainian passenger jet in January — would further undermine the
notion of public support for the system. Authorities prioritized their
political concerns over the risk of the virus spreading.
“Today,
the country is engaged in a biological battle,” Gen. Hossein Salami,
commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said.
“We will prevail in the fight against this virus, which might be the
product of an American biological [attack], which first spread in China
and then to the rest of the world.”
theweek | All over the world, governments are scrambling to defend their
citizenry from COVID-19, the disease caused by the outbreak of novel
coronavirus. So far it seems levels of success have varied; countries
like Italy and Iran have struggled so far, while Vietnam and Taiwan have seemingly put forth an efficient and effective response.
The United States, where a major outbreak is clearly developing,
however, is in a class by itself. America's atrociously inadequate
welfare state makes it by far the most vulnerable rich country to a
viral pandemic, and the vicious, right-wing ideology of the Republican
Party has wrecked the government's ability to manage crises of any kind.
The national health care system is of course the most important tool
for any country trying to fight off an epidemic — all citizens need to
be able to get tested, receive treatment, or be quarantined if
necessary. If and when a vaccine is developed, the system needs to
distribute it to everyone as fast as possible. That means handing it out
for free in locations across the country, and perhaps making it
mandatory if uptake is insufficient.
The American health care system fails at every one of these tasks. Nearly 30 million Americans are uninsured, and a further 44 million are underinsured
— meaning they will likely hesitate to go to the doctor if they start
developing COVID-19 symptoms. This problem is seriously exacerbated by
the rampant predatory profiteering that infects every corner of the
health care system. Indeed, responsible citizens who have gone in for
tests have already started getting slammed with multi-thousand dollar bills.
A father and daughter who were evacuated from China and then forcibly
quarantined for several days (luckily they were not infected) went home
to find $3,918 in bills.
If you are working-class person with a $10,000 deductible (not at all uncommon),
going to the doctor simply because you have flu-like symptoms (which is
how most cases of COVID-19 are experienced) could very easily send you
into bankruptcy. If infected, millions of Americans are likely going to
take their chances — and keep spreading the virus.
Indeed, U.S. health care is not only by far the worst system among
rich countries, it is much worse than that of many middle-income or
poorer countries when it comes to confronting a fast-moving epidemic.
lpeblog | It is now clear that we are entering a new phase of the global
COVID-19 pandemic. The virus appears in new countries around the world
each day. New cases are now regularly reported in the United States, and
as testing is scaled up, that number will increase, probably
substantially. It is clear now that the virus will spread in a sustained
way in the community here. The estimated mortality rate derived from
the data from China resembles that of the 1919 flu, which killed 50-100
million people around the world. As we are better able to track mild
cases, we may find that it is substantially, even an order of magnitude,
less deadly. Under every plausible scenario, however, this outbreak is
likely to be extraordinarily disruptive. It will surprise no reader of
this blog that the US is ill-prepared for this, and that the harms of
this pandemic will not be equally visited on all. Yesterday, I worked
with a group of more than 450 law and public health experts to put out a public letter
addressed to federal, state, and local leaders, to identify essential
aspects of an effective and fair response. It may be worth a read for
those thinking about the political economy of pandemics. It illustrates
some familiar LPE themes, and shows how features of our socio-legal
context that drive injustice and inequality will undermine the COVID-19
response.
Slowing the spread of the disease, for example, will be
extraordinarily hard without major surge of social support and a
commitment to something like basic social solidarity. Measures like
contact tracing and isolation and other forms of “social distancing”
(closing schools and minimizing public events) are the main mitigation
tools we have. But as the letter points out, whether they are effective
depends on whether they are enacted fairly, and we put people in a
position to cooperate. We cannot expect people to stay home, identify
contacts, or seek recommended care and testing, if it throws them or
their loved ones into harm’s way. Staying home may create an existential
threat for millions of low-wage and gig-economy workers. If we send
children home from schools and ask families to care for the mildly ill
at home, how will the millions now juggling paid work and care work
manage? Immigrants will be discouraged from seeking care and disclosing
contacts if they fear immigration enforcement.
