Coronavirus News (297)

This Is Why Republicans Fear Change The party’s survival depends on frozen politics. ............ the case for D.C. statehood is straightforward: American citizens deserve full representation in Congress .......... Puerto Rico, on the other hand, has routinely chosen Republicans for statewide office. ......... Republicans are hostile to greater democracy, where democracy means equal representation in a federal system of separated powers. ...........  The question of whether Democrats will abolish the filibuster or expand the courts or create new states, should they win power, is actually a question of whether Democrats will bring dynamism to the American political system. 

The Case Against Google A lawsuit with bipartisan support could herald a new era of trustbusting. ....... Why has Washington united against one of America’s most successful and popular companies, and how could the case change the internet as we know it? ........... Google now controls 88 percent of the U.S. search engine market, an unparalleled power the company uses to effectively prevent alternative search engines from competing. .......... Google, like Facebook, has argued that it doesn’t harm consumers, since its flagship product costs them nothing to use. ........  “The harm is to competition” ............. Google’s control over search means it can charge marketers higher fees for ads ........... “On too many queries, Google is more interested in making search lucrative than a better product for us.” .......... many news organizations have virtually no choice now but to depend on Google and Facebook to reach readers and fund their operations ........... two crises: a financial crisis, because advertising revenue that used to go to publishers is now captured by big tech intermediaries, causing the news industry to collapse; and an editorial one, because media’s dependency on a handful of platforms incentivizes virality and sensationalism over high-quality journalism. ................  “When a consumer uses Google, the consumer provides personal information and attention in exchange for search results,” the lawsuit reads. “Google then monetizes the consumer’s information and attention by selling ads.” ......... Google, the lawsuit claims, pays $8 billion to $12 billion a year to Apple in exchange for making Google the default search engine across all of its devices. That has made the two tech giants heavily reliant on each other to the exclusion of other search engines. ................... the Justice Department’s move could set off a cascade of similar lawsuits against big tech companies  

Why Does Trump Win With White Men? The gender gap probably deserves another name. ......... The electorate as a whole seems ready to cast out President Trump by a big margin. But not men. .......... Trump leading Mr. Biden among white men by a 12-percentage-point margin — 53 percent to 41 percent. ................... not flattering to men. Women tend to cast votes based on what they perceive as the overall benefit to the nation and their communities. Men are more self-interested. .......... “Women think about government in terms of the well-being of the country” ........ “Men are much more likely to think about it in terms of their wallet. Their bottom line is, how does this affect me?” ..............  “I think the gender gap reflects traditional differences in male and female values and personalities, differences such as men’s greater competitiveness and concerns with issues of power and control, and women’s greater compassion and nurturance, rejection of force and violence, and concern with interpersonal relations.” ............  Men’s political views were shaped by a more individualistic attitude ............  “We see it in poll questions that ask, “Is America getting too soft and feminine?” Dr. Deckman said. “Those who answer ‘yes’ lean strongly Republican.” ............ white college-educated men are beginning to vote more like women and people of color. ..... just 6 percent of Black women support Mr. Trump; for Black men, it was 11 percent. There was a bigger gap between Hispanic men and women: 23 percent of women were for Mr. Trump, and 35 percent of men. ...........  His boorish tone, inability to express empathy and unwillingness to admit mistakes are not qualities that most women find attractive. ........... when men and women pay attention to politics, they are looking at two different pictures. ...........   “Men consume more political news, but for a lot of them, especially younger men, it’s like a hobby and a sport” ......... The gender gap cannot be completely differentiated from rank misogyny. Some would argue that it is misogyny. ................  Trump might be fading so fast and hard that Mr. Biden could win the male vote — though not the white male vote. .......... a torrent of Trump-splaining ........ Republicans spent a full three decades tearing down Hillary Clinton, often in flagrantly sexist ways — criticizing her clothes, her tone of voice, her physical stamina, her “likability,” her response to her husband’s infidelity. It worked and she lost because a large proportion of the nation, including lots of women, viscerally disliked her. ......................  He said he believed every American family needed a tank in their garage.

Coronavirus News (296)

Why the 5G Pushiness? Because $$$. Selling 5G capability is a huge opportunity for phone companies. Be careful.

The Ottoman Empire's Influence On The Present Day “Whether politicians, pundits and traditional historians like it or not, the world we inhabit is very much an Ottoman one.” ....... “It’s not as though Columbus didn’t cross the Atlantic, of course he did, or that Martin Luther didn’t lead a Protestant Reformation, of course he did; but there are Ottoman and Muslim elements to those stories that we have ignored or not paid attention to. A lot of the work of my book is reinserting Islam and the Ottoman Empire into those stories to give us a fuller and, I would say, more empirically true story about all of these events that we think have something to tell us about the making of the modern world.”

Why the 5G Pushiness? Because $$. 

