Nuclear Waste Reclassification

Finally, DOE has decided to reclassify nuclear waste in terms of what it is rather than what it was. 

Wrong Lessons Learned

 When the USSR collapsed, the Movement Conservatives took wrong lessons from that and started to destroy our country in a similar manner, Much of today's political woes and social deterioration can be traced to their efforts. 

Who Knew?

 Wyoming is a major global tax haven.

Bogus BBB Arguments

 Paul Krugman objects to the Build Back Better criticism.

there may be some sincere concern that the bill would increase budget deficits. Actually, it wouldn’t have a significant deficit impact — the Congressional Budget Office says that the spending is almost completely paid for, and attempts to claim otherwise aren’t credible. But even if the deficit did rise, why would that be such a bad thing?

I was struck the other day by Elon Musk’s declaration that Build Back Better shouldn’t pass because it would increase the budget deficit. Interesting fact: Tesla was founded in 2003 and had its first profitable year in 2020. That is, it spent 17 years spending more money than it was taking in, because it was investing in the future. If, as many executives like to say, the government should be run like a business, why shouldn’t it be willing to do the same thing?

...

It’s true that the bill’s $1.75 trillion price tag is, on the surface, a lot of money. But that’s spending over 10 years, which means that annual outlays would be far smaller than the $1.9 trillion rescue plan passed earlier this year, or for that matter the $768 billion annual defense bill the House passed last week.

Also, much of the spending would be paid for with new taxes. Furthermore, you should never cite a big-sounding budget number without putting it in context. Remember, the U.S. economy is enormous. The budget office estimates that in its first year Build Back Better would expand the deficit by 0.6 percent of gross domestic product, a number that would shrink over time.

I’m not aware of any economic model suggesting that spending on that scale would make much of a difference to inflation. And because much of the spending would expand the economy’s productive capacity, it would probably reduce inflation over time.

The Current Inflation Is NOT a Problem

 Paul Krugman examines the details. 

Rising prices have certainly eroded many workers’ wage gains, although real personal income per capita is still above its prepandemic level even though the government is no longer handing out lots of money. And my sense is that inflation has a corrosive effect on confidence even when incomes are keeping up, because it creates the perception that things are out of control.

...

Republicans say, bizarrely, that current economic conditions are much worse than they were in March 2009, when the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month.

...

ask people how their current financial situation compares with five years earlier; 63 percent say they’re better off, the same number as in September 1984, just before Ronald Reagan won an electoral landslide with claims that it was “morning in America.”

...

If consumers are really as depressed as the sentiment numbers say, why are retail sales running so high?

And if we turn our attention from consumers to businesses, what we see is a huge surge in capital expenditures. That is, businesses are investing as if they see a booming economy and expect the boom to continue.

...

In short, the public’s highly negative assessment of the economy is at odds with every other indicator I can think of.

...

Two-thirds of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen; how much of a stretch is it for them also to believe that the Biden economy is terrible, whatever their personal experience? 

This is actually a very good economy, albeit with some problems. Don’t let the doomsayers tell you otherwise.

SCOTUS and Civil Rights

 SCOTUS gutted federal power to enforce national civil rights

Inequality programs are worth talking about

 link

Warning to Democrats

 We have to stop eating our own.

Covid Fatigue

 Dulling our sensitivity. The pandemic has become boring. Routine counts of unnecessary deaths no longer alarm us. Is the virus winning? It knows when you are sleeping. It knows when you're awake. It knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for everybody's sake.

The mood of the year might also be numbing people’s fear response. As the pandemic has dragged on, I’ve highlighted how many people are languishing in a state of emptiness and ennui. When you feel that “blah” or “meh,” your emotional reactions are subdued. The sense of impending doom that plunged you into action last spring feels more like a nagging headache this fall. Many are tired of being afraid — and just plain tired, too. If a Covid-19 variant falls in a community and no one is there to fear it, does it still make a sound?

Asymmetrical Political Warfare

 Dan Rather comments:

Those who have made the biggest differences in humanity’s march towards a more just and equitable society are invariably the ones who do not give up. To succumb to fatalism is its own form of privilege. I can count the votes in Congress. I can see who has the power of elected office in state and local governments. I understand that it might seem like nothing can be done.

But I also firmly believe that no political leader, including the president of the United States, is bigger than the country (or state or county) they lead. The voices of the people matter, and not just at the ballot box. If there is a sustained national movement around this issue, if it is everywhere, if the troops fighting for it on the frontlines can feel the support from the “homefront,” I believe change is possible. I’ve seen it happen.

There’s an old saying which happens to be a wise one: Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

COVID and Obesity

 It seems that COVID thrives in fatty tissue. This why folks with a few extra pounds fair worse when infected.

Now researchers have found that the coronavirus infects both fat cells and certain immune cells within body fat, prompting a damaging defensive response in the body.

“The bottom line is, ‘Oh my god, indeed, the virus can infect fat cells directly,’” said Dr. Philipp Scherer, a scientist who studies fat cells at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who was not involved in the research.

Is Douthat making any sense?

 Ross Douthat

To get an idea of how smart Douthat isn't, (from Gillman):

In a column headlined “There Will Be No Trump Coup,” the New York Times writer Ross Douthat had predicted, shortly before Election Day, that “any attempt to cling to power illegitimately will be a theater of the absurd.”

I think it makes more sense to believe people who's predictions bear out that those who miss the mark. 

Coup is underway

 Barton Gellman tells how Jan6 was just a practice run.

DOJ Sues Texas

TX redistricting plan under the microscope 

The heavily gerrymandered maps violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Justice Department said, because they deny equal representation to the state’s Black and Latino voters.

...

The lawsuit is the first the Justice Department has filed over gerrymandered maps during this year’s redistricting cycle. The department, which has filed numerous lawsuits against states that have restricted voting rights this year, warned in September that it would act against any state that moved too aggressively to gerrymander maps in a way that diluted minority representation.

That’s precisely what Texas did, the department alleged in the complaint filed Monday.

Texans of color are responsible for 95% of Texas’ population growth over the past decade, according to recent census figures. But the new maps significantly limit their political power, the department determined, citing the fact that while the minority population growth resulted in the state gaining two new seats in the U.S. House, lawmakers drew both districts to have white-majority populations.

...

Under the new maps, white Texans would make up the majority population of 23 of the state’s 38 congressional districts, 89 of its 150 state House districts and 20 of its 31 state Senate districts, meaning a population that makes up roughly 40% of Texas as a whole would make up majorities in roughly 60% of its districts.

