The first Festive Season at Cold Spring Shops's current headquarters.
The 36 longer, faster trains – with their iconic sleek design – have already transformed journeys for passengers in south west England, since their introduction by GWR in August 2018. Now the partnership between Hitachi, the train builder and maintainer, and Eversholt Rail, the trains’ owner, will develop a plan to install batteries on a modern Intercity Express Train. The trial will demonstrate that the innovation meets passenger service and safety standards.That will mean the end of the Inter City 125 diesel trains (that Elton John sang about?) which went into service before there was an Amfleet. These successors will probably have to run on diesel into Cornwall. They do have enough range to go to and from Oxford on batteries.
The line between the South West and London is only partially electrified, with the majority of the 300 mile journey requiring diesel power. The partnership is looking at batteries replacing a diesel engine as a power source on an existing Hitachi-built five-carriage train – currently known as a bi-mode for its ability to switch seamlessly between electric and diesel power.
Adding a battery creates an electric-diesel-battery hybrid train (tri-mode). On non-electrified sections of the route, the batteries will supplement the power of the engines to reduce fuel usage and carbon emissions by more than 20%. Whereas when travelling in and out of stations and surrounding urban areas, the train would rely on battery power only. This has the benefit of improving air quality and dramatically reduce noise levels, creating a more pleasant environment for passengers and people living nearby.
[Great Western's] Intercity Express Train fleet currently calls at 15 non-electrified stations on its journey between Penzance and London, all of which could benefit from trains running on battery-only power.
Our systemic stability has relied upon the patriotism and prudence of state and local officials, state courts, the federal courts, and the Supreme Court, including the three justices appointed by Trump, none of whom would take up his fantastical nonsense.Problem is, the more material I get to mock, the more material to mock I will have.
Republicans are not alone in this. The Democrats’ effort to impeach Trump, a project that preceded its pretext, was very much of a piece with Trump’s refusal to concede his defeat. The formal rules allowed for the Democrats to do what they did, but their actions were destructive, cynical, and self-serving nonetheless. That mad crusade, too, ultimately was contained by constitutional process.
In the end, it will be impossible to maintain a rules-based civil order if Americans do not believe the rules to be legitimate or feel bound by them. We are in need of refreshing the habits of citizenship, without which we will in the end cease being citizens and become subjects.Deconstruct that at your peril.
Soon Rosemary and Vera join them for a nightcap, everyone breaking into the song “Snow,” accompanied by Kaye’s rhythmic “choo-choo” sounds. It’s corny, but these people know how to sing close, jazzy harmonies. And you can’t do better than composer Irving Berlin.The use of California passenger trains is common in movies: although a lot of the North by Northwest train action took place on the New York Central, and the most dramatic parts of It Happened to Jane took place on the New Haven (standing in for Cape Ann, Maine; anything can happen in a cartoon, and there was a steam locomotive and some fallow track available in Connecticut) in both pictures Southern Pacific get into the act, if you know where to look.
At this point a couple of establishing scenes appear, and they’re both howlers. You probably know them: the evening train out of Florida is played by a Santa Fe San Diegan racing down the California coast (the Pacific Ocean standing in for the Atlantic), and the morning arrival in Vermont by a Southern Pacific train in the mountains. Director Michael Curtiz hardly could have chosen scenes that were more wrong.
I decided the nightclub scene at Novello’s unfolded on Florida’s east coast, always a draw for New Yorkers, so I’m going with Hollywood (what else?), a beach town 17 miles north of Miami. That gave me two railroads to choose from, either Seaboard Air Line or Atlantic Coast Line.Back in the day, the Seaboard trains called inland, where the Amtrak service and Miami's commuter trains run today, whilst the Coast Line trains were on Florida East Coast, current home to the Brightline trains (if the rest of Florida is generally under sensible quarantine, why aren't those trains running?) Seaboard Coast Line, now an operating unit of CSX Transportation, is a merger of those two carriers.
