Commenter and blogger, Professor Joel Eissenberg, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Saint Louis University. Introduction: “A group of clinicians and researchers is petitioning the FDA to delay fully approval of any COVID-19 vaccines before clinical trials have been completed, calling the notion of approval to stimulate vaccination rates ‘backward logic.’ The group, led by Linda Wastila, BSPharm, MSPH, PhD, professor of...
Read More »Pro and Con of a Virtual Currency
What are we talking about here? Federal Reserve is taking an initial step towards launching its own virtual currency. The move is disturbing to banks as it gives millions of low-income Americans access to the financial system and fortifies the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. The rise of private cryptocurrencies is motivating the Fed to start considering a digital dollar to be used alongside the traditional paper currency. The...
Read More »When The Truth Overtakes Politics . . .
Sharing the truth while speaking to a 100% white and 70% male GOP Pennsylvania legislature body and telling them what is more important. PA Representative Brian Sims takes on the Republican majority in the state House. PA Rep. Brian Sims: “Your boos mean nothing to me as I’ve heard for what you cheer. We are a legislature that has met more times to remove mask mandates, strip executive emergency powers, and overturn free and fair elections than we...
Read More »Global Polls
Global Polls OK, so I think the nations surveyed are biased, but I have now seen two polls with roughly similar polls. So Pew, with a larger base and solid credibility has that among foreign nations polls in their nations data set showed an improvement in favorability rating for the POTUS have gone from 17% to 75% give or take a few percents. OTOH, the attitude towards the US among whichever nations Pew polled had the attitude towards the US...
Read More »Douthat: democracy, whatever
Ross Douthat is evidently having trouble filling his column quota. Or maybe he’s just confused about the role of public intellectuals and the nature of rational decision making. In two recent columns, Douthat suggests that Democrats are excessively worried about Republican attacks on voting and election and should just chill out. He defends this “what, me worry?” approach to politics in two ways. First, he argues that there is so much...
Read More »The Lewis Powell Court
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, RI, has recently begun giving a series of speeches on the Senate floor in ref. dark money and the effect on the Supreme Court. The two so far have centered on Lewis Powell’s secret memo to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 just before his appointment to the US Supreme Court. The two speeches go a long way toward explaining the present makeup of the Court, how we got to this point, how capitalism works in America, southern...
Read More »April Trade Deficit Decreased 8.2% on Lower Imports
April Trade Deficit Decreased 8.2% on Lower Imports of Consumer Goods and Automotives, Commenter and blogger RJS Our trade deficit was 8.2% lower in April, as our exports increased and our imports decreased . . . the Commerce Dept report on our international trade in goods and services for April, incorporating an annual revision, indicated that our seasonally adjusted goods and services trade deficit fell by a rounded $6.1 billion to $68.9...
Read More »Coronavirus dashboard for June 7: a Tale of Two Pandemics: the Vaccinated States vs. the Idiotic States
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...
Read More »The Big Lie
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...
Read More »Wings
Why the reference to the wings in re the two major political parties? Are we being asked to envision either of our two major political parties as a bird, an aircraft. If so, each would surely have two matching wings, one on either side of the body/fuselage. Maybe they meant to make an analogy with the sides of an aisle in a room, or the banks of a river as in rive gauche or rive droite, or to those seated on the far left hand side of the room or on...
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