Latino Texans, who account for roughly 40% of the population, would make up the majority in just 20% of those districts. And Black Texans, who make up about 12% of the Texas population, would be the majority in less than 3% of districts.

Response to the Case Against Abortion

Ross Douthat attempts to use logic rather than misogyny and religion to defend abortion bans.

The problem today is the same problem SCOTUS faced in Roe v. Wade. How can we establish the legal right to life of the fetus? Historically, all sorts of different lines have been drawn from conception to child survival of infancy. Then, the justices picked a line that would seem to have the most popular support, ie., let the woman decide. Between the fetus and the mother, the mother certainly has the stronger right-to-life. Medically, we don't sacrifice the mother in favor of the child if such a stark choice is called for.  Douthat doesn't seem to get that. He comes down on the idea that the fetus trumps everything else. He refuses to see that whenever the fetus ranks higher than the mother, we are using law to lessen the status of a full-fledged person against an organism that cannot survive independently. The uncomfortable truth is that developing humans are not legal persons, yet.

He also ignores the demonstrated fact that abortion rates are minimized in societies where women have full control over their childbearing. Women do better and babies do better when women are in control.

Right Wing Cognitive Dissonance

Michelle Goldberg articulates the cognitive dissonance between being anti-vax and anti-abortion. They espouse body-autonomy when it comes to the mild discomfort of a vaccine yet deny body autonomy to women who are would rather not go through a pregnancy, birth, and parenting. As Frank Schaeffer says, it isn't about the fetus, it's about making sure women have less autonomy than men.

It’s striking, the gap between the bodily impositions people on the right will accept in their own lives and those they would impose on others. When it comes to themselves, many conservatives find any encroachment on their physical sovereignty intolerable, and arguments about the common good irrelevant. Yet their movement is dragging us into a future where many women will be stripped of self-determination the moment they get pregnant. Choices, it seems, aren’t for everybody.

As the feminist Ellen Willis once put it, the central question in the abortion debate is not whether a fetus is a person, but whether a woman is. People, in our society, generally do not have their bodies appropriated by the state. It’s unimaginable that they would be forced to, say, donate blood. As we’ve seen, even mask and vaccine requirements elicit mass umbrage. Americans tend to believe that their bodies are inviolate.

“You can’t make a case against abortion by applying a general principle about everybody’s human rights; you have to show exactly the opposite — that the relationship between fetus and pregnant woman is an exception, one that justifies depriving women of their right to bodily integrity,” Willis wrote in 1985. To ban abortion is to say that pregnant women are not entitled to the authority over their physical selves that other adults expect and demand.

...

Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt, a Trump appointee, wrote that the public interest is “served by maintaining our constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions — even, or perhaps particularly, when those decisions frustrate government officials.”

Engelhardt, a former member of Louisiana Lawyers for Life, obviously doesn’t believe that all individuals should have the liberty to make “intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions.” But that doesn’t mean he’s a hypocrite. He simply appears to believe, as much of the modern right does, that there are some people who should be subject to total physical coercion, and some who should be subject to none at all.

Spinal Cord Therapy

 Imagine. One injection to the spinal cord and the ability to walk can be restored.

The research will be published in the Nov. 12 issue of the journal Science.

By sending bioactive signals to trigger cells to repair and regenerate, the breakthrough therapy dramatically improved severely injured spinal cords in five key ways: (1) The severed extensions of neurons, called axons, regenerated; (2) scar tissue, which can create a physical barrier to regeneration and repair, significantly diminished; (3) myelin, the insulating layer of axons that is important in transmitting electrical signals efficiently, reformed around cells; (4) functional blood vessels formed to deliver nutrients to cells at the injury site; and (5) more motor neurons survived.

Reassessing Suburban Voters

 A lot of what we think about suburban voters is wrong. 

Loudoun County, Va., which became ground zero of stoking panic about education and critical race theory by the incoming governor, Glenn Youngkin, has become an example of many different political ideas, but they can’t be understood outside the local context. In the 1990s, over 80 percent of Loudoun County’s students were white. Today that number has dropped to 43 percent, after a large influx of Asian American and Latino families. Youngkin’s strong showing in Virginia’s suburbs, then, should be seen not only as a triumph of manipulation and messaging by the G.O.P. but also as the most recent nationwide response to demographic changes in the suburbs.

...

Youngkin’s strategy exposed oversights and misconceptions within the Democratic Party — its fundamental misunderstanding of Asian American voters and the ways in which it tends to focus on race and inequality in urban areas while mostly ignoring what’s happening right outside city limits.

...

a lot of folks who ended up in the suburbs didn’t move by choice. The central city got too expensive. So the rents and tenements that used to be accessible to low-income people, those got snapped up. In Detroit they got turned into downtown lofts. And many low-income people started to move outside the city because that’s where affordable housing was.

...

We know that now, in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, the majority of Black residents live in the suburbs. Now the majority of immigrants live in the suburbs. Now the majority of Latinx and Asian Americans live there. But most news media, when they say “suburban,” they mean “white.”

...

it also raises the question of what coalition politics are going to look like. So many folks have assumed, because the suburbs are becoming more Black, more brown, more poor, that they’re just going to vote straight-line Democrat. And I think when we look, we actually see that there are moments in which the Republican Party has made significant inroads in terms of mobilizing suburban voters of color. It varies significantly by racial and ethnic group. Black folks remain solidly Democratic in the suburbs.

...

Many residents, across race, have said one of the reasons they left the city was because of the safety net — the safety net was a burden that took more taxes away from them.

There are now more poor people in suburbs than in central cities, which means these problems have cropped back up for these same suburban residents. They have to reckon with the thing that they tried to escape.

...

We’re going to be forced to reckon with where people are because the narrative has been marching along for 20 years. We just haven’t been paying attention. You hear it arise more and more around elections, but you’re going to see it when we try to figure out how to deal with national poverty, with food insecurity, with transportation and infrastructure. Because the conversation has exclusively assumed people of color are in cities and white folks are in the suburbs. So I hope that people get shaken out of that misconception. But I think we have another 20 years before that happens.

Political Targeting Notes

 Suburbia is not white anymore. Successful Democratic candidates need to build multi-ethnic coalitions.

Every R voted against BBB in the House, including our own.

R like Dan Newhouse doesn't want you to have:   

Galapagos Tortoise Genome

Long life. Cancer Free.

