Link.
Monthly Archives: December 2020
Against Tufekci: it’s not a coup.
Link. Good point that, so far, GOP officials with responsibikity have not cooperated. On balance I favor Tufekci though. This is an attempted coup that is not yet effective.
Authoritarian control the next stage in economic growth.
Link. 9/11 was a turning point. It accelerated the development of control systems by decades.
Scientists Slam Microwave Theory For “Havana Syndrome”
Link. A mixture of psychological, infectious, toxin seems more plausible.
Trump is Thanos.
Link. The comic book version, not the TV guy. A legit spin with new to me quotes.
Media intrigue at the end of cable.
Link. Fun for the chiefs but a hard world for the minions.
Newt Gingrich Slams ‘New York Times’ 1619 Project As Shameless Abolitionist Propaganda
Link. “What happened to giving the public all the information about slavery’s benefits and drawbacks and trusting them to decide?”
“Trump’s ability to scrape the bottom and then go lower still is simply impossible to overestimate.”
Link. He’s a genius at exploiting weakness. We can’t match him.
“In Turkish, we do have many different words for different types of coups, because our experience similarly demands it”
Link. Trump, with significant GOP support, is attempting illegal control of the US government. Coup is the right word. Don’t underestimate him and don’t overestimate the health of US democracy.
A Dem on the future of the Never-Trump conservative.
Link. I also applaud. Their best hope is conservative immigrants and Latino.
[toread] “… his North Star, his organizing principle, should be doing as much good on as many fronts as fast as possible. Blitz.”
Link. Ignore the GOP.
“any downfall of 21st-century liberal democracy is unlikely to follow a 90-year-old template.”
Link. Lessons from the past may mislead.
“The deputy was thrown onto the hood of the car, the office said. Mr. Presti was not injured.”
Link. Deputy had bilateral tibial fractures. Some serious white privilege in play, but hard to believe Presti won’t spend some time in the big house.
Why Trump’s coup is working on GOP.
Link. Good analysis – the coup has not failed yet. Of course if we really had hacked the election we’d have taken the damned Senate.
“Google’s cross-platform web browser utilizes a hidden auto-update daemon and agent that wrecked Mac systems and wreaked other havoc”
Link. Google needs a rethink.
Murder and violent corruption in Mexico: Fidel Herrera and Javier Duarte
Link. Trumpism is a milder (so far) version of the same disease.
Ed Yong: Pandemic told via LOTR
Link. Love the beacon watchers
Keynes resurgent: “for now, macro in the real world is “GIVE PEOPLE MONEY.”
Link. Actually it’s well beyond Keynes. The money flow is broken, it goes only to the 10% and especially the 0.1%. Governments are installing energency bypass shunts.
McCarthy to Trump: the continuity.
Link. The GOP went bad long ago.
iPhone 11 screen defect repair program
Link. defect affecting some iPhone 11 screens,
“Kia and Hyundai must pay $137 million in fines and for safety improvements because they moved too slowly to recall more than 1 million vehicles with engines that can fail”
Link. Fines are far too small.
“Just eight Republicans, 3 percent of all GOP lawmakers, voiced support for Trump’s current strategy of claiming victory and asking state legislatures to declare him the victor in states that he lost.”
Link. Of the 8 I’d guess 1-2 are idiots and the rest don’t give a sh*t.
“metrics in the HHS dataset that we are able to evaluate appear to be at least as accurate and reliable as the state data”
Link. Good news.
“30% of the PA Assembly seeking to overturn the results of an election that Biden won by 82K votes. Signers include the House Speaker & Majority Leader.”
Link. Had the election been closer the coup would have led to mass strife.
Tony Hsieh’s self-destruction.
Link. Imagine the grief of his parents.
“Biden’s popular vote margin by percentage (4.4 percent) far surpasses Obama’s 2012 victory over Mitt Romney.”
Link. America, in the end, rejected Trump by as much as is probably possible for America.
Newsmax viewed. Beyond Fox.
Link. If Fox is heroin, Newsmax is meth.
“substantial proportion of the 50 billion pounds has been siphoned off and is being used for illegal activity such as money laundering”
Link. Illegal enterprises growing with COVID.
Long haul COVID group: “85 percent report cognitive dysfunction, 81 percent had numbness and other neurological sensations”
Link. Brain injury. We don’t know prevalence or age distribution.
“they were less worried than last spring about socializing outdoors, touching surfaces or sending young children to school. They were more worried about indoor air transmission and the dangers of not wearing masks”
Link. This has not been communicated well.
The Puzzle of Low Interest Rates – Mankiw
Link. Money/opportunity ratio high. Wealth concentration. Redistribution by government is most economically productive use now.
Quantum supremacy, now with BosonSampling
Link. Obviously I don’t understand but it soumds important.
Fauci day: “11:50 a.m. to 12 p.m. A bathroom break and more email”
Link. Insane energy and discipline.
6PPD-quinone, produced from car tire preservative, kills coho salmon.
Link. Doubt only them.
“we are well into stage three of GOP gutlessness.”
Link. The Benedict Arnold Party.
Where are you in vaccine queue?
Link. I’m near front.
Bezos: reversible and irreversible decisions.
Link. So much better than the usual CEO advice.
“46-minute videotaped speech that denounced a “rigged” election and was filled with lies”
Link. Quality journalists know how to cover Trump.
“Trump tried to leverage the power of the presidency to subvert the vote and overturn the election results.”
Link. If he had won we’d be done.
“McInerney, who served as the Air Force’s assistant vice chief of staff in the 1990s, told Howse he’d heard reports that U.S. soldiers were killed in a CIA-led operation to retrieve ballot servers in Frankfurt, Germany”
Link. This year we have had lots of proof that very stupid people can be quite successful.
Elastomeric masks: when you really don’t want COVID.
Link. We need more like ths.
“What about the Black Africans?’ Well, you can see something, the vitality, there. I mean, they have a little animallike charm. But God, those Indians, ack, pathetic.”
Link. Nixon.
“Holm 15A, formed from yet another merger of two already-huge cored elliptical galaxies that wprobably formed from the combination of eight smaller spiral galaxies over billions of years”
Link. Sounds like a rough neighborhood.
Trump despicable again: claims COVID carr facility is fake
Link. He is a horrible person.
“it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.”
Link. When David Brooks and I agree the apocalypse is nigh. But what policy?!
“Collectively, as a society, we wrung our hands and ran in circles and screeched and died and screeched and died and screeched and died until scientists made vaccines against the virus.”
Link. Science is the miracle.
“The FEC should be reshaped to emulate Australia’s independent election commission”
Link. Essential reforms. Stop Trump II takeover.
Predict Hospitalization Risk for COVID-19 Positive
Link. Age, gender, BMI
“Atlas said what Trump wanted to hear so Trump elevated him to say the same things to the American public”
Link. A fair appraisal of Atlas. A useful minion.
‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’
Link. We have always been like this.