The letter calls for direct interventions to try to reduce the
precarity in which so many workers, carers, and migrants today in the US
live, so that everyone is in a position to cooperate with
recommendations that will benefit us all. This includes direct payments
or other compensation to individuals who are affected, sick pay, and
immediate assurances that the COVID-19 response will not be linked to,
or trigger, immigration enforcement. It notes that we need to consider
the impact of policing on health, given how jails can drive epidemics.
It sets out the legal requirements and risks of carceral measures like
quarantine (building in part on earlier work I did with others on the
disastrous Ebola quarantines),
and makes clear that voluntary measures are more likely to earn
cooperation and trust. The letter also demands that our leaders address
the potentially catastrophic ways that our for-profit healthcare system
intersects with what may be rapidly mounting need for testing and care.
WSJ | The Trump administration is considering using a national disaster
program to pay hospitals and doctors for their care of uninsured people
infected with the new coronavirus
as concerns rise over costs of treating some of the 27 million
Americans without health coverage, a person familiar with the
conversations said.
In natural disasters such as hurricanes, hospitals and medical
facilities can be reimbursed under a federal program that pays them
about 110% of Medicare rates for treating patients such as those
evacuated from hard-hit areas.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services has been in discussions about using that program to pay
providers who treat uninsured patients with coronavirus, the person
said.
Dr. Robert Kadlec, who is the assistant secretary for
preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human
Services, said Tuesday at a congressional hearing that discussions are
being held about using the National Disaster Medical System
reimbursement program.
n 2018, 8.5% of people, or 27.5 million, didn’t have insurance at any point
during the year. It was an increase from 2017, when 7.9% of the
population, or 25.6 million, were uninsured, according to the U.S.
Census Bureau.
RollingStone | No other 2020 candidate for president, including Donald Trump, can come close to matching Bernie Sanders’
level of support among members of the U.S. military, to go by the most
recent campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission.
Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have donated a total of
$185,625 to Sen. Sanders’ 2020 campaign. By comparison, they have given
$113,012 to Trump, $80,250 to Pete Buttigieg, $64,604 to Sen. Elizabeth
Warren, and a relatively paltry $33,045 to former Vice President Joe
Biden, according to Doug Weber, a senior researcher at the Center for
Responsive Politics.
For every candidate in the 2020 race, the CRP maintains a list of the
20 companies or institutions whose employees have given the most money
to his or her campaign. Remarkably, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the
U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the Department of
Veterans Affairs all separately appear on Sanders’ list,
comprising 5 of his top 20. The largest service branch, the U.S. Army,
comes in at number 11, with $65,395 in total donations. That’s just
behind Walmart, whose employees gave $69,523.
Sanders’ support from employees of Walmart, Amazon, Microsoft, and the U.S. Postal Service has been reported, but the strength of his appeal to the armed forces has gone largely unnoticed.
If Sanders wins the nomination and his financial support from service
members translates into votes, it would represent a significant shift
from 2016, when active-duty personnel were twice as likely to choose
Trump over Hillary Clinton. In 2016, the Military Times sent a
confidential survey to its 59,000 subscribers in the armed forces. The
respondents preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton by a “huge margin,” and were nearly three times more likely to identify as Republican than Democrat.
yasha.substack | When I launched Immigrants as a Weapon
back in September, I argued that America had done more to promote the
far-right around the world than any other country on earth. I wasn’t
exaggerating. America really is the biggest and most active player in
the field — the biggest by far.
Even a cursory look at modern
American history shows that promoting nationalism and backing far-right
emigre groups has been a major plank of American foreign policy going
back to the very end of World War II. This mixture of covert and overt
programs and initiatives was first deployed to fight the Soviet Union
and left-wing political movements but has over the years touched down
all over the globe — wherever America has some sort of geopolitical
interest, including modern capitalist states like Russia and China. One
of these nationalism weaponization initiatives — which targeted the USSR
for destabilization in the 70s and 80s — was how a Soviet kid like me ended up in San Francisco as a political refugee.