The Shrinking of the American Mind What wasn’t said at the debates was as telling as what was. ......  President Trump never mentioned Afghanistan, where the United States lost more than 2,400 lives and spent some $2 trillion over the past two decades. ........ One of the characteristics of a nightmare is that it is all-consuming. Everything beyond it fades into the murk. President Trump, in an extraordinary sustained broadcast of his self-obsession, has managed to corral the world into the shadow of an orange colossus. ...........  the pandemic’s exposure of a global leadership vacuum, rising inequality in Western societies, the frozen inadequacy of the United Nations, social fracture, the spread of the surveillance state, and the hate-multiplying impact of social media platforms may be pivotal issues of the coming decade. What did we hear on these themes? Essentially nothing. ........ The shrinking of the American mind involves a kind of numbness. It has become difficult to think or see beyond the noise emanating from the White House. Indignation fatigue has set in. There he goes again. .......... In the end the debates amounted to a portrait of the growing irrelevance to the rest of the world of an insular United States. Two men in their 70s showed an almost complete disregard for the I-want-to-help-change-the-world idealism of Generation Z. This was close to insulting. The exchanges were, on the whole, petty, petulant and predictable. ...... Africa, famously home to “shithole” countries for Trump, is where roughly two-thirds of population growth will occur between 2020 and 2050; its fate is also humanity’s. ....... The essence of America is openness. ...... The shrinking of the American mind under Trump therefore amounts, for Americans, to a dangerous denial of themselves. Prolonged for another four years, in a second Trump term, it would negate the American idea

Trump’s Last Stand for White America We face a choice between a true renewal and a warped fantasy of the past. .......... His has been the stand — I am tempted to say the last stand — of whites against nonwhites. .......... fear has been Trump’s main weapon. Fear, which depends on pitting one group against another, is the currency of the Trump presidency. It is therefore no surprise that the America that is about to vote is probably more fractured than at any time since the Vietnam War. ..........  He wants to freeze a white America. ......... France is worried about Muslims from North Africa. .......... Power has migrated eastward to Asia. America’s recent wars have been unwon. By midcentury, non-Hispanic whites will constitute less than 50 percent of the population. .........  He puffs out his chest, Mussolini-style, but he is a bone-spur coward. A narrow ramp makes his limbs tremble. He is good at getting the blood up. He is good at undoing. He is not good at getting anything constructive done.  ......... Donald Trump does business the McCarthy way. He deals in specters: immigrants, and Muslims, and brown people, and Black people, and L.G.B.T.Q. people. 

How Democrats Won the War of Ideas The era of big government is here. ........ The Democrats won the big argument of the 20th century. It’s not that everybody has become a Democrat, but even many Republicans are now embracing basic Democratic assumptions. Americans across the board fear economic and physical insecurity more than an overweening state. The era of big government is here. ..............  two-thirds of Americans support allowing people to buy health insurance through the federal government, the public option. Two-thirds support Joe Biden’s $2 trillion plan to increase the use of renewable energy and build energy-efficient infrastructure. Seventy-two percent of likely voters, including 56 percent of Republicans, support another $2 trillion in Covid-19 relief to individuals as well as state and local governments. ................... Two-thirds of Americans think government should do more to fight the effects of climate change. At least 60 percent of Americans support raising the minimum wage and providing tax credits to low-income workers.  Eighty-two percent of voters and 70 percent of Republicans would like to consider legislation to expand paid family and medical leave. ..........  both parties are moving left, it’s just that Democrats are moving left at 350 miles an hour while Republicans are moving left at 50 miles an hour. .......... canceling college debt, more than doubling the minimum wage, shutting down coal-fired plants and guaranteeing every American a job. ......... the familiar historic pattern. A crisis hits, like Covid-19, the financial crisis, World War II or the Great Depression. Government expands to meet the crisis. Republicans eventually come around and ratify the expansion. ........... This is still a nation where 72 percent of people call themselves moderates or conservatives and only 24 percent call themselves liberal. Americans still have a strong basic faith in democratic capitalism and dislike socialism, by a two-to-one margin. ................. a much stronger social safety net to protect people from the hazards of life — poverty, sickness, joblessness — but they also call for reform in three sectors where government has been captured by insider manipulation: housing, finance and health care. ............  the liberal welfare state won — a robust capitalist economy combined with generous social support. 

How to Reopen the American Mind In the midst of an existential crisis for higher education, is it even reasonable to expect the humanities to survive? ..........  Many colleges and universities are now fighting for survival. .......... liberal arts colleges are shutting down at even higher rates, and job losses at colleges are multiplying .......... Words like “apocalyptic” and “extinction” keep showing up in otherwise dispassionate analyses of the situation. ............ the vulnerability of democratic institutions to the forces of technocracy, greed, materialism and an immoderate individualism. ......... the “four years of freedom” enjoyed by his elite students, a “charmed” period that fell “between the intellectual wasteland” of the student’s family life and the “inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.” ...........  an ignorant and benighted populace looming outside the campus gates ...........  the public perceives — not incorrectly — that the cynicism of politicians and administrators about their capacity to think for themselves is often matched by that of academics ............. The health of the humanities should be measured instead by whether our society provides ample opportunities for its citizens to ask the fundamental questions about the good life and the just society. ...........  millions of Americans have gravitated to online reading groups and book clubs, attended Zoom panels on the burdens of history and the meaning of open discourse, watched philosophy lectures on YouTube and flocked to longform, humanistic magazines ................  we have finally matched the inherent elitism of humanistic inquiry with the democratic faith in everyday intellect that has always characterized the American mind at its most open.