Tag Archives: Hot Topics

Fear and Loathing On the 17 July 2020, episode of Counterspin, Fair’s Janine Jackson interviewed True North Research’s Lisa Graves about attacks on the US Postal Service. ‘A Combination of Forces Puts Our Postal Service at Grave Risk‘ Jackson leads off talking about the recent appointment of Louis DeJoy, a big Trump donor, to be the new head of the US Postal Service. Upon being appointed, DeJoy promptly issued a series of memos calling for operational...

“Republicans finally get “death panels,” Hullabaloo, Tom Sullivan, July, 26, 2020 Dr. Jose Vasquez, the health officer for Starr County, Texas located on the US-Mexico border “The situation is desperate.” At the only hospital in the county, over 50% of patients are testing positive for the COVID-19 virus — 40 new coronavirus cases were reported Thursday. Starr County Memorial Hospital in Rio Grande City made plans to set up a committee to decide which...

Managing A Zoom Conference As of the end of this week, I completed chairing the 30th annual international conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences, with 54 participants from around the world.  It basically went well, and it was kind of cool to make introductory remarks at 8 AM during EDT, with somebody on at 6 AM their time in Montana and someone else on at 10 PM their time in Sydney, Australia.  It can be done, and...

Via Diana Ravitch’s blog on a Time magazine article What the U.S. Can Learn from 3 Countries About Reopening: TIME Magazine just published a story about school reopening in Denmark, South Korea, and Israel, with lessons for the U.S. Lesson #1 from Denmark: Get the virus under control before reopening schools. Unlike Denmark, the United States is bungling that, and the virus is spreading in the south and west. Perhaps states that have taken the necessary...

Given the state of the race, people are starting to ask what this would mean for the future of progressive politics in America. James Kwak is gloomy: I think the policy solutions are obvious . . . The problem, of course, is the politics—not just President Trump and the Republicans, but a Democratic Party controlled by its conservative wing, defined primarily by its insistence on fiscal responsibility, and terrified of doing anything that anyone might call...

Blacks Should Be More Afraid Of Other Blacks Than Cops Rudy Giuliani joined Fox and Friends to trash Mayor de Blasio and decree that Black men should be more afraid of other Black men than of his cop buddies murdering black men with racist intent. Echoing Trump’s “law and order” idiocy and hatred of the Black Lives Movement, Giuliani gave his unfettered support to law enforcement, and decreed that he has always been the true savior of New York. Me: What...

Epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding . . . “No other ways to spin this.” Common Dreams, “Warnings of Possible Cover-Up in Progress” I was hoping I could get the clip of Doctor Wen discussing what the Trump administration has done in its end run around the CDC. I couldn’t C&P the embed code as it is in a lock down and I do not have the wave length to create one for it. You can view the news clip here “Trump Orders Hospitals to give him the data.”...

to coronavirus, like the famous pioneers who “had to turn to cannibalism” Rush Limbaugh, Media Matters for America, July 14, 2020 Something to sleep on tonight by our faithful idiot Rush. “In the Spanish flu — ’17, ’18, ’19, 1917, ’18 — much death. Do you know that there was not one mention of it by the president of the United States at the time, Woodrow Wilson? Never talked about it, there was no national policy to deal with it. There was no shutdown,...

by Joseph Joyce Economists and Inequality Binyamin Applebaum of the New York Times has written a book, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets and the Fracture of Society, in which he claims that economists are responsible for the increase in income inequality in the U.S. I thought this charge was off the mark and wrote a reply. My piece, “Are Economists Responsible for Income Inequality?“, has been published in the June issue of Society. Here...

Infidel 753 writes at his own site of the same name. From time to time in the past he has put up several of Angry Bear’s posts on Crooks and Liars. This post (of his), I find interesting as he discusses the history and legitimacy of statues honoring  Confederates and US military bases named after Confederate military leaders. History needs to be recorded and remembered, regardless of how we today judge the events and people of the past.  What happened is...