Dan Diamond, Health Policy Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: "The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!" Although the quote is usually attributed to Stalin, the real source is the 1930s German journalist, satirist, and pacifist Kurt Tucholsky. The point though is the death of large numbers of people is almost incomprehensible except as a statistic. And that is where America finds itself when trying to comprehend the catastrophic and deliberate failure of the Trump administration to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. And they knew what they were doing, as this article by Dan Diamond lays out.
It is my opinion that Trump and his orcs should be indicted and tried for crimes against humanity and mass murder. will it happen? Probably not. It seems to be Trump's karma to skate through all the evil he has done in his life. He is the Nero of the modern world.
Former Trump administration official Michael Caputo, left, in 2018. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Trump appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services last year privately touted their efforts to block or alter scientists’ reports on the coronavirus to more closely align with President Donald Trump’s more optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to newly released documents from congressional investigators.
The documents provide further insight into how senior Trump officials approached last year’s explosion of coronavirus cases in the United States. Even as career government scientists worked to combat the virus, a cadre of Trump appointees was attempting to blunt the scientists’ messages, edit their findings and equip the president with an alternate set of talking points.
Science adviser Paul Alexander wrote to HHS public affairs chief Michael Caputo on Sept. 9, touting two examples of where he said officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had bowed to his pressure and changed language in their reports, according to an email obtained by the House’s select subcommittee on the coronavirus outbreak.
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate Economist and Professor - Columbia University - The New York Times
Stephan: Once again, Paul Krugman gives us the unvarnished truth, and lays out the failure, incompetence, and sheer nastiness of the Trump and Republican tax cut for the rich.
Nobel Laureate Economist Paul Krugman Credit: Businessweek
Today’s column is about the Biden administration’s proposal for corporate tax reform — a term I use advisedly. For this isn’t just about raising the tax rate, although that’s part of it. It’s also an attempt to crack down on tax avoidance, in particular the strategies multinational corporations use to shift reported profits to low-tax jurisdictions.
Will this happen? Probably, although it will be tricky keeping the Democratic caucus in line (there won’t be any Republican votes). But it wouldn’t be happening if the 2017 Trump tax cut for corporations hadn’t been such a complete flop, hadn’t failed so completely to deliver the promised surge in business investment.
So what I want to talk about here is why even many critics, myself included, thought the Trump tax cut was less bad than the usual Republican tax plan, followed by three reasons we were, it turned out, too kind.
The least bad idea?
Republican tax cuts are usually concentrated on high-income individuals, and are justified with the claim that cutting marginal tax rates will lead to an explosion in individual effort, entrepreneurship, and so on.
Stephan: I am beginning to see assessments of Congress popping up in a wide range of publications. And I certainly agree about the mediocrity of most of the Congress in both houses. But I have a slightly different take from this and other commentaries. People like Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are in office because Americans voted them into those offices. The solution is obviously to vote them out in 2022. Will that happen? Perhaps surprisingly, I am mildly optimistic. Because Biden and his administration are making real and serious policy moves to foster wellbeing, by 2022 we should see some substantive results. Maybe that will wake up enough Americans that we can get back on track.
These are the types of adjectives that every so often—the interval between episodes never lasts long—are inspired by one story or another about this or that member of Congress.
As it happens, we are in one of those seasons again. Perhaps you long ago relinquished your faith that most lawmakers are decent, conscientious, responsible people who are concerned first and above all with legislating in the public interest, and only then turn their attentions to their own earthly appetites.
Even so, some of these recent cases are out there: allegations of underage sex trafficking, unwanted public groping, resume-padding, and other manifestations of human weakness and depravity.
One useful thing about extreme behavior, however, is that it can help illuminate prevailing norms—the non-extreme, perfectly ordinary reality. So at a time when a lot of recent coverage of lawmakers revolves around allegations, or documented evidence, of unacceptable behavior, it seemed in a peculiar way an apt moment to look at Congress through the prism of a different noun: Mediocrity.
As an informal poll, I recently asked a bunch of […]
Stephan: People, including many scientists, who believe we have worked out how nature works, are in for a surprise; a new fundamental force has been detected. Here is a general audience presentation on what has been discovered.
Scientists working at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois have made some of the most important discoveries in physics over the years, including the existence of the top quark and characterizing the neutrino. Now, the team working on Fermilab’s Muon g−2 experiment has reported a tantalizing hint of a new type of physics, according to the BBC. If confirmed, this would become the fifth known fundamental force in the universe.
Our current understanding of particle physics is called the Standard Model, which we know is an incomplete picture of the universe. Concepts like the Higgs boson and dark energy don’t fully integrate with the Standard Model, and the Muon g−2 might eventually help us understand why. The key to that breakthrough could be the behavior of the muon, a subatomic particle similar to an electron. The muon has a negative charge, but it’s much more massive. So, it spins like a magnet, which is what points to a possible new branch of physics.
The roots of the Muon g−2 experiment go back to work done at CERN in the late 1950s. However, the instruments available at the time were too imprecise to accurately measure the “g-factor” […]
David J. Lynch, Financial Writer - The Washington Post
Stephan: I don't think most Americans realize quite how competently and strongly Biden and his administration are fostering wellbeing, not only in the United States but throughout the world. Nor do most people seem to realize just how incompetently and badly Trump and the Republicans damaged not only the U.S. economy but the world economy.
The robust U.S. economic recovery this year is expected to be good news for factory workers, freight handlers and farmers.
Factory workers in China. Freight handlers in the Netherlands. And farmers in Germany.
Amid steady progress with coronavirus vaccinations, the U.S. economy is gathering so much steam that its gains will not stay at home. Demand for goods and services this year is expected to spill well beyond U.S. borders, making the United States the largest single contributor to global growth for the first time since 2005, according to Oxford Economics.
The U.S. ascent ends — at least for now — China’s long reign as the principal engine powering the $90 trillion global economy.
Free spending by the Biden administration — coupled with the Federal Reserve’s ultralow interest rates — is driving the nascent U.S. boom and lifting other countries, where governments have not responded as aggressively to the pandemic. As Americans spent their $600government stimulus checks in January on furniture, laptops and clothing, the U.S. imported a record $221 billion […]
