Exiting Afghanistan, Heart Failure Progression, and Polygamy News

 #Dexter Filkins, "Last Exits," The New Yorker, March 8, 2021. - "But, as Americans have lost patience with the war, the U.S. has reduced its presence in Afghanistan, from about a hundred thousand troops to some twenty-nine hundred." "The U.S. has spent more than a hundred billion dollars to rebuild Afghanistan."

"As American and NATO troops have departed, blast walls , barbed wire, and armed checkpoints have risen to provide a semblance of security." "Twenty years into the American-led war, Kabul feels again like the capital of a poor and troubled country."

"According to U.S. officials, the most favorable outcome of the ['peace'] talks is a ceasefire and an agreement to form a transitional government, with powers shared between the Taliban and the existing Afghan government." "Since 2001, the arena of conflict in Afghanistan has been the countryside: the government held the cities, while the Taliban fought to control the villages and towns, particularly in the south, their heartland." "The result is that twenty years of effort in Afghanistan has meant twenty different campaigns. Where the U.S. once pursued ambitious goals, instilling democracy and economic development, he [General Austin Miller, the commander of NATO forces], defined his mission narrowly: 'Don't let Afghanistan become a terrorist haven.' "

"But many observer in Kabul suspect that the Taliban are using the talks to buy time until the Americans depart." "[Sima Samar, who presided over the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission for 17 years] "believes that the Taliban will ultimately decide it's easier to take power by force."

#Joshua Rothman, "Missing a Beat," The New Yorker, March 8,  2021. - "Heart failure is a progressive condition -- a person can live for years while his heart slowly gives out." "[Patients] survived for days, months, even years on various kinds of artificial hearts, but their quality of life was often                    poor. They were connected to large machines; they frequently suffered from strokes and infections; their new hearts were too big or had parts that wore down."

"According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 6.2 million Americans suffer from some form of heart failure, often feeling weak, out of breath, and unsteady." "By mid-century, as many as forty percent of American deaths were caused by heart disease." 

"Subject to too much force or pressure, blood cells can tear apart; get caught in eddies or crevices; and they can stick together on textured surfaces. They can catch and form tangled beds that narrow  passages." 

"Today, the vast majority of patients receive VADs, which usually assist or replace the left side of the heart. Still, more than a thousand people each year now receive HeartMate IIs, or similar devices, living with them as they inch their way up the transplant list;" "Today, the only company manufacturing and selling artificial hearts that are actually implanted in people is Syn Cardia Systems."

"In the United States, there are fewer than twenty hospitals at which surgeons have been trained to install the heart." "The longer a patient waits, the less likely she is to survive the implantation of the  artificial heart and any subsequent transplant. And yet nearly six hundred and sixty thousand Americans die of heat disease annually -- a pandemic-level death toll for which we feel little sense of emergency."

#Andrew Soloman, "The Shape of Love," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "As many as sixty thousand people in the United States practice polygamy, including Hmong Americans, Muslims of various ethnicities, and members of the Pan-African Ausar Auset Society." "Polygamists have become more vocal about achieving legal rights since the legalization of same-sex marriages nationwide in 2015." "In 2017, the Uniform Law Commission, an association that enables states to harmonize their laws, drafted a new Uniform Parentage Act, one provision of which facilitates multiple-parent recognition." [Douglas NeJaime. a professor at Yale Law School] writes that: "If parentage doesn't turn on gender or biology but on the parent-child bond, then laws that have limited it by number no longer seem logical." "If the court is adjudicating multiple parents, how can it deny multiple-relationship recognition?"

"Today, polygyny -- the subset of polygamy that involves one man and multiple women -- enjoys legal status or general acceptance in more than seventy countries." 

"Utah's decision to decriminalize polygamy was in large measure the result of a lobbying campaign that the Dargers [a family group] had pursued for two decades. Joe Darger "emphasized that in households with many women, they have a strong voice: 'There's no major decision we make as a family that we're not unanimous on. We may not all agree, but we'll all align.' "

Joe Darger believes that the groundwork for decriminalizing polygamy in Utah had already been done, thanks to the Supreme Court landmark decision in 'Lawrence v. Texas' in 2003, which rendered a slew of state laws about cohabitation unconstitutional. 'The L.G.B.T.Q. movement and, in particular, a lot of gay men embrace polygamy,' Derek Kitchen, a Democrat in the Utah State Senate, told Andrew Soloman. "Many Mormon polygamists were more happy to make common cause with the gay-marriage activities." 

"Legalizing poly marriages would require revising the tax code and entitlement programs to accommodate multi-partner families."  

"Texts on polygyny have tended to focus on the concerns of white middle-class, college-educated readers, and skate over historical and cultural boundaries that constrain individual choice." 

ADDENDUM:

*The under-funding of U.S. troop levels is illustrated by the 209th [Corps], which is budgeted for fifteen thousand troops, but was fielding barely ten thousand. 

The New Left as Revolt, Decolonization, and the Port Huron Statement

 #Louis Menard, "Change Your Life," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "The New Left was born in the early nineteen-sixties as a revolt against the modern university, and it died less than ten years later in the auto-da-fe of Vietnam." "People like [Sandra] Cason and [Tom] Hayden cared about injustice, but the fundamental appeal of politics for them was existential. 'We were alike... in our sense of moral adventure, our existential sensibility, our love of poetic action, and our feeling of romantic involvement,' Hayden wrote after meeting Cason.

"The Port Huron Statement echoes [C. Wright] Mills, [author of the 'The Power Elite']." It says that the Cold War had made the dominant power in what Hayden called (after Mills) 'the triangular of the business, military, and political arenas.' "Participatory 'democracy -- democracy in the streets' -- and authenticity were the core principles of Hayden's forty-nine-page draft." "The politics are progressive: regulate private enterprise, shift spending from arms to domestic needs, expand democratic participation in the workplace and public policy-making, support decolonization movements, and advance civil rights by ridding the Democratic Party of its Southern segregationists, the Dixicrats."

"The student didn't really want free speech, or only free speech. They wanted institutional and social change." 

#Argun Appadeerai, "Beyond Domination," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "Their joint goal (collaborative work) is to make the case for decolonization, the idea that a different form of decolonization or anti-colonialism was, and continues to be, possible in the Global South -- one that does not rest in Western forms of knowledge, but instead on Indigenous epistemological styles and claims." "The fable of modernity uses the unifying arc of this aggressive universalism, and Miguolo's principal argument is that any variety of Marxist argument that focuses primarily on capitalism, class, and material exploitation misses the forms of power that came through this cultural and epistemological domination." Decoloniality: "a model of politics that seeks to replace extraction from nature with harmony with nature, and hierarchy among humans with conviviality." (These ideas are expressed by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, co-authors of 'On Decoloniality.' Duke University Press). 

"Instead, Achille Mbembe, author of 'Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization,' argues that Africa is a continent rich in resources, epistemologies, and new modes of political association, and that, in its openness to the global circulation of ideas, people, cultures, and goods, we can find an alternate modernity to the one we live in now." 

"Mbembe's Africa is where the newest technologies (digital mediatic, and fiscal) ), in concert with its new forms of language, art, and philosophy, are being experimented with and innovated upon in ways that prepare this emerging Africa to be a model for the decolonization of the planet, without having to abandon or forget the colonial encounters." Thus, the European West, and France in particular, in Mbembe's view, have engaged in a massive effort to place their colonial subjects outside the space where solidarity, humanity, and conviviality properly belong." 

#Letter writer John Mills, The New Yorker, March 8, 2021. - "As the A.C.L.U. and other groups have demonstrated through lawsuits on behalf of young children, it is absurd and immoral to force asylum    seekers to navigate these proceedings without legal counsel. In cases in which there is a credible    claim that deportation could result in death --as when immigrants invoke asylum protection or the Convention Against Torture -- due process requires access to an attorney. Prisoners facing the death penalty are afforded that right, along with many other procedural protections. Our legal system fails if  it does not provide analogous protections, including the right to counsel, to those facing death through immigration proceedings." 

ADDENDUMS:

*Dan McKay, "NM trapping ban passes by just 1 vote," The Albuquerque Journal, March 19, 2021. - "By the slimmest margin, New Mexico legislators granted final approval, Tuesday, [March 18], to a proposal to ban traps, snares, and wildlife poison on public land." "Since the most recent trapping season began, at least nine dogs have been caught in privately set traps and snares on public land, according to Animal Protection Voters and WildEarth Guardians." The state Senate had passed the bill on a 23-16 vote.

*Elise Young, 'People with disabilities left behind in push to defeat pandemic." The Albuquerque Journal, March 19, 2021. - "About 1 in 4 adult Americans, or 61 million people, have a disability that can affect mobility, a cognitive function, hearing and sight, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

*Letter writer Michele J. Gelfand, The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "In a study of fifty-seven countries published in 'The Lancet Planetary Health.' my co-authors and I found that in cultures with  looser social norms there were five times the number of COVID cases, and more than eight times the deaths as in cultures with stricter norms." 

 

Capital Punishment, Police Shootings, a Rescue Plan, and Venezuela's Refugees

 "Briefly Noted," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "This haunting history of capital punishment in the United States focuses on Texas, which accounts for a third of our fifteen hundred people executed  since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Probing American history for the origin of our criminal-justice stain, [Maurice] Chamonah, [author of 'Let the Lord Sort Them Out' (Crown)] finds a frontier culture that saw extrajudicial killings as 'expressions of the will of the community,' and ultimately formalized such retribution in law in ways that reinforced racial and class inequities."