Galapagos giant tortoises are some of the longest-living animals on Earth, but how do they pull off the feat? A new study has examined the genome of the species and found that they pack plenty of duplicate genes, which may protect them from aging-related diseases like cancer.

Supply Chain Problems are Labor Problems

The world's freight transportation problems were teetering on the edge before the pandemic. Then they cratered under COVID restrictions.

Long before the Ever Given, a 220,000-ton container ship, blocked the Suez Canal in March, transport industries had issued a blunt public warning that a trade logjam was unavoidable if conditions for sailors, drivers and pilots were not improved. To keep trade moving, workers urgently need fast-tracked visas, the return of flights to and from ports and vaccinations. Instead, the opposite happened. Draconian travel bans and limited access to vaccinations have had a devastating impact on transport workers’ well-being and safety. Crews have not been allowed to disembark ships without the right vaccination paperwork, so leaving or joining a ship has become impossible: Hundreds of thousands of them have been trapped on their vessels, with some working months beyond their initial contracts. Thousands of truck drivers at international borders have also been forced to sit for days in freezing temperatures without access to food or medical facilities. Pilots of cargo planes have faced extensive quarantines after completing international flights, meaning long periods away from their families.

This ill treatment may push many workers out of the sector, exacerbating the shortfall in labor that underpins the chaos.

Rittenhouse Reasoning

Kyle Rittenhouse self-owns his own case. 

At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.

This is self-defense as circular reasoning: Rittenhouse says he carried a rifle in order to guarantee his safety during a violent protest. He was forced to shoot at four people when his life and the lives of other people were threatened, he says. What was he protecting everyone from? The gun strapped to his own body, the one he’d brought to keep everyone safe.

...

The guns failed to deter attacks against their owners. According to the defense, Rittenhouse’s gun was a reason Rosenbaum pursued him. And Grosskreutz’s gun was the reason Rittenhouse shot him.

The guns failed any notion of proportionality or moderation. Prosecutors pointed out that Rittenhouse quickly fired four shots at Rosenbaum. Even if Rittenhouse felt genuinely threatened by Rosenbaum, why hadn’t Rittenhouse stopped shooting after the first shot, which could have immobilized Rosenbaum without killing him? (A defense “use of force” expert implied that the gun shot too quickly for him to pause and reassess the threat between shots.)

If you believe Rittenhouse’s defense, the gun also failed at a more basic level, that of ordinary product safety. Rittenhouse had his rifle strapped to his body but was still worried that it could be taken from him. How useful is a gun that can be pulled away from you by a guy who is also hitting you with a skateboard?

And finally, the guns failed at their most vaunted purpose, helping the good guys fight the bad guys. If Rittenhouse was your good guy, what good did his gun do him? How did it help anyone in the community he was trying to protect? It got two people killed, one person injured, and Rittenhouse himself facing charges of homicide. 

There's also this from the Arbery trial.

Seeing Around Corners or Through Tissue

A new holographic technique can do amazing things by bouncing lasers of opaque objects.

"It's like we can plant a virtual computational camera on every remote surface to see the world from the surface's perspective," Willomitzer said.

For people driving roads curving through a mountain pass or snaking through a rural forest, this method could prevent accidents by revealing other cars or deer just out of sight around the bend. "This technique turns walls into mirrors," Willomitzer said. "It gets better as the technique also can work at night and in foggy weather conditions."

Civil War by Other Means

Republicans will do anything if it harms Democrats, even if it hurts their own people.

“It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other,” he says. “Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules.”

Republicans pass photo ID laws knowing they could disenfranchise not just Democratic women, but their own.

Republicans hold pandemic relief hostage. prolonging their supporters’ suffering if it will harm Democrats.

Republicans refuse time-tested practices for fighting a global pandemic, and promote Covid denialism and crank cures while hundreds of millions of their own supporters die.

Now in Michigan, Republicans have found a new way to harm their own voters on the prospect that they will harm Democrats more. Having failed to override Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) veto of their proposed voting restrictions, they hope to eliminate 20 percent of voting places statewide.

Texas Evangelicals Prepare for a Post-Roe World

These fine examples of Christianity prepare to use the travails of unwanted pregnancy to bring sheep into their perverted fold.

The idea of providing a place for single, pregnant women harkened to a time before abortion became legal and so-called “homes for unwed mothers” were often the only option for women—mostly White women—to give birth in secrecy and avoid social scandal. The homes were often run by institutions such as The Salvation Army, orders of Catholic nuns, and evangelical churches. They were often bleak places where women were assumed to need reform and were sometimes abused and shamed, the kind of subjugation that advocates of legal abortion aimed to end.

...

she envisioned her own maternity ranch in almost utopian terms. To her, it would be a place of liberation and Christian development in accord with the beliefs she had refined at her church, one of the many popular megachurches in suburban Dallas that tended to be conservative in values, modern in style, with praise bands, coffee shops and names such as the Door and the Well.

...

By the time that lawyers were arguing over the heartbeat law at the U.S. Supreme Court, Aubrey had raised more than $120,000, a figure that continued to rise.

...

“If I can offer these moms and babies a safe, structured first year of life, of calm and stability — that can change whole generations,” Aubrey said, and as she headed back toward her car, she started describing another vision, one that was even larger than a maternity ranch.

“What if Texas ends up becoming a model for the future?” she said. “What if Texas meets this shift in culture? And instead of having high abortion rates, what if we help single moms to become stronger moms, to become successful?”

She imagined what that would look like. Churches helping. Christians opening their homes. Christian safe havens all over Texas. Maybe all over America.

Vaccination for Alzheimer's

Research has found a way to vaccinate in such a way that the body attacks and eliminates the form of amyloid that is related to the disease. 

Cats Be Tracking You

Even when you are across the house, they keep track of you with their ears.

Don't Panic

We need to hold the course through this blip of inflation.

current events don’t look anything like the 1970s. Instead, the closest parallel to 2021’s inflation is the first of these surges, the price spike from 1946 to 1948.

...

So what can 1946-48 teach us about inflation in 2021? Then as now there was a surge in consumer spending, as families rushed to buy the goods that had been unavailable in wartime. Then as now it took time for the economy to adjust to a big shift in demand — in the 1940s, the shift from military to civilian needs. Then as now the result was inflation, which in 1947 topped out at almost 20 percent. Nor was this inflation restricted to food and energy; wage growth in manufacturing, which was much more representative of the economy as a whole in 1947 than it is now, peaked at 22 percent.