I went with ACL and its train 76, the Havana Special, an evening run out of Miami over Florida East Coast that stopped at Hollywood at 10:28 p.m., just about the time our stars got on the train to head north. Under normal circumstances, Bing and company might have chosen ACL’s more prestigious East Coast Champion, but its daytime carding out of Miami doesn’t jibe with what happens onscreen. Same thing with SAL’s Silver Meteor, whose northbound schedule wouldn’t allow the connection I want in New York for Vermont.
The beautiful thing about using the Havana Special is that, assuming it ran on time, you could make a convenient connection via taxi with Central Vermont train 66-77, departing Grand Central at 8:30 a.m. on a New Haven-Boston & Maine routing to meet train 307, the Ambassador, a joint operation with B&M, at White River Junction, Vt. In 1954, steam still ruled CV passenger service, so I’d like to think our stars might have taken a moment to use the stop at White River Junction to check out the big 4-8-2 being coupled to their train before departing at 3:20 p.m.Problem is, our heroes are being roused from their sleeper on a Vermont morning, and the premise of the movie is they're all short on funds, which rules out overnighting in New York and riding the Montrealer (or the Mount Royal, if you really want to have some fun, although that had come off by 1954) onward. Anything can happen in a cartoon. Unfortunately, getting there by rail is no longer the possibility it once was. "But the movie is a reminder of how passenger trains remained a part of daily life in 1954."
Some people or most people have to take the risk of getting sick and acquiring immunity in order to move a virus from the status of epidemic or pandemic to become endemic; that is, predictably manageable. By the time the pathogen reaches the ruling class, it becomes less life-threatening. The lower classes in this system operate as the tonsils or kidneys in the human body: taking on the disease to protect the rest of the body and finally to expel it.The lockdown theater? Eleanor Roosevelt rolling bandages.
The ruling class designated the working classes and the poor as the groups that would need to get out there, work in the factories, warehouses, fields, and packing plants, and to deliver our groceries and supplies to our front door. We called these people “essential” but we really meant: they will build immunity for us while we wait in our apartments and hide from the disease until the infection rate falls and it is safe for us to go out.Thus the bottom panel. "Only Democrats can take the best economy in American history, turning it into the worst poverty in decades."
As an homage to the new unclean, and in consideration of the nice things they are doing for us, we will pretend to participate in their plight through perfunctory performances of disease mitigation. We will dress down. We will avoid revelry. And we will wear a mask in public. Very conveniently for the professional class, these little performances are also consistent with the underlying motivation of staying away from the bug and letting others grapple with gaining immunity.
The poor and the working class are the new unclean, while the professional class enjoys the luxury of waiting the pandemic out, interacting only with disease-free laptops. The Zoom call is the 21st century equivalent of the manor estate on the hill, a way to interact with others while avoiding the virus to which the people who keep the goods and services flowing must necessarily be exposed. These attitudes and behaviors are elitist and ultimately selfish, even vicious.
The machinations worked, but at a high price: According to a McLaughlin poll, enough Joe Biden voters say they would have changed their votes had they known of the Hunter Biden scandal that they would have produced a solid Trump win. The impression of tech-media-corporate underhandedness will long endure.Social distancing with Chinese characteristics, ditto. "The fun is going to be in the populists of left and right finding common causes."
So the Deplorables are still around, and they’re still angry. And as long as they’re still around, and still angry, the Democrats can’t actually get what they want.
Trump was elected, remember, because in 2016, the elites had already lost their mojo. In the mid-20th century, elites brought us antibiotics, jet planes and trips to the moon. In more recent years, they’ve brought us failed wars, a failed health care reform with a lousy nonfunctioning website and economic policies that benefited the rich at the expense of the middle and working classes.
The Fifth’s four-note opening theme occurs and recurs in variations throughout the symphony, slowly shifting from minor to major keys and mirroring Beethoven’s experience with deafness. The Fifth’s creative rule-breaking — subverting the classical sonata form in the first movement, for example — requires close listening to fully grasp.Pedant's note: perhaps it was Beethoven's deafness that made it easier for him to subvert the dominant paradigm. He was also born too soon. More powerful instruments led to a different set of norms, e.g. "clap at the end of each riff" in jazz or rock, with those electric guitars. Just more grist for the critical studies mill.