#Jarrell Ross, "In the Chauvin case, a nightmare replayed," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "In a typical year, about 1,000 people are shot to death by police in the U.S. From January 2005 to March 11, 2021, just 138 law-enforcement officers had been charged with murder or manslaughter, for on-duty shootings, according to an  analysis prepared for TIME by Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University. Of the 138 officers, 44 have been convicted."

"Patrick Bayer, an economist at Duke University, who studies racial inequality and segregation, and his co-authors, examined data from 2,400 felony trials conducted from 2005 to 2012 in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. They found that people from predominantly white and affluent suburban neighborhoods were over-represented in jury pools, resulting in juries that looked little like the people living in and around the nation's fourth largest city."

In Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, white Americans made up 80% of the jury pool in fiscal 2020, according to the most recent Census data. Black residents were 13.8% of the population but 8.2% of the jury pool.

#Lissandra Villa, "Trump's South Texas gains vex Democrats," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "Zapata County, a patchwork of cattle ranches covered in prickly pear cactus that is nearly 95% Latino or Hispanic, went for Clinton by a 35-point margin in 2016. In November, [2020] Trump won by 5 points, the first time since 1920, according to data by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, that this county of 14,000 voted Republican in a presidential race."

#Nicholas Lemann, "Bigger and Better," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "This is the most economically liberal piece of legislation in decades." Lemann is referring to the American Rescue Plan. "It feels as if a century's effort to reorient the political economy away from the state and toward the market may finally have run the course." "Now, because the pain is so widespread, the new law has a very large and racially diverse group of beneficiaries, which ought to make it less vulnerable to the familiar attacks on social programs." 

"The new bill's fate will depend on Americans embracing the idea that the reason the misery of the pandemic may finally be abating is that government can solve problems. Republicans accustomed to caricaturing Democratic programs as elitist schemes created by a party that doesn't care about ordinary people, will have to feel too intimidated by their constituents' appreciation for the American Rescue Plan to stage an all-out assault on the new bill." 

#Karl Vick, "A vanishing border," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "Yet 5.5 million people have poured out of Venezuela since 2015, almost as many as the 6.6 million people who have fled Syria over the course of a decade." "The country [Venezuela] has both the world's largest oil reserves and a third of its population facing hunger. Small wonder that as many as one-fifth of Venezuelans have sought help elsewhere. The largest share, estimated at 1.8 million, are in Colombia, which shares with Venezuela a 1,400-mile border, a similar culture and history of hospitality." 

"Lockdown hits migrants hard; many would no longer afford the $5 daily rent for shelter in cities like Bogota." "The international community has committed over $20 billion to support Syrian refugees, compared with $1.4 billion for almost as many Venezuelans." 

ADDENDUMS:

 *Michael Schulman, "Years Lost," The New Yorker, March 8, 2021. - "There are some three million L.G.B.T.Q. seniors in the United States;" "Their numbers are diminished by AIDS, and thirty-four per cent of them fear having to go back into the closet when seeking senior housing."

*Letter writer Erika Arthur, The New Yorker, March 8, 2021. - "The answer involves the Doctrine of Discovery, a collection of edicts issued by the Church throughout the past thousand years on land that was unoccupied by Christians." "Ever since, the logic of terra millius, or 'nobody's land,' has been used to justify the seizure of land and water and the accompanying attacks on indigenous sovereignty." 

Fish Meal, Trans Issues, and Vaccine Woes

#Ian Urbina, "The Smell of Money," The New Yorker, March 8, 2021. - ""Exported into the United States, Europe, and Asia, fish meal is used as a protein-rich supplement in the booming industry of fish farming, a aquaculture." "Global demand for seafood has doubled since the nineteen-sixties. Our appetite for fish has outpaced what we can sustainably catch: more than eighty percent of the world's wild fish have collapsed or are unable to withstand more fishing."

"The United States imports eighty percent of its seafood, much of which is farmed." "The carbon emissions produced per pound of fish are a quarter of those produced per pound of beef, and two-thirds of those produced per pound of pork."

"Food constitutes roughly seventy percent of the industry's overhead, and so far the only commercially viable form is fish meal." "The result is a troubling paradox: the seafood industry is trying to slow down the rate of ocean depletion, but, by farming the fish we eat most, it's draining the stock of many others -- the ones that never made it to the aisles of Western supermarkets." "In a 2019 report, the Nature Conservancy argued that by 2050, sustainable fish farms should become our primary source of seafood." 

"As global fish stocks have been depleted, many wealthier nations have increased their marine policing." "Paperwork violations are common, especially on fishing boats along the coast of West Africa, where countries don't always provide clear guidance about their rules."

#Cady Lang, "New Neighbors," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "But while Sesame Workshop has always highlighted the importance of multiculturalism and inclusivity --and featured a racially and ethnically diverse human cast -- it's never tackled race and racism head-on -- but a 2019 study by Sesame Workshop, conducted in partnership with the social-research organization , NORC, at the University of Chicago, found that many parents rarely or never discuss race or ethnically with their kids." "Sesame Workshop's own study backs this up: only 26% of white parents said they were likely to discuss race and ethnically with their kids, compared with 61% of Black parents."

#Katy Steinetz, "Visible Trans People..." TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "Increased social acceptance has led to  more people describing themselves as trans -- 1.8% of Gen. Z compared with 0.2% of boomers -- according to a recent Gallup poll." "Anti-trans hate crimes are on the rise in the U.K., along with increasingly transphobic rhetoric in newspapers and tabloids." 

Lack of access to medical care can be one of the many reasons that an estimated 41% of transgender people have attempted suicide, according to one survey. "Nearly half of all Black respondents reported being denied equal treatment, verbally harassed and/or physically attacked in the past year." 

"Today, several bills [in state legislatures] list genitalia for deciding who plays on which team." 

#Alice Park, "Astra Zeneca's vaccine woes," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "Public health experts found that data from the company's Phase 3 trials -- which were used to gain authorization in the U.K. -- were hard to interpret because changes were made after the trial began in both the size of doses required and the timing of the shots." "If Astra Zeneca's shot stays on the sidelines for long, it could hamper the battle against COVID-19 far beyond Europe. The company has promised large supplies of its vaccine to countries in need, in part through the global COVAK program."

#Suyin Haynes, "A woman's killing ignites fury across the U.K.," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - Sarah Everard's body was discovered in a public space on the same day that a new survey by 'Women U.K.' revealed that more than 70% of women of all ages in the country said they had experienced sexual harassment in a public space.

"Images and videos of the heavy-handed policing [at a peaceful vigil for Everard] drew attention to a controversial bill that U.K. lawmakers voted to pass on March 16, which will expand policing powers and increase restrictions on protestors."

ADDENDUM:

*Melissa Chan, "Crime Unleashed," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "French bulldogs can cost up to $10,000 and are a favorite among celebrities, including Lady Gaga." "In the U.K., dog thefts increased 170% from 2019 to 2020, according to 'Dog Lost', which works to reunite lost dogs with their owners."

Trump in the Crosshairs, Vaccine Hesitancy, and Violence Against Asian-Americans

 Jane Mayer, "Trump in the Crosshairs," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - Ruth Ben-Ghist, New York University historian, has said that "Trumpism isn't just about 'him.' It's a whole new way of being in the world. It's about secrecy, domination, trickery, and fraud." "Now he [Trump] is pitted against a D.A. who regards the law as the politically blind foundation of democracy."

Jane Mayer writes that Allen Weisselberg, who managed Trump's money for decades, will be a star witness; however, she also acknowledges that tax cases are "notoriously difficult to prosecute, because the details are dull and complicated; ignorance can be an effective defense." Mayer believes that prosecutors "will likely create a time line and compare it with various financial representations made by the Trump Organization, looking for inconsistencies." 

District Attorney Cy Vance's office learned that condominium owners at the Trump SoHo believed that  they had been cheated by Donald Trump's children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, who were managing the project for the family business. The buyers alleged that the Trumps had lied to them by inflating the number of apartments they had sold, thereby misleading them into thinking the condominiums were better investments than they were. 

Mary Trump, the daughter of Donald's brother, believes that her uncle had swindled her and other family members out of a fair share of the financial distribution of her grandfather's estate. Mary told Jane Mayer that "Vance let two of my cousins off the hook. If he hadn't, he may well have kept Donald from running for President when two of his children were indicted for fraud." 

As for the argument that heads of state can't be prosecuted for what they did while in office, Anne Appelbaum, author of 'Twilight of Democracy', wrote that "it's not uncommon for heads of state to be prosecuted." She warned that the lesson for democracies under strain elsewhere around the world is that failing to lay down the law "is dangerous -- it creates long-tern feelings of impunity, and incentives for Trump and those around him to misbehave again!" 

