BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-07-23 Fr
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First: The COVID Widows of Yosemite:
I confess that I did not expect to meet COVID widows, scattering their late husbands’ ashes fifteen months after their deaths…
…and sixteen months after they last saw them—as the hospitals’ attempts to stem the plague kept hospitalized patients in isolation.
Damn everybody who has kept us from scotching this thing early by, you know, normal and appropriate plague-control measures. Damn them all.
One Video:
Susan Athey & al.: IT & Digitization Workshop - YouTube: ‘IT and Digitization Workshop: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf11icy9vvs>
Very Briefly Noted:
Brewster Kahle: Reflections as the Internet Archive turns 25 <https://blog.archive.org/2021/07/21/reflections-as-the-internet-archive-turns-25/>
Paul Campos: Looks Like Rupert Murdoch Has Decided that too Much COVID Is Bad for Business: ‘Fox News host Steve Doocy urged “Fox & Friends” viewers to get the COVID–19 vaccine on Monday’s morning show…. “If you have the chance, get the shot. It will save your life”… <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/07/looks-like-rupert-murdoch-has-decided-that-too-much-covid-is-bad-for-business>
Menzie Chinn (2009): Edward Prescott Is Meshugannah <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2009/02/menzie-chinn-edward-prescott-is-meshugannah.html>
Timothy Burke: The Read: Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist <https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-read-lulu-miller-why-fish-dont>
Andrew Donaldson: Washington Post Reporter Felicia Sonmez Sues The Washington Post: Read It For Yourself: ‘A lawsuit alleging her editors and supervisors used her own experience with sexual assault against her, and retaliated to her speaking out on the subject leaving her “chastised, silenced and subjected to humiliation”.… LINK: <https://ordinary-times.com/2021/07/23/washington-post-reporter-felicia-sonmez-sues-the-washington-post-read-it-for-yourself/>
Tom Frieden: ‘There Isn’t a Vaccine to Buy’: ‘The Delta variant, criticism of the CDC, and the urgent need for a broad global response… <https://democracyjournal.org/voices-of-the-virus/there-isnt-a-vaccine-to-buy/>
Paragraphs:
Scott Lemieux: The Tucker/Berenson Corridor, & the Blue State Holdouts: ‘The COVID surge is of course concentrated heavily among the unvaccinated—the vaccines are extremely effective!—and so it’s not surprising which states are seeing the worst numbers…. Still, blue states can’t be entirely complacent: Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia have adjusted rates below the national average. In the region, however, lower vaccination rates in the Black community have concentrated cases there to an extraordinary degree. Before vaccines, Black people represented about one-third of new coronavirus cases in Maryland and half in D.C. In the latest data, Black people represent just under half of the new cases in Maryland and more than 80 percent in D.C. In jurisdictions where it’s politically viable, we need more vaccine mandates and more positive incentives to take the vaccines. Solving the problem of MAGA non-vaccination is harder but there’s still plenty of lower-hanging fruit out there in absolute numbers…
Joe Studwell: How Asia Works: Success & Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region: ’A rather typical landlord of the era was Deng Wenming, father of future Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who owned ten hectares in Paifang village in the hinterland of Chongqing in Sichuan province. Deng Wenming lived in a 22-room house on the edge of his village and leased out two-thirds of his fields. He, like so many other landlords, was not a man of limitless wealth. But he controlled the land of more than half a dozen average families…
Paul Krugman: What Inflation Risks & My Intermittent Fasting Have in Common: ‘This creates a situation very different from the one that prevailed after World War II. Then, people rushed to buy the cars and home appliances they had been prevented from buying under rationing…. There really was a lot of pent-up demand. But you can’t suddenly eat all the restaurant meals you didn’t get to eat during lockdown; people will probably spend a few months dining out more than usual, and they may engage in some revenge vacation and travel. But there’s a limit to how much of that you can do—just as there’s a limit to how much you can stuff yourself after a fast day…. So my guess is that there’s less to those huge excess savings numbers and big stimulus numbers than meets the eye. Overheating is still possible, and the Fed should keep its eye on that possibility. But the big numbers aren’t as scary as they seem…
LINK: <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2>
Matthew Yglesias: Thirteen ways of Looking at a Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal: ‘A clear path to a successful 117th Congress is emerging: A bipartisan group of senators… agreed yesterday on a broad framework for an infrastructure bill…. A lot is being made of progressive sour grapes about how they don’t want to agree to this deal unless they are guaranteed a later reconciliation package with more partisan ideas. I think the real linkage goes the other way—Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (and quietly the dozen other senate Dems who kinda agree with them) now get to say that bipartisan legislating is happening, and it’s happening thanks to them. They are now open to a reconciliation bill on its own terms…. This whole thing could still fall apart! The painstaking negotiations were driven by the perceived political needs of moderate Senate Democrats, who wanted to make a deal with Senate Republicans. But Democrats’ House majority is very thin and it’s not clear that bipartisanship in the Senate will carry over into votes from House Republicans. I don’t think anyone on either side of the aisle in the House is thrilled about having been cut out of these talks. Watch what happens there!