In Mozart’s day, each movement in a symphony was self-contained, like a collection of short stories. Beethoven’s Fifth acted more like a novel, asking audiences to follow a single story that unfolded over an entire four-movement symphony. New norms of concert behavior developed in turn. Sitzfleisch, or “sitting still,” became the ultimate desideratum for showing one’s understanding of the new language of classical music. Over time, these norms crystallized into a set of etiquette rules (e.g., “don’t clap mid-piece”) to enhance the new listening experience.
Though concert etiquette that evolved in response to the Fifth may have had the goal of venerating the music, it can also act as a source of gatekeeping. “Polite society” first emerged as a set of cultural standards developed during the mid-18th century as bourgeois class signifiers. In Beethoven’s time, new social etiquette extended into the concert hall.Institutions evolve to conserve on transaction costs, what's the big deal?
Today, some aspects of classical culture are still about policing who’s in and who’s out. When you walk into a standard concert hall, there’s an established set of conventions and etiquette (“don’t cough!”; “don’t cheer!”; “dress appropriately!”) that can feel as much about demonstrating belonging as appreciating the music.
[Modern audiences (the nyekulturny among them: scroll through)] want more Beethoven and the other great white European composers, like Brahms and Mahler, who followed in his footsteps because they love it.Did you know, dear reader, that even saying Beethoven, without specifying that it's Ludwig Van, is also oppressive?
Indeed, without these white male immortals, orchestras like the NY Philharmonic, which were already struggling before the COVID shutdowns, would have even more trouble filling seats.
The attempt to cancel Beethoven ought to be a wake-up call for the music world and even those who aren’t classical fans: The war on Western civilization will leave nothing sacred untouched. If Beethoven can be canceled, nothing is safe.
The habitual, two-tiered way we talk about classical composers is ubiquitous. For instance, coverage of an early October livestream by the Louisville Orchestra praised the ensemble’s performance of a “Beethoven” symphony, and the debut of a composition memorializing Breonna Taylor by “Davóne Tines” and “Igee Dieudonné.” But ubiquity doesn’t make something right. It’s time we paid attention to the inequity inherent in how we talk about composers, and it’s time for the divided naming convention to change.The essay offers a useful suggestion, namely, that there are composers other than those in the standard repertoire who make use of standard compositional techniques (phrases, sequences, what have you.) Fine, fair enough, but musicologists really ought to learn some price theory. "Mouthfuls of full names became truncated to terse sets of universally recognized syllables: Mozart. Beethoven. Bach." Whatever. One might as well drill people to understand that the proper mononym is Leonardo, not da Vinci. Do we retrospectively have to edit all the Peanuts strips with Schroeder, too?
Since Critical Race Theory and its myriad offshoots are based on the claim that racism is like an invisible gas that surrounds us—all the more pernicious for it being undetectable to all but expert anti-racists—its precepts are unfalsifiable. Amazingly, this is happening at a university whose scholars purport to honour the scientific method.He notes that the behavior of the university's administrators, who are terminally stupid people, is that being terminally stupid in a woke way is a good career move. Shout hurrah, clap your hands.
The corporate media and Democratic Party are celebrating Joe Biden’s incoming cabinet as “the most diverse in US history,” proclaiming that the appointment of women, African Americans and Latinos to key cabinet positions is a sign of tremendous social progress.Common Dreams participants are less obligated to hew to the Trotskyist line of the day, and yet, they are making similar claims. Here's Brett Wilkins, yesterday.
In reality, Biden’s rainbow coalition of imperialist reaction encapsulates and exposes the right-wing essence of identity politics.
Nowhere is the excitement more palpable than in the editorial offices of the New York Times, a leading proponent of racial and gender politics, which gushed that the president-elect has “signaled his intention to draw from a diverse cross section of America in building his cabinet.”
