The nice people at the IRS

It is popular in the US to bash the Internal Revenue Service. Part of the reason is the spreading of the right wing and libertarian propaganda that paying taxes is a form of theft by the government that is taking money away that rightly belongs to the people, ignoring the obvious fact that the government needs money to provide the services that we all enjoy. The oligarchs have fueled this dislike of the IRS to advance their own nefarious agenda, which is to gut the IRS staff so that they cannot fully audit the various frauds that wealthy people engage in to avoid paying taxes.
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Imagine, a country that likes its leaders trusting science

From a story that I read today.

Jacinda Ardern will govern New Zealand for a second term after the Labour party secured a historic landslide victory in the general election, attracting so many votes it could become the first party in decades to be able to govern alone.

Ardern’s deft handling of the Covid-19 outbreak and resolute belief in science and experts was credited with earning the trust of New Zealanders, who cast early votes in record numbers, giving her party more votes than at any other election in the past five decades. [My italics-MS]
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Voting, American style

Early voting has begun in the US. It is estimated that about 18 million people have already voted, about ten times the number at this point in the election cycle in 2016. Given that the total number of people who voted in 2016 was around 137 million, that means that 13% of ballots have already been cast and we could well be on the way to having about a third to half the people voting before election day. In those parts of the country that do not allow mail-in voting for anyone who requests it, we are seeing extremely long lines at polling locations.
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Why, yes, Trump is someone’s crazy uncle

Yesterday both Joe Biden and Donald Trump held separate town hall meetings in lieu of the cancelled debate that Trump withdraw from because he did not like the virtual format. I did not watch either event but here is a brief review of both.

One thing that stood out for me in the reports I read was when the NBC moderator Savannah Guthrie took Trump to task for re-tweeting a crazy conspiracy theory involving bin Laden.


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An alternative approach to police misconduct

We have seen how in the US, the police in some cases get away with literally murder, often because they have powerful unions that fight to protect their members even when they commit the most egregious of acts, and sometimes because local prosecutors and city leadership are unwilling to take the actions needed to deter such behavior.

But policing in the US is a local matter and not all jurisdictions take such a lax approach. Take for example, the city of Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio where I lived for 30 yers before moving last year to California. It is an integrated community that is about one third African American. When the debate between Biden and Trump was held in September, Cleveland called upon the police in neighboring communities to assist in providing security and during the event, a police officer in a black Shaker Heights police van was caught on camera giving the finger to Black Lives Matter protestors as he drove by.

If you slow the video down, you can see him in the black van doing it at the 8-second mark, immediately followed by a woman shouting “Hey!”

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Covid cases are rising again in the US and Europe

In the case of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, most of the deaths occurred during the second wave of the disease that occurred towards the end of that year and it was feared that the current pandemic might follow a similar pattern. That fear may be coming true. This graph tracks the number of new confirmed cases per week in the US for the current pandemic.

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It looks like Donald Trump doesn’t love me anymore

You may recall that I would post the contents of the emails that I would get from the Trump campaign where they would appeal to me as one of his greatest supporters, someone he depended upon to advise him, even offering to pay for me to go to Washington, DC to meet with him. They would also ask me to send in money or to purchase some cheesy merchandise.

It struck me that I have not received any emails for some time. This surprises me because such fundraising campaigns are relentless and do not stop even when you ask them to.

Have they finally figured out that I am not the greater supporter they thought I was?

Oh well, that’s too bad. Those emails were always good for a laugh.

How the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was resolved

One thing that we should all know by now is to never believe the accounts given by political leaders about major events. They always embellish and even flat out lie to put themselves in the best possible light. You have to wait until the actual records are revealed much later to find out what really happened.The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is one such event which is often portrayed as the time when the world got closest to nuclear war.
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The tragic consequences of believing that the coronavirus is a hoax

A man from Texas was convinced that the coronavirus was a hoax and hosted family gatherings that violated the guidelines. You can anticipate what happened. Fourteen of his family members, including him, got infected and two of them died. He too was hospitalized. He now regrets his behavior, saying that he feels like drunk driver who killed members of his own family and he cautions others against acting like him.
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