Friday, December 11, 2020

In The News (25)

Why Melinda Gates Spends Time ‘Letting My Heart Break’ One of the richest women in the world devoted decades to preparing for a pandemic. .............  Since then, the Gates Foundation has given away more than $55 billion, much of it directed at efforts to eradicate disease in the developing world. ............  Vaccine hesitancy is on the rise, disinformation is running rampant on social media, many Americans still refuse to wear masks, and cases are surging again. ........... It is insane that we’re at this point in this pandemic, in the United States, and we’re still debating whether people should wear a mask when they go in a store to buy their groceries. ................ Disinformation is just too easy to spread ...........  A lot of wealthy people are making a lot off of their capital gains, versus their ordinary income. And I think that’s one place we ought to look at tax policy.  




Why I Chose Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense We need a leader who is tested, and matched to the challenges we face in this moment. ............. Austin oversaw the largest logistical operation undertaken by the Army in six decades—the Iraq drawdown.  

The Pandemic’s Final Surge Will Be Brutal Over the weekend, the seven-day average of COVID-19 deaths passed the spring’s peak. .............  If the seven-day average of deaths remains above the spring record in the weeks to come, it will soon be inarguable that the pandemic winter is worse than the novel coronavirus’s first surge. 

Elon Musk has left California and moved to Texas “If a team has been winning for too long, they do tend to get a little complacent, a little entitled and then they don’t win the championship anymore,” Musk said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “California has been winning for too long.”  

‘Corruption In Real Time’: Rep. Katie Porter Shreds McConnell For Stymying Stimulus Bill “This must be exposed,” the California Democrat wrote as Congress tries to negotiate a COVID-19 stimulus deal. 

The Winter Mitch McConnell Created Will we have Covid-19 relief or jobless agony? ......... if nothing passes, the U.S. economy will be $1 trillion smaller in 2021 and $500 billion smaller in 2022. .......... The $2 trillion CARES Act was one of the most successful pieces of legislation of modern times. ......... the core problem is that Republicans have applied a dogmatically ideological approach to a situation in which it is not germane and is in fact ruthlessly destructive. ................... For the first time in a long time we have a core group of moderates, progressives and conservatives willing to practice politics — willing to work with the other party toward a reasonable solution. ............  If we don’t see a Covid-19 relief measure pass in the next week or two, then our democracy is existentially broken.


Nine Nonobvious Ways to Have Deeper Conversations The art of making connection even in a time of dislocation. .............. if you’d never met a human and suddenly encountered one, you’d be inclined to worship this creature. Every human being is a miracle, and your superior in some way. ......... What crossroads are you at? What commitments have you made that you no longer believe in? Who do you feel most grateful to have in your life? What problem did you use to have but now have licked? In what ways are you sliding backward? What would you do if you weren’t afraid? ................ “What was it like. …” or “Tell me about a time. …” or “How did you manage to cope while your wedding was postponed for a year?” ..............  The important part of people’s lives is not what happened to them, but how they experienced what happened to them. ..............  I have a friend who listens to conversations the way congregants listen to sermons in charismatic churches — with amens, and approbations. The effect is magnetic. ............  In Japan ..  businesspeople are more likely to hear the whole comment and then pause, sometimes eight seconds, before responding .............. “Even when we can’t agree on Dad’s medical care, I’ve never doubted your good intentions. I know you want the best for him.” .............  In the Talmudic tradition when two people disagree about something, it’s because there is some deeper philosophical or moral disagreement undergirding it. Conversation then becomes a shared process of trying to dig down to the underlying disagreement and then the underlying disagreement below that. There is no end. Conflict creates cooperative effort. ................... spending a lot of time patiently listening to the other person teach herself through her narration, bringing forth her unthought thoughts, sitting with an issue as it slowly changes under the pressure of joint attention ............... “Humans need to be heard before they will listen”