#Eliana Dockerman, Moms on a mission," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "Now, inconsistent monitoring of falsehoods by social media and a politically polarized atmosphere -- in addition to genuine confusion about the COVID-19 virus -- has created a perfect storm for vaccine hesitancy. The Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the 147 biggest anti-vaccine accounts on social media gained 7.8 million followers in 2020." Forty-four percent of white evangelical Americans, who make up a significant portion of epidemiologist Emily Smith's following, say they will not get the vaccine, according to a January Washington 'Post'-ABC poll. "In 2019, pre-COVID-19, 19.5% of children had a parent who reported being 'hesitant' about childhood shots, according to a study published in 'Pediatrics.' "  

#Cady Lang, "Silent no more," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "The violence that has long targeted their community is rarely seen for what it is. Since the start of the pandemic last spring, Asian-Americans have faced racist violence at a much higher rate than in previous years. Stop AAPIHate, a reporting data-base created at the beginning of the pandemic as a response to the increase in racial violence, received 3,795 reports of  anti-Asian discrimination between March 19, 2020, and February 28, 2021; women reported hate incidents at 2.3 times the rate of men's." 

"A 2018 report from the American Psychological Association outlined the ways in which Asian-American women are exoticized and objectified as 'faceless, quiet, and invisible', or as sexual objects." "A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center found that Asian-Americans experience the largest income-inequality gap [among] ethnic and racial groups in the U.S." 

ADDENDUM:

*"Vatican: No same-sex union blessings," TIME, March 29/April 5, 2021. - "While calling for LGBTQ people to be treated 'with respect and sensitivity,' the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog said on March 15 that Catholic priests cannot bless same-sex unions."

Trailer-Park Sales, Regulatory Takings, Modified Guardianship, and More

 Sheelah Kolhatkar, "Trailer-Park Trades", The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "In Iowa, park owners can choose whether to accept Section 8 vouchers --which are distributed to 5.2 million Americans -- and many, including the owner of Table Mound, do not, citing the administrative burden." In the U.S., approximately twenty million people, -- many of them senior citizens, veterans, and people with disabilities -- live in mobile homes, which are also known as manufactured housing."

"Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, Denver, and the author of the book, 'Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Fight to Place,' told me that mobile home parks now compose one of the largest sources of nonsubsidized low-income housing in the country." "According to a report by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, there isn't a single American state in which a person working full-time for minimum wage can afford a one-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent." "Whereas traditional homeownership can form the basis for intergenerational wealth, mobile homes depreciate in value, like cars or motorboats." 

" 'In many cases, residents have invested forty, fifty, sixty thousand dollars into the homes,' he [John Baker, executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholders Project], said. 'There is such a strong incentive to pay, because are you going to walk away from the home that you put your retirement into?' " Baker was referring to a situation in which another company purchased the trailer-park, jacked up the rent, and began charging for services which had once been free.

"Trailer-parks first sprang up in the nineteen-twenties, as campgrounds designed to attract wealthy tourists." [The Mobile Home University Web site reads] "Mobile homes are the only segment of real estate that grows stronger as the economy only weakens." "Residents can be evicted for no reason, provided that park owners give them sixty days notice." A staffer in the Iowa Senate has said: "The entire chapter on manufactured-housing tenant law is absolutely obscene." "People who own their manufactured homes have little to no rights once they have put them on rental property." 

#Sara Laterman, "The Argument," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "Stripping a person of their legal rights is inherently dangerous and dehumanizing . Guardianship is built on the patronizing assumption that people with certain disabilities are incapable of being full citizens, and  need a nondisabled person to act as their proxy in all things." "According to AARP, about 1.3 million Americans are currently under guardianship."

"Supported decision-making is a system in which trusted advisers --usually family members, friends, or caseworkers -- explain complex choices to help a disabled person make their own decisions." 

#David Bromwich, "No Offense," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "But sanctions, whether the target is Russia or Iran, hurt people more than governments. Nor do they lead people to love the country that infects the pain." "It would be interesting to learn how the racially enlightened 'New York Times,' 'Washington Post,' CNNN, PBS, and MSNBC align their rigorous reporting on the sufferings of nonwhite US residents at the hands of police with their largely uncritical treatment of thousands of nameless foreigners." 

#Nathan Newman, "Perverting the Fifth," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - So  if the Supreme Court is bothering to take the case [on March 22, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on an appeal from a corporate firm seeking to void California regulations giving union organizers access to its property to talk to farmworkers. The case is 'Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid'] "There's a reasonable likelihood that, with Barrett, there are now five justices ready to overturn the lower courts, and move forward with the most radical economic goals of the legal conservative movement." "As an alternative, the legal conservative holy grail has been for the courts to insist that the government compensate corporations when its regulations overreach on their property; this is what conservative legal scholars call unconstitutional 'regulatory takings.' " 

"The plaintiff has invaded the key area where the court has found Fifth Amendment violations, namely where government policy mandates permanent physical change or access to private property, such as installing cable equipment, extracting walls, bike lanes, or beach access paths. The goal is to have even 'temporary physical invasions' --such as the limited periods when union organizers are permitted access to nonwork areas to talk to farmworkers -- declared unconstitutional takings as well."

"Notably, federal labor law has granted nonemployee union organizers access to mining and logging camps and other nonpublic locations without running afoul of the Fifth Amendment." "Now, despite the extensive precedents justifying California's farmworker union regulations, there's nothing to stop the current court's majority from overriding them all and opening the door to a torrent of radical new decisions." 

#Mike Davis, "American Book of the Dead," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "According to a recent, widely publicized report in 'The Lancet,' about 40 percent of our Covid-19 mortality could have been averted had the US death rate mirrored the weighted average of the G7 nations." "Trump not only sabotaged and discredited the efforts of public health officials, but did so with an obvious political purpose: to expand a right-wing base already built on the foundations of climate denialism, religious superstition, and the perception that most scientists are the servants of secretive elites." 

#Amanda Petrusich, "Merging Lanes," The New Yorker,  The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "What we mean by 'pop' or 'jazz' or 'country' changes regularly; genre is not a static, immovable idea but a reflection of an audience's assumptions and wants at a certain point in time." "What makes  something country is often just as much about what the audience for the genre expects it to be, as it is the chord progression, instruments, time signature, or lyrical content." 

[Ehren Pflugfelder, a professor of writing at Oregon State University] believes that: "Black artists should be sold to Black consumers (these were often called 'race records'), and white artists to white consumers."                                                                                                          

Diplomacy With China, How Parties Die, and Debasing the Squad

 #Peter Hessler, Manufacturing Diplomacy," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "Market Pulse, which analyses e-commerce, has said that nearly half of Amazon's top sellers -- those with more than a million dollars in annual sales in the U.S. -- are in China." "Bill Clinton turned out to be better for China than anybody would have predicted. In his second term, Congress granted China permanent trading privileges, and Clinton began the process of negotiating for China's admission to the World Trade Organization, which happened in 2001." 

"By 2000, there were more than seventy thousand American companies doing business in China. Meanwhile, the Chinese were producing much of the P.P.E. and may other goods that were bought by Americans during a time of crisis." "China was the only major economy that had grown in 2020, and domestic support  for the pandemic policies had become stronger as the year went on."

"In March [of 2020] the Trump administration sharply limited the number of Chinese who were allowed to work in America for state-run news organizations." "After the Capitol was stormed, on January 6, Chinese reporter Jin Gang, reported a spike in orders for Trump flags."

"Along with four other economists, [Scott] Baker [of Northwestern University], had analyzed high-frequency bank-transactions data for more than thirty thousand customers. They concluded that the 2020 stimulus was less effective than previous programs, in part because of the unique nature of the pandemic, which had caused consumers to be wary of visiting a car dealership or having appliances delivered by strangers."

#Jelani Cobb, "How Parties Die," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "Mitch McConnell, the Party's leader in the Senate, has long played this game of despising Donald Trump, but knuckling under to the reality of his immense popularity among Republican voters." "The combination of a  base stoked by a sensationalist right-wind media and the emergence of kook adjacent figures in the so-called Gingrich Revolution of 1994, and the Tea Party, have redefined the Party's temper and its ideological boundaries." "But the Party still controls thirty state legislatures and twenty-seven governorships."

"In 2018, some seventy per cent of 'safe' or 'likely' Republican districts were in Southern states. Prior to last year's election, Southerners composed forty-eight per cent of the Party's ranking committee members." 

Thomas Patterson, a political scientist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, writes: "It [the Republican Party] cannot reinvent itself in a convincing enough way for a quick turnabout. Republicans have traded the party's future for yesterday's America." "That blend of populist rage and overt-racism was the active ingredient in what eventually became the Trump movement." 

"Last month, Reuters reported that dozens of Republicans who had served in government during the George W. Bush era were abandoning the party." "Last year, for the first time, the number of registered Independents exceeded the number of registered Republicans." "By 2020, eighty-one per cent of Republican voters were white and fifty per cent were male."

#Kali Holloway, "Protect the Squad," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "They are also, as Ocasio-Cortex has not so obliquely noted, among the key players in a faction of Republicans who maintain 'fealty to white supremacists organizations' not just 'as a political tool' but because they themselves are 'legitimate white supremacists sympathizers.' " 

[Marjorie Taylor Greene] "who recently wore a mask reading 'Nolon laba', (a Greek phrase favored by gun nuts meaning 'Come and take them.'), had also posted an image of herself holding an assault rifle next to the faces of Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib, whom she had labeled 'hate America leftists.' "

"There's a particularly vicious and violent hatred white right-wingers have for Black and brown women, who they believe do not know their place." "Trump's harassment campaign pulled out every racist greatest hit, demanding the four [the 'Squad'] 'go back' to where they came from, debasing them as 'savages,' and accusing them of being 'not really smart' -- meaning innately, genetically unqualified."