The Times writes: “Unlike President Trump’s cabinet, which is more white and male than any in nearly 40 years, Mr. Biden’s list of likely top advisers promises to reflect 21st-century sensibilities.” It cites statements by Biden aides claiming the incoming cabinet “will look like America.”
Whatever the skin color of the cabinet members, the Biden administration will not think like America. The population is demanding massive social change to address the deadly pandemic and unprecedented levels of inequality and social desperation.
"As the Biden administration takes shape, the Beltway insider consensus is that the path to achieving bipartisanship runs through installing corporate-friendly officials in key posts," said David Segal, the progressive Rhode Island politician who in 2010 founded Demand Progress with the late hacktivist Aaron Swartz.Balph Eubank and Wesley Mouch must have coöperated to write the column. "Other leading progressives have been imploring Biden to fill his remaining cabinet picks with leaders who will prioritize human need over corporate greed." I suppose that is less harsh than the Trotskyite line. "The nominees are not pioneers of their race or gender, they are social criminals." Doesn't matter: none of corporatist technocracy, social democracy with set-asides for protected status, or full-on communism will work. Even getting control of the high cabinet posts is cause for identity politics faction fighting. "Black Progressives Denounce Claims They Want Wall Street Insiders in Biden Cabinet." I've got plenty of popcorn. That column came out while the legacy media were still sitting on the Hunter Biden, Chinese stooge story. It's really the tilting at the Church of Intersectionality's core catechism that amuses me.
"But our polling shows what is common sense outside of the Beltway," Segal added. "The D.C. insiders are dead wrong. People across party lines want an administration that is run by people who care about the public interest—not by corporate executives, lobbyists, and consultants."
Jeff Hauser, director of government watchdog Revolving Door Project, told Politico that Biden could easily find diverse, qualified cabinet appointees outside Wall Street board rooms and executive suites.Apparently, under the logic of intersectionality, being in the intersection of black and banker gives a person a different identity than being in the intersection of black and some (any?) other occupation. That's for another post, though. Good old viewpoint diversity is enough for me, dear reader. And watching the self-styled progressives grapple with their intersectionality priors is going to be amusing.
"To say that we would have to have people who are currently working in private equity or Wall Street or the banking industry to take up senior economic jobs is absurd," Hauser said. "You can come up with a very rich set of potential appointees of color without taking on people who are currently and very recently closely identified with high finance."
Although Politico reported early Friday that "a critical mass of GOP senators said in interviews that Biden has the right to his Cabinet, indicating he may be able to staff his administration largely to his liking," progressives are alarmed by some potential picks.To the extent that Senate Democrats can engage in pink-on-red fratricide, it's probably easier for Senator McConnell to just let the Democrat caucus turn on each other. To the extent that the corporatist and communist factions that argue with, then vote for, Democrats spar, the liberties of the people are safe. I'll let Mr London have the last word about the nominees. "Then there are the white men, whose own records are no more and no less criminal than those of their female and minority counterparts." In militant Normal speak, that says the flawed content of the nominees' characters is more important than the color of the package each comes in.
People on the "Persons of Interest" page include Jason Bordoff, who "rarely sees a fossil fuel project he doesn't support," former BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, "a steadfast ally of Wall Street and corporate America throughout her time in politics, selling out pensioners to hedge funds, slashing social services, and making enemies of labor unions."
The page also shines a spotlight on Ernest Moniz—who served as energy secretary during the Obama administration—as well as Heather Zichal, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, Tony James, Mark Gitenstein, and Brian Deese. Progressives and climate-focused groups have called on Biden to exclude Moniz and former U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota from his transition team or administration due in part to their ties to the fossil fuel industry.
Biden could not have been much more ungracious, but that’s okay. This is not how it’s done and we decline in any event to “unite” behind the regime of left-wing hacks and retreads for whom he will serve as front man. And the lecture comes particularly poorly from one of the protagonists in the Russia hoax that successfully sought to undermine the Trump administration from well before day one. We won’t forget that either.That speech was less energetic than Konstantin Ustinovich's farewell to his comrade Yuri Andreyevich. We're on board with hating on his(*) administration already, anyway.
