Can I Get A Do-Over?

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Ron Byrnes

This morning, on the way home from the pool, I dropped my ballot in the box at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church on the corner of Henderson and North Street.

I voted for Biden-Harris.

Then, over breakfast, I read these tweets.

I don’t want my 403b to crash or all that I’ve built to be destroyed. And I don’t want to lose my health care or pay more taxes. Nor do I want to be complicit in destroying our economy.

What are my options here? How do I retrieve my envelope from the box? The only thing I can think of is dynamite.

How To Get The ‘Rona

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Ron Byrnes

Sane people now know the vast majority of cases are the result of people congregating indoors without masks. I’ll continue to be outdoors or inside with a mask on, but if you want to get the ‘rona, some of our Canadian brothers and sisters are here to help.

At least 61 COVID-19 cases tied to ‘very large’ outbreak at Hamilton spin studio, Spinco.

A tutorial.

Step 1. Go to an indoor spin class with LOTS of other people.

Step 2. Conform to what everyone else does—after clipping into your bike, take your mask off.

Step 3. Lean on the pedals hard for an hour.

Step 4. Wait.

Sentence to ponder from the article.

“Hamilton Public Health Services isn’t calling it a ‘super spreader’ event, but Richardson described it as a large outbreak with lots of transmission.”

That’s the funniest thing I’ll read all day.

Personal Life

Posted on October 18, 2020 by Ron Byrnes

I hear someone super smart on a podcast. I read about an unsuspecting athlete inspiring lots of other people to vote. I watch Savannah Guthrie give Fox News hosts a tutorial on how to interview the President. I read an absolutely beautiful essay about the arrival of fall in Twisp, WA.

And I want to know more about these people. So I google them and in a few seconds I’m skimming their wikipedia pages (or in the case of the essay writer, their personal website).

And when I skim someone’s wikipedia page, I always start with “Personal Life”. Is that because I’m a nosy bastard or because it’s human nature? What, dig this, they live in Ojai, CA; they’ve been married a few times; they have three children; and they raise llamas.

I wonder whether this phenomenon, which I think is human nature, partially explains higher education’s irrelevance in most people’s day-to-day lives. Higher education is always looking itself in the mirror and saying “This is the year I’ll become a public intellectual. This is the year I’ll make my work accessible. This is the year I’ll engage with the Deplorables.”

But why don’t the changes ever take? I propose it’s because academics, intellectuals, scholars, pick your preferred term, never ever talk about their Personal Lives. The unspoken agreement is that it detracts from the seriousness of your scholarship. The thinking being that one’s ideas, if they’re persuasive and original enough, should be sufficient to garner attention.

And how’s that working out?

Maybe higher education needs to look in the mirror and say “This is the year I become human. This year I’ll reveal something, hell anything, about my life off campus. This is the year I’ll crack the curtains on my Personal Life.”

Joe Biden: Vote For America

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Ron Byrnes

Eighteen more days.

https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1316513615373987840?s=20

Journalism Heavyweight

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Ron Byrnes

Congress has been asleep at the anti-trust wheel for a long time. Meaning you and I are largely responsible for the fact that every sector of our economy is dominated by fewer, ever larger entities. Small promising companies are inevitably gobbled up by larger ones. Economic theory suggests a lack of competitiveness is bad for consumers.

Similarly, if an ever shrinking number of newsrooms translates into less competition for readership, ever larger newspapers should be bad for citizens and our democracy. Right now, The New York Times is serving as a powerful counterfactual to this phenomenon. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the largest newspaper is doing a lot of the best work.

Two examples.

‘Straight to Gunshots’: How a U.S. Task Force Killed an Antifa Activist. From the article,

“President Trump praised the killing of Michael Reinoehl, suspected of fatally shooting a far-right protester, as ‘retribution.’ Our investigation found that officers may have shot without warning or seeing a gun.”

More and more it’s looking like Reinoehl was murdered by the U.S. government inside the U.S. Four officers fired their weapons around 30 times. Eight bullets hit civilian properties. Some bullets flew right by an eight year old on his bike. Others blew out windows of neighboring cars. Our incredible passivity about this murder will embolden our President.

As the virus spread, private briefings from the Trump administration fueled a stock sell-off. While we’re making jokes about a fly, the owners of production fuck the proletariat. By calling it “draining the swamp”, their thoughts about us are obvious, they think we’re stupid. Remember what the President said in the run-up to the last election, “I love the uneducated.”

“The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.

Interviews with eight people who either received copies of the memo or were briefed on aspects of it as it spread among investors in New York and elsewhere provide a glimpse of how elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.”

Imagine if the President’s base got half as upset about white collar criminality as they do about the occasional criminality that accompanies urban protests.

Olympia, Washington Y’all

Posted on October 14, 2020 by Ron Byrnes

Or if you’re solar powered, Detroit, Rochester, Buffalo or Milwaukee.

Our politicians are not thinking nearly enough about the next several decades. Fortunately, some people are as this impressive piece of journalism attests, “How Climate Migration Will Reshape America”. Amazing photography throughout.

“Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California — decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly.

In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people — the nation’s opioid crisis, by comparison, produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000. The most affected people, meanwhile, will pay 20 percent more for energy, and their crops will yield half as much food or in some cases virtually none at all. That collective burden will drag down regional incomes by roughly 10 percent, amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, as people who live farther north will benefit from that change and see their fortunes rise.

The millions of people moving north will mostly head to the cities of the Northeast and Northwest, which will see their populations grow by roughly 10 percent, according to one model.”

The Choice

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Ron Byrnes

With each passing day, the entire (dis)United States, not to mention interested parties in countries around the world, are increasingly preoccupied with a cataclysmic decision.

LeBron or Jordan? Which one is the GOAT. . . Greatest Of All Time? The answer, of course, is neither.

Paragraph To Ponder

Posted on October 12, 2020 by Ron Byrnes

“After the Lakers’ disappointing flame-out last season, general manager Rob Pelinka was under pressure to assemble a roster after holding out for, then missing on, Kawhi Leonard. He didn’t bring in a third star, but it’s worth noting that Alex Caruso, Rajon Rondo, Markieff Morris and Dwight Howard (!) made up just 7 percent of the team’s salary cap, while ultimately contributing far more than that to the Lakers’ championship run.”

From “LeBron And AD Are The Heroes. But The Sum Of This Lakers Club Was More Than Its Superstar Parts”.

Weekend Required Reading

Posted on October 10, 2020 by Ron Byrnes

1. Defund police dogs.

2. The Trump Administration Says Diversity Training Can Be Harmful. What Does the Research Say? Make it voluntary and invest sufficient time. I remember how resistant some of my Southern white colleagues were to it at the North Carolina college I taught at. The starting point was an acknowledgement that “We’re all racist”. Or for them, I should say, the non-starting point.

3. How Hatred Came To Dominate American Politics. Our hatred creates serious opportunity costs. Instead of thinking about and planning for 2025, the current administration is fixated on 2015 and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Meanwhile, other countries are investing in infrastructure, social safety nets, and trade partnerships.

4. Dr. Dobson’s Open Letter To Christians Regarding The Election. If Dr. Dobson is a Christian, I need a different term to describe my religious worldview. He claims the Presidential candidate that is much stronger on “racial unity” also brings “more wisdom in handling the pandemic”. Can you guess which candidate that is? Then again, his audience is 800,000, the humble blog’s is a little less than that.

5. This is what I’m currently watching. Starts fast.

6. Magnus Carlsen extends his winning streak to 125 games.

Pressing Pause

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Monthly Archives: October 2020