________
________
________
from The Archive
Nassau, capital and largest city of the Bahamas, is lined with tropical beaches and luxury resorts and hotels, making it a popular tourist destination for decades. But three centuries ago, Nassau was popular with an entirely different crowd—pirates. The colony long abandoned by the British crown evolved from ramshackle huts into a pirate republic, populated and loosely governed by buccaneers as a home base during the Golden Age of Piracy.
________
from The Atlantic Magazine
The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility
The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people.
By John McWhorter: I must admit that I had not gotten around to actually reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility until recently. But it was time to jump in. DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen.
A Lot of Americans Are About to Lose Their Homes
The COVID-19 pandemic is a historical accelerant. It has compressed 10 years of online-shopping growth into a few months, bankrupted chains that were in steady decline, hastened Democratic gains in the Sun Belt, sped up an urban exodus from America’s most expensive cities, and persuaded my grandmother to finally use Instacart. All of this was bound to happen eventually. The coronavirus just mashed its big fat thumb on the fast-forward button. And now a housing problem years in the making is dangerously close to spiraling out of control. Before the pandemic, half of U.S renters spent 30 percent of their income on housing. The poorest quintile of Americans spent more than half their income on rent, on average. Even in a healthy economy, housing costs were eating workers’ wages. Without intervention, the COVID-19-induced economic crisis is in danger of becoming a housing crisis. Data on rent payments are hard to come by, but one survey has found that a third of Americans say they failed to make a full housing payment in June. By September, more than 20 million renters will be at risk of eviction, especially as eviction moratoriums come to an end. Without income, renters can't pay rent and utilities. Without monthly payments, landlords and other companies can’t make mortgages and bond payments. ... Pandemics are complicated, but pandemic economics is simple. Get families cash, or people will go hungry and lose their home. Get companies cash, or firms will fire their workers and disappear from their communities. Stop the pandemic, or else suffering and devastation will continue no matter how much cash we spend. The United States has been terrible at following the third rule. But in the next few weeks, Congress has a chance to do what it does best—appropriate money. If it doesn’t, we will all accelerate into a world nobody wants to live in.
from BBC News (UK)
Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born
The world is ill-prepared for the global crash in children being born which is set to have a "jaw-dropping" impact on societies, say researchers. Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century. And 23 nations - including Spain and Japan - are expected to see their populations halve by 2100. Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born. The fertility rate - the average number of children a woman gives birth to - is falling. If the number falls below approximately 2.1, then the size of the population starts to fall. In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 - and their study, published in the Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100.
Northern English accents becoming more similar, researchers find
Northern accents are becoming more similar and softer as the number of educated city-dwellers rises, research has found. Linguistic experts at the University of Manchester found evidence of a pan-regional “general northern English” accent among middle-class northerners. Analysis of speech patterns across the north of England, conducted using machine learning algorithms, showed there was little distinction between the accents of people in Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield.
________
from Competitive Enterprise Institute
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy on Tuesday jumped on the bandwagon that California Governor Gavin Newsom started by suing rideshare companies Uber and Lyft in her state for the crime of “misclassifying their drivers as independent contractors.” In layman’s terms, Healy is accusing them of skirting their responsibility to abide by state and federal employment regulations like minimum wage and overtime. ... Uber and Lyft have been hurt financially because of the COVID-19 outbreak, but they should nevertheless strongly consider raising the rates for their drivers and making the formulas more straightforward. It’s the old Henry Ford approach: Treat your workers well and they won’t see the need for a union.
Trump Administration Rule Reforms NEPA, Congress Must Finish the Job
President Trump today announced a final rule reforming the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process of evaluating and granting permits for major new energy infrastructure and natural resource projects. Director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment Myron Ebell said: “CEI welcomes the final NEPA rule as a major improvement over the existing regulations. Eliminating the necessity to consider cumulative impacts of proposed projects, limiting the effects that can be considered to those that have a reasonably close causal relationship to the project, and excluding projects from NEPA review that have only minimal federal involvement are especially important changes.
________
Magazine of The Living Church Foundation (Anglican)
HOPE AS THE WORLD IS ENDING
Life in the time of coronavirus is hard.The battle that the human race now wages against this pandemic is beyond anything known in our lifetime. Many people have described it as apocalyptic, and while that is mostly an exaggeration, it is understandable why people feel like they are witnessing the end of the world. No one knows what the world will look like when all this ends, but it will look different. And as the crisis continues week after week with no end in sight, that unpredictability is causing many people to become hopeless. In a strange way, our loss of hope may be a good thing. If we are no longer able to place our ultimate hope in science or politics or the general notion of human progress, perhaps we will finally be forced to reckon with a truth that Pope Benedict XVI captured succinctly in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi: “Man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope.”
________
from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED
Modern Monetary Theory's Connection to Soviet-Era Money
Adherents of modern monetary theory (MMT) argue that money is “a creature of the state,” as the economist Abba Lerner famously put it back in 1947. As they see it, money initially comes into existence as a result of government spending and derives its value from the fact that it can be used to discharge the public’s obligations to the government. The policy implication—that we don’t need to worry about the budget deficit, because it can be financed through money printing—has led many to imagine that a panacea for all our economic problems has at last been found.... The MMT understanding of fiat currency is essentially that of Joseph Stalin, who claimed that “the stability of Soviet money is assured above all through the enormous quantity of commodities over which the state disposes and which are put into circulation at fixed prices. Who among economists would deny that such a guarantee, which exists only in the USSR, is a more real safeguard of a stable currency than any gold reserve?” Certainly not MMT economists!