Migration Is Normal, Effects of Racial Discrimination, and More

 #Daniel Immereichr, "We All Move," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - Yale University cartographer Bill Rankin "calculates the the uninhabited areas discovered by seafaring Europeans amounted to only 0.14% of the world's land." "Polynesians came first from Asia and not by accident." "It is typical of a non-migratory closed-border world." Sonia Shah, author of 'The Next Great Migration' (Bloomberry), writes that most people assume lemmings on the move are seeking death, yet her research suggests that they are actually seeking new lives.

Shah writes that: "We no longer think ancient migrants accidentally reached new locales on pre-time, one-way journeys. Rather, it now appears, they crossed back and forth, migrating in multiple and many directional streams. The image of humanity as a tree with diverging branches, makes sense only it we imagine those branches frequently curling back and fusing with one another."

"The year 2015 saw an unprecedented surge in construction of new border walls," Shah writes. "Barriers shot up on the European side of the Mediterranean to block refugees from the Middle East." "People, plants and animals move, and they do so regularly. The coming years will see more migrants than ever, and we should not see that in itself as a crisis. Migration is normal. The lemmings are all right." 

As he warned in his best-selling treatise of 1916, 'The Passing of the Great Race,' Madison Grant, a founder of the Bronx Zoo, the migration of people from their customary climate would lead to intermarriage and the enfeeblement of the white race. "Grant's work eventually helped inspire a U.S. immigration law in 1924 to heavily restrict immigration from countries outside Western and Northern Europe."

#Maritga L. Felix, "Unfinished Reunions,"  The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "Under the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy, migrants, including migrant seekers -- who attempted to cross the border without authorization -- were detained and criminally prosecuted." "The immigration courts still have more than a million pending cases."

#Nefertiti Austin, "Care Interrupted," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "In Los Angeles County, where I live, 20 percent of the 20,876 children in foster care are Black." "Covid mandates delayed reunifications, movement between foster homes, and adoption finalizations; the whole system came to a screeching halt." "In fact, 52 percent of young adults currently or formerly in foster care reported that Covid negatively affected their health or mental health care."

#Jenni Moret, "Reclaiming Indigenous Birthways," The Nation, 3.22 -29.2021. - "According to one study, nearly a quarter of Native patients reported experiencing racial discrimination while visiting a doctor or health clinic, and 15 percent of those surveyed also said they avoided seeking health care altogether because they feared mistreatment."

"Further damaging the relationship between Indigenous women and health care providers was the shameful practice of forced sterilization. Beginning in 1970, physicians working in the Indian Health Service carried out this permanent procedure to prevent pregnancies, an agenda initiated by an act of Congress." 

Nicolle Gonzales is one of a small but committed group of Indigenous midwives trained to provide modern, professional pregnancy and childbirth-related care in any setting." "Fewer than 10 percent of today's certified nurse-midwives are practitioners of color. That figure is  dramatically less for Indigenous midwives -- by Gonzales's account as little as 1 percent." "Native Americans are more than twice as likely as other women to die from pregnancy-related causes."

#The most comprehensive research on integrated schools comes from Rucker C. Johnson, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. "White kids who go to integrated schools thrive academically and develop the mental and emotional muscles for long-term interracial friendships." "In one study of the most and least progressive districts in America, researchers found that Black and brown kids actually get better education (scoring 15 and 13 percentage points higher in math and reading) in what we might reflexively assume are more racist cities." "We must employ what Martin Luther King Jr. called 'creative maladjustment': doing what our parents and friends think is maybe a little too extreme and very much unexpected."

#Jamileh Lemieux, "Diversity Is Not Enough," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "But Black children enrolled at a good Black school are learning while being affirmed, nurtured, and loved;" "Disparities in academic achievement and discipline suggest that the vast majority of non-Black educators in this  country lack an understanding of Black history, Black identify, and Black culture that is not comprehensive enough to serve our children well."

 "According to data from the Department of Education, the nation's public school teaching force is 79 percent white and over 75 percent female. 'The man,' a once popular colloquialism among African Americans, referring to the unseen force that is white supremacy, reflects how white men have largely been the face of anti-Blackness in this country." 

#Chesa Boudine, "Across Prison Walls," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "The majority of people in prisons are parents, and there are far more children with an incarcerated parent than there are prisoners. Because of the constant churn of people in and out of incarceration, one in 12 American children will experience parental incarceration." "As my friend Emani Davis, who grew up visiting her father in Virginia prisons, put it, 'We're told prison visiting rooms are set up for security and control; to kids, they feel designed to kill the human spirit and deter us from coming back.' " 

"40 percent of the people in prison never completed high school." "Prisons and jails do not promote parenting; they seriously impede it." 

Restaurant-Parking Conundrum, Workforce Declines, and Clogged Courts

 #Nick Baumgarten, "It's No Picnic," The New Yorker, March 11, 2021. - "All over town [New York City], restaurants were entrenching with a Soviet-caliber regimen of contradictory demands." "Meanwhile, parking spots, now widely displaced outdoor-dining structures, were scarcer than ever, at a time when more people spooked or betrayed by public transportation, were looking for parking." 

"A survey by the Hospitality Alliance found that ninety-two per cent of restaurants were unable to meet their obligations in December." "At the beginning of 2020, restaurants employed about twelve million people nationally. Automobile manufacturers, some of which got a bailout after the 2008 financial crisis, employ fewer than a million. The airlines, which got a COVID bailout, employ fewer than half a million."

#Abigail Abrams, "Workers in the line," TIME, February 15/February 22, 2021. - "In 2020, the total number of workers in unions across the U.S. dropped by 321,000, to reach a low of 14.3 million, as national employment fell, and companies pressed legal advantages to deter employees from organizing." After four years of employer friendly decisions under Donald Trump, the Biden Administration has reset the tone in a flurry of moves hailed by labor." 

"The Trump Administration's NLRB rolled back and weakened worker complaints, while OSHA was criticized for its lax treatment of worker complaints in 2020."

#Justin Worland, "Rebuilding the U.S. for a climate changed world," TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021. - "The Texas power outage delivered a dose of reality, as all fuel types failed to some degree. Wind turbines froze and instruments at nuclear and coal-fired power plants iced over, shutting them down. Most significantly, the state's national gas infrastructure couldn't stand the extreme cold, as wells froze in the heart of the state's gas-producing region. In other words, the problems were not with any one energy source, but with a system-level failure of the grid."

#Eliona Dockterman, "Love or money," TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021. - ""More than 23 million women have dropped out of the labor force since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A Census Bureau and Federal Reserve analysis found that 1 in 3 women not working in July cited childcare issues as the reason." 

"The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) mandates that employers offer 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave, but about 40% of American workers are not covered by this law." "The Center for American Progress (CAP), and the Century Foundation estimated that if women remained out of the workforce at the same levels as last spring for a year, it would cost the country $64.6 billion." 

"A survey by the National Association for the Education of Young Children published in July found that without government help, 40% of children programs would shutter." 

"Women overall still make 82 [cents] for every dollar men make, with Back, Latina and Native American women earning far less, according to the U.S. Census Bureau." 

#Melissa Chan, "Slow Notions," TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021. - "More defendants , especially those with health problems, are striking plea deals to avoid sitting in virus-infected jails while waiting their day in court, defense attorneys say. And virtual courts are exposing the disadvantage of the poor, who are less likely to have Internet service, as a staggering number of new criminal cases stack up. New York City alone is bogged down with about 49,000 pending criminal court cases, and Maine has 22,000, court officials say." "At the end of November, about two dozen U.S. district courts nationwide resuspended jury trials and grand-jury proceedings, making a 'significant pause' in efforts by federal courts to resume full operation. court officials say." 

"In a prepandemic world, state trial courts typically resolved 18 million felony and misdemeanor cases annually, according to a NCSC study in August, and an estimated 8 million to 10 million U.S. citizens reported for jury duty each year." Of the nearly 80,000 defendants facing federal criminal cases in 2018, about 90% pleaded guilty and only 2% went to trial, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data collected by the federal judiciary. At the state level, jury trials in 2017 accounted for fewer than 3% of criminal dispositions in 22 jurisdictions with available data, the NCSC says." 

Klan Act, Domestic Violence, Postfeminist Fantasy, and Food Insecurity

 #Jelani Cobb, "Assessing Threats," The New Yorker, March 11, 2021. - "The killing of [Fred] Hampton, who was just twenty-one when he died, was part of a coordinated strategy employed by federal and local law enforcement across the country to disrupt the Black Panther Party. Yet the Bureau took no such action against the leadership of the Klan, which was responsible for an uncountable number of murders, or against George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party, which formed in opposition to the civil-rights movement." 

"The N.A.A.C.P. filed a lawsuit on behalf of Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, against Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, for violating the Enforcement Act of April, 1871. The Klan Act, as it is known, prohibits the use of 'force, intimidation or threat' to prevent government officials from executing their responsibilities. The suit agues the attempts to interrupt the certification of the Electoral College vote qualifies as such a violation." 

"On October 6th, the Department of Homeland Security released a threat assessment stating that 'ideologically motivated lone offenders and small groups pose the most likely terrorist threat to the Homeland, with Domestic Violent Extremists presenting the most persistent and lethal threat,' and expressing particular concern about 'white supremist violent extremists.' "

Regarding law enforcement misconduct, the New York Times has reported that at least thirty law enforcement officials have been identified as part of the mob at the Capitol on January 6th. "A year and a half ago, the Philadelphia Police Department fired thirteen police officers for posting racist or offensive messages on Facebook."

