“Oh, isn’t that nice!”

Ivanka Trump was asked for her response to the Green New Deal. The poster child for being born with a silver spoon in her mouth and not having to work for anything because her rich daddy gave her everything, who himself was given everything by his own rich daddy, and whose husband was given everything by his own rich daddy, thinks that most Americans don’t want to have a guaranteed minimum wage or a guarantee of a job.

Bernie Sanders’s response to billionaire Howard Schultz’s comments is perfectly appropriate here too.

Warning: I am going to be using “Oh, isn’t that nice!” quite a lot.

Growing pressure in support of the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal is drawing more support as it becomes better known and is generating activism. Eoin Higgins writes that senator Diane Feinstein is not the only politician feeling the heat from young people who are taking up the cause because they feel that it is their lives that are being sacrificed by politicians who grovel before the fossil fuel industry. They are taking aim at the rationale being offered by timid Democratic politicians like Feinstein for not signing on.

The main rhetorical device that Democratic skeptics of the Green New Deal have been employing begins with a confident assertion that they believe in climate science and that the crisis must be taken seriously, and they admire the ambition of the Green New Deal. But, they add, the resolution just can’t pass a Republican Senate or be signed by President Donald Trump.
…

By asserting their support of the broad principles undergirding the policies while rejecting the actual nuts and bolts of the legislation, Democrats are trying to have it both ways: keeping rhetorically in tune with the desires of the base but protecting the interests of the party’s powerful establishment donor class in their actions.

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John Oliver on psychics

Making fun of psychics is easy and fun but the non-amusing aspect is not only that four in ten Americans believe in them but that they are promoted by mainstream TV shows. These people are not harmless. They scam people out of money with their fakery and give false hopes and unnecessary grief. John Oliver has a good show about how they fool people and the harm that they and their TV accomplices cause.

We can only hope that he is right

Cliff Sims used to work in the White House for the Trump administration and like so many others, is trying to wash himself of the stench of association by writing a book about his experience and trashing others. He is currently making the rounds promoting his book and is apparently a religious person. He had this to say to the Christian Post about the spectacle of evangelical Christian leaders, including those on Trump’s evangelical advisory board, willing to overlook and excuse and even praise the actions of an amoral lying sociopath like Trump.

I found some of the board to be mainly interested in maintaining their proximity to power, even to the point of trashing “rival” faith leaders to keep them from threatening their own position close to the President. There are specific anecdotes in the book that illustrate that point.

I also write in the book that my greatest regret from my time in the White House is that I wasn’t a better picture of my faith to the President and my colleagues. I’m haunted by the late author Brennan Man¬ning’s quote, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Chris¬tians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”

Many of us in the atheist camp have long felt that the biggest recruiters in our favor are the hypocritical religious leaders who are turning away young people especially with their words and actions. It is nice to see that even some religious people share that view, even if they fear it while we welcome it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reduces income inequality among her staff

She has has set a living wage minimum of $52,000 per year for her staff and a $15 per hour minimum for her interns.

Claudia Pagon Marchena, like so many Hill staffers, moonlighted at a Washington, D.C., eatery to pay her rent until she took a job with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She celebrated her last day at her coffee shop job that same week.

That’s because Ocasio-Cortez, who has called on fellow lawmakers to pay their staffs a “living wage,” is making an example out of her own office. The New York Democrat has introduced an unusual policy that no one on her staff will make less than $52,000 a year — an almost unheard of amount for many of the 20-somethings whose long hours make House and Senate offices run.
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The economics of the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal plan proposed jointly by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and senator Ed Markey has been attacked not only by Donald Trump and Republicans but by incrementalist Democrats who never seem to realize that one must stake out bold positions initially if one is to shift the debate away from the status quo. As I said in a comment to my post on senator Diane Feinstein’s dismissive attitude to the children who urged her to sign on to the GND, in negotiations, you have to start out with the maximal position and then bargain down from there. That is how you push the envelope. It is because of this kind of relentless pushing by Bernie Sanders that the ideas of higher minimum wages, Medicare for all, and affordable college tuition, derided just four years ago as being unrealistic, are now embraced by nearly all Democratic presidential candidates.
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More on the toilet paper puzzle

I have been thinking about yesterday’s post with the surprising statistic that in the US, three rolls of toilet paper per person per week are used. That seemed improbably high and so I conducted a quick survey asking people to estimate how much they think they used per week. The sample was small (just my wife, actually) and she estimated half a roll. She was shocked when I told her that it was six times as much.
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Blondie defends manual labor

I sometimes hear white-collar workers speak disparagingly about manual workers whom they see relaxing. They seem to think that such people should be working non-stop even though they are doing extremely difficult and tiring jobs, often in terrible conditions, while their critics push paper around in air-conditioned workplaces where a lot of time is spent in idleness. I, for example, have never really done a hard day’s work in my life and am aware that I am very fortunate and am grateful for being so lucky.

I was glad to see that the creators of the Blondie comic strip were taking a stand for manual labor against this unfair criticism.

The world of cricket is topsy-turvy

It’s been awhile since I had a post about cricket. There have been some unusual happenings recently and the good news is that it does not involve cheating or other bad behavior by players but instead is about the game itself. It used to be that national Test cricket teams had periods of dominance of a few years when a good crop of players matured together and then went into a slump as those players retired and new ones entered who had yet to find their feet. But now teams lurch from looking dominant in one series to looking awful in the very next one and then bouncing back again, all within a period of months.
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