But the inflation didn’t last. It didn’t end immediately: Prices kept rising rapidly for well over a year. Over the course of 1948, however, inflation plunged, and by 1949 it had turned into brief deflation.

What, then, does history teach us about the current inflation spike? One lesson is that brief episodes of overheating don’t necessarily lead to 1970s-type stagflation — 1946-48 didn’t cause long-term inflation, and neither did the other episodes that most resemble where we are now, World War I and the Korean War. And we really should have some patience: Given what happened in the 1940s, pronouncements that inflation can’t be transitory because it has persisted for a number of months are just silly.

The Guarantee Clause

JAMELLE BOUIE explains how the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution could be the ultimate authority in the fight against gerrymandering. It says Congress is obligated to guarantee that state governments are republican and representative of people.  This clause was the basis for the federal government to take apart Jim Crow.

It is not too much to say that the Republican Party has cleared itself a path to nullifying the votes of millions of Americans. What, if anything, is there to do about it?

Here, I think it is worth looking at one rarely discussed section of the Constitution.

In Article IV, Section 4, the Constitution says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

Much of this is straightforward. The federal government is obligated to protect each state from foreign invasion — a legitimate threat in the early days of the United States, when the nation faced foreign powers on its northern, southern and western borders (as well as British naval power) — and is obligated to quell domestic uprisings, from the rebellions that rocked the United States as it existed under the Articles of Confederation to the slave revolts that struck terror into the hearts of the Southern planter class.

But what, exactly, does it mean for the federal government to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government”?

...

As James Madison explains it in Federalist No. 43, it means that “In a confederacy founded on republican principles, and composed of republican members, the superintending government ought clearly to possess authority to defend the system against aristocratic or monarchial innovations.”

He goes on: “The more intimate the nature of such a Union may be, the greater interest have the members in the political institutions of each other; and the greater right to insist that the forms of government under which the compact was entered into, should be substantially maintained.”

Of course, there’s no real chance in the modern era that any state will become a “monarchy” or “aristocracy” in the 18th-century sense. So why does the Guarantee Clause matter, and what does it mean? How does one determine whether a state has maintained a “republican form of government”?

...

In his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan cited the Guarantee Clause in his brief against Louisiana’s Jim Crow segregation law. If allowed to stand, he wrote,

there would remain a power in the States, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the blessings of freedom; to regulate civil rights common to all citizens, upon the basis of race; and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a part of the political community, called the people of the United States, for whom and by whom, through representatives, our government is administrated. Such a system is inconsistent with the guarantee given by the Constitution to each State of a republican form of government, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

In this vision of the Guarantee Clause, the touchstone for “a republican form of government” is political equality, and when a state imposes political inequality beyond a certain point, Congress or the federal courts step in to restore the balance.

Truth About the Build-Back-Better Banking Regulation

IRS already know how much wage-earners make because of W-2's. For people who earn their money in other ways, it isn't so easy and that's where the largest offenders of our tax laws operate. The Build-Back-Better legislation modestly expands the IRS purview to include the annual gross in-flows and out-flows of  large bank accounts.

The right-wingers are drumming up scare stories about this and of course lots of people are biting the hook. Don't be taken in by the lies.

New Take on Fusion Energy

Typical proposed fusion reactors plan to take the energy out of the reactor by generating steam and driving turbines. The Helion model uses the change produced in the plasma flux when a fusion occurs to generate an outgoing electric current directly in the magnets that are confining the plasma. I think this might be a game-changer.

Preserving Democracy and Freedom

An interview with Sebastian Junger as he talks about the price and reward of freedom and democracy.

“For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for if not died for. That raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed.” Shortly after that, you say, “The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.”

...

The great thing about a democracy is if you think that the government is overreaching — and the government’s great at overreaching ... I mean, it’s not like it doesn’t do that. I get it. — But if you think that that’s the case, you have recourse. You can go to the courts or you can vote the bastards out. You can go to the polling booth.

But the one thing you can’t do in a democracy is use violence to change an outcome. As soon as you use violence to change that outcome, you’re actually creating the opposite of a democracy. You are on the road to fascism.

...

How do we maintain our autonomy in the face of a more powerful group?

Sometimes that more powerful group is your own government. The labor movement 100 years ago, there were totally disenfranchised foreign workers working in the textile mills in Massachusetts, and they faced down the National Guard and the corporations and the government, and they got the laws changed.

One of the ways they did that was incorporating women into their ranks. Once you put women on the front line of a protest, the cops often do not dare use mass violence. They’re way more willing to do that against men. As one frustrated policeman said in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, he said, “One good cop can handle 10 men. But it takes 10 cops to handle one woman.” That changed the tactical dynamic on the streets that allowed those protests to succeed.

The Red Death Is Real

As vaccinations have been rolled out, the gap in compliance between red and blue geographies has become more and more apparent.

The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

Here's the picture

They Had A Game Plan

The Bulwark published a piece on the Claremont Institute's war game plan for overthrowing our democracy. It's an exercise that uses large swaths of right-wing fantasy and wishful, magical thinking about how our government actually works. Fortunately, they were wrong about so many things and sadly, they came really close nonetheless.

despite the authors’ pretensions to scholarship and rigor—“for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism”— the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right.

Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government—aided by citizen “posses” of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office.

...

The exercise ends with crude myth-making: the noble and sacrificial decision by a “Republican member from an at-large delegation” suffering from “life-threatening wounds” who, “understanding what is at stake, demands to be transported to the House for the state delegation vote and arrives in a heavily guarded convoy.”

This isn’t a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries.

Democratic Elitism

 From David Brooks. Some points, but he fails to address the problem of conservatives espousing fundamentally destructive ideas.

When Democrats seem to be magnifying the education establishment’s control of the classroom and minimizing the role of parents, there’s going to be a reaction. Some of the reaction is pure racism, but a lot of it is pushback against elite domination and the tacit ideology.

...

If Republicans can find candidates who oppose the blue oligarchy but without too much Trumpian baggage, they can win over some former Biden voters in places like Virginia and New Jersey.

Democrats would be wise to accept the fact that they have immense social and cultural power, and accept the responsibilities that entails by adopting what I’d call a Whole Nation Progressivism.

...

Democrats need a positive moral vision that would start by rejecting the idea that we are locked into incessant conflict along class, cultural, racial and ideological lines. It would reject all the appurtenances of the culture warrior pose — the us/them thinking, exaggerating the malevolence of the other half of the country, relying on crude essentialist stereotypes to categorize yourself and others.