LINK: <https://www.slowboring.com/p/infrastructure-deal>
Noah Smith: Who Can Push Back When Wokeness Overreaches?: ‘There were reasons that wokeness emerged when it did; it was not an external imposition or a communist infiltration or any of the other nefarious plots its inveterate opponents accuse it of being…. By the early 2010s, America had become a country where the general social respect afforded to minorities of all kinds was out of step with the country’s increasing diversity and material equality. Wokeness, I posited, arose as a leveling movement for the upper rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy—a sort of socialism of respect. In the second post, I drew a connection between wokeness and Protestant Christianity, especially the Congregationalist abolitionism of the early 1800s…. Wokeness is a fundamental, recurrent part of the American nation…. In other words, I believe that wokeness was a thing whose time had come…. has done a number of positive things in America. Even some conservatives are starting to agree with me about this. But like many movements… overreach[ing]…. A few examples of places where I think wokeness has gotten a bit over its skis…. Dr. Mansa Keita… "I’ve called this stuff out before, and I have other friends publicly known in social justice circles who’ve pointed out the racial essentialist ideas behind things around that ‘white supremacy culture’ nexus. It does more harm than any good…. I really hate the ‘X is white supremacy culture’ stuff when X is something good like ‘punctuality’. If something else is meant, then it would be good to say that clearly instead…. In 2015, a group of protesters protested an exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that encouraged attendees—of all races—to wear kimonos. The protesters, who were themselves mostly (maybe entirely?) non-Japanese, alleged that this was a form of White appropriation of Asian culture. They were promptly opposed by a group of counter-protesters: the Japanese women who made and sold the kimonos to the attendees! In other words, non-Japanese American protesters had appropriated kimono culture for themselves and threatened to deprive Japanese people of their livelihood selling their country’s cultural products…. The college cafeteria firing… Smith College… a cafeteria worker who was threatened with firing for informing a Black student that she wasn’t allowed to eat in a space that had been reserved for young children. Later, a janitor called security to talk to the student, following a procedure forbidding janitorial staff from interacting with students on their own. Accusations of racism erupted, and the university apologized, even though its own investigation found that both employees were following procedures correctly and were not motivated by racism…. Ideological overreach does need to be pushed back against, otherwise it can grow into a serious problem. The question is: Who in America has the moral standing to push back?…
LINK: <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/who-can-push-back-when-wokeness-overreaches>
Lant Pritchett: National Development Delivers: & How! & How?: ’Core dual ideas of early development economics and practice were that (a) national development was a four-fold transformation of countries towards: (i) a more productive economy, (ii) a more responsive state, (iii) more capable administration, and (iv) a shared identity and equal treatment of citizens and (b) this four-fold transformation of national development would lead to higher levels of human wellbeing…. Idea [(b)] is strikingly correct: development delivers…. How national development delivers… varies…. Economic growth is much more important for achieving wellbeing at low versus high levels of income… matters more for “basic needs” than for other dimensions of wellbeing (like social inclusiveness or environmental quality)… [and] state capability matters more for wellbeing outcomes that depend on public production than on private goods…. These findings may seem too common sense to be worth a paper, national development–and particularly economic growth—is, strangely, under severe challenge as an important and legitimate objective of action within the development industry…
LINK: <https://bsc.cid.harvard.edu/files/bsc/files/2021-05-cid-wp-398-development-_delivers.pdf>
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