Here’s Why 74 Million Voted for Trump Readers’ analyses of the reasons include that voters liked his policies, if not the man; a Democratic failure to communicate a vision; and racist dog whistles. .........  Emotions run so high in support of President Trump that reasoned debate has become impossible if friendship is to be maintained. The friends of whom I speak are good honest people with strong values. ..............  This is now the second consecutive transition from a Republican administration in which the incoming Democrat inherits an economy in severe crisis — yet in the popular imagination, Republicans are still the party of economic strength. .......... The dog whistle of the Southern strategy is now a bullhorn from coast to coast

Biden Plans to Tap Lloyd Austin, Former Iraq Commander, as Defense Secretary The retired four-star Army general would make history as the first African-American to lead the Pentagon. ........... the first African-American to lead the country’s 1.3 million active-duty troops and the enormous bureaucracy that backs them up. .......... Some 43 percent of active-duty troops are people of color. But the people making crucial decisions are almost entirely white and male. ......... his supporters point to a long career in combat and command, including some of the most difficult assignments of the post-9/11 era. 



Barack and Michelle: Scenes From a Marriage Their two blockbuster memoirs offer a primer on a famous union. .........  the private love story, and scenes from a marriage just as complicated as any other. ....... Though he seems to get his way on his grandest ambitions, she frequently pushes back, saying their lives have to be about we, not me — or it won’t work. ............ The Obama marriage, as they tell it, reflects both the strains of their place in history and the contemporary aggravations of professional strivers — the hard balancing of dual careers. ...........  She’d heard he was cute, smart and ambitious. “I was skeptical of all of it. In my experience, you put a suit on any half-intelligent Black man and white people tended to go bonkers.” ..............  “He was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant. Not once, though, did I think about him as someone I’d want to date.” ...........  as summer went on, she fell for his weirdness and his wit, his tardiness and his tranquillity, and when the mystery tug at her heart became too strong to resist, she knew she was in trouble. “He was like a wind that threatened to unsettle everything,” she writes. She spends more than 50 pages in her memoir on the courtship. ..................  Going into politics proved to be one of the biggest sources of contention in their marriage. “We began arguing more, usually late at night when the two of us were thoroughly drained,” he writes. “‘This isn’t what I signed up for, Barack,’” says Michelle. “‘I feel like I’m doing it all by myself.’” ..................  “What happens when a solitude-loving individualist marries an outgoing family woman who does not love solitude one bit?

The Fight to Win Latino Voters for the G.O.P. For 10 years, Libre — an arm of the Koch family’s Americans for Prosperity — has been working to foster conservatism in Hispanic communities. Now, the group is going all-in on Georgia’s Senate runoffs...........  Either America would exist as “a free society, a free market, a free people” — “libre” means “free” in Spanish — or the nation would find itself in a future where “we’re going to look to government as the remedy to every social ill under the sun.” ............. Nearly one million Latinos now live in Georgia, and more than 8 percent of Georgians speak Spanish at home. ................  a midsize bus station in Mexico might list Dalton and Atlanta as destinations, alongside Houston and Chicago. ............ this year, for the first time in a presidential election, the number of eligible Latino voters was greater than the number of eligible African-American voters  

What the Church Meant for James Baldwin Although he ultimately rejected Pentecostalism, the writer captured its pathos and ability to bear witness to Blackness in America in his first novel. ............  We went to church twice on Sundays. Between the morning and evening services there was a Sunday afternoon feast — I recall these as among the finest meals I have ever eaten — that left us drowsy and contented. On Wednesdays we went to prayer meeting, and on Thursdays to Bible study. Every day, there were prayers before bed and prayers when we rose in the morning and Family Radio always murmuring in the background. ..............   His family, like so many Black families, look at their beloved children and fear the world will kill them. .............   the physical — and psychic — brutality of white supremacy. .........  Black children play games of race shame and race-switching to this day, I imagine. Little brown children, young and innocent, already beset by a sense of unworthiness they cannot name. ............. the six million strong Great Migration that began in 1915 and lasted into the 1970s ............  Without it we would never have had, among other things, the civil rights movement, jazz, Michelle Obama or Baldwin himself. .........   Church was a place where Black people could speak their pain or their rage, free of the endless and violent scrutiny of whiteness.   

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