#Madealine Roache, "Finding a way out," TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021. - "As lockdowns trapped women at home with abusers, advocates and authorities report that calls for help from abuse victims doubled and tripled. In response, 120 countries have strengthened services for female survivors of violence during the COVID-19 crisis."

"A fifth of all Russian women have been physically abused by a partner, and an estimated 14,000 in the country die as a result of domestic violence each year --more than nine times the number of deaths in the U.S., though Russia's population is less than half the  size. At least 155 countries have passed laws criminalizing domestic violence." "The Kremlin has effectively cast groups fighting domestic violence as 'traitors' and requires that those that receive foreign funding and engage in 'political activity' to declare themselves 'foreign agents,' a derogatory Soviet-era term for political dissidents."

#Judy Berman, "Puncturing the postfeminist fantasy," TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021. "Meanwhile, amid a booming economy, the ecstasy of female purchasing power could drown out scrutiny of what was being sold, from breast implants to snarky tabloids. And then there was the tendency of the white, middle-class feminist establishment to ignore the millions of women who weren't in a position to buy their way to fulfillment." 

"Amid the anti-rape activism of the early 2010s, many Black women pointed out that sex-positive feminism didn't have the same consolations for them as it did for their white counterparts." 

"As many veterans of the movement have noted, the traction feminism has gained within the cultural realm in the past decade has rarely extended to politics, where 'Roe v. Wade' is in peril, rape still goes mostly unpunished, and a disproportionately high number of single moms live in poverty."

#Marish Espoda and Abby Voesoulis, "Communal Meals," TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021. - "Even in flush times, millions of Americans, including 11 million children, lack access to nutritious, affordable food -- but Black and Latino households are most vulnerable. They were more than twice as likely as white ones to experience food insecurity during various points in 2020, according to reports by the Urban Institute." "While 17% of white individuals in America faced food insecurity in February 2021. according to snapshot polling analyzed by Northwestern University, the rates among Black and Hispanic-Latino Americans were 30% and 31% respectively." 

"While SNAP and other federal food-aid programs have changed substantially since the '60s, they still have millions of Americans struggling to get enough to eat. A single person making more than $1,064 a month after taxes does not qualify for any SNAP funds at all, and those who do qualify often can't feed families on the amount provided, which maxes out at $2.60 per meal."   

U.S.-South Korea War Games, China-South American Trade Partners, and More

 #In her truthout.com posting of January 27, 2021, retired U.S. Army Colonel and seasoned diplomat Ann Wright agrees with several hundred civil societies' call for the suspension of the forthcoming U.S.-South Korean joint military exercises. Wright says that the combined  exercises have long been a trigger point for heightened military and political tensions on the Korean Peninsula. She says it is likely to sabotage any prospect of diplomacy with North Korea in the near future, heighten geopolitical tensions, and risk reigniting a war. She also points out that these exercises raise fears in North Korea are rehearsals for the overthrow of its government. 

Wright has called for the emphasis to be placed on negotiating a treaty to end the state of war; also Wright is opposed to making denuclearization the focus of U.S. policy toward North Korea. I believe that Wright has it about right, as denuclearization is a will-o'-the-wisp kind of policy emphasis. Intelligence agencies were finding that North Korea was ramping up its nuclear weapons program while President Trump was linking credible evidence of denuclearization to U.S. concessions, and carrying out a bromance with Kim Jong Un. 

The Stephanie Miller Show has long used the tagline: "You're going the wrong way!" Peace Action should use the same tagline to counter what Peace Action's executive director, Jon Rainwater, describes as $500 billion for new nukes over the next decade. (The Biden administration and Congress are deciding whether or not to spend over $500 billion on new nukes, including replacing the entire International Ballistic Missile force).

#Clara Nugent, "The new neighbors," TIME, February 15/February 22, 2021. - "Today, China is South America's top trading partner. In 2019, Chinese companies invested $12.8 billion in Latin America, up 16.5% from 2018, [focusing] on regional infrastructure, such as ports, roads, dams, and railways." "In Brazil, the region's largest economy, bilateral trade with  China rose from $2 billion in 2000 to $100 billion last year." 

#Kimberly Dozier and W.J. Hennigan, "Why isn't the U.S. sanctioning Mohammed bin Salman?" TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021. - "On February 26, his [Biden's] Administration announced new sanctions and travel restrictions for dozens of MSB's alleged henchmen, but punishment for the 35-year-old de facto ruler is limited to bruising his ego." "The slap on the wrist sparked immediate criticism in Washington from lawmakers and human-rights activists, who want to see MBS charged --or even somehow ousted from power --for the killing" [of The Washington 'Post' journalist.]

"Biden officials hope the diplomatic snubs are just enough to distinguish Biden from Donald Trump's coddling of the kingdom -- and to keep MBS from lashing out at other journalists and dissidents."

#Jeffrey Keuger, "COVID-19 may lead to a heart-disease surge," TIME, February 15/February 22, 2021. - "One study published over the summer in 'JAMA Cardiology,' for example, found that from a sample group of 100 people who had recovered from COVID-19, 78 had some inflammation of myocardial tissue or other damage, such as scarring." "In another 'JAMA Cardiology' study, researchers reported finding SARS-COV-2 in the heart tissue of 61.5% of 39 patients who had died due to COVID-19." 

"Consider a September 2020 study in JAMA that showed that alcohol consumption had increased 14% in a sample group of 1,540 adults during the pandemic. Or the study from the same month in 'Psychiatry' of 3,052 adults showing a decrease in physical activity in 32.3% of adults who were previously physically active."

#Madeline Carlisle, "Texas blackouts raise climate warning," TIME, March 1/March 8, 2021. - "A freak snowstorm may not seem like a harbinger of global warming, but a growing body of research links climate change with the occurrence of the so-called polar vortex. Scientists say warming in the Artic, where temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else in the planet, may be weakening the jet stream that typically keeps cold air deep in the northern hemisphere."  

"In 2020, while eyes around the world were trained on COVID-19, the U.S. experienced 22 weather and climate events that each cost more than $1 billion, eclipsing the previous record of 16 in one year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration." 

ADDENDUMS:

*Andrew R. Chow, "Can the Grammys survive a new music era? TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021. - "The Grammys, Billboard Music Awards, and CMA Awards all hit all-time ratings lows. The Grammys themselves hit a 12-year low last January."

*Marie Newman and Evie Newman, "All Americans deserve equality," TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021. - "This is a nation where 33% of young people experiencing homelessness are members of the LGBTQ community." "Evie was going to grow up in a nation where, in more than 25 states, she could be discriminated against merely because of who she is." 

Mike Davis's Pros and Cons of Los Angeles, and a Concise Assessment of Trump's Legacy

 #Micah Vetricht, " Amid the Wildfires," The Nation, 2.22 - 3.1.2021. - "Marx argued that the organized working class could be the 'gravedigger' of the bourgeoise, ushering in a new and better world." In Mike Davis's book, 'City of Quartz', he described the pressure-cooker atmosphere of extreme racial and economic inequality in Los Angeles, and was released just before the beating of Rodney King triggered riots. "In 'Planet of Slums,' Davis examined the 'frightening consequences of this ever-growing population, which had been shunted into massive urban slums, whose basic structure and economic development were nowhere to be found -- over 1 billion people treated as surplus population in their miserable urbanized holding zones.'  'Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, Davis wrote, 'much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.' " 

"Davis quoted the influential researcher Robert Webster, who said in 2003: 'If a pandemic happened today, hospital facilities would be overwhelmed and understaffed, because many medical personnel would be afflicted with the disease. Vaccine production would be slow... Critical community services would be immobilized.' "

"But in 'Old Gods', Davis is not ready to throw in the towel quite yet. He insists that 'workers still hold the keys to change the world. They have been demoted in agency, not fired from history. Machinists, nurses, truck drivers, and school teachers remain the organized social base defending the historical legacy of labor.' " Davis adds that 'Urban growth can preserve open space and vital natural systems, while creating environmental economies of scale in transportation and residential construction.' "

In his book, 'Old Gods', Mike Davis conveys a very harsh assessment of the Los Angeles Police Department. "The LAPD is constantly cracking skulls, or worse." Davis makes Police Chief William Parker a central villain of the Watts uprising, describing his approach to fighting the neighborhood's Black residents as 'very much like fighting the Viet Cong; the racist brutality of his officers and the National Guard -- who wantonly sprayed shotgun blasts and high-caliber machine gun fire during the uprising.' Davis's overall assessment is that: "Police impurity has remained rife, while inequality continues to expand and military-grade hardware finds its way into cops' hands." 

#Arthur Levy, letter writer in The Nation, 2.22 - 3.1.2021, makes the concise assessment of the legacy of President Trump: "Trump sponsored huge tax cuts for the rich, attempted to gut the Affordable Care Act, denied the existence of climate change, appointed three very conservative Supreme Court justices, savagely disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement, and brought white supremacy back into the political mainstream."

ADDENDUMS:

*"The Smell Test," The New Yorker, March 11, 2021. - "Dogs can be trained to sniff out just about anything: bedbugs and black-footed ferrets, firearms, peroxides-based explosives, gourmet fungi, toxic mold, marijuana, malaria, ovarian cancer, even contraband cell phones and child pornography."

