Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Utah and Beyond Tuesday, June 29, 2021: The small town of Lytton, British Columbia, Canada recorded a high of 121 degrees Fahrenheit. This was the highest ever recorded in Lytton, in British Columbia, in Canada. Wednesday, June 30, 2021, the small town of Lytton burned to the ground. On Monday, June 28, 2021, the temperature in Portland, Oregon reached 116 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest ever recorded. On that same day, Seattle recorded 108...

Black and Brown Americans suffer the most in biggest U.S. drop in life expectancy since WWII, Modern Healthcare, June 2021 In an earlier post listing a series of articles I thought might be interesting to AB, this one Modern Healthcare article was listed as one of interest. I decided to expand on the article and allow it more space and subsequent detail. The advent of Covid, lack of medical access, and subsequent resistance to vaccinations has...

It is an unfortunate fact that many think tanks funded by conservative plutocrats and nominally devoted to spreading free-market ideas actively foster the politics of white grievance.  I believe the evidence for this claim is quite strong, but it is not always immediately obvious that this is happening.  Classical liberals and libertarians generally do not engage in overt race-baiting, and they make arguments with at least a thin veneer of...

“Could it be a better result? By this, I mean should there really have been an extreme shortage and long lead times?” A fellow writer was an engineer at OnSemi. As he stated once, his job was watching the crystals (future “wafer material) grow. More coming on this comment shortly. You will not be experts (I am not either) in the process. Hopefully, you will understand why the issues associated with manufacturing semiconductors are questionable. I...

TimeWork Web Reloaded Publication of my article, “The Ambivalence of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties at Two Hundred,” felt very much like the culmination of a 26-year long research project that began when I answered a call for proposals from the B.C. Ministry of Employment and Investment. My proposal included a research hub website, which was pretty innovative for 1995. It turns out that no research contract was...

The Cornwall Paradox  The County of Cornwall has been in the news as the site of the G7 summit, just ended. In today’s Washington Post an article “In Cornwall, a jarring contrast of power and poverty,” by Karla Adam and Loveday Morris, a paradox of this visit is highlighted and brought out, indeed, that Cornwall is one of the poorest places in Great Britain, indeed in Northern Europe more generally, but that it is drawing much attention and some...

Record High Job Quitting; Record Low Layoff Rate, MarketWatch 666, AB Commenter and Blogger RJS The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report for April from the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated seasonally adjusted job openings jumped by by 998,000, from 8,288,000 in March to 9,286,000 job openings in April, after March’s record job openings were revised 165,000 higher, from 8,123,000 to 8,288,000 . . . April’s jobs openings...

Coronavirus dashboard for June 7: a Tale of Two Pandemics: the Vaccinated States vs. the Idiotic States The drive towards “herd immunity” via vaccination has slowed to a crawl. The slowing is almost entirely driven by Trump-voting States in the South and West. Those Idiotic States are continuing to suffer from an ongoing pandemic, while in the Biden-voting States of the Northeast, Midwest, and California, the pandemic has all but ended.Here...

Ross Barnett didn’t invent the big lie, but he was a practitioner. One might even say that Ross was to the manor born. The big lie had been a southern thing from the get go; comes with the turf. First you must lie to yourself, and so they did. Hitler appropriated, without acknowledgment, the concept in Mein Kampf, Chapter 10. That wasn’t all he appropriated from the American South; they had beaten him to a lot of the Nazi shtick. Joseph McCarthy...

“Ambivalence” has dropped! “The Ambivalence of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of theNational Difficulties at Two Hundred,” Tom Walker,Simon Fraser University  Two things I am especially pleased about that were sort of incidental at the time: 1. The prominence in the title of “Ambivalence” — the future is ambivalent — and 2. The ending quote by Benjamin of a quote about stereoscopic vision.  The “author’s original version” can...