I was going to say “no,” but then something stopped me, and made me write: “Hell no!” Because if he is the second coming, which a lot of Americans apparently believe, then Satan is laughing his ass off down in Hell. In August 2019, Bess Levins, a politics correspondent for [...]
Archive for May, 2021
May 3rd, 2021 - 9:20 pm § in Politics
D.C.: The GOP’s Maryland option
Republicans like things just the way they are, but if D.C. residents (over half of whom are black) insist on being represented in Congress like other Americans, then they prefer to tack D.C. onto Maryland. Of course they do. Because D.C. statehood would add two new senators, who certainly would be D[...]
Antiviral drugs: A primer
“Unlike broad-spectrum antibiotics, which can be used to treat a wide range of bacterial infections, drugs that work against one type of virus rarely work at treating other viruses.” That, in a nutshell, is why we don’t have a penicillin for Covid-19. Also because “viruses ar[...]
How to find “deep work” time
“For busy people,” this BBC article says, “finding time for uninterrupted work may feel utterly unrealistic. But there are methods we can use to optimise what limited ‘deep work’ time we have.” Read it here. “Deep work” means, I think, thinking or reading or a[...]
States’ rights … to be reckless
The phrase “states’ rights” used to refer to southern-Democrat segregation policies. Now it refers to Republicans-everywhere fecklessness. Conceptually, states’ rights is a subset of federalism, which has to do with the allocation of power between federal and state government[...]
May 3rd, 2021 - 2:40 pm § in Economics
Consumers face rising prices, shortages
Cash-hoarding, homebound consumers piled up lots of savings over the last year, government stimulus payments added more (for some), and now — according to surveys and the economic data coming in — they’re in a mood to spend it. Bam. Forward motion, hit wall. Home prices (if you cou[...]
May 3rd, 2021 - 2:19 pm § in Misc.
“You’ve Got Mail!” … but how much longer?
Verizon has sold its media assets, including AOL and Yahoo, to Apollo Global Management, a large publicly-traded investment firm (details here), CNBC reported on Monday, May 3, 2021 (read story here). In the internet’s early days, AOL became the most widely used internet access provider, but t[...]
May 3rd, 2021 - 1:26 pm § in Misc.
Bye bye, Microsoft default font
In today’s earthshaking news, Microsoft is sacking the long-running (since 2007) default font in its Office™ programs (e.g., Word, Excel) in favor of … fashion. Actually, I didn’t know “Calibri” (a made-up moniker) was the default font. My Office™ documents alwa[...]
Here’s your voting fraud
While there was no widespread voting fraud in the 2020 election, which Joe Biden easily won, there were isolated acts of individual voting fraud here and there. For example, Bruce Bartman, 70, a Pennsylvania man (photo, left), was charged with two counts of felony perjury and one count of unlawful v[...]
May 2nd, 2021 - 10:12 pm § in China, Foreign Affairs
Should the Navy get a bigger slice of the defense pie?
That’s the argument of this article in Foreign Policy magazine. “[T]he challenges faced by the United States now and for the foreseeable future are maritime,” the author, a defense consultant and naval reserve officer says. Even Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the joint chiefs, and [...]