It would instead offer a vision of unity, unity, unity. That unity is based on a recognition of the complex humanity of each person — that each person is in the act of creating a meaningful life. It would reject racism, the ultimate dehumanizing force, but also reject any act that seeks to control the marketplace of ideas or intimidate those with opposing views. It would reject ideas and movements that seek to reduce complex humans to their group identities. It would stand for racial, economic and ideological integration, and against separatism, criticizing, for example, the way conservatives are often shut out from elite cultural institutions.

Who's in Control?

David Foster Wallace predicted the binge culture of today. First it was simply video-on-demand. Then recommendations based on prior viewing. Now it's predictive analytics. It takes strong conscious effort to climb up out of our selected ruts. Not only do the algorithms look at what you like, but they are able to group you with other users like you and make suggestions based on the things people in your cohort like.

In the post-modern age, helped by technology, we dream of achieving 24/7 joy. But behind the joy are the algorithms. In 2012, for instance, when Sarandos commissioned a political drama for Netflix TV called House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, predictive analytics helped justify his decision. “It was generated by algorithm,” Sarandos told me. “I didn’t use data to make the show, but I used data to determine the potential audience to a level of accuracy very few people can do.”

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This “if you liked that, then you’ll like this” facility has become commonplace in the new millennium, tailoring cultural supply to your tastes. And yet, customized culture such as that devised at Netflix risks creating what internet activist Eli Pariser in 2010 called “filter bubbles”: each of us isolated intellectually in our own informational spheres.

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What Netflix’s notorious binge culture results in is flow by another means, more efficient and more insidious— insidious in that we seem to be getting what we want all the time, and we suppose we have liberated ourselves from the gatekeeper of TV (schedulers), only to be ruled by another, much more sophisticated group of gatekeepers, whose task is to keep us watching while at the same time suggesting that viewers are being liberated by being given more choice.

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What fascinated Wallace about this passage was not so much the parodic regress—the tourists watching the barn, Murray watching the tourists, Jack watching Murray, us watching Jack watching Murray watching the tourists watching the barn—but Murray’s assumption of the role of scientific critic at a remove from the culture of gawping. Wallace’s sense was that we’re all gawpers now, lens-dangling barn-watchers as much as pop-cultural theorists. The most absurd aspect of this parodic regress is the person who thinks he can stand outside it, observing with ironic detachment.

Sports Fandom and Political Polarization

Perhaps you've noticed that there appear to be similar tribal similarities in how people identify with a sports team and a political party.

the creation of a sports fan has a number of requirements, including a specific geography, family affiliations and the sense of kinship one may get from being a fan of a team. She said that in many ways, sports fandom “forms similar to other kinds of identity, where you start associating with folks who have something in common. And then you can feel support from them. You feel that sense of winning when your team wins, or that sense of defeat when your team loses.”

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Duncan elaborated on how our connections to our political identity are markedly similar — our political understanding is largely based on where we are and with whom we socialize.

“When your political party wins, same as when your team wins, you feel that sense of winning yourself. Or when your team loses, you feel that loss similarly.” She added that based on her research in sports and politics, those kinship ties also affect how we perceive bad news about our favorite teams.

“You know it’s going to take more than simple facts for you to believe that your hero of a sports coach has actually looked the other way while sexual abuse happened. Or it’s going to take more than just facts for you to realize that your political party isn’t headed in the same direction or doesn’t share your same values,” she said.

So what could reshape someone’s sports fandom or, by extension, political affiliations? Duncan told me that while some shifts happen when something takes place that “cracks through your sense of reality” and raises questions about how and why you think the way you do, the way many people change in their sports fandom or political alignment often stems from a literal, physical shift.

“We see shifts in political alignment or sports team fandom if you shift to maybe a completely different geographical area where your social structure, those around you, thinks differently,” she said. If you grew up in a very liberal area and moved to a place that’s more conservative, your views might change, or at least your views on what the people now around you believe might change. And your sports fandom might change if you moved to a new town with different sports allegiances — lessening your hate for your traditional rivals as well.

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I am proud of my willingness to be wrong, but I’ve noticed that I have a troubling propensity to excuse my own wrongness in the face of evidence by saying that hey, well, those guys are probably even more wrong than I am.

That’s not reason. That’s fandom.

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watching Michigan play Michigan State today and probably saying many things that perhaps I would not repeat in the paper of record — fandom makes you do some very, very stupid things.

Disinformation Attacks

An analysis of the disinformation about COVID shows that certain communities were singled out for attacks by certain antagonists.

Some reports suggest that some of the anti-vaccine activity spotted online had roots in disinformation campaigns that were linked to the Russian government. On June 8, GroupSense analysts said they agreed with the assessment of another research firm, known as Graphika, that an anti-vaccine cartoon posted to a website devoted to promoting far-right conspiracy theories was “consistent with a pro-Russian disinformation campaign.” That campaign was attributed to people linked to the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency.

Preventing Tragic Accidents

Instead of finding fault, tragic accidents could be more preventable by using systems thinking. 

Instead she looks at how accidents can be caused by unforeseen interactions between various components of a complex system.

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“I don’t believe in blame,” Leveson says. “When it’s about blame, you just find someone to blame and then you go on.” Instead, she emphasizes making systems mistake-resistant, if not mistake-proof. “You need to design your system to prevent accidents, not depend on the operator,” she says.

Leveson contends that too many systems today are designed so that “we’re guaranteed the operator is going to make a mistake of some kind.” For example, a 2010 investigation of radiation oncology accidents by The New York Times found that while new technology helped doctors better attack tumors, the complexity of the technology also “created new avenues for error through software flaws, faulty programming, poor safety procedures or inadequate staffing and training.”

It's all the interactions among components of the process that tends to bring out unintended consequences. And it's failure to account for how humans actually tend to operate systems.

Killing the Leaf Blowers

A NY Times article points out the problem.

a two-stroke gasoline-powered leaf blower spewed out more pollution than a 6,200-pound Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup truck. Jason Kavanagh, the engineering editor at Edmunds at the time, noted that “hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor.”

With those words, the California ban seems quite reasonable. 

Gasoline-powered lawn-care machines — mowers, trimmers, leaf blowers, etc. — consume nearly 2.2 billion gallons of gas each year and are responsible for about 10 percent of all the mobile hydrocarbon emissions in this country.

