Football team doctors are not the players’ friends

Professional football is a brutal sport and players get injured a lot. It should not be surprising that NFL teams have doctors and other medical personnel on staff and on the sidelines to take action if needed. The sight of these people rushing on the field when a player gets hurt may give us the sense that the teams care about the well-bring of the players. But what the spectators and even some players may not fully realize is that the primary aim of these medical staff is not to protect and take care of the players. Instead they represent the interests of the team and its owners who are seeking to protect their financial investment and hence they may overlook potentially dangerous and even life-threatening conditions in their effort to squeeze more playing time out of the players.
[Read more…]

Revealing behavior of the Democratic establishment

There was an uproar recently when the Democratic party establishment in the form of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said that they would cut off any consultants and vendors who worked for primary challengers to party incumbents. This was seen as yet another example of the party leadership trying desperately to retain its neoliberal ideology in the face of more progressive challengers who had succeeded in unseating entrenched conservative incumbents.
[Read more…]

Get a grip, Carly!

Carly Fiorina is the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard who ran for president in 2016 and faced withering and scornful attacks by Donald Trump who even stooped as low as denigrating her looks, not that that kind of behavior should come as a surprise anymore.

In an interview, Fiorina says that she thinks Trump should be impeached and then in the very next breath says that she might vote for him in 2020.

“I think it is vital that he be impeached,” Fiorina said. But whether Trump should be removed from office, Fiorina said, “this close to an election, I don’t know.”
…

After dropping out of the race for the Republican nomination in 2016, Fiorina said she did vote for Trump in 2016, citing her disapproval of then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, but since then she has been “bitterly disappointed.” But when asked whether she would vote for Trump in next year’s presidential election, Fiorina did not rule out voting for him again.

“It depends who the Democrats put up,” she said.
…

In a September 2015 Rolling Stone interview, Trump mocked Fiorina’s looks and said, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” Trump later said he was talking about her persona, not her appearance.

[Read more…]

The aftermath of the Bolivian coup

Wyatt Reed writes that Evo Morales’s party the MAS is regrouping in Bolivia after the coup that overthrew Morales while the right wingers who conspired to create the coup are now fighting with each other over who should get the spoils of their plotting.

Local analysts had predicted that coup leader Luis Fernando Camacho and businessman Marco Pumari could unite the right from the country’s east and west, both indigenous and white or mestizo. They were seen as an insurmountable dream team.

That alliance now lies smoldering, with the two presidential frontrunners openly airing their dirty laundry amid a vicious power struggle.

The battle between the two right-wing heavyweights began when Camacho secretly taped and leaked a conversation in which he accused Pumari of soliciting a bribe of $250,000 and control of two customs checkpoints in return for his spot on the presidential ticket. Camacho fervently denied leaking the tape, which has left Pumari’s presidential aspirations in shambles.
…

Within the span of just a week, Camacho and Pumari have gone from theoretical frontrunners to national laughingstocks.
…

In spite of its forced removal from power, MAS is poised to emerge from the US-backed coup with an unprecedented level of organizational rigor.

[Read more…]

The other Ilhan Omar and her politics of ‘radical love’

The right wing in the US have been on a campaign against first-term Minnesota Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, implying strongly that she is some sort of radical Muslim terrorist sympathizing anti-Semite while stopping short of actually saying so. In a profile of her in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of The Progressive magazine, John Nichols writes that the attacks based on this distorted one-dimensional portrait of her obscures the fact that Omar has a very wide range of issues that she is interested in.
[Read more…]

Weaponizing big philanthropy

On his show Patriot Act Hasan Minhaj brilliantly “dissects how the ultra-rich use philanthropy to get richer, distract from the injustices on which they built their fortunes, and dictate politics and policy.”

He interviews Anand Giridharadas, author of the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. He has been calling for big taxes on the income and wealth of the ultra-rich as a way of eliminating the massive and growing wealth inequality.

Billionaires want to control everything

Cory Doctorow explains that in the face of protests from internet freedom advocates, the move to give control of the .org domain name registry to a billionaire owned private equity fund has been halted, for the moment at least.

Here’s what’s happened: first, ICANN (the legendarily opaque US corporation that runs the internet’s Domain Name System) approved a change in pricing for .ORG domains, run by the nonprofit Internet Society (ISOC) through its Public Interest Registry (PIR), allowing the registry to raise prices. The change was done entirely by staff, without board approval.

Next, several of the people involved in that decision migrate from ICANN to ISOC or to a brand-new private equity fund called Ethos Capital, whose major investors are three families of Republican billionaires: the Romneys, the Perots and the Johnsons.

Ethos then buys the Public Interest Registry from ISOC for a little over a billion dollars — about a billion dollars less than it’s likely worth — and makes a nonbinding pledge to limit its price increases to 10%, compounded annually (!!) and starts a PR campaign to argue that this is very reasonable (however, none of the defenders of this practice are willing to refinance their mortgages on these “reasonable” terms, nor to offer bonds for sale at that rate).
…

The self-dealing and corruption on display are so revolting and undeniable that the news spreads and spreads, and becomes part of the wider critique of the monopolization of the internet and the devastating tactics of private equity firms.

Doctorow says that it will take sustained and concerted action by internet activists and lawmakers to shut this move down permanently.

Scottish National Party seeks referendum on Scottish independence from the UK

While the UK general election saw a huge win for the Conservatives and was seen as driven by a desire to leave the EU, it also saw the Scottish National Party win big in Scotland, winning 48 seats of the 59 seats in Scotland, up from 35 seats in the previous parliament but less than the high of 56 they won in 2015. The Conservative vote totals in Scotland decreased by 3.5% and the party lost seven seats, going down to just six. This widens the split between Scotland and the rest of the UK. It should be remembered that Scotland voted against Brexit in 2016 and the new results have fueled moves to have another referendum on Scottish independence so that if it passes, they can rejoin the EU. The last independence referendum lost by a margin of 45-55% in 2014.
[Read more…]

Why Scientists Should Be Atheists revisited

My Oxford University Press blog post on Why Scientists Should Be Atheists generated an interesting discussion in the comments of my blog post here that linked to it. One issue that was raised was my use of the word ‘should’ and why I was singling out scientists with that imperative. Why should scientists apply the same standards they use in science to everything in life? Of course, no one can be forced to do so and people can (and do) compartmentalize their thinking to enable them to be scientists by day and believers in all manner of supernatural entities by night (so to speak).
[Read more…]