*Zach Halfand, "Vaccine Yenta," The New Yorker, March 11, 2021. - "There are too many Web sites to check, and not enough people answering phones. Portals crash, confirmed appointments vanish. Shots go not to the most at risk but to the most techsavvy."

Working-Class Base, Modernism Movement, Blue-State Secession, Minot Virus Surge, and Nuclear Pits

 #Elizabeth Anderson, "The Broken System," The Nation, 3.8 - 15.2021. - " 'Despite seeking to protect working-class interests more than the Republicans , it [the Democratic Party] has lost considerable segments of its working-class base,' says Michael J. Sandel, author of "What Became of the Common Good?" Sandel recognizes that other factors besides meritocracy have undermined the working class. 'Globalization, technological change, and the economic policies initiated since the 1970s have reduced the prospects of many Americans without college degrees,' he argues. 'The top tier of workers has turned itself into a self-producing elite, flattering itself as a natural aristocracy, superior to the losers in the race to succeed.' 'By turning colleges and universities into the gatekeepers to jobs that offer dignity, security, and a decent standard of living, meritocracy has not remedied inequality,' as Sandel argues, 'it has entrenched and justified it.' "

"In Sandel's view, meritocracy does more than drive material inequality; 'it creates a toxic economy of esteem. The winners of meritocracy competition feel entitled to take all they can, while losers feel humiliated, continually told they deserve the fate to which elites consign them.' 'No wonder the non-college-educated have erupted in populist revolt. Vividly aware of the reality that hard work does not enable them to rise, and resentful of condescending elite judgments, many gravitate toward popular authoritarian leaders who channel their grievances and promise to restore them to their former centrality in the nation and the culture.

Elizabeth Anderson believes that the tax system should be revised to eliminate the favorable treatment of capital income relative to wage income, and to discourage financial schemes that merely extract wealth from others, destabilizing the economy.

#Glenn Adamson, "A Tale of Two Bookcases," The Nation, 3.8 - 15.2021. - "At birth, modernism was an equal opportunity movement that tried to meet its public on level terms. Its quashing at the hands of reactionary regimes -- Stalinism in the Soviet Union, Nazism in Germany -- only reinforced its creditability as a political progressive style," "Back in 1932, the Museum of Modern Art had proclaimed modernism to be the 'International Style': in the postwar years, that prediction came true. Hardly a country on earth, no matter its political system, was without its repetitive concrete-and-glass housing projects -- which recommended themselves for the cheapness, if nothing else." 

"The term 'POST-MODERNISM' first circulated in architectural circles, and was also freely applied to fashion, graphic design, even music." 

"Meanwhile, recent surveys indicate that women hold only 17 percent of the leadership positions in architecture firms, and only 11 percent in design studies." "The representation of African Americans in the profession is only about 3 percent compared with approximately13 percent in the US population."

#Nathan Newman, "The Case for Blue-State Secession," The Nation, 2.22- 3.1.2021. - "The Rockefeller Institute of Government found that over a period of five years, New York taxpayers sent $142.6 billion more to the federal government than they received back in federal spending. New Jersey received a similar 91cents in federal spending for ever dollar paid." "Twenty of the 50 states -- home to 180 million people -- have voted for the same party in the past seven presidential elections, meaning that their voters could largely be ignored by presidential contenders."

"Thanks to the Senate's bizarre filibuster rules, 41senators -- who represent as little as 11 percent of the population -- can prevent any bill from even coming to a vote." 

"The fact is that white supremacy is embedded in US policy, since racial minorities make up 44 percent of the population in the 10 least populous, which have disproportionate voting  power in the Senate." 

#My Comment: Even accepting these very troubling statistics, blue-state secession would be too extreme a remedy for me.

#"The Mail," The Nation, 2.22 - 3.1.2021. - Letter writer Sonya Michael says that: "The paid labor force has become more gender-diverse, but women still perform the bulk of housework, whether unpaid in their own homes or as the majority of the eighty percent of U.S. employment..." "The work is the lowest-paid in the U.S., and, because it often entails proximity to other people, it puts millions at increased risk of contracting COVID-19."

#Atul Gavande, "Don't Tell Me What to Do," The New Yorker, February 15 & 22, 2021. - "The story was grim. North Dakota had more new [Covid-19] cases and deaths per capita than any other state." "I wanted to learn about Minot because it was exceptional: it was the worst-performing county in the worst-performing state in the worst-performing country in the world."

"In 2019, per-person spending for medical care in the United States was almost twelve thousand dollars; it was just fifty-six dollars for public-health departments."

#Susan Montoya Bryan, "Groups seek reconsideration of nuclear decision," The Albuquerque Journal, February 19, 2021. - "Watchdog groups want the Biden administration to reconsider the decision by a  U.S. agency not to conduct a more rigorous environmental review related to the production of the plutonium cores used in the nation's nuclear arsenal. The renewed request comes from federal installations in New Mexico and South Carolina, who face a deadline of making 80 cores per year by 2030, with the first 30 due in five years." Several groups have asked for a rigorous environmental review be done before production is ramped up in Los Alamos and the Savannah River site.

A 2019 analysis by the GAO last year estimated that expanded pit production plans could cost up to $9 billion over the next decade.

#Cady Long, "What's being done to combat violence against Asian Americans?" TIME, March 1/March 8, 2021. - " 'There is a stereotype that Asian Americans have class privilege [and] have succeeded in this country,' says racial-justice educator Bianca Mabute Louie. 'That creates a fallacy that Asian Americans don't experience struggle,' she says, and 'erases these experiences of violence and discrimination.' " " 'This is an issue that affects all our communities,' says [Russell] Jung, a co-founder of Stop AAPIHate (sp?). 'And we're not calling necessarily for more punitive measures, but [for] restorative justice models that break the cycle of violence.' "

Coal Ash Waste, Forest Fires, Chestnut Tree Devastation, and the Atlantic Slave Passage

 #Austyn Gaffney, "From the Ashes," Sierra, March/April, 2021. - "Since the United States began burning coal on an industrial scale in the 19th century, upwards of 35 percent of the material has fallen to the bottoms of boilers as ash. That ash has been removed, mixed with water, and placed in ponds and landfills. Over 3 billion tons of it now occupy more than 1,400 sites across the United States." "Because of a dubious system engineered by industry groups, coal ash isn't regulated as hazardous waste."

"Rare earths coexist with other elements throughout the earth's crust, but unlike coal, they're more dispersed and difficult to separate from surrounding ore." "Between 1966 and 2017, coal-mining companies and utilities dumped more than 4 billion tons of coal ash across the United States. Since the 1970s, approximately 1.5 billion tons of coal ash has been put to 'beneficial use.' This EPA-approved form of waste recycling -- reusing coal ash as a replacement for Portland cement in concrete dams and bridges -- is called  encapulation." These practices of reusing coal ash waste went unregulated for decades until 2015, when the EPA under the Obama administration, finalized the first ever federal regulation of coal ash." "Of the EPA's 158 reports of coal ash contamination with high pollutant releases at least 22 of the cases were caused by fill."

#Rebecca Solnit, "Unfinished Business," Sierra, March/April 2021. - ""Native Americans, hunter gatherers, agriculturists, and horticulturists, users of fire as a land-management technique, and makers of routes across the continent, played a profound role in creating the magnificent North American landscape, that the Europeans invaded." 

"The recent fires across the West are most of all a result of climate change --but more than a century of fire suppression by a society that could only imagine fire as destructive, contributed meaningfully." "It took the pervasiveness of radioactive fallout in the 1950s and pesticides in the 1960s to wake conservationists up to the fact that nothing is separate, and you can't protect a place by setting it apart."

"The Sierra Club literally held space, preventing forests from being cut down, canyons from being dammed, mountainscapes from being developed, wetlands from being drained, species from going extinct."

#Kate Morgan, "Once Upon a Tree," Sierra, March/April 2021. - "Between 1904 and 1940, some 3.5 billion American chestnut trees, the giants of the Appalachian hardwood forest, succumbed to a fungal blight called 'Chyphonectria parasitis.' The loss was stunning -- not just for sprawling ecosystems across much of the eastern United States, where the tree was a keystone species -- but also for the Appalachian way of life. At the dawn of the 20th century, hundreds of millions of chestnut board feet were milled annually, fueling a multibillion-dollar timber industry (as measured in today's dollars)." "By some estimates, a million or more acres of Appalachian forest were denuded, and then converted in the name of reclamation, into pasture areas with low or nonexistent biodiversity."

#Gerald Horne, "A Poisonous Legacy," The Nation, 3.8-15.2021. - "Even though the Atlantic slave trade had been officially outlawed in the United States, it persisted despite this fact, which meant that millions of captives still departed Africa for a hellish enslavement in the Americas. Indeed. [John Harris, author of 'New York and the End of the Middle Passage' (Yale University Press) ], writes that: 'almost four million captives left African shores between the beginning of the century and the closure of the traffic in the 1860s, around a third of all captives who ever crossed the Atlantic.' "

"From 1851 to 1860, 159 individuals were prosecuted under US slave trade laws in the republic..." a number of which "were acquitted, encountered a dead-locked jury, or were otherwise ordered released."