The Faculty Senate at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington last week voted to censure campus chancellor Jose V. Sartarelli, 51 to 20, following months of tension. The censure motion says Sartarelli “initially refused to support a global social movement supporting the liberty and human rights of Black people,” and he demonstrates little leadership and a “lack of empathy” regarding racial justice, diversity and inclusion. Many professors fault Sartarelli for not firing the late Mike Adams, a controversial professor of criminal justice, outright, although Sartarelli has said settling with Adams to get him to resign was “less damaging” to the university financially. Sartarelli also reportedly said this year that affirming that Black lives matter would “be hard for me to do … because I believe all lives matter.” Banners and signs must now all be approved by the university, which some see as a response to Black Lives Matter movement activity on campus.Mr Sartarelli should have understood that encouraging Professor Adams to step out of line and disappear was attempting to appease the crocodile in order that it would eat him last, and told the woke mob to pound sand back then. Now the crocodile is hungry again. Is it inconsistent with the spirit of the season that I hope to see that university sacked and razed to the ground and the ashes salted?
Sartarelli told WHQR that “my focus is centered on our students and advancing our mission, vision and values in partnership with all faculty and staff. Establishing a campus commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is a continual process. How we learn from and live with our history matters. I understand the urgency required and hope all of us (Chancellor, administration, faculty, staff, students, alumni and the community) can build a better Seahawk future together.” Sartarelli said he's already shared an advance copy of a chancellor's report on diversity, equity and inclusion with the Senate and looks forward “to leading UNCW as we continue to pursue this important work in the new year.”
The [conference] announced [current commissioner John] Swofford’s retirement in June, though he was to continue in the job until a successor was named and to aid the transition.Perhaps instead of the four conferences of sixteen teams that I have envisioned as supplanting the current basketball tournament with their entirely in-house tournament (and football playoffs) there might be five conferences of sixteen teams, which means there will be some teams that fail to qualify. Or perhaps there will be enough of a shakeout of redundant universities, say, Marquette or Gonzaga or Virginia Tech, that there will be only 64 serious basketball or football programs left standing in another ten years. But if the Atlantic Coast have further expansion on their mind, it might help to have as a commissioner somebody who knows something about building the amenities to be competitive in that sort of arms race.
The 72-year-old Swofford became commissioner in 1997 of a very different [conference], which had only nine members at the time and remained basketball-focused.
Swofford eventually led [it] through multiple waves of expansion to form a 15-team conference stretching along nearly the entire Eastern Seaboard and west into Kentucky and Indiana.
Phillips has been Northwestern’s [athletic director] since 2008, leading the athletic department through a period of success in competition and growth in facilities. He oversaw the funding of Northwestern’s $270 million Walter Athletics Center and Ryan Fieldhouse indoor practice facility located on Lake Michigan’s shores.Apparently, to be competitive with Ohio State, Northwestern must have the kind of practice facility an Oregon would be proud of. Whether that is the right sort of look for universities in an era of declining birth-rates and macroeconomic torpor abetted by arbitrary coronavirus lockdowns and the second coming of Hope and Change remains to be seen. But Mr Phillips might be as well placed as anyone to carry that off. The article doesn't mention that he oversaw the funding of similar sorts of practice facilities during his tenure at Northern Illinois. Plus he picked up an advanced degree of some kind (I once knew what that was, even had a chance to congratulate him and wish him well at the Post Office, of all places) during that time: should sports broadcasters extend to Dr. Phillips the same courtesy one Jill Biden, Ed.D. seems to insist on.
Big Ten officials announced Sunday that the contest that was called off last month due to concern over COVID-19 cases within the Gophers program is scheduled for 3 p.m. Saturday at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison.Well, good. There was enough flexibility in the quarantine-style college football schedule to make such a game possible, in this case as a sort of curtain-raiser for the Big Ten title game that will take place later that evening in Indianapolis. There is also enough flexibility in the quarantine-style professional football game to have the [North] Carolina Panthers at Packers game take place that same Saturday (!) evening.