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“Using a two-stroke engine is like heating your house with an open pit fire in the living room — and chopping down your trees to keep it going, and trying to whoosh away the fetid black smoke before your children are poisoned by it.”

Anti-democratic Anti-business Tax Cheaters

The Republican Party has made it very clear. They are all theses things.

Each year, about $600 billion in taxes legally owed are not paid. For scale, that’s roughly equal to all federal income taxes paid by the lowest-earning 90 percent of taxpayers, according to Treasury Department data.

These unpaid taxes — often called the “tax gap” — are predominantly owed by wealthy individuals. The richest 1 percent alone duck an estimated $163 billion in income taxes each year.

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There are some types of income, however, for which little or no third-party reporting exists. These income categories — including partnership, proprietorship and rental income — accrue disproportionately to high earners. The government has much less ability to tell when these filers are misreporting; as a result, they can more easily get away with cheating.

And some of them do.

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When it comes to ordinary wage and salary income, taxpayers are remarkably forthcoming, with noncompliance averaging only 1 percent; for those more “opaque” income sources, noncompliance is an estimated 55 percent.
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Financial institutions already report certain information to the IRS about their clients’ accounts, such as interest income accrued over the year. Under Democrats’ latest proposal, banks would — once a year — also report the sums of all deposits and withdrawals for certain accounts. Not every transaction; just the year-end totals. Only accounts with flows of more than $10,000 not tied to wage income or exempted benefits would be affected — the idea being that the IRS already knows about the wage income anyway.

The reporting proposal is estimated to bring in $200 billion to $250 billion in revenue over the next decade, according to Treasury.

This is revenue that would be collected without having to raise a single tax rate, which you’d think Republicans would applaud. Instead, the GOP, backed by the bank lobby, has fought every version of the reporting policy tooth and nail.

Just as they did with Obamacare “death panels,” Republicans have megaphoned misinformation. They allege that Democrats would create a Marxist “surveillance program designed to target low- and middle-income earners” (false) in which the government would “monitor every single transaction you make” (false) with “no limits” (definitely false).

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The GOP seeks to exploit the confusion of honest, rank-and-file taxpayers. Their income is already quite well reported to the IRS: Three billion 1099 forms alone will be issued this year, and Americans haven’t considered this a “dragnet” or “infringement on personal privacy.” But suddenly it is — when similar reporting is proposed to ensure high-income people’s tax compliance, too.

Republicans also presumably have another shameful aim: communicating to tax cheats that, now and in the future, the GOP has their backs.

Not Divided

The headlines are misleading. The Democratic Congress is not divided or at war with each other. They are remarkably unified but are being held hostage by some corporate-friendly outliers. 

The big number for the reconciliation infrastructure bill is misleading. Trump's tax cut was a %5 trillion dollar bill and the anti-democratic Republicans didn't even blink at it despite the economic theory behind it has been proven to be wrong multiple times.

I'm looking forward to have Medicare provide vision and hearing coverage. Many folks living in states controlled by the anti-democratic Republicans are looking forward to expanded Medicaid. Families are looking forward to the expanded tax credit that will lift them out of poverty. Family bread-winners are looking forward to paid family and medical leave so they don't have to choose between keeping their job and being there for their family when the family needs them most. 

There Was So Much Good Stuff with Lawrence Last Night

Here's the link to the transcript.

Democrats with Biden have done a lot. Unemployment relief, child tax credit. Millions of previous felons have had their voting rights restored.

While Republicans have devolved into a purely obstructionist anti-democratic cult.

Democrats need to use the human side of Biden's accomplishments to speak to the hearts of people rather than the wonky checklists. We need to stop selling the recipe and start selling the brownie.

And the Senate needs to be fixed. The filibuster needs to be changed such that it returns to being a tool to fostering negotiation rather than a weapon of obstruction.

O'Donnell:

Today in his column in "The Washington Post," Michael Gerson writes the GOP is a garbage scow of the corrupt, the seditious, and their enablers. This is unprecedented in American political history, but by now, we`ve grown used to it, that the most eloquent and lacerating and accurate descriptions of the Republican Party now come from the former leading lights of the Republican Party, intellectuals like George Will, speech writers like Michael Gerson and Bill Kristol, presidential campaign strategists like Stuart Stevens and Steve Schmidt, and the list goes on and on.

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Jennifer Rubin who writes: It is long past time that Democrats seize the high ground on values including fair play, honesty, respect, and nonviolence. In truth, a party that winks at violence and tries to undermine faith in elections is anti-American and anti-democratic. Hold Republicans accountable when they rationalize violence and denigrate the importance of elections. Take them to task as anti-work and anti-family for opposing necessities such as subsidized child care for working parents or paid family leave to take care of parents.

That`s how Democrats can achieve consensus, if not unity, cast themselves as defenders of American values and put Republicans on defense.

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Jennifer Rubin, a conservative opinion writer at "The Washington Post," and author of "Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump":

we who have been on the Republican side once upon a time do have a little perspective. And you`re right, they on the Republican side use values to hit the Democrats over the head with you`re anti-family, you`re not patriotic, you`re anti-police. All of this, of course, is nonsense, and is now directly applicable to them.

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[Biden] really has to set a much higher bar and talk about his package as one that is pro-family, that is pro-democratic, that is pro-national unity and begin to talk in the language of values pointing out that Democrats are the repository of those values now.

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I would point him in the direction of my dear friend Matt Dowd who is running for lieutenant governor of Texas of all things.

You watch his ads, he`s talking about common sense, common purpose for the common good. That`s language that we need to hear on a national level from Democrats.

Eddie Glaude, chair of the African- American studies department at Princeton University

it falls upon the shoulders of an unsuspecting generation to save American democracy, and that`s where we are. And that`s what the Democratic Party has to understand its task as, so as we articulate these values, we have to articulate within a framework that the republic is in crisis, that it`s in danger, and that we must in some way stand behind or stand for those values if we`re going to salvage this fragile experiment it seems to me.

Rubin:

The issue of our time is whether we`re going to have a democracy, whether the American ideal, equal justice under the law, a Constitution that restrains those in power is going to survive or not.

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go out and tell the American people what you are for, that you are there to not only protect their interests but to embody and save American democracy. And really take it to the next level.

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[Presidencies] are built on this emotional connection in which voters see in that leader someone who cares about them, someone who embodies their values, and someone who makes them feel like America is a place for them. And if Democrats can`t do that, we are in deep, deep trouble.

