Ocean Gyres; White Supremacy; and Guns in the City

 I. The Widening Gyre
"There are four ocean gyres in the world, but scientists believe that the one in the North Pacific contains the most trash -- nearly two trillion pieces of plastic, weighing nearly eighty thousand metric tons, according to a study that scientists working with the Ocean Cleanup, published in the online journal Scientific Report last March." "Of all the waste created, only about nine per cent rests, forgotten, in landfills, dumps, forests, rivers, and the ocean." "A major concern of scientists is that chemical toxins in the microplastics may leach off during digestion, gradually building up in animal and human tissues." [1]

Marcus Ericksen, cofounder of the nonprofit called the 5 Gyre Institute, says that only one percent of the plastic entering the ocean is on the surface of the North Pacific gyre. Scientists still don't know where, exactly, the rest goes.

II. White Supremacy
" ' White Supremacy' was the motto of the Alabama Democratic Party until 1966. Mississippi did not satisfy the Thirteenth Amendment which outlawed slavery until 1995." "When the South began instituting Jim Crow, after the end of Reconstruction, laws mandating separate cars on trains appeared across the region. One of the first such laws was passed in Florida, in 1887, followed by Mississippi, in 1889." [2]

"In Dred Scott, the Chief Justice, Roger Taney, had said that, constitutionally, black people were 'a subordinate and inferior class of beings,' with 'no rights which the white man was bound to respect.' " "There were 130,334 African-Americans registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896; in 1904, there were 1,342. In Virginia that year, the estimated black turnout in the Presidential election was zero." "Between seventy-eight and a hundred and sixty-one black men were lynched every year in the decade from 1890 to 1899."

"Jim Crow required a constant reminder of who was in charge. Its mania for racial separation was insatiable." "As many historians have pointed out, one of the reasons the South was able to exercise a stranglehold on race relations in national politics was the supervention of the famous three-fifths clause, once the focus of abolitionist attacks on the Constitution. When the former slaves were counted as full persons, the former slave states gained twenty congressional seats, a twenty-five per cent bump. They also gained seats in the Electoral College." "After 1900, the South had Jim Crow, a legal regime of separation, but the rest of the country had ghettos, redlining, gerrymandering, quotas, and exclusion systems, and the artifice of the local school district."

III. Guns in the City
As an appeals court judge, in a 2011 dissent, Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the District of  Columbia should not be allowed to ban semi-automatic assault rifles, largely because they were "in common use." He added that asking people to register their guns is unconstitutional. "An overriding issue at stake, then, is whether the Court will decide that the right to 'bear' arms is tantamount to a broad right to travel with them." "A far greater risk to public safety than leaving handguns in empty apartments is the nationwide effort to satisfy the right to  carry weapons, concealed or openly in public places." "Kavanaugh, for his part, has written that public safety should not be a determining factor -- only 'text, history, and tradition' really matter." [3] 

"According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, forty members of Congress who had been regarded as N.R.A. stalwarts lost their seats."

ADDENDUMS:
*A recent Hill-Harris X poll shows 61% of all voters; 74% of Democrats; and 50% of Republicans support Sen. Warren's Ultra-Millionaire Tax. There wold be a 2% tax on people with assets over $50 million, and 3% on people with assets over $1 billion.

*Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has ordered LA police to scale back on vehicle stops. Metropolitan District officers stop black drivers at a rate more than five times their share of the population.

*University of California economist Gabriel Zucman has found that 0.00025 of the U.S. population owns more wealth than the 159 million adults in the bottom 60%. Those in the bottom 60% of the wealth distribution saw their their share of the nation's wealth fall from 5.7% in 1987 to 2.1% in 2014.

*Trump missed the deadline for him to identify and punish those behind the death and disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi.

Footnotes:
[1] Carolyn Kormann, "The Widening Gyre," The New Yorker, February 4, 2019.

[2] Louis Manard, "In the Eye of the Law," The New Yorker, February 4, 2019.

[3] Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Guns and the City," The New Yorker, February 4, 2019.