The COVID-19 Panic Shows Us Why Science Needs Skeptics
The dumpster fire of COVID predictions has shown exactly why it’s important to sustain and nurture skeptics, lest we blunder into scientific monoculture and groupthink. And yet the explosion of “cancel culture” intolerance of any opinion that doesn’t fit a shrinking “3 x 5 card” of right-think risks destroying the very tolerance and science that sustains our civilization. Since World War II, America has suffered two respiratory pandemics comparable to COVID-19: the 1958 “Asian flu,” then the 1969 “Hong Kong flu.” In neither case did we shut down the economy—people were simply more careful. Not all that careful, of course—Jimi Hendrix was playing at Woodstock in the middle of the 1969 pandemic, and social distancing wasn’t really a thing in the “Summer of Love.” And yet COVID-19 was very different thanks to a single “buggy mess” of a computer prediction from one Neil Ferguson, a British epidemiologist given to hysterical overestimates of deaths, from mad cow to bird flu to H1N1. For COVID-19, Ferguson predicted 3 million deaths in America unless we basically shut down the economy. Panicked policymakers took his prediction as gospel, dressed as it was in the cloak of science. Now, long after governments plunged half the world into a Great Depression, those panicked revisions are being quietly revised down by an order of magnitude, now suggesting a final tally comparable to 1958 and 1969. COVID-19 would have been a deadly pandemic with or without Ferguson’s fantasies, but had we known the true scale and parameters of the threat we might have chosen better tailored means to both safeguard the elderly and at-risk, while sustaining the wider economy. After all, economists have long known that mass unemployment and widespread bankruptcies carry enormous health consequences that are very real to the victims suffering drained life savings, ruined businesses, broken families, widespread mental and physical health deterioration, even suicide. Decisions involve tradeoffs.
________
from New York Times
Newspaper in New York
Newspaper in New York
Drug deaths in America, which fell for the first time in 25 years in 2018, rose to record numbers in 2019 and are continuing to climb, a resurgence that is being complicated and perhaps worsened by the coronavirus pandemic. Nearly 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses last year, according to preliminary data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — an increase of 5 percent from 2018. Deaths from drug overdoses remain higher than the peak yearly death totals ever recorded for car accidents, guns or AIDS, and their acceleration in recent years has pushed down overall life expectancy in the United States.
________
from Reuters
International news agency headquartered in London, UK
Special Report: Drug cartel ‘narco-antennas’ make life dangerous for Mexico’s cell tower repairmen
In addition to high-end encrypted cell phones and popular messaging apps, traffickers still rely heavily on two-way radios like the ones police and firefighters use to coordinate their teams on the ground, six law enforcement experts on both sides of the border told Reuters. Traffickers often erect their own radio antennas in rural areas. They also install so-called parasite antennas on existing cell towers, layering their criminal communications network on top of the official one. By piggybacking on telecom companies’ infrastructure, cartels save money and evade detection since their own towers are more easily spotted and torn down, law enforcement experts said. The practice has been widely acknowledged by telecom companies and Mexican officials for years. The problem persists because the government has made inconsistent efforts to take it on, and because companies have little recourse to stop it.
________
from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
________
________
from U.S. National Archives
The 1932 Bonus Army: Black and White Americans Unite in March on Washington
Gaunt and grizzled, some with families in tow, tens of thousands of impoverished World War I veterans traveled to Washington, DC, in 1932. Many had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression three years earlier. Americans followed their progress in the news as the travelers hopped freight trains and hitched rides across the country. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF). The public called them the Bonus Army. They came to the nation’s capital to demonstrate for immediate payment of their military bonus certificates that weren’t redeemable until 1945. The movement was extraordinary in many ways, not least because this army, unlike the U.S. military, was integrated. Black and white marchers began arriving in May. They set up multiple camps near the Capitol, lobbied Congress for relief, and asked if their brothers could spare a dime. Living and protesting together in harmony, the Bonus Army proved that the color line was not as indelible as many believed.
The 1932 Bonus Army: Black and White Americans Unite in March on Washington
Gaunt and grizzled, some with families in tow, tens of thousands of impoverished World War I veterans traveled to Washington, DC, in 1932. Many had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression three years earlier. Americans followed their progress in the news as the travelers hopped freight trains and hitched rides across the country. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF). The public called them the Bonus Army. They came to the nation’s capital to demonstrate for immediate payment of their military bonus certificates that weren’t redeemable until 1945. The movement was extraordinary in many ways, not least because this army, unlike the U.S. military, was integrated. Black and white marchers began arriving in May. They set up multiple camps near the Capitol, lobbied Congress for relief, and asked if their brothers could spare a dime. Living and protesting together in harmony, the Bonus Army proved that the color line was not as indelible as many believed.
________
No comments:
Post a Comment