O'Donnell:

The August payment of the child tax credit lifted 3.5 million children out of poverty. New polling shows many Americans don`t know that Democrats and the Biden administration provided that relief and that every single Republican in Congress opposed that relief. The latest "Politico"/Morning Consult poll finds 61 percent of respondents say they received the expanded child tax credit of up to $300 for every child each month, but only 47 percent of those respondents credited Democrats for passing the legislation, and only 38 percent credited President Biden.

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO, FOUNDER, ASO COMMUNICATIONS:

So, a message is like a baton that has to be passed from person to person to person. If it gets dropped anywhere along the way, by definition, it isn`t heard, and even someone with arguably the largest pulpit,

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it is the media, hate to tell you, that determine what it is people hear about these programs. The child care tax credit, for example, was dropped right around the same time as what happened in Afghanistan. That swamped the coverage, and to me, it is very, very sad that the numbers that you report are there are certainly not what we`re seeing in our nightly focus groups very much reaffirming that and in the polling we`ve done privately, but it`s also utterly unsurprising. 

If the media isn`t telling folks about these things, then how is it they`re supposed to get this message, even if the president is reporting on it.

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something very interesting is happening in the polls. Republican voters with children tend to be more favorably disposed to Biden than Republican voters without children. That could be correlation or causation, but the people I talk to say that shows there is some resonance.

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motivated cognition is a hell of a drug. And what I mean by that is that the more the descriptor of the human cognitive processing system would be I`ll see it when I believe it, not the other way around.

What we find in experiment after experiment is that when people have already cemented a world view, they in essence have a frame around what is occurring, then facts are simply impervious to it. They bounce off of it, right?

In lay terms if you`ve ever had the experience of trying to tell one of your friends that the guy that she`s dating is a complete and total jerk and you provide her fact after fact after fact and they are just going ping, ping, ping, that`s what I`m talking about. But spread across massive issues of social justice and economic well-being.

And so people are incredibly adept at discounting factual information that`s simply weeding it out, not paying attention to it, ignoring it that doesn`t fit their pre-existing frame.

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We could recognize that we have to speak as your previous guests were saying in the language of values. And more than that, as I often like to tell people, don`t take your policy out in public. It`s unseemly.

Messaging about policy is always less effective than what that policy delivers. So when we ask people, how do you feel about paid family leave? They`re into it. When we say instead you`re there the first time your newborn smiles, they`re way more into it.

When we say raising wages very popular. When we say instead everyone makes enough to care for their family, way more popular.

What Democrats need to do when they do have the mic is stop selling the recipe and start selling the brownie. Stop talking about the names of your policies and instead speak to voters in imageable terms about what it would feel like to have that as the reality in their life.

And so it`s not a child care tax credit, which is the name of a policy. It`s you go off to work and you feel great about what your kid is and you know that they`re safe, loved, and cared for and that you can afford it.

 NORM ORNSTEIN, CONGRESSIONAL HISTORIAN:

And the Senate`s going to get worse. I mean we have to consider that, Lawrence, that before long it`s become -- going to become even less representative of the country as a whole. But right now we are in a moment where we need triage. And the fact is if we don`t fix the Senate, we can kiss our democracy good-bye.

Certainly the debt ceiling fiasco is a part of it. I think and hope that Mitch McConnell, not for good purposes, but his own malign ones, has given us an opportunity, a little bit of breathing room to take that reconciliation bill and make it work so we have a big accomplishment, one that will include an enormous set of things for the American public, especially for working class and middle class and poorer people.

And then we have to fix that debt ceiling blackmail once and for all. It`s Tom Hannah (ph) and I, when we wrote more than ten years ago about what was then an insurgent outlier purpose, now an obstructionist cult, saw that this was being used for horrible purposes. And there are ways to do that in reconciliation.

And third and most important, we discussed it before, we have to discuss it many times. We need to find a way to restore the filibuster where the burden is on the minority so we can get the things done starting primarily with democracy reform but moving on to many, many other things that are just going to be blocked because every single Republican will filibuster and keep them from happening.

BBB Borrowing is OK

While people are wringing their hands about Sinema's "No new taxes" stance on the Build Back Better bill, Paul Krugman points out that borrowing the money to pay for it is much less worse than not having it at all.

the Trump tax cut was just the latest in a long series of giveaways to the wealthy that were sold on false pretenses. And Sinema should be ashamed of herself for helping corporate interests perpetuate this grift.
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If the U.S. were to end up borrowing another $1.75 trillion, that would be over the course of a decade, not a single year — and the Congressional Budget Office projects total G.D.P. over the next decade of $288 trillion. So while it might sound as if we’re talking about huge deficit spending, the additional deficit would be only 0.6 percent of G.D.P., which simply isn’t a big deal.

In fact, given the arithmetic you might wonder why Biden ever wanted to raise taxes enough to fully pay for his investment agenda. The answer, I think, was more about the politics than the economics — that pitching his plans as deficit-neutral was supposed to reassure politicians who haven’t caught up with current mainstream economic thinking, and who still regard budget deficits as a major threat.
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We can deplore the corporate influence that may block some justified tax increases, but borrowing to invest for the future isn’t a bad thing in itself. Hey, businesses do it all the time. So Democrats should just go for it.

Merkel Was Right

When Angela Merkel bravely accepted the influx of a million refugees, the backlash was vocal. Now, it looks like Merkel made the right move. The scare stories never materialized and the German economy has grown its workforce for future economic growth.

In the recent German election, refugees were barely an issue, and the AfD lost ground. “The sense is that there has been comparatively little Islamic extremism or extremist crime resulting from this immigration, and that on the whole, the largest number of these immigrants have been successfully integrated into the German work force and into German society overall,”
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the refugees had more to offer Germany than a burnished self-image. In an aging country with a low birthrate, they were a useful addition to the work force. The economy, Stelzenmüller said, “was looking for labor before the pandemic, and so there was a real demand and presumably a willingness from the labor market and companies to help people. And of course we have a long experience, a decades-long practice, of on-the-job training that is seen as a model by other European countries and in fact by America.”
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in absorbing a million desperate people at a time when others were putting up razor wire, Germany did something great, something the rest of the world could learn from as wars and ecological calamity send many millions more trudging across the globe in search of sanctuary.

“We now have a case study, an example, of how it can work, and I’m hoping the world will make use of Merkel’s example,” said Marton. The chancellor’s refrain in 2015 was, “We can do this.” If only the rest of us could too

Incompetence Is Their Best Feature

Once again a Trumpist attempt to build a media mouthpiece which fails because of incompetence. 