'Unsurprisingly, the mass struggle for an 8-hour workday, and the liftoff of unions, more generally, occurred after the abolition of slavery. Correspondingly, no more dramatic example of class struggle can be found then that of tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people fighting with arms in hand in order to terminate slavery and remain 'forever free.' "

Voter Blocks, Ostracizing Trump, Capitol Rioters Profiled, and Even More

 #Elie Mystal, "The GOP Strikes Back," The Nation, 3.8 - 15.2021. - "The GOP's entire protection strategy was to reinstate race-based voter disenfranchisement all the way up to January 6." "The Brennan Center for Justice reports that state legislatures have already prepared three times as many voter-restriction bills this year as were proposed during the same period of time last year. The numbers are staggering: 'Twenty-eight states have introduced , prefiled, or carried over 106 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020).' " 

#Jeet Heet, "Impeachment Was Just the Beginning," The Nation, 3.8 - 15.2021. - "Trump remains a toxic figure on many grounds: racism, abuse of office, and incitement to violence. For defenders of American democracy the still urgent mission is to turn him into a political pariah: To ostracize him from the political process, radically diminish his political power, and change the incentive structure so that Republicans will think twice before allying themselves with him again."

#Katha Pollitt, "The Disloyal Opposition," The Nation, 3.8 - 15.2021. - ""As Robert Pape and Keven Ruby point out in a detailed analysis in 'The Atlantic': 'The demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs.' "We warned one another against normalizing Trumpers by presenting hard-core reactionaries as ordinary people. But what if they are normal -- the new normal?" 

"The actual political murders in recent years have mostly been premeditated attacks committed by militia types and anti-abortion fanatics and racist loners like Dylann Roof." "Maybe if we can get enough power, the Trumpers' numbers will dwindle as they see it's not so terrible to have health insurance, or to legalize the status of immigrants who have been living here forever, or even to wear a mask to prevent a deadly virus from spreading."

#Amy Littlefield, "Closed Roads," The Nation, 3.8 - 15.2021. - Women seeking an abortion are being "lured by free ultrasounds to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers that were allowed to operate even as abortion clinics were being shuttered." "Under Ohio law, [Larada] Lee had to undergo a counseling session, in person, that included information designed to discourage her from having an abortion."

"Eighteen states have active laws requiring physicians to be physically present when medication abortion is administered, making remote abortion care impossible." "A study of independent clinics found that while 73 percent of facilities in the Northeast reported that they had started or increased telehealth services during the pandemic, only 23 percent in the South had done likewise."

#Wiliam D. Hartung, "Diplomacy First?" The Nation, 3.8 - 13.2021. - "Nearly 250,000 people have died in Yemen since the war began, according to a December 2020 United Nations report. Millions are on the brink of famine, and the country is uniquely vulnerable to diseases like cholera, and Covid-19, because of the destruction of much of its health care infrastructure, and the lack of access to clean water and life-saving medicines."

ADDENDUM:

*Chase Iron Eyes, "Yes," The Nation, 3.8 - 15.2021. - "Each year, nearly 45,000 people die and more than half a million families declare bankruptcy because they lack affordable health care."

Mostly Partisan Politics

 #John Nichols, "Democrats Inherit a Broken Senate," The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. - "The 48 senators who opposed the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett in October represented 13.5 million more Americans than the 52 senators who voted to approve it." "Today, a senator from Wyoming elected in 2018 with just 136,210 votes cancels out the decision of a senator from California elected in the same year with  6,019,422 million votes." 

"Democrats are too deferential to longtime Republican colleagues, imagining they can somehow find    common ground." "Stepped-up oversight isn't just about pinning the blame on Trump's team; it's also putting pressure on Biden's administration to get things right." 

#Jeet Heer, "The Unity Trap, The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. - "Upholding unity by itself paradoxically produces conflict, since it opens the door to competing ideas of union. The problem Biden has is that unity-as- comity, or democracy, are actually at odds with each other. Republicans have quickly and shrewdly figured this out, and realized that unity-as-comity offers them a language to sandbag Biden's agenda. After all, if the goal is to get the two parties working together, then all the Republicans have to say is that any effort to push a Democratic agenda forward is anathema to Biden's goal of unity." 

"The consistent message from Republicans was [and is]: Unity means giving us everything we want."

#Alexis Grenell, "Back Talk," The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. - "In the far more common scenario of a divided government, opposing parties have zero incentive to support the executive, since electoral success is directly linked to his or her popularity. As in the case of the previously Republican-controlled US Senate, impeachment was rendered useless by the sycophants who'd hitched their wagon to Donald Trump."

#Eric Alterman, "Sheldon Adelson," The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. "Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, believe it or not, was once quite pro-Palestinian. He argued in 2005 that it was 'vital to our credibility in the entire Middle East that we insist on an end to Israeli expansionism,' and 'vital to our humanitarian duty to the Palestinian people at we protect the weaker party from the stronger power.' " 

"Adelson spent more than a half-billion dollars on Republican candidates between 2012 and 2021. In doing so, he transformed our political discourse and essentially became the final authority on Donald Trump's Middle East policy."

#Elie Mystal, "End the Coward's Filibuster," The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. "Ending the filibuster is one way to make the Senate less beholden to a ruthless minority, and more responsive to the majority of its members." "The US Senate was a mistake. It's a fundamentally anti-democratic institution that gives political power to land instead of people, and it was structed that way at the request of slave owners worried about losing their 'right' to hold people in bondage." 

"The filibuster refers generally to the ability of any senator to delay or block a vote on a bill. But when people talk about ending the filibuster, what they really mean is reforming the rules of cloture." "The use of the filibuster has skyrocketed, largely because it costs the members of the minority nothing."

ADDENDUMS:

*David Remick, "The Final Days," The New Yorker, January 18, 2021. - "From the podium [on January 6], he [Trump] said that the vote against him was 'a criminal enterprise.' He thanked his supporters for their 'extraordinary love,' and urged them to to march to the Capitol: 'I'll be there with you.' "

*Sen. Lindsey Graham said: "As the Republican Party, if you want to stop a socialist agenda, we need to work with President Trump."

*Conservative Texas state politicians blamed frozen wind turbines for power failures; however, Texas gets only a fraction of its power-generating capacity from wind turbines. 

*Rudy Giuliani is not currently representing Trump 'in any legal matter.'

*Washington County, Pennsylvania Republican chairman David Bell said: "We did not send him [Sen. Patrick J. Toomay] there to do 'the right thing' or whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us."

From Health issues, Death Penalty, Struggling Americans, and the U.S. Senate

 #Sarah Jaffe, "Healing Sickness, Nursing Justice," The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021 - "White men have gradually filtered into the field (in 2019, nearly 11 percent of registered nurses were male, up from 2.7 percent in 1970), gendered expectations continue to define the profession."

"The presumption that their [nurses'] work is  'a gift, a calling, or a sacrifice,' makes many of the skills of nursing invisible." "Some 17 percent of health care workers in the country are immigrants, and they tend to be concentrated in the spaces in the industry with fewer resources -- and likely, fewer protections." 

#Siter Helen Prejean, "Just Eight Days..." The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. - "I wasn't at all surprised to see Donald Trump order 13 federal executions carried out before he left office." 

"A Gallup poll in late 2019 found that when asked to choose between the death penalty and life without parole, just 36 percent supported death. In 2020, there were a total of seven state executions, the lowest since 1983." "Since 1973, 173 convicted death row inmates have been lucky enough to emerge from their death dungeons after the mistakes and lies that put them there were exposed. For every nine of the 532 people executed since 1973, one person has been exonerated." 

"Prosecutors and state attorney generals have embraced that power in Texas, which has carried out 570 executions since the 1970s, over a third of the total; five more people are slated to die in 2021."

My Comment: I don't see life without parole as much of an improvement over the death penalty, if any, as it a lingering death sentence. There are undoubtedly some inmates so twisted inside that they can't ever be allowed to roam free in society. The other developed nations in the world tend to impose sentences that are much shorter than sentences imposed in the United States.

#Abby Vesoulie, "The crisis around the corner," TIME, March 1/March 8, 2021. - "While the unemployment rate has leveled off in recent months, more than a third of U.S. adults are still struggling to pay basic household expenses, according to a January Census Bureau survey; and 11% reported that their households didn't get enough to eat in the prior weeks. Nearly 12 million U.S. renters were expected to owe an average of almost $6,000 in late rent and utility payments per household by January, according to a December analysis by the economic research firm Moody's Analytics." 

"More than 70% of properties with five or fewer rental units aren't owned by fatcats at all, according to the National Association of Realtors, but rather by people like deLatt: mom-and-pop landlords who often live nearby." "Almost half of the nearly 49 million rental units in the U.S. are owned by individuals." "Black people account for 13% of the U.S. population, but Black renters  make up 35% of the evictions carried out since March [last year], despite the moratoriums , according to Princeton's Eviction Lab." "And some landlords may be put off by the bureaucratic hurdles of applying for aid -- a reality that may drive mom-pop landlords out of the rental market." 

"Nationally, less than a quarter of American families who meet eligibility requirements for public-housing assistance are beneficiaries of it, according to a 2014 report from the Urban Institute."