This
history is important. Without it, it’s impossible to understand the
mechanics of our reactionary foreign policy today — whether in China or
with our “strategic partner” Ukraine, a country that’s at the center of today’s impeachment show.
There are all sorts of possible entry points into this story. I guess I could go all the way back to America’s support for the White Russians against the Bolsheviks
in the Russian Civil War. But for now I’d like to start at the very end
of World War II — when this approach was just beginning to crystalize
as a distinct strategy inside America’s foreign policy apparatus.
wsws | What are the stakes that people imagine to be bound up with
demonstrating that capitalism in this country emerged from slavery and
racism, which are treated as two different labels for the same
pathology? Ultimately, it’s a race reductionist argument. What the
Afro-pessimist types or black nationalist types get out of it is an
insistence that we can’t ever talk about anything except race. And
that's partly because talking about race is the things they have to
sell.
If you follow through the logic of disparities discourse, and watch
the studies and follow the citations, what you get is a sort of bold
announcement of findings, but finding that anybody who has been reading a
newspaper over the last 50 or 70 years would assume from the outset:
blacks have it worse, and women have it worse, and so on.
It’s in part an expression of a generic pathology of sociology, the
most banal expression of academic life. You follow the safe path. You
replicate the findings. But it’s not just supposed to be a matter of
finding a disparity in and of itself, like differences in the number of
days of sunshine in a year. It’s supposed to be a promise that in
finding or confirming the disparity in this or that domain that it will
bring some kind of mediation of the problem. But the work never calls
for that.
Q. You make important points about the way social problems are
approached. As an example, we have a scourge of police violence in this
country. Over 1,000 Americans are killed each year by police. And the
common knowledge, so to speak, is that this is a racial problem. The
reality is that the largest number of those killed are white, but blacks
are disproportionately killed. But if the position is that this is
simply a racial problem, there is no real solution on offer. We have a
militarized police force operating under conditions of extreme social
inequality, with lots of guns on the streets, with soldiers coming back
from serving in neocolonial wars abroad becoming police officers. And
all of this is excised in the racialist argument, which if taken at face
value, boils down to allegations about racial attitudes among police.
A. Cedric Johnson [3] has made good points on this and I’ve spoken
with him at considerable length about the criminal justice system. To
overdraw the point, a black Yale graduate who works on Wall Street is no
doubt several times more likely to be jacked up by the police on the
platform of Metro North than his white counterpart, out of mistaken
identity. And that mistaken identity is what we might call racism. But
it’s a shorthand. He’s still less likely to be jacked up by the police
than the broke white guy in northeast Philadelphia or west Baltimore.
The point of this stress on policing is containing those
working-class and poor populations and protecting property holders
downtown, and in making shows of force in doing so. I mean the emergence
of, or the intensification of, militarized policing in the 1990s and
2000s was directly connected with an increased focus on urban
redevelopment directed toward turning central cities into havens for
play and leisure. To do this you have to accomplish a couple of things,
as Saskia Sassen pointed out almost 30 years ago, in the reconfiguration
of the urban political economy in ways that create a basis for upscale
consumption, and an industrial reserve army who will work for little
enough to make that culture of upscale consumption profitable. Then you
have to have the police to protect all of this. It’s really like a
tourist economy.
So that’s kind of natural enough and you don’t need to have a devil
theory like the crack epidemic to explain it—all of this pointless
back-and-forth about how the cultural and political authorities are
responding to the opioid crisis compared to how they responded to the
crack epidemic. I mean, it’s all beside the point.
johnsolomon | In recent interviews, Joe Biden has distanced himself from
his son’s work at a Ukrainian gas company that was under investigation during the
Obama years, with the former
vice president suggesting he didn’t even
know Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings.
There is plenty of evidence that conflicts with the former vice
president’s account, including Hunter
Biden’s own story that he discussed the company once with his famous father.