It would be the 130th meeting between the teams, which is the longest-running uninterrupted series in Football Bowl Subdivision history and is the most-played rivalry in FBS history.
If Marquette does not remain in the top 100 schools in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, it may not be able to weather the storm of demographic transition. We are currently ranked at #88. Class-sizes, student debt ratio, and educational expenditures are all variables in USNWR rankings. USNWR has announced that it will increase the weight of the student debt ratio in factoring future rankings. Harm to this standing may take more than a decade to recover, and may further threaten the financial well-being of the university.Oh, there is a diversity talking point as well. Sixth out of six on the list. No recommendation to spend less on deanlets and deanlings there.
In Florida, schools are open, restaurants are open, bars are open, gyms are open, hair salons are open, churches are open–everything is open. People who think it is too risky to go to those places don’t have to go, but Floridians have the freedom to make those decisions themselves rather than have the nanny state make their decisions for them.And Florida never became the kind of Wuhan coronavirus charnel house that New York was, or that Illinois and California are. Heck, the Pritzker family have a compound in Florida, that they made use of while their subjects have remained under house arrest.
Governor DeSantis recognizes that mandates and lockdowns violate individual rights. Freedom only exists when people are free to make choices that others view as poor choices. Governor DeSantis has demonstrated his commitment to preserve individual rights, as should anyone who holds a position in a government dedicated to the preservation of liberty.
,br>I see clear value in wearing masks, social distancing, and avoiding indoor locations with many people. But just because something is a good idea does not mean it should be legally required. In a free country, people should be able to choose the level of risk they want to bear, especially when the alternative deprives them of their economic right to earn a living.
There is a trade-off involved in protecting individual rights and imposing mandates to slow the spread of the virus. Science can inform individuals as to what appears to be prudent behavior, but the appropriate government policy cannot be determined by science, as I noted in a previous post. Take the example of speed limits for motor vehicles. Science can tell us that higher speed limits will result in more fatalities, but it cannot weigh the value of more rapid transportation against the risk of accidental death.
The same is true with regard to government policies in response to the virus. There are clear short-term economic costs to the mandates that have been imposed, but there are also long-term costs in that precedents have been set that governments can suspend individuals’ rights to earn a living if officials view it as in the public interest.
Most of California is now under strict stay-at-home orders, for example, while states including Nevada, Maryland and Pennsylvania have issued new indoor occupancy limits. Such orders tend to hit already vulnerable workers in low-wage service jobs in restaurants, retail and bars the hardest.Nice of them to discover what I've been reporting for months.
Alex graduated with a master’s degree in May and was immediately in a bind: no job, no money and, with much of the country still shut down, little hope that anything would change.br>,br>She’d spent most of her $1,200 stimulus check on rent, and used what little she had left to buy groceries. Everything else — vitamins, moisturizer, body wash — she said she shoplifted from a Whole Foods Market a few miles from her apartment in Chicago.The article also reports on Les Miserables manifestations at the dollar stores, which acknowledge the shrinkage and their enhanced security efforts.
,br>“It was like, I could spend $10 and get a couple of vegetables or I could spend $10 on just a box of tampons,” said Alex, 27, who asked to be identified by her middle name to speak candidly. She has a job now, earning $15 an hour, but still struggles to make ends meet. She says she continues to shoplift — something she’d never done before the pandemic — every few weeks.
She says she moves through the store mostly unnoticed. Usually, she said, she picks up a few bulky vegetables — a bunch of kale, maybe, or a few avocados — to disguise the pricier items she slips into her bag at the self checkout.
“I don’t feel much guilt about it,” she said. “It’s been very frustrating to be part of a class of people who is losing so much right now. And then to have another class who is profiting from the pandemic — well, let’s just say I don’t feel too bad about taking $15 or $20 of stuff from Whole Foods when Jeff Bezos is the richest man on Earth.” (Bezos is the founder and chief executive of Amazon, which owns Whole Foods. He also owns The Washington Post.)
Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment.
