Weekend News Events – Casual Reading
I always tour the sites to catch the news about what is happening in the world today. You should have access to these articles if interested. The blockade by truckers is here, SCOTUS, truckers and supply chain, Seniors, etc. An occasional opinion expressed.
Have a good rest of the weekend.
“About those right wing [tr]uckers,” Digby, Hullabaloo
Features Brian Beutler’s Big Tent , “The Northern Blights”
“You’ve no doubt heard by now about the right-wing, anti-vaccine truckers who’ve caused quite a truckus made life hell in Canada, and even in parts of the U.S., by blockading cities and shutting down shipping arteries that cross the northern border.
Their stridency and persistence, to say nothing of the media’s soft-touch fascination with them, might make it seem as though these men (mostly men, anyhow) and their lawless actions grew out of widespread Canadian opposition to the country’s vaccination requirements; that they express Canada’s true national character, even if most Canadians would never go to their lengths.”
The rest of the majority Canadian 90% vaccinated truckers seem to be pissed at these truckers. If they have any support base at all, it’s among U.S. Republicans.
“COVID-19 truck blockade in Canada shuts down Ford plant,” AP, Rob Gillies and Tom Krisher
One would think actions to stock more inventory during a pandemic would go a long way to ensuring continual production to meet customer demand. But then, we are a captured audience. Top management can pass the costs along to all forgiving customers. Lean manufacturing has to be shelved for now or lean might mean 4-6 weeks on hand to keep from being held captive.
“Right of Way,” Big Tent”
Right-wing men in America can’t get away with literally everything. When they plot to kidnap a Democratic governor, they go to jail as happened in Michigan. When they film themselves, or get caught on someone else’s camera, laying siege to Congress and assaulting Capitol police, they generally go to jail. When the Congressman of a rather large forehead commits sex trafficking and makes it with an underage girl; he or they stays in Congress and may eventually go to jail. We are still talking about Matt, “forehead” Gaetz a year after all of this came to America. My pretty wife’s Uncle Bananas would have been looking for him. I met Uncle Tony, a union rep in NYC. You just have to know, I was being checked out.
“The Supreme Court’s ‘Dead Hand,’” The Atlantic
“The six Republican appointed Supreme Court justices have been nominated and confirmed by GOP presidents and senators representing the voters least exposed, and often most hostile, to the demographic and cultural changes remaking 21st-century American life. Now the GOP Court majority is moving at an accelerating pace to impose that coalition’s preferences on issues such as abortion, voting rights, and affirmative action.
Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign “The Court seems to be pulling the United States back into a prior era without regard for changing notions and understandings of equity, equality, and fairness.”
“The Supreme Court Seems to Think Discrimination Is When You Try to Remedy Discrimination,” Adam Server
The right-wing majority on the Supreme Court continues its run of nullifying constitutional rights by shadow docket, while insisting that it is doing no such thing.
On Monday, the SCOTUS blocked a ruling by a panel of three federal judges, two of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump. The finding being Alabama violating the Voting Rights Act when it drew a congressional map. Only one majority – Black district out of seven rather than two, in a state where Black people make up more than a quarter of the population. Five of the justices disagreed with the lower court’s decision, but only Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained his rationale in an opinion joined by Samuel Alito, arguing that complying with the 15th Amendment would just be too much work.
Older adults can blame ‘clutter’ for difficulties with memory (msn.com), Sarah Sloat
“There’s a paradox in memory science: Empirical evidence and life experience both suggest older adults have more knowledge of the world. However, in laboratory settings, they generally perform worse on memory tests than younger adults. What can explain the disparity?
The answer might be “clutter,” according to a review of memory studies published Friday in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science.“
Certainly, something to be considered. I find myself attempting to remember things which I know I know.
“Behold the Electric Fueling Station of the Future” (treehugger.com)
“Treehugger has noted previously that the time it takes to charge an electric car could be a business opportunity, with the development of sophisticated and entertaining rest stops like the “michi no eki” they have in Japan. Many appear to be thinking about this including Electric Autonomy Canada (EAC), “an independent news platform reporting on Canada’s transition to electric vehicles, autonomous transportation and new mobility services.”