There also was a December
2015 New York Times story that raised the question of whether Hunter Biden’s
role at Burisma posed a conflict of interest for the vice president, especially
when Joe Biden was leading the fight against Ukrainian corruption while Hunter
Biden’s firm was under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors.
But whatever the Biden family recollections, the Obama State
Department clearly saw the Burisma Holdings investigation in the midst of the
2016 presidential election as a Joe Biden issue.
Memos newly released through a Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit filed by the Southeastern Legal Foundation on my behalf detail how State
officials in June 2016 worked to prepare the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine,
Marie Yovanovitch, to handle a question about “Burisma and Hunter Biden.”
In multiple drafts of a question-and-answer
memo prepared for Yovanovitch’s Senate confirmation hearing, the department’s
Ukraine experts urged the incoming ambassador to stick to a simple answer.
“Do you have any comment on Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s
son, serving on the board of Burisma, a major Ukrainian Gas Company?,” the draft Q&A
asked.
The recommended answer for Yovanovitch: “For questions on Hunter
Biden’s role in Burisma, I would refer you to Vice President Biden’s
office.”
Tennis umpires are reportedly considering a boycott of Serena Williams matches. The public statement of boycotting Serena’s games underscores beyond any shadow of a doubt the specific nature of this particular tempest on a tennis court. Even in the twilight of her career, the disparate economic influence of the GOAT on the worldwide enterprise of tennis vs. the butt hurt bleetings of some expendable little men - will be most interesting to observe and measure.
There have been rumblings for years about replacing these overpaid and underperforming accessories to the match with computers, taking the element of human error (and human sensitivity) out of the equation. If the umpires go on strike, it will be a perfect opportunity to begin testing a new and improved HawkEye system which does a bit more than accurately track tennis ball ballistics.
In the interim, while the final and permanent disintermediation of highly fallible human umpires is developed, it will not be difficult to find other umpires to replace the ITF's little men with their panties in an ill-considered bunch. Technology has advanced to the point where umpires aren't really necessary.
The victorian-era rules of tennis are a little archaic and arbitrary to being with, the fact that they are selectively enforced means it's overdue time for a change.
medium |Serena’s
unhinged outbursts in yesterday’s US Open Championship, was an
embarrassment and an eyeopener to who and what she’s become. We can go
back and forth on what other male players have said and gotten away
with, one has nothing to do with the other in this case. Serena’s issues
over her career have not been because she was a woman but because she
was Black. It’s disingenuous of those who claim to be woke, to not
acknowledge that Serena used every liberal and feminists excuse, except
for the real issue that’s plagued her career; her skin color.
This
intersectionality game that Feminist play to ensure that White women
are the real benefactors in all things related to womanhood and civil
rights, is becoming irritating. The fact that Serena did not acknowledge
her Blackness as the real issue she has been constantly discriminated
against, was a slap in the face for Black women and more importantly
Black female athletes. Serena has attempted to use her giving birth and
being a mother as somehow a foreign thing in women’s sports. She has
also bought into the social media hype and White liberals newfound love
and praise for her because she’s a mother.
theindependent | “Everyone was in a very awkward situation yesterday. A lot of emotions.
Serena was crying. Naomi was crying. It was really, really tough.
“But I have my personal opinion that maybe the chair umpire should
not have pushed Serena to the limit, especially in a Grand Slam final.
“He changed the course of the match, which in my opinion was
unnecessary. We all go through our emotions, especially when you're
fighting for a Grand Slam trophy.”
After the match Williams accused Ramos of sexism, claiming that he
had never deducted a game from a male player for calling him “a thief”.
The former world No 1 received backing on Sunday
from Steve Simon, the Chief Executive Officer of the Women’s Tennis
Association, who claimed that umpires do not treat female players in the
same way as men.
Simon said in a statement: “The WTA believes that there should be no
difference in the standards of tolerance provided to the emotions
expressed by men versus women and is committed to working with the sport
to ensure that all players are treated the same. We do not believe that
this was done last night.”