#Alice Park, "No right answers," TIME, March 1/March 8,  2021. - "According to the CDC, up to 60% of adult Americans have chronic conditions, some of which put them at higher risk of developing COVID-19. And around 28.5 million Americans have no health insurance, making them less likely to have regular access to health care. The CDC lists 12 conditions, ranging from diabetes, to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart and kidney diseases, cancer  and obesity that put people at higher risk of getting COVID-19 or having complications if' they do. Yet around 25% of the U.S. population doesn't see a doctor regularly, according to a 2020 JAMA Internal Medicine study, much less           have access to a hospital or clinic." Dr. Eve Glacier says that in her health system, there are 120,000 patients over age 65 with chronic health conditions who are being prioritized over those over age 65 without health issues." 

#Brittney Cooper, "An insult to an abolitionist," TIME, March 1/March 8, 2021. - "One in two Americans have lived some version of this story, because half of U.S. residents and 63% of Black people have a loved one who has done time." "Upon release, people with criminal records are greeted by over 45,000 policies that dictate where they go, with whom they may live, and how they may spend their time." "Today, there are 19,419 employment restrictions that keep people from being able to rent an apartment; 3,954 restrictions that limit their civic participation; and 1,612 that constrain their family and domestic rights."

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Senate Rules," The New Yorker, February 15 & 22, 2021. - "One of the topsy-turvy arguments that Trump's defenders, including Senator Lindsey Graham, are making is that the evidence that some people in the mob arrived in Washington already intent on engaging in violence exonerates the President. How, they ask, could he possibly have incited them, if  they'd already decided to lynch Nancy Pelosi and others? One answer lies in the House managers' seventy-page pretrial brief , which charges Trump with 'a course of conduct aimed at subverting and obstructing the election results.' in the weeks leading up to the rally."

ADDENDUMS:

*Charlie Campbell.  "Jang Hye-yeong," TIME, March 1/March 8, 2021. - "In South Korea, an average of 3.4 sexual harassment crimes are reported every hour."

*Priscilla Chan, "Brian Hooks, TIME, March 1/March 8, 2021. - "There are between 70 million and100 million people with criminal records facing extreme barriers to opportunity."

*Katie Reilly, "Jonathan Shith," TIME, March 1/March 8, 2021. - At least 30 U.S. school districts cut ties with police in 2020.

*Senator Lindsey Graham told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out."

*Joe Walsh, "Rush Limbaugh," TIME, March 1/March 8, 2021. - "By so demonizing the left, Limbaugh contributed to the dangerous polarization of our politics today. And by trafficking in lies and conspiracy theories he helped ensure that a sizable segment of Americans no longer believe in basic truths. This is Limbaugh's legacy."

Reducing Pentagon Spending

 William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, "Will the Biden Administration Dare Cut Military Spending?" Scheerpost, November 30, 2020.

"Pentagon spending could easily be reduced substantially even as the world was made a safer place. For that to happen, however, its budget would have to begin to deal with the actual challenges this country faces rather than letting billions of dollars more be squandered on outmoded military priorities and artificially inflated threats supposedly posed by our biggest adversaries.

One blueprint for doing just that has been put together by the Center for International Policy's Sustainable Defense Task Force, a group of former White House, Pentagon, congressional budget officials, retired military officers, and think-tank experts from across the political spectrum. They have crafted a plan to save $1.25 trillion from proposed Pentagon spending over the next decade.

As that task force notes, for durable reductions in such spending to become feasible, this country's leadership would have to take a more realistic view of the military challenges posed by both China and Russia.

In recent years, the regime in Beijing has indeed been increasing its military spending, but when it comes to an armed presence in the Pacific region and the ability to make war there, the United States remains staggeringly stronger. As a start, it has an arsenal of nuclear weapons five to six times as large as China's (though, of course, it would mean a planetary Armageddon). And while Beijing's influence is primarily focused on its own region, the U.S. military has a historically unprecedented global reach, deploying nearly 200,000 troops overseas garrisoned on at least 800 military bases scattered across continents, and maintaining 11 aircraft carrier task forces to patrol the global seas. In reality, the sort of 'arms race' with China now being considered will be costly and unnecessary, while only increasing the risk of war between  those two nuclear-armed powers, an outcome to be avoided at all costs.

China's real twenty-first-century challenge to this country isn't military at all, but political and economic in nature. Its leadership has focused on increasing that country's power and influence through investment programs like its ever more global Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. Despite many problems, such efforts are clearly giving Beijing the sort of growing global clout, especially in the America First era of Donald Trump, that a hopeless attempt to match U.S. military power never could. Add to this one factor: if there's to be any hope of preventing future pandemics from ravaging the planet, curbing the growing impact of climate change, or reviving a global economy that's distinctly in the dumps, increased cooperation and transparency between the two greatest powers on the planet, not confrontation, will be a necessity.

As for Russia, a relatively shaky petro-state, its primary tools of influence in recent years have been propaganda, cyber-threats, and 'hybrid warfare' on its peripheries (as in its use of local allies to destabilize Ukraine). Despite its still vast nuclear arsenal, Russia does not represent a traditional military challenge to the United States and so shouldn't be used to justify another pointless Pentagon spending boost. To the extent that there is a military challenge from Russia, it can be more than adequately addressed by various European nations with the United States in a limited supporting role. After all, European members of NATO cumulatively spend more than three times what Russia            does on their militaries and far outpace it economically. Keep in mind that this isn't the Cold War era of the previous century. In reality, Russia's economy is now smaller than Italy's and Moscow is in no position to engage in an arms race even with the nations of Western Europe, no less Washington.

Despite its disastrous forever wars in distant lands, if the institution still often referred to as the 'Department of Defense' were to refocus on actual national defense rather than global military domination, it could, as a start, instantly forgo a number of ill-conceived and staggeringly expensive new weapons systems. Those would range from plans to 'modernize' the country's already vast nuclear arsenal by buying a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines at a cost of up to $2 trillion, to the fantasy of building up from current levels to a 500-ship Navy.

High on any list of programs to be instantly eliminated would be a proposed new International Ballistic Missile (ICBM). As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has pointed out, ICBMs are among 'the most dangerous weapons in the world' for a simple reason: a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch such missiles upon being warned of another power using similar weaponry to attack the U.S. Since, in the past, such warnings have proven anything but accurate, new weaponry of this sort will only increase the chances of an accidental nuclear war being started. The Pentagon has, however, already given the giant arms maker Northrop Grumman a  sole-source contract and $13.3 billion to develop just such a new weapon, a down payment on a program that could ultimately cost $264 billion to build and operate. Funds like those could go far to meet other genuinely pressing national needs.

Contributors to Climate Change, China's Food Revolution, Hoover's King Pursuit, and the Failed F-35

 #Bill Gates, "A Green Premium," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "The biggest contributor to climate change is manufacturing -- making things like steel, cement and plastic -- at 31% of global emissions. Second in line is producing electricity, at 27% of emissions; after that comes growing things like crops, at 19%. Transportation comes in fourth at 16%, followed by the emissions from heating and cooling buildings."

#Charlie Campbell, "The Vegan Dynasty," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "China is on the cusp of a plant-based-protein revolution that has investors as well as diners licking their lips." "Today, China consumes 28% of the world's meat, including half of all pork. Halving China's annual animal-agricultural sector could result in a 1 billion-metric-ton reduction of CO2 emissions."

"China's government has published guidelines to cut meat consumption in half by 2030 to reduce pollution and combat obesity." "China, like the world, is waking up to the risks of asking our planet to support 7.7 billion people, as well as 677 million pigs, 1.5 billion cattle, 1 billion sheep, 23 billion chickens."

#Anthony Lane, "Surveillance," The New Yorker, January 25, 2021. - "As an internal F.B.I. report read: 'We must mark him [Martin Luther King, Jr.] as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation'; but in addition, Hoover also publicly referred to King as ' the world's most notorious liar.' "

"Hoover's F.B.I. was not some rogue outfit, but a core component of the existing social structure, welded firmly to public opinion."

#"The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted the F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed," Forbes, February 23, 2021.

"The 25-ton stealth warplane has become the very problem it was supposed to solve. And now America needs a 'new' fighter to solve that F-35 problem, officials say." "With a sticker price of around $100 million per plane, including the engine, the F-35 is expensive. While stealthy and brimming with high-tech sensors, it's also maintenance-intensive, buggy and unreliable. 'The F-35 is not a low-cost, light-weight fighter,' said Dan Ward, a former Air Force program manager and the author of popular business books, including 'The Simplicity Cycle.' " "Hence the need for a new low-end fighter to pick up the slack in day-to-day operations."

"As conceived in the 1990s, the program was supposed  to produce thousands of fighters to displace almost all of the existing tactical warplanes in the inventories of the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." "The Air Force alone wanted nearly 1,800 F-35s to replace aging F-16s and A-10s, and constitute the low-end of a low-high fighter mix, with 180 F-22s making up the high end."

"But the Air Force and Lockheed baked failure into the F-35's very concept. 'They tried to make the F-35 do too much,' said Dan Grazier, an analyst with the 'Project on Government Oversight' in Washington, DC." "There's a small-wing version for land-based operations, big-wing version for the Navy's catapult-equipped aircraft carriers, and, for the small-deck assault ships the Marines ride in, a vertical-landing model with a downward-blasting lift engine." 

"The complexity added cost. Rising costs imposed delays. Delays gave developers more time to add yet more complexity to the design."

"Fifteen years after the F-35's first flight, the Air Force has just 250 of the jets. Now the service is signaling cuts to the program."