There’s a Problem With How We Train Truckers (msn.com)
“when the final rules were released in 2016, a minimum number of behind-the-wheel hours had been dropped. The agency said it was not able to find data that proved the value of such training and that it was important to avoid imposing extra training costs on proficient drivers. (In the same document, the agency acknowledged that 38% of commercial motor vehicle drivers said they did not receive adequate entry-level training to safely drive a truck under all road and weather conditions, according to a 2015 survey from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.)”
How American Shopping Broke the Supply Chain | Time
This is old news. If this comes as a surprise to you, you were probably sleeping. It is also not 100% accurate.
As Americans went on a spending spree this year and the ports filled with imports, clogging the supply chain, trucks started dumping shipping containers in Wilmington so they could go back to the ports and pick up more to relieve the backlog. The 40-foot containers, which can weigh four tons, are hulking feet from residents’ kitchen windows and blocking the driveways where their children ride bicycles. They’re piled six or seven high in storage yards where they dwarf small churches and homes.
He Donated His Kidney and Received a $13,064 Bill in Return (msn.com)
One example of why we need single payer.
“Living organ donors are never supposed to receive a bill for care related to a transplant surgery. The recipient’s insurance covers all of those costs. This rule is key to a system built on encouraging such a selfless act. And for most uninsured patients in end-stage kidney failure, Medicare would pick up the tab. But in Malin’s case, he would end up facing a $13,000 billing mistake and the threat of having his bill sent to collections.”
“Protesting The Limits,”
Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has monitored the manufactured panic over critical race theory and school masking rules and the liberal response to both. His conclusion is pretty depressing.
“Much discussion among Democrats of how to approach those matters seems to envision mostly an array of defensive commentary in response. Avoid talking about them at all to aggressively calling out the left with a Sister Souljah-type attack for foisting activist terminology on the party.
There is little discussion of how Democrats might hold Republicans politically accountable for the deeper national aims their tactics reflect, and the harms they’re inflicting on our national life.”
Crimes A wastin’ Big Tent
This week and in addition to habitually destroying presidential records, we learned Trump also stole troves of them when he left the White House for Mar-a-Lago, including some unknown number of classified documents. We also learned that it’s “not yet clear” whether Merrick Garland’s Justice Department will investigate what by every appearance is blatant criminal activity. Lump it together with the warmed over Mark Meadows contempt citation, Trump’s attempt to shake Brad Raffensperger down for fake votes, the absence of Trump accountability for obstructing justice, etc. We would be naive not to wonder how much of his reluctance to enforce the law against prominent right-wing criminals is driven by fear.
Couple of drafts that never made it past scratched out: I’ve been on walkabout for the past couple of years, mostly on the east coast but I have made several runs across the country and one thing I’ve noted in the thirty years hence is that “truck-stops” are not so prolific as they once were. Seemingly every exchange has a gas station mini-mart, if not a Hilton, and the travel plazas are more like a super-mini-mart. So too the pikes out east, that I recall fifty and (sigh) sixty years ago featured Howard Johnson’s restaurants. Someplace you could spend sixty or ninety minutes. Now they’re mini-marts with a Burger Kings and Dunkin’ Donuts.
On the other hand, I’ve been known to spend several hours at a nice rest-stop …
It was Christmas, I was consulting, and dressed as such. I was driving an underpowered GM Disel Suburban, Detroit Disel which was detuned. Saw a couple of kids, early twenties hitch-hiking up 39 which was 94 back a ways and now 39. Young man and a young woman. It was Christmas and I was off for the holidays.
Took them from Rockford to just north of Madison, WI. Dropped them at a Love(?) Truck Stop. Told them they can catch a ride there with the truckers. Gave her $20 to get some food after asking if they were hungry. Figured she would parcel it out for food. Wished them a Merry Christmas and was gone.
I had my CB and would listen to the traffic. I lived in Madison and worked in Rockford. I would talk to the truckers to stay awake at night.
What strikes me about this is the era of brainlessness we seem to have entered.
There is evidence that price hikes are caused by gouging by businesses in a position to create “supply chain” shortages. The Canada truckers “strike” is driving up costs and reducing supply of critical products. Yet the response of our government appears to be “inflation is caused by excess demand, excess demand is curtailed by raising interest rates.” raising interest rates appears to work by discouraging investment in businesses which decreases hiring. etc. but my point here is simply the triumph of cast in lead non-thinking over actually looking at the facts in front of us.
article elsewhere pointed out increase in traffic deaths. blamed on agressive driving. blamed on covid frustration….then drifts quietly into blaming the victims for being out of school and not looking both ways, being black and poor…without ever noticing that being agressive and angry is the religion of the most powerful political party. [i used to have something to do with increasing traffic safety. it seemed clear to me at the time that we kept making roads safer and safer, and the drivers just kept driving faster and faster..]
another article tells about a man who donated a kidney and got billed for it, and the bill went to collection….because no human (people maybe, but not human) looked at it and said “this ain’t right.”