Guardian | When affluent urban men in plaid flannel shirts let their hair grow
wild and unkempt across their face and necks to affect a laborer’s style
for doing laptop work in coffee shops, I think of my dad immaculately
trimming his beard every morning before dawn to work on a construction
site. The men closest to me took meticulous care with their appearance
whenever they had the chance.
Mom, too, presented herself like her main job was to be photographed,
when it was more likely to sort the inventory in the stockroom of a
retail store. Her outfits were ensembles cobbled together from Wichita
mall sale racks, but she always managed to look stylish. My favorite was
a champagne-colored silk pantsuit that was cut loose and baggy. She
wore it with a scarf that had big, lush roses on it like the satiny
wallpaper she had glued and smoothed across our hallway. She had married
a farm boy but had no interest in plaid shirts.
For me, country was not a look, a style, or even a conscious
attitude, but a physical place, its experience defined by distance from
the forces of culture that would commodify it. That place meant long
stretches of near-solitude broken up by long drives on highways to enter
society and then exit again.
Owning a small bit of the countryside brought my father deep
satisfaction. The state had seized some of his dad’s farmland through
eminent domain in the 1960s to dig the reservoir and move water east in
underground tunnels for the people of Wichita. Sometimes Dad would park
his truck on the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop that ran along the
lake dam and take my brother and me up the long, steep concrete steps to
look at what would have been his and then our small inheritance, now
literally underwater. We couldn’t use the water ourselves; it was for
Wichitans to access by turning on a faucet. We thus had dug a private
well right next to a giant reservoir on what once was our land. It’s an
old story: pushing poor rural communities out of the way to tap natural
resources for cities.
Witnessing this as a child had affected Dad deeply, and he shared
Grandpa’s attitude toward the value of land: “They don’t make any more
of it.” He had plans to buy the bit of land north of the house and build
an addition when my brother and I were older and needed more room.
Mom was less sure of these plans.
Some evenings, I’d watch her curl and tease her dark hair at the
vanity mirror that my dad had built next to their master-suite bathroom.
She smelled of hair spray and Calvin Klein Obsession perfume. She left
in the darkness and turned her car wheels from our dirt road on to the
highway for Wichita.
When Mom went to a George Strait concert at the small Cowboy Club in
Wichita, when Strait was newly famous, Dad sat at the stereo next to our
brick fireplace, listening to a radio broadcast of the show on a
country station. George would pick a woman from the audience to join him
on stage, the man on the radio said. Dad held his breath, worried that
Mom would be picked and swept away by a handsome celebrity in tight
Wranglers and a cowboy hat. The men I knew more often wore ball caps
stained through by the salt of their foreheads.
Dad didn’t even like country music. Too sad, he said.
In college, I began to understand the depth of the
rift that is economic inequality. Roughly speaking, on one side of the
rift was the place I was from – laborers, workers, people filled with
distrust for the systems that had been ignoring and even spurning them
for a couple decades. On the other side were the people who run those
systems – basically, people with college funds who end up living in
cities or moving to one of the expensive coasts. It’s much messier than
that, of course. But before arriving on campus, I hadn’t understood the
extent of my family’s poverty – “wealth” previously having been
represented to me by a friend whose dad was our small town’s postmaster
and whose mom went to the Wichita mall every weekend.
Even at a midwestern state university, my background – agricultural
work, manual labor, rural poverty, teen pregnancies, domestic chaos,
pervasive addiction – seemed like a faraway story to the people I met.
Most of them were from tidy neighborhoods in Wichita, Kansas
City, the greater Chicago area. They used a different sort of English
and had different politics. They were appalled that I had grown up with
conservative ideas about government and Catholic doctrine against
abortion. I was appalled that they didn’t know where their food came
from or even seem to care since it had always just appeared on their
plates when they wanted it.
There was no language for whatever I represented on campus.
Scholarships and student organizations existed to boost kids from
disadvantaged groups such as racial minorities, international students
and the LGBTQ community. I was none of those things, and professors and
other students often assumed from looking at me or hearing me speak that
I was a middle-class kid with parents sending me money.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...