For people who should know that the geeks are out to snarl their plans, they just can't seem to put up a website using sufficient security. 

the site’s early hours revealed lax security, rehashed features and a flurry of bizarre design decisions. An open sign-up page allowed anyone to use the site shortly after it was revealed, sparking the creation of the “donaldjtrump” account and the pig posting. A Washington Post reporter was able to register and post under the account name “mikepence” without any stops in place. New sign-ups were blocked shortly after.

What Democrats Need to Do

 David Brooks has some ideas.

Are Democrats up for such a tough (and expensive) fight? Many liberal voters have taken a step back from politics, convinced that Mr. Trump is no longer a threat. According to research conducted for our super PAC, almost half of women in battleground states are now paying less attention to the political news.

But in reality, the last election settled very little. Mr. Trump not only appears to be preparing for a presidential campaign in 2024; he is whipping up his supporters before the 2022 midterms. And if Democrats ignore the threat he and his allies pose to democracy, their candidates will suffer next fall, imperiling any chance of meaningful reform in Congress.

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Having underestimated Mr. Trump in the first place, Democrats shouldn’t underestimate what it will take to counter his malign influence now. They need a bigger, bolder campaign blueprint to save democracy that doesn’t hinge on the whims of Congress.

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Where possible, Democrats should sponsor plebiscites to overturn anti-democratic laws passed by Republicans in states. They should underwrite super PACs to protect incumbent election officials being challenged by Trump loyalists, even if it means supporting reasonable Republicans. Donations should flow into key governor and secretary of state races, positions critical to election certification.

The good news is that liberals do not have to copy what the right is doing with its media apparatus — the font of falsehoods about voter fraud and a stolen election — to win over voters. Democrats can leapfrog the right with significant investments in streaming video, podcasting, newsletters and innovative content producers on growing platforms like TikTok, whose audiences dwarf those of cable news networks like Fox News.

Issues like racial justice, the environment and immigration are already resonating online with audiences Democrats need to win over, such as young people, women and people of color. Democratic donors have long overlooked efforts to fund the media, but with so much of our politics playing out on that battlefield, they can no longer afford to.

Why Supply Chain Problems

It's the pandemic. When people can go do things like attend public activities or dine in restaurants, they buy stuff, lots of stuff. Our supply-chain problem is the result of a huge increase in shipping demand. The way we solve this is to get vaccinated, put the pandemic behind this, and get out there and do stuff rather than buy stuff.

Small Worlds

Whatever world we live in I think we all fabricate for ourselves a smaller, tribal world to live in. It serves as a place of safety, nurture, and refuge. It can be a circle of compatible friends that are emotionally comforting.

The dark side of small worlds is that if they are too small you can get to feel hemmed in and want to escape. You have to be able to have the small world with the freedom to step out of it any time you feel the need.

It's in the small worlds that one has the biggest sense of obligation because there are fewer folks

With my particular church fellowship, that fellowship serves as a small world. It's a pretty sparse membership so that world is small indeed.

A small world can have all the comfort and frustrations of the family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Each must decide how to deal with that, escape or embrace. There are costs to both paths. I would like to figure out how to minimize the costs of embracing the small world and maximize the benefits.

A small world leads to protected childhoods and youths frequently unprepared for the wider world and it demands and temptations. I'm all for protecting children but we need to also raise our youth the be complete adults.

Even though we think we are ready and willing to live in a small world, life (or something) sometimes kicks us out unwillingly.

If the small world is large enough it can be a fairly complete experience. Some are willing to fit in and stay in completely. They have no concern or desire about whether they might be missing something. The small world is a safe refuge in a larger, scarier universe.

Anti-democratic anti-business Republican Party

In addition to being anti-democratic, the GOP is becoming more and more an anti-business party.

Republican politicians are at odds with corporate America on crucial issues. It’s not just vaccines. Corporate interests also want serious investment in infrastructure and find themselves on the outs with Republican leaders who don’t want to see Democrats achieve any policy successes. Basically, the G.O.P. is currently engaged in a major campaign of sabotage — its leaders want to see America do badly, because they believe this will redound to their political advantage — and if this hurts their corporate backers along the way, they don’t care.
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Now they’re learning that they aren’t in control, and in fact have barely any voice in the party they bankrolled. They thought they were using the extremists; it turns out that the extremists were using them.

The question is, what are they going to do about it?

Unfortunate Title

A poorly titled Harvard study seems to imply that vaccinations aren't working against COVID. However the authors of the study simply say that vaccinations themselves are not enough to stop the pandemic, masking and distancing are also essential. 

Anti-vaxxers, of course, are not bothering to actually read the paper and are touting as "proof" that vaccines don't work. And, as usual, what they want to hear is getting higher engagement than the actual truth.  

Some Roman Concrete Gets Stronger Over Time

The tomb of Caecilia Metella is a landmark on the Via Appia Antica. the Appian Way. It has stood for over 2,000 years. The mortar in its construction has actually become stronger over time. It's secret is minerals from a nearby pyroclastic flow. As water saturates the mortar, unique chemical reactions create stronger bonds and the aggregate works to stop microfracture from propagating.

Jackson and her colleagues are working to replicate some of the Romans' successes in modern concretes, specifically in a U.S. Department of Energy ARPA-e project to encourage similar beneficially reactive aggregates in concretes that use engineered cellular magmatics in place of the tephra of the ancient Roman structures. The objective, according to ARPA-e, is that a Roman-like concrete could reduce the energy emissions of concrete production and installation by 85% and improve the 50-year lifespan of modern marine concretes four-fold.

"Focusing on designing modern concretes with constantly reinforcing interfacial zones might provide us with yet another strategy to improve the durability of modern construction materials," Masic says. "Doing this through the integration of time-proven 'Roman wisdom' provides a sustainable strategy that could improve the longevity of our modern solutions by orders of magnitude."

A Tonic for the Party

Gaining ground in rural America has become a difficult task for the Democratic Party. Major sparkplug Anderson Clayton shows us how to do it.

Part of the reason Democrats fail to get traction in rural America is failure to be loud and proud about what they stand for. Another is that many Democratic committees have all the institutional vigor of a mid-20th-century men’s fraternal organization. What’s needed is not just more younger activists, but more “legacy Democrats” willing to stand aside and let them take the reins.