Manchin is still using deficit hysteria to prevent legislation that might help people. MMT whatever flaws in may have, at least points to the possibility that deficits might not be as dangerous as letting social infrastruture go to hell. even the Dems are afraid to say this loud enough to be heard. because deficit hysteria is right up there with god, motherhood and going to war as staples o American politics.
oh, and climate change. worst drought in over a thousand years in my half of the country. what are we doing about it? drilling for more oil. building more highways…and yes, building more charging stations for long range high speed cars. because no one, as we know, can own two cars…a small slow cheap one with not exotic metal batteries for town use, and saving the freeway cruisers for those absoluely essential cross country trips when you don’t yet own a private jet. not to mention the exotic vacations we all must take to see the ecosystems before they are all gone.
i ran across a whole bunch of you-tubes yesterday “proving” vaccines are dangerous. yet liberals who are supposed to be smart keep telling themselves that the people who believe these stories are “selfish”, and in their desire to defeat fascism want to force frightened people to get vaccinated. and call me names when i suggest that might not be the best way to convince them that the left is not out to force them to submit to “socialism”, by which they mean state control of your most personal lives. seems fear and power contribute to that aggressive driving we heard about in another context.
there are more, but i promised myself i would try to spend more time trying to convince people that they can keep social security only if they are willing to pay an extra dollar per week for it. for some reason that has turned out to be a suprisingly hard sell.
I think the media has done a pretty poor job explaining the Alabama districting case. I do not understand either the specific law or what the underlying reasoning for this law might be. I get that the proportion of Black Alabama voters is about 27% and that 2 is closer to 27% than 1 is out of a total of 7 districts. After that, quite unclear. What is considered the objective? Is it to maximize the percent of Black Alabama voters being represented by the candidate they voted for or is it something else? I know in Wisconsin there is always a lot of discussion about the districting for state seats near the Milwaukee county borders with Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties, and generally the discussion seems to be that the districting may be unfair to Democrats, yet I have seen analyses that say Blacks (as opposed to Democrats) in Wisconsin usually are more likely to be voting for a winning candidate than the population as a whole. Does a certain district’s voter’s representation depend on who wins in other districts? Does representation even depend on voting for a winner? In most stories that have any detail at all, it is thought remarkable how the one “Black” district wanders around a lot to pick up Black populations that are pretty dispersed. But it is not clear what districts would have to look like to get two such districts. Would they have to be non-contiguous regions aggregated as a district? Would 3 districts of 37% each be an okay districting? It is clear that critics do not like the current districts, but not much else is ever explained.
Eric:
Perhaps reading The Atlantic article might enlighten you? About three quarters of the way down, the article has a comment by Justice Elena Kagan;
(Serwer) But it (Alabama) does not want to.
Two majority black districts? Instead of doing so, the “Republican” dominated legislature chose to pack a district which Justice Kavanaugh chooses to ignore in favor of “it is too late doctrine” and then he is angry about the public not supporting his “significant and radical decrees” which are being made using the “shadow docket.”
The court is ignoring landmark precedents determined during “real” SCOTUS hearings and not some undocumented sidebar . . . “the traditional process of briefs, oral arguments, and private discussions among the justices to produce lengthy, heavily footnoted opinions.”
Indeed, the message from Kavanaugh, the other political justices, and Roberts is “we have your back.” do what is necessary to do. If Roberts had not tinkered with the Voting Rights Act several years ago, this discussion would not be occurring. As too Wisconsin? The same as Alabama and Michigan, the state practices the packing of districts to minimize the impact of minorities.
Your answer is already in the article
Eric
I would like to agree with at least part of your questions, but these days it’s hard to take seriously the idea that districting and re-districting is not done to render a significant part of the electorate’s votes meaningless.
But rationalizations for such districting are easy enough to come by.
I would like to see black people do a much better job of organizing whatever districts they end up in to turn out the vote, and encourage white people to vote for candidates that have a real chance of making things better for all of us.
Fairly sure I am being unrealistic.