Because we needed yet more proof of the unconscionable wealth inequity devastating what was once proudly deemed the land of equal opportunity for all, Wednesday saw the release of new research showing America's 651 billionaire pandemic profiteers have raked in so much wealth - as in, over $1 trillion - during these last, grim, nine months that they could easily give $3,000 stimulus checks to every suffering American and "still not lose a dime of their pre-virus riches." Even as Congress not only fails to provide vital COVID relief but incomprehensibly threatens to let paid sick and family leave expire, the collective worth of several hundred U.S. billionaires soars past $4 trillion, or nearly double the combined wealth of the bottom half of America's tired, poor and huddled masses. These discrepancies are perhaps most glaring in New York City, home to arguably the most billionaires in the world and to a growing movement, echoing a global one, to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes and the cost of our dauntingly hard times. So it was that Wednesday, in a snowstorm, hundreds of activists gathered in Central Park to unfurl a three-block-long, 700-foot scroll condemning their own fat cats' obscene profits and demanding Cuomo and his cronies #MakeBillionairesPay to support over a million workers struggling to get by - after which, it was noted, they would still be ahead of the rapacious game.The common cause is in the rent seeking. Here's Pajamas Media's Jeff Reynolds. "As we head into a new round of severe lockdowns, and more small businesses shutter across the nation, America’s [information technology] billionaires seem poised for even more spectacular growth in wealth. The Democrat politicians ordering these lockdowns once again prove they are more beholden to the ultra-wealthy, in direct contrast to the image they spin." That essay obtains similar information about the technology billionaires's gains from such communistic sources as Forbes, Business Week, and Fortune. But those Democrats are unwilling to tax or regulate the technology companies. That could be interesting.
In the nearly nine-month period between March 18 and December 7, American billionaires gained more than $1 trillion in wealth as people across the U.S. lost their jobs, their businesses, their homes, and their lives to the pandemic. The collective net worth of U.S. billionaires now sits just above $4 trillion—nearly double the combined wealth owned by the bottom 50% of the American population.Where did those gains come from? Let's step back and consider that there might be five billion people on Earth who are willing to pay a nickel a day to have synchronous and asynchronous communication with other people and access to all sorts of information, whether about jobs, or about the news, or the latest tunes. I'm probably underestimating that willingness as at a nickel, deal with the consumer surplus arguments yourself: this is simply a calculation one of those people scraping by on a dollar a day might make. That nickel turns into roughly $18 in a year, or $90 billion in nickels for somebody to pick up. Those pioneers of information technology at Microsoft and Apple and Amazon and Facebook are scooping up nickels at a rate that the avaricious streetcar conductor of years ago would find impossible. In life, the devices run for a lot more than $20, suggesting there are even more nickels to be collected.
The net effect of academic bullying and ad hominem attacks has been the creation and maintenance of “groupthink”—a problem that carries its own deadly consequences. There is little doubt that as the world faces second and third waves of COVID-19, public health measures such as the various forms of lockdown can both save lives and cause deaths.The problem, as the authors note, is that the various camps of experts are each looking at that part of the puzzle that they understand. Because depression and addiction are not contagious in the sense of Fauci, they might as well not happen, and they don't teach civics any more, which lets him get away with scoffing at civil liberties.
That means there will still be a need for reasonable and effective public health measures for many months to come. An exhausted public is now fed up with conflicting messaging from the Trump White House and public health experts, as well as isolation and loss of income. People are becoming increasingly resistant to the prospect of more public health measures that restrict their lives. Silencing any science-based viewpoint that would lift some of the most oppressive aspects of controlling the spread of the virus could leave the public even more resistant to public health measures.Unfortunately, public health is part of a different kind of process, politics, and that doesn't bode well for the future.
It is critical that [incoming president(*)] Biden’s task force avoid creating a majoritarian echo chamber and instead continues the approach pursued by the experts who convened for the Johns Hopkins debate. Only by entertaining a broader, scientifically informed view of what might work will the next phase of COVID-19 control be acceptable to a deeply divided public.By then, it might be too late to persuade the public to go along.
