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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
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Or: the victimhood kabuki show is for the fans rubes.
By Emily Birnbaum @ TheHill.com, Dec. 7
President Trump is defending Google, Facebook and other big tech companies he's repeatedly railed against when it comes to France's digital tax, a position that underscores how Trump's policies on tech don't always match his fiery, antagonistic rhetoric.
Silicon Valley has applauded the Trump administration for condemning Europe’s efforts to tax the U.S. tech giants, but the situation has made for strange bedfellows as the president continues to galvanize his base by claiming companies like Facebook and Twitter are out to get him.
Some tech industry sources say it’s part of a long-standing dynamic: Trump lambasts the companies in public but his “America first” administration often defends them as valuable U.S. businesses. “There’s sometimes a delta between the rhetoric and the policy actions,” a tech industry source told The Hill. “But I’d say that’s probably true beyond just the tech industry. The relationship is probably better than people suspect." [....]
By Jonathan Chait @ NYMag.com, Dec. 6, with Warren video
The National Education Association, the most implacably anti-reform of the two major national teachers’ unions, has released a series of candidate interviews. Senator Elizabeth Warren, making her case for NEA support, notes her role in opposing a 2016 ballot initiative to expand charter schools in Boston.
In one sense, Warren is correct. The fact that she opposed the Massachusetts initiative does prove how far she is willing to go to maintain teachers’-union support. But what it says about her willingness to follow evidence, and to value the needs of low-income parents, is deeply worrisome.
Boston has probably the most effective public charter schools in America, producing enormous learning gains for the most disadvantaged children. “Charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes,” reported a Brookings study. “The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores.” Researchers have asked and answered every possible objection: Boston’s charters are not “skimming” the best students, they do scale up, and they do not harm students left behind in traditional public schools. (Indeed, “charter expansion has a small positive effect on non-charter students' [....]
"We have a situation where we're looking very strongly at sinks and showers, and other elements of bathrooms," Trump says.
"People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once."
In its first safety report, the ride-hailing company detailed sexual assaults, murders and fatal crashes through its platform.
By Kate Conger @ NYTimes.com, Dec. 5
SAN FRANCISCO — Uber said on Thursday that it had reports of 3,045 sexual assaults during its rides in the United States in 2018, with nine people murdered and 58 killed in crashes, in its first study detailing unsafe incidents on the ride-hailing platform.The number of incidents represented a fraction — just 0.0002 percent — of Uber’s 1.3 billion rides in the United States last year, the company said.
There are few comparable figures to judge Uber’s safety record against. The New York Police Department, which keeps a register of sex crimes and rapes that occur on transit systems, counted 533 in 2018 [....]
@ TheGuardian.com using wire services, Dec. 5
A US sailor opened fire at the historic military base in Pearl Harbor on Wednesday afternoon, authorities said, killing two civilian workers and injuring a third before taking his own life
[.....]
The shipyard is across the harbor from the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, which on Saturday will mark the 78th anniversary of the attack by Japan that propelled the US into the second world war.
Yes, transitioning to a more equitable system might eliminate some jobs. But the status quo is morally untenable.
Op-ed by Farhad Manjoo @ NYTimes.com, Dec. 4
Won’t you spare a thought for America’s medical debt collectors? And while you’re at it, will you say a prayer for the nation’s health care billing managers? Let’s also consider the kindly, economically productive citizens in swing states whose job it is to jail pregnant women and the parents of cancer patients for failing to pay their radiology bills. Put yourself in the entrepreneurial shoes of the friendly hospital administrator who has found a lucrative new revenue stream: filing thousands of lawsuits to garnish sick people’s wages.
And who can forget the lawyers? And the lobbyists! Oh, aren’t they all having a ball in America’s health care thunderdome. Like the two lobbyists who were just caught drafting newspaper editorials for Democratic state representatives in Montana and Ohio, decrying their party’s push toward a “government-controlled” health care industry. It’s clear why these lobbyists might prefer the converse status quo: a government controlled by the health care industry. If we moved to a single-payer system, how would lobbyists put food on the table, and who would write lawmakers’ op-ed essays? [.....]
By John Wagner & Felicia Sonmez @ WashingtonPost.com, live reporting Dec. 4
LIVE UPDATES
A fourth professor cautions against impeachment
The impeachment inquiry has moved to the House Judiciary Committee, a 41-member panel with a history of partisan brawls, as four constitutional experts testify on the historical underpinnings of impeachment [.....]
The leaders of Canada, France and Britain did not appear to realize that a conversation about President Trump at a Buckingham Palace reception was being recorded.
By Annie Karni & Katie Rogers @ NYTimes.com, Dec. 4, for text and Trump video; here is the originating video:
By Garry Wills @ New York Review of Books Daily, Dec. 3
Myth One: “Co-Equal” [....]
Myth Two: “Checks and Balances” [....]
Myth Three: Deliberate Ineptitude? [....]
By Dexter Filkins @ NewYorker.com, Dec. 2 for Dec. 9 print issue (audio version available)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi presents himself as an ascetic economic visionary. He is also a hero of anti-Muslim bigots. His Hindu-nationalist government has cast two hundred million Muslims as internal enemies.
Here’s what Russia’s 2020 disinformation operations look like, according to two experts on social media and propaganda.
By Darren Linvill & Patrick Warren @ RollingStone.com, Nov. 25
[....] Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy.
Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously.
On August 22, 2019, @IamTyraJackson received almost 290,000 likes on Twitter for a single tweet. Put in perspective, the typical tweet President Trump sends to his 67 million followers gets about 100,000 likes. That viral tweet by @IamTyraJackson was innocent: an uplifting pair of images of former pro football player Warrick Dunn and a description of his inspiring charity work building houses for single mothers. For an anonymous account that had only existed for only a few months, “Tyra” knew her audience well. Warrick’s former coach, Tony Dungy, retweeted it, as did the rapper and producer Chuck D. Hundreds of thousands of real users viewed Tyra’s tweet and connected with its message. For “Tyra,” however, inspiring messages like this were a tool for a very different purpose [....]
By Michael Nedelman @ CNN via MSN.com, 7 hrs. ago
Nearly a quarter of young adults and a fifth of adolescents in the United States have prediabetes, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. Prediabetes -- a condition wherein blood sugar levels are elevated, but not high enough to warrant a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes -- was estimated at 18% among adolescents ages 12 to 18, and 24% among young adults ages 19 to 34.
Experts say these numbers have risen over the past decade, putting young people at risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other conditions down the line."Until recently, young children and teens almost never got type 2 diabetes, which is why it used to be called adult-onset diabetes," says the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where most of the new study's authors are affiliated. "Now, about one-third of American youth are overweight, a problem closely related to the increase in kids with type 2 diabetes, some as young as 10 years old."
Analyzing nearly 5,800 individuals included in a national health survey from 2005 to 2016, the study authors found that "the prevalence of prediabetes in male individuals was almost twice that in female individuals" [....]