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."