Eric Boehlert: ’What happens when you don’t have a truly delusional, right-wing party and media in your country: The Delta waves in the US and Canada, a striking contrast…
Seth Cotlar: ’When Bill Buckley was 11, in 1937, four of his siblings burned a cross on the lawn of a Jewish club near their Connecticut home. Young Bill cried…because he was not allowed to tag along…
Adam Serwer: Texas Coronavirus Politics Are Dangerously Broken: ‘Greg Abbott Surrenders to the Coronavirus…. The coronavirus pandemic should have been over by now, but instead the U.S. is facing what some medical experts have described as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”… Calling it a pandemic of the unvaccinated, however, may mislead some people into believing that the current wave is merely a problem for those who haven’t gotten the shots. The surge is straining the state’s hospital capacity, forcing Texans to delay medical procedures. Children under 12 remain unvaccinated, and some adolescents and adults who have gotten the shot, including those who are immunocompromised, remain vulnerable…. The longer so many people go unvaccinated, the more likely the evolution of even-more-deadly strains of the disease becomes. And, put simply, you should care when the people around you are dying in droves of a preventable illness…. The coronavirus surge is not entirely attributable to conservative media’s irresponsible campaign against vaccines, which makes the campaign no less reprehensible…. Although this misinformation is a real issue, and has driven a partisan divide in vaccination, not every unvaccinated person is being brainwashed by conservative media. The larger issue is that the conservative media’s devotion to undermining vaccination encourages Republican elected officials with political ambitions to make irresponsible public-health decisions, because they understand how media coverage shapes the attitudes of the GOP’s voters. Vaccine mandates for things such as school and air travel are supported by more than 60 percent of Texans, despite the state’s conservative lean. But Republican elected leaders fear the wrath of the GOP primary electorate more than they fear thousands of residents of their states dying of COVID–19…. A pathetic irony is that Texas Republicans such as Senator Ted Cruz, who has proposed banning vaccine mandates on the federal level, formerly insisted that the seriousness of the pandemic was a liberal plot to harm Trump and would subside when he left office, as would liberal support for mitigation measures. But now Cruz, ever the craven apparatchik, the type of man who kissed the ring of someone who smeared his father and insulted his wife, is opposing the policies that would more quickly end the pandemic and make such measures unnecessary…. Something is wrong when an extreme primary electorate has such a stranglehold on a state of 29 million people that a public official believes it is against his interest to take basic steps to keep his own constituents alive.
Anjani Trivedi: Warren Buffet & Berkshire Hathaway Call It Right on EV Batteries: ‘The Sage of Omaha’s Berkshire Hathaway bet on China’s BYD looks like it’s paying off. It’s all about the technology…. BYD is… getting closer to mastering the right technology for EV batteries… BYD electric cars are clunky and don’t carry the techy-coolness of new generation cars like Nio Inc.’s or Tesla’s Model X with its falcon wing doors. But it does have the right price and safe battery technology. It’s now China’s largest EV maker, selling more cars than the competition in the mainland…
William Buckley may have been a toxic figure in US politics, but trying to tar him with an event that happened when he was just 11 is ridiculous. That is an age when one is not held responsible for one's actions and his motivations were likely far from the implied ones by Cotlar. What next, capturing a baby's laughter while in the background a cross is burning or a lynching happening?
When Re is greater than one, the difference between much greater than one and a little greater than one is how long you have to kiss your ass goodbye.
A mix of more (possibly) more effective vaccination (long waits, mixing vaccines), slightly higher vaccination rates, and a little more normalization of caution have had beneficial consequences, but until Re is reliably and continuously less than one this is not anything in the vicinity of success.
I think it's going to take another pile of corpses and another grim winter before the political consensus manages to shift into a recognition that resumption of the status quo ante pestis is not an available option.
William Buckley may have been a toxic figure in US politics, but trying to tar him with an event that happened when he was just 11 is ridiculous. That is an age when one is not held responsible for one's actions and his motivations were likely far from the implied ones by Cotlar. What next, capturing a baby's laughter while in the background a cross is burning or a lynching happening?
When Re is greater than one, the difference between much greater than one and a little greater than one is how long you have to kiss your ass goodbye.
A mix of more (possibly) more effective vaccination (long waits, mixing vaccines), slightly higher vaccination rates, and a little more normalization of caution have had beneficial consequences, but until Re is reliably and continuously less than one this is not anything in the vicinity of success.
I think it's going to take another pile of corpses and another grim winter before the political consensus manages to shift into a recognition that resumption of the status